u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
BloomTech is formerly Lambda School and changed names as a result of a trademark lawsuit. Their founder, Austen, is a natural marketer and grew the school way too fast. I have thoughts here but they are just opinions and not relevant. BloomTech in its current form is nothing like Lambda School so the past reviews and bad press are somewhat irrelevant.
CourseReport is a supporting member of CIRR and accepts payments from bootcamps to promote them. Switch Up makes money by referring people to specific bootcamps. Career Karma also pays fees to refer people to specific bootcamps. So all three are biased as their success depends on the bootcamp industries success and you have at their content through that lens.
CIRR is another irrelevant source nowadays because no one is in them. If a bootcamp takes part in CIRR you can trust the numbers they report to CIRR. But CIRR's most recent standards doc (REV 2020-07-07) is full of ambiguity and gaps that bootcamps can take advantage of to make their data look the best possible - this is what I would do if I was running a bootcamp and it's not a bad mark on the bootcamp's part, it's just to point out that CIRR alone needs to be interpreted with a respectfully careful perspective.
Back to BloomTech. So their new incarnation has a few changes. I'm a pros and cons person, and things are rarely 100% one sided:
1. All the lecture and sessions are self-booked at your own pace. So the program adapts more to your lifestyle.
2. There remains fairly limited quality assessment, code review, and lots of criticism about their curriculum. I think they try hard but people just don't feel it holds up.
3. Related to 2, is that they are offering AMAZON'S CURRICULUM for their backend track, over 9 months, and 20 out of 22 people were hired at Amazon in apprentice and SDE positions (Austen won't confirm this but someone at BloomTech confirmed this). While this is great for the industry, it's kind of a bad mark on BloomTech that their outcomes were much worse using their own curriculum and got a lot better with Amazon's. This is my point at Formation, that you need industry leading people teaching and building the materials to be taught and those people are hard to come by because they are paid seven figures at their FAANG jobs.
4. They have eliminated ISAs entirely and now have a simple deferred payment plan instead. Fantastic option as long as you go into with the mindset of expecting to pay the full amount due wether you get a job or not and the benefit is deferring that until you make money to pay for it, instead of taking a loan upfront.
So as always, I can't tell you what to do or what not to do, but hopefully this gives you some ideas of things to look into.
P.S. I would ignore surface level comments about BloomTech's past. There is a lot in their CURRENT programs to be skeptical about, but it's not a rational argument to suggest making conclusions based on their past.