u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
I can give my pros and cons fact based answer. It's funny that when I do this for Codesmith people say I'm "trying to take down the great things they have done" and when I do it for BloomTech I'm accused of "supporting a scam" but 🤷♂️, I'm just trying to give balanced views.
1. Bloom Tech rebranded from Lambda School because of a trademark lawsuit with Lambda Labs. They spent over a million dollars (unverified) on legal fees to defend the lawsuit and even acquired a company in Florida called Red Lambda to try use that company's trademark defensively. But instead they settled and changed their name.
2. They have undergone massive changes in the past 2 years, not necessarily good ones, but they are trying to make a sustainable business that works. They let go of a large number of their staff and moved to a more self-service model based on their platform. the platform is some in house and some 3rd party and it's not the best Platform.
3. [Outcomes](https://www.bloomtech.com/reports/outcomes-report) As a result of 2, they now have a 50 to 60% graduation rate in 2021 (with 2022 not published yet) and of the people who graduate, a 90% "placement rate" - 83% within 180 days HOWEVER LOTS OF FINE PRINT HERE. This is a 90% placement rate of JOB SEEKING graduates, which excludes people who stop checking in with career coaches... which is about 62% of graduates. In 2021, 1698 people started, and only 550 were considered JOB SEEKING and of those 550 (plus 124 people carried over from 2020 and 4 people brought forth from 2022), 90% got jobs.... All of this is in the report above, DO YOUR OWN MATH, THIS IS A LOOSE SUMMARY. But this indicates something like 38% of people starting actually getting jobs
4. Their founder has a reputation of "selectively posting" on Twitter - only telling good stories and making it seem like those happen every day. It's super normal and expected for companies to highlight their success cases, which is why it's important to ask more details of how things work to figure out if it will work for you. For example, he used to post a screenshot of placements every Friday or so from Slack making it seem like people were being placed left right and center on a continuous.... however this was because their staff input the placements on Friday at a certain time and there just happens to be all the placements then.
5. Most of their executives have left in the past year and only 4 people are left and have not publicly been replaced. They quietly hired Bill Brosseau from their loan provider as a VP business person, so I'm curious to see if he is preparing the company for sale, or if he's there to help grow it... time will tell!
6. It costs $17,950 (it used to be a lot more actually)
So all in all it's priced as a top tier bootcamp. Is it the best? On paper, I don't see a vector where it is and why you would go there over one of the programs with something more notable about them.
Many programs work with companies like Stride Funding, Ascend, and more to offer deferred financing policy and the days of the"I don't pay a cent unless the school gets me a job" marketing are long gone (and never really existed, hence the multiple lawsuits against Bloom Tech).