(I don't have time to write all my thoughts, but starting a comment and will edit throughout the day)
RE: ISAs. It's more complicated because of the way ISAs are financed, but I generally agree. The newest wave of ISAs have time limits after which you have to start repaying (.... only if you currently have a job) which makes the math different, so I wouldn't say to avoid them all together, but I would say to question the solvency of the company you are working with and each one is different.
RE: Quality. Not all VC backed companies need to grow like a hockey stick, but most do yeah and their investors can execute control to push for that. But not ALL, if the bootcamp has investors, ask questions about who they are and why they invested. I don't work for a bootcamp, but we do mentorship and job hunt support and we raised funding from Kapor Capital - which is a super mission driven VC that supports our mission as well.
RE: Reviews. Yeah so many games. Like the number of reviews are like hundreds on one site and zero on another and clearly students are directed to one place or another. Course Report does have sponsorships for their videos. I have also reported a few "reviews" that had names on them and the people worked at the program itself part time without disclosing it and they decided to keep them up.
RE: FAANG engineers. Our mentorship program actually has dozens of FAANG-level senior mentors and they don't teach - exactly for the reasons you said - they instead either do mock interviews, or collaborative problem solve with Fellows to show how they think about problems. I think that more senior and mission driven FAANG engineers do a better job with the "attitude" than more junior ones looking to boost their resume or for side income.
RE: Bootcamps = Scam. Agree.
RE: Outcomes. Agree that people claiming fraud are likely incorrect and the issues are more manipulative and subtle within the standards themselves.
u/Misterlulz wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
So, my bootcamp mentioned it was CIRR certified, but then announced they were thinking about "moving away" from CIRR for their accreditation and reporting...
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I was just wondering, what made CIRR so "bad"?
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited
What program is this?
u/jcasimir wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I'd have to look at the CIRR bylaws but my guess is that there isn't a minimum threshold for number of members. I don't see there being any legal issue per se, even if it got down to just one member. It's just that people would (continue to) not care about it very much.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Hypothetically, if the Koch Foundation is giving CIRR like $1M a year and the there is only one member, wouldn't that potentially be seen as some crazy loophole for the Koch Foundation to funnel money to support just one program indirectly.
u/jcasimir wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Ok so I’m kind of a tax/non-profit nerd. Apologies in advance, hah.
If there was big foundation money going into CIRR, then it would be up to the CIRR board to ensure those funds are spent in line with CIRR’s non-profit mission. So maybe the board decides they should spend all
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I might want to move this offline but can we connect on Codesmith's OSLabs. Feel free to DM me or LinkedIn Message me.
It's a 501.3c charity but:
1. President went to Codesmith a long time ago as a student
2. VP is a paid consultant for Codesmith who co-founded a subsidiary of Codesmith
3. Treasury is Director of Community for Codesmith
4. 3 Codesmith employees posted about how they are helping hire / involved in hiring the executive director position at OSLabs
5. The contact phone number is the same for OSLabs and a Codesmith for profit subsidiary.
6. Letters of Reference from OSLabs are signed by Codesmith's Chief Academic Officer but titled as a OSLabs Board Member who is not listed as such.
I'm curious because we've explored sponsoring non-profits in various ways and consulted expensive Silicon Valley lawyers and non of this would fly according to them.
u/endlessvoid94 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I was the cofounder / CTO at bloc.io and it’s been baffling to watch seasoned executives at boot camps repeat the mistakes of the past with ISAs. It’s such a bad deal for everyone.
All too often when education and capitalism meet, the result is exploitation. It’s like a systemic
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I disagree that it HAS to destroy mission drive people even though it does sometimes.
VC-backed for profit education has tried to scale fast by just "temporarily" hiring humans (which cost too much and don't scale) or by buying 3rd party software that doesn't meet the needs.
I worked at FB for 8 years and despite many failed features, I observed what building "good product" means and I think that's the missing piece in high-touch expensive training. The nuances of building good product at scale I can't put into a single post or comment but it's the secret sauce people don't talk about. We're taking that approach - hiring very strong product engineers and building good product to not just "scale something that works at a smaller scale" but to make an experience that GETS BETTER THE LARGER IT IS. Our algorithms and platform genuinely get better the larger we are because we can match people better and schedule things better. Right now we schedule 500+ sessions every week from scratch (choosing all the people in them, the topics, the formats all from scratch) and the algorithms that do this genuinely get better the most options there are to crunch through.
This is the kind of thing that to me will scale. Obviously there are tons of challenges with that need to be solved, but at least it's a new approach that could work without "destroying the mission"
u/jcasimir wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
It doesn’t sound/feel great, but I don’t see anything that is explicitly breaking code or law.
What the IRS doesn’t want is a non-profit being used as a tax shelter, where they take in tax-deductible funds and just pass them right through to a for-profit or employees of a for-pr
u/michaelnovatireplied·
So if tax deductible donations are used to pay "mentors" who spend their time only reviewing Codesmith student's projects, that could be a problem?
And it would be a problem for individuals who might be irresponsibly balancing their responsibilities and not the parent organizations?
u/jcasimir wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I think if they wanted to be really clean about it, then the non-profit would want to open the mentoring to all qualified individuals where the qualifications are broader than “you are a Codesmith student.”
The main issue I’d see though is in the fulfillment of obligation to the
u/michaelnovatireplied·
So what if only Codesmith is the funder of this non profit, and the purpose is to legitimize the work Codesmith students are doing and give them letters of reference from an "independent" company?
u/jcasimir wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
All going to be fine from the IRS / law perspective. It’s essentially like they’re just bad at running a non-profit.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
So really the main legal factor then is just taxes? If somewhere in the money chain taxes aren't being paid as a result of the scheme, that would be an IRS issue, and if a fraudulent scheme was in place to avoid taxes, could be a criminal issue.
That's interesting, so ultimately it's up to the public then to see a scheme like this and just not trust the games being played?
u/endlessvoid94 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Are you able to scale OUTCOMES without hiring more people or merely engagement / satisfaction? This is a very important distinction in this particular topic.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
It depends how you define outcomes. Again, since we're not a school or program, we are trying to help people achieve their goals, we take you from A -> B in C time for D cost, and those expectations have to be aligned for it to make sense to join. But everyone's A, B, C, D are different.
We currently focus on preparing people for top tier DS&A/SD/classic interview pipelines and if we scale super large then it wouldn't make sense because every top tier job would be competing for Formation Fellows and so many people would want to join, there probably wouldn't be enough jobs.
So the vision for us is to actually figure out what the best company is FOR YOU, help you figure out your best "B" target. And on the other side, we can help companies find the RIGHT people for them. If we can match everyone up with the right jobs for them and help every company find the right people, we have a scalable solution yeah.
One of the problems with bootcamps is when a bootcamp finds a market inefficiency. Like Codesmith grads I'm talking to saying their 3 week project was 2, 3, and 4 years respectively instead of 3 weeks, and getting away with it, like that doesn't scale at all and we're seeing the limits of that in this market as they are shrinking pretty fast.
So if we just find an efficient way to get into a small number of companies, we do not scale, correct.
u/JohnWangDoe wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
>building good product at scale. hiring very strong product engineers and building good product to not just "scale something that works at a smaller scale" but to make an experience that GETS BETTER THE LARGER IT IS.
Can you have a Formation session talking about this.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I have an AMA next week you can come to and we can talk about it. We were also issued a patent and have additional ones filed on it.
I love explaining how this works!