Do you feel like the botocamps misled you when you joined about the state of the job market, or is it that the job market changed while you were there?
I have some recordings in my possession of a bootcamp leader telling people in November 2023 that the market was improving, that it was a normal up and down, the worst was behind them, and expecting to see outcomes back to their previous highs in six months. I don't have context from the recording itself to know if this was deception or just an overreaction to a brief set of good data at the time
The market has been terrible in 2024 for bootcamp grads and I would be extremely cautious about any bootcamp rooting a recover.
If you are promised a recovery, wait six months to see if it's real or not.
What's the rush? Why join now? If you feel pressured to join now, red flag. Do free and cheap self paced learning in the mean time.
u/Realistic_Command_87 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
> they told us at the end it would be challenging
They 100% knew this before you even joined. Bootcamps today are committing fraud.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment but I think you need evidence that the bootcamp made specific claims and evidence that they knew those claims were false and intentionally told them to mislead.
I have a lot of evidence from a lot of bootcamps about things they said sound a little sketchy, and evidence that reality wasn't lining up.
But to show that they genuinely knew this and that it was just a bad interpretation, a miscommunication, an issue of misunderstanding fine print and definition, it's really hard.
BloomTech is one of the schools with a lot of pressure on it because of statements it made that some people felt were misleading. Despite settlements and lawsuits and regulators, no one has been criminally convicted of fraud there.
u/Realistic_Command_87 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Well, if you withhold information in order to get someone to buy your product or service, that can be fraud
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Yeah I agree, we're on the same page here, I'm just trying to be real about how this has played out so far in the industry.
I don't think relying on bootcamps being convicted of fraud is going to solve the problem, in my opinion.
u/Realistic_Command_87 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I think bootcamps can be awesome under certain conditions, but they have a duty to disclose up-to-date and accurate information about the market and their placement rates to prospective students, and they should be subject to independent audits
u/michaelnovatireplied·
In all of my research, I've seen very interesting interpretations of what placement rates mean, and accurate information about the market.
One bootcamp, said in Sept 2023 that their previous highs had two offers s day, and in 2023 they were seeing 1 offer a day. In Nov 2023 they said they are seeing an uptick and should be back at the previous high in 6 months. Then six months later they published data showing about 0.8 offers a day... even lower than the above but they are celebrating it as incredible outcomes in a hard time.
I don't think people are falling for this stuff anymore, but I could very easily see someone misled into thinking things are good now when they aren't despite recent numbers being presented.
u/Realistic_Command_87 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Interesting, I do appreciate the insights btw. I think the “forward looking statements” are the most questionable here, it’s one thing to claim that “it won’t always be this bad” and another to claim “it will recover in 6 months” — the latter could be considered reckless (even No
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Yeah the tone and confidence of the speaker also impact people in a way that words on paper might not.
the direct quote is ."I think 6 months we'll be fully back to where we were, but it's really not bad now genuinely'"
Bundle that with charismatic confidence and (paraphrasing) 'I've been doing this for 30 years and know the industry better than anyone on Reddit'
You start to see how something might not be "legally" clearcut fraud, but might be misleading people with bad advice.
When bad advice crosses into fraud depends a lot about the intentions of the person and it's very hard to prove that in court.