u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I really appreciate you being realistic about the market.
RE: 3RD PARTY PLATFORM
Personally, I'm not a fan of bootcamps marketing features that they outsource to 3rd party services anyone can use. You are indirectly paying for that choice.
Second, in this market you need people looking for different angles that other people don't have and using 3rd party solutions is using something a bunch of people have access to - like you said - jobs getting 100 applications in 20 mins.
RE: MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
If something is too good to be true it probably is. The motivations of the guarantee make sense, but it doesn't work if they refund most people and paid all this money on Prentus and staff members in the mean time, company goes bankrupt.
We're seeing that happen a lot of places!
But the ideal in this market is meeting in the middle - you have some lower amount minimum if you don't get placed that covers enough of the costs for the thing to work and you pay more if you do.
If you don't have this model then successful people are paying for all of the money-back failures and that's not really great either.
RE: PROMOTION
I see this a lot. I follow Codesmith hyper closely and you start to see the illusion fade when you dig into the details. A lot of the most 'promoting' people show up as contractors/paid mentors/paid instructors, or they WERE TAs or mentors, etc... or they BECOME them shortly after the promotional posts.
I totally get that a business would be presenting it's best foot forward - it's vision - it's ideal path.... but in a job market where a minority of people get jobs it's extremely unethical to knowingly do that, even worse to pull the crap Codesmith is with fake Reddit posts from paid marketings sneaking into 'real' posts and comments, and people are catching on.