Anyone familiar with bloom institute of technology?

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.

It's taught by BloomTech but the curriculum comes from Amazon: [https://amazontechnicalacademy.com/training-providers](https://amazontechnicalacademy.com/training-providers) They have three current partners who offer the same thing. I'm sure they are free to teach the curriculum however they want though yeah. "Amazon expects training partner organizations to produce and launch a backend Java development program based on the curriculum developed for Amazon Technical Academy. The core of this curriculum is the Amazon-defined knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to succeed as an Amazon Software Development Engineer (SDE)."

Only the "Backend" track they currently offer is under this program. Their other tracks are not. They have had one cohort finish and I think 22 people got placed, where Amazon hired 20 of them. Having just one person hiring the graduates is fairly risky to bet on in the future, but given that company is Amazon, might be be worth the risk, 🤷‍♂️

First, SwitchUp's "data" intake form hasn't been updated since 2020 according to [archive.org](https://archive.org) ([https://web.archive.org/web/\*/https://www.switchup.org/write-review](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.switchup.org/write-review)) and still promises a chance to win a $500 / $100 gift card for submitting a review. Who got those and when and how do you have a chance to win them? The Additional Survey they rely on for data hasn't been updated since 2020/2021: [https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YMTFNWK](https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YMTFNWK). Their latest major report is from 2018: [https://www.switchup.org/rankings/coding-bootcamp-survey](https://www.switchup.org/rankings/coding-bootcamp-survey) I never once criticized the validity of the content on these sites. I'm saying the sites themselves are biased... you mention VC funding repeatedly... both of these sites only exist if the bootcamps they review exist. And those bootcamps are VC funded. Almost every last one of them from HR, to Codesmith, to Rithm to BloomTech, to Springboard, to NuCamp, to Flatiron, etc... has taken some amount of outside funding from investors/been acquired by companies with investors/etc... VC !== bad all of the time. Second, I can explain why Formation does not participate in CIRR as a school. We would consider participating as a supporting company to help improve CIRR. I've read through the entire standards doc several times, which is also how I know about many loopholes programs use. Galvanize's G.R.A.D. standards are arguable equally sophisticated as CIRRs. Before you say well Galvanize coming up with it's own standards is bias... CIRR is just an entity legally bound to represent the interests of it's bootcamp members and isn't much different. Formation has 1. No concept of graduation/passing/ending etc... making the entire premise does not apply. This is not in a wordsmithing kind of way, we just don't have any kind of "ending" or length of time, or materials you cover until you "end". You start, you keep getting new material just for you indefinitely, then you get a job and leave and it "ends". 2. Since we have no concept of finishing Formation or graduating, all of the outcomes metrics have no starting point to measure from. We could measure them from your START date, but that's not how CIRR works, not does it allow for fair comparison to other programs. 3. Each Fellow has a unique experience. Each person covers different topics and spends time in different areas. So while CIRR supports non-fixed length programs, we don't have a fixed program, again making the whole premise not work. I'm not defending BloomTech at all. I have really strong feelings about how Austen grew the company that are extremely negative, they are just personal feelings I don't talk about because people here want objective and useful information

I don't think anyone here is an idiot, no. Remember all those sports card price magazines and pokemon card price magazines and beanie baby price magazines, that are all gone... they only survive if the underlying thing survives, and many of them have been accused of inflating the value of the cards and of the beanie babies to keep the hype going. According to Crunchbase (I can't disclose confidential non-public info): Rithm is backed by Slow Ventures and Codesmith is backed by a serial entrepreneur, film producer, and investor Chad Troutwine. We publish some salary data of outcomes on our website and have for a while. Happy to try to answer these questions, they are extremely reasonable questions: “average percentage of students that finds a job within 3-6 months of program” \- I'm not sure what this means. Of STARTING Formation or of when? Everyone starts Formation at a different point - could be zero experience, could be 10+ years as a SWE. If I was a candidate I wouldn't want to be mislead by aggregate time of placement. We try to give people 1-1 estimates based on non-statistically significant number of people similar to them. “Overall percentage of students who find employment” \- We work with people for how every long it takes to sign an offer that meets their goals, whether it's a month or a year. I don't know the exact numbers but a small number of people leave in the first week because Formation was more intense than they expected, or they expected more handholding, or other misalignments. A smaller number of people leave because of changing life circumstances, like long term medical or person issues, or changing goals/direction. So I'm hesitant to say 100% without the caveats but as long as you show up and do what we ask you to do, it's 100% without any guaranteed timeframe. “Base pay averages” without TC And “overall pay with TC” \- This is on our website, please read the disclaimers on how we calculate it there. Most importantly private stock and options are excluded entirely, which brings down the averages: (May 2021 to July 2022) EXPERIENCE / BASE / 1ST YR TC No Experience / $119K / $134K 1-2 YOE / $137K / $181K 3+ YOE / $155K / $204K All of the data since July 2022 continues to bring up the averages (especially Amazon and and we're hoping to update soon! Our overall goal is to accelerate your career. Several people start with $200K TC and end up with $300K/$400K, others start with no job post bootcamp and end up with $130K TC, others have zero experience and end up making $90K. We constantly collect feedback on how satisfied people are with every aspect of Formation so we can create the best experience we can for Fellows, and helping them meet their goals, whatever they may be, is our #1 priority.

Oh yeah the average time is somewhere 6ish months from starting (?). And the range is anywhere from 1 month to 12 months. I never said it's fast and depends on a lot of factors. Another major one is part time vs full time. Some people spend 50 hours a week on Formation and some 10 hours a week. People can also usually pause depending on their life. It's really drastically different from a bootcamp and much more like a personal trainer analogy.