Startup Coding Bootcamp Modern Labor Says It Will Pay You $2,000 a Month For 5 Months To Learn To Code, and Take Roughly 15% of Your Salary For 2 Years Later (vice.com)

Modern Labor promises to teach you to code in five months and help find you a job when you graduate -- but you're on the hook for the next two years. From a report: Most coding bootcamps almost sound like get-rich-quick schemes: Devote a few months to learning a new skill from home, and walk into a job that could pay you $70,000 a year to start. For the most immersive programs, you'll need to put your life on hold while you learn full-time. Usually, students pay for those coding bootcamps upfront while they take time off their jobs to learn.

Startup coding bootcamp Modern Labor pays people $2,000 a month for five months while they learn to code, following a curriculum remotely from wherever they live for at least 30 hours every week (working out to roughly minimum wage). After graduation, if they land a job that pays at least $40,000, Modern Labor takes 15 percent of their salary for the next two years. For example, if they find a job that pays $80,000, they'll pay Modern Labor $24,000 over two years. [...] Modern Labor's business model is an example of an "income sharing agreement," a scheme that's on-trend for Wall Street and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs looking to disrupt education.

Comments

How about NO? Lol what the

[Anonymous Coward]

.... wait, and Take Roughly 15% of Your Salary For 2 Years Later? Hahaa... KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNN (academy)

Capitalism in action

[RalphSlate]

This is just capitalism in action, right? When you ask the repair shop in the desert "how much to fix my car" and they respond "how much you got?" , it's the same premise. If the company can get you trained and into a job, they will try to extract as much of your future earnings as they can, because in their eyes, without them, you wouldn't have that job.

This is not much different from the philosophy of private colleges. Just a slightly different payment method.

Re:Capitalism in action

[gtall]

No, it isn't the same premise. In the desert, you have no choice. In learning how to code, you have many choices.

The scam here is saying that you can learn to code in 5 months. It's almost as though you went to some entity that promised you could learn to reason in 5 months. I sure hope you didn't pay them for the "privilege".

Re:Capitalism in action

[Aighearach]

If you really need it explained to you, here is a link explaining how to learn to code.

http://programming-motherfucke...

Don't forget to read the Manifesto while you're there.

Re:Capitalism in action

[Shotgun]

I've talked to many of them. I'd go with indoctrinated over educated. Their critical thinking skills rank on level with an 18 yr old.

And this proves the point...

[Anonymous Coward]

that so many IT analysts are making that being a programmer is becoming a "blue collar" job. Boot camps prey on people with promises of glory and being a hacker, but most of them emerge to work in places where the pay is fairly low and the job basic, like front-end Web development. Very, very few of these "graduates" go on to do systems programming, graph theory, AI/ML, etc. They just don't teach that kind of stuff, and what they do teach is fairly shallow anyway. It's better to go to a community college for two years and get an AS degree in programming. You'll have at least some credibility and an actual degree. And in many cases, it's cheaper than a lot of these boot camps.

I've worked with some of these guys, and they don't emerge knowing much. A few couldn't even set up their own programming environments, as the labs at these places are run by sysadmins who ensure the labs are up to spec all the time. If you want to make money and you're good at math and enjoy numbers, learn Python, R, Go, and some systems stuff. Wall Street loves them some R hackers.

Re:And this proves the point...

[ghoul]

Programming was always a blue collar job. The problem that happened was we threw engineers at it. We have wasted an entire generation of engineers doing draftsman work - coding. Finally things are getting back to normal. The difficult part in any software is figuring out what to build and the overall architecture. After that the actual typing to pass test cases is something Teenagers should do for pocket money (aka its a McJob)

Re:And this proves the point...

[Aighearach]

The difficult part in any software is figuring out what to build and the overall architecture.

If you find that you've fully specified what the software you're building is supposed to do, you might have also just finished implementing it.

If for some reason that is not true, you should stop everything and write a code generator that accepts your specification as input. That is, if you're really sure that you've actually specified everything already.

Re:And this proves the point...

[dwpro]

To have this view, you must never have personally coded anything complicated and large. I will admit, we do expend valuable engineering man hours on small problems sometimes, but there's no shortcut to clean, maintainable code. Find me a pool of teens that can write code that meets specs that include multi threading and bitwise operations who will do it for pocket change and you've found an endless revenue stream.

Re:And this proves the point...

[apoc.famine]

To have this view, you must never have personally coded anything complicated and large.......Find me a pool of teens that can write code that meets specs that include multi threading and bitwise operations who will do it for pocket change and you've found an endless revenue stream.

To have this view, you must never have personally worked in any of the millions of small businesses which just need some analyses a step above a pivot table or to automate some of the regular tasks that an employee has to do.

There are tons and tons of jobs for programmers which do not require any significant software engineering. Almost any business with more than six people could likely use someone hacking together some scripts and analyses to automate blue-collar tasks. An intranet inventory sheet that's shared. A primitive CMS or CRM. Automated backups of the general ledger. Transaction database with a front end and the ability to spit out a summary for taxes. Payroll.

If you've got less than a dozen or two employees, it's likely going to be cheaper to hire someone at $40k to build and maintain a primitive, custom version of a lot of COTS business software than buying it outright. Especially if you've got some unique needs, which small businesses often do.

And even in a larger business, there's a place for engineers, and there's a place for support staff. My first job was support staff. I'm not a degreed programmer, and thus I wasn't the one working on designing and building the new business software my organization needed. Instead I helped bugfix and work around issues in the current software, at the bargain basement price of like $30k/year.

When sales and marketing crashed stuff and broke things, I cleaned it up. I reverted their mistaken transactions in the general ledger database. I ran off-schedule batch jobs to take care of their past-deadline order submissions. I handled backups and restores. Wrote an automated billing script for customer service that defaulted to by-the-minute, by-the-call, or monthly flat-fee depending on the business customer, so that CS would stop fucking up their billing every month. (That saved the organization essentially 1/4 of an accounting position.)

It was absolutely a programming McJob, and there are millions of them out there. If you think programming requires an engineering degree and is all about fancy architecture, you're missing like 95% of the programming that's done in the world. This bootcamp is essentially the first 5 months I was at my first job out of college. Pay isn't that far off either.

A failure of government.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly the kind of thing Government should be providing for free. It's even mostly the same deal, you earn more money, and the government takes a higher percentage of your salary.

The fact that private enterprise is doing this shows the failure of government to provide free education.

Re:A failure of government.

[fat man's underwear]

I don't know, I think the fact you were able to read the story and write the comment shows success at government providing you with free education.

Re:A failure of government.

[fat man's underwear]

And ***** I ***** pay for yours.
Wow what a concept!

Cheaper than College it seems.

[lamer01]

Let's say you make $75K per year. That's like $22K over 2 years you have to pay. Minus the $10K they paid you to learn, that's only $12K for an education and a job. Better than most college deals where you pay upfront with the possibility of maybe making some money in the future

Re:Cheaper than College it seems.

[ShanghaiBill]

Minus the $10K they paid you to learn, that's only $12K for an education and a job.

There is also a $15k tuition for the bootcamp. Nowhere do they say tuition is waived for people being "paid to learn".

So $27k not $12k.

But this is not comparable to a college degree. A BS-in-CS will get you a job interview, and likely a well paying job. A bootcamp certificate has NEGATIVE value in the job market. It is best to not even mention it in the interview. The skills you learn in a cram course are going to get you an entry level code-monkey job at best.

Re:Cheaper than College it seems.

[breeze95]

The skills you learn in a cram course are going to get you an entry level code-monkey job at best.

Even code monkey jobs pays well. At least better than the average salary. Hell with 2 years experience as a code monkey under your belt, you can leverage this into a much better IT position somewhere.

Re:Cheaper than College it seems.

[Obfuscant]

There is also a $15k tuition for the bootcamp. Nowhere do they say tuition is waived for people being "paid to learn".

Nowhere do they say there is any tuition fee for their class. There is nothing to waive.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[ShanghaiBill]

It is worse than that. TFA isn't clear, but it looks like they pay you $2000 per month, yet you are still responsible for paying tuition that exceeds that. So YOU are paying THEM in net payments even while you are still taking the class. Since these are "online" courses, their net cost to educate you is near zero.

Only a complete idiot would sign up for this scam.

When my company is interviewing, and we have two candidates:

Candidate 1: I learned to code in a 3 month boot camp that cost me $15k.

Candidate 2: I learned to code in my mom's basement using free tutorials and Stackoverflow.

we will definitely prefer #2, who is not a fool parted from his money, but has also shown himself capable of self-learning.

Better idea

[TimMD909]

Why don't all colleges provide free education, but in return, your wages are garnished for a period at a set percent? This would provide a huge incentive for colleges to graduate students with real world skills. If your university turns out students who can't make money, your institution fails quickly thus freeing up resources for better ones.

Re:Better idea

[tsqr]

Or we make all colleges free and buy a few less unnecessary tanks for the army.

This is on the same order of bullshittery as "we could erase the national debt if we just raised taxes on the top 1%." In 2011, the total amount of money spent on college tuition in the US (note, this does not include books, housing, or food) was about half of the total US miitary budget. Since then, the military budget has declined and college tuition has increased. So no, passing on "a few less unnecessary tanks for the army" would not free up enough money to make all colleges free.

Re:Better idea

[ShanghaiBill]

Why don't all colleges provide free education, but in return, your wages are garnished for a period at a set percent?

Some colleges do offer these plans. There are also lenders that offer them.

Income Sharing Agreements

They have a mixed track record.

A big problem is that the students with the most earning potential (engineering, CS, MBA) are not stupid, and are the least likely to sign up. So the ISA programs are stuck with the liberal arts dregs who have little more earning potential than a high school graduate. So they end up with high default rates.

Instead of focusing on "How to fund college?" we should focus on "Why does college cost so much?" The cost of college has far exceeded inflation for decades, with no measurable increase in quality of outcomes.

Re:Better idea

[ShanghaiBill]

Don't forget the total amount spent on tuition includes the outrageously priced schools as well.

Bernie and AOC think those should be free too.

A big problem with their proposal is they assume the number of people going to college would stay the same. Most likely it would go up dramatically if there was no cost.

They also assume that the extra education would boost the GDP. But free colleges tend to have far higher dropout rates, since the students have less skin in the game. So it is unclear if completion rates would go up even with far more students attending.

Universities would even less incentive to control costs, or to care about outcomes for their graduates.

Re:Better idea

[Shotgun]

My wife is Polish, and grew up under communism. When you make college free, you have to implement some other mechanism to determine who gets to go. Otherwise, mother's would push every single child to be either a doctor or a lawyer. She aced all the tests, but was not able to get into medical school without her father making the right connection. Turns out, that is how ALL the med students got in. We're seeing the same thing here with the publication of the recent admission scandals.

People pushing socialism and communism like to pretend that it would just make everyone equal. It won't. It just hands the decision making off to bureaucrats and politicians, which then use their power for personal gain. The resources are still limited, only the person getting rich off their utilization changes.

Hooray

[rsilvergun]

We've successfully brought back indentured servitude. This will go nicely with those Debtors Prisons we bought back years ago and the modern slavery this is prison labor.

Re:Hooray

[apoc.famine]

Do you know what any of the words you just used mean? It doesn't seem like it, because most really have nothing in common with this program.

1) This is voluntary. 2 out of 3 of the things you mention aren't.
2) This is a paid educational opportunity. Nothing that you mentioned is. (Neither are college or trade school for that matter.)
3) You only have to pay for this education if you get a job paying more than $40k in the 5 years after the program. And they only take 20% of your salary for 2 years, so no 30 year student loan hanging over your head. That's fucking indentured servitude. I work with people who have kids in college, and they're both borrowing for their kids education while still paying for their own.

At the worst with this program, you got paid for learning, didn't go into debt, but it didn't lead to a job paying more than $40k. (And for the record, the average US household income is $61k.) This is like like the opposite of college, where you don't get paid for 2 to 5 years, and come out with a pile of debt and no job. At best, you got paid to learn and are now making a pile more money than you were before, making your "student loan" worth the education. That's a guarantee you don't get with traditional college.

Since your MO on slashdot is pissing and moaning about poorly paid programmers like yourself, you really should have been able to do a better job with this. You really failed at that, so I'll help you out:

This is just a new, creative way to further reduce programming wages by paying what is effectively $10/hr for short-term, no-benefit consultant gigs. They're contracting with companies for coding projects and effectively paying offshore wages to their "students" under the guise of a bootcamp. And I bet that when their bootcamp attendees can't find a job right after, they'll snap up round 2 of the bootcamp for another $10/hr consultant gig to make sure that the rent gets paid.

If you think I'm kidding, read the article. This is exactly what they're doing. Taking actors and baristas and getting them to do minimum wage coding and spinning it like it's good for everyone. The companies providing the work even have the opportunity to hire the "students" afterwards, and since they know they'll work for peanuts, that's what they'll be offering.

If this takes off, that's what we're all going to be competing with.

(You're welcome.)

It's a 5 month "Degree"

[rsilvergun]

if they do manage to find you a job you'll be in deep if you ever lose it. These days you can't make it past an HR filter unless you've got a 4 year degree from a proper University. My bud's been looking for months and the only thing he can get is weekend graveyards where they're so desperate they'll take anything with a pulse. He's had a few of those, they don't last because they're always working to offshore you...

In 1990 this would have worked. But in 1990 I could crack open a book, read it, and go get a job making $70k/yr writing code because that was before H1-Bs and offshoring.

Re:It's a 5 month "Degree"

[larryjoe]

if they do manage to find you a job you'll be in deep if you ever lose it.

It's bad to lose a job and income, and there is risk in spending time and effort, if not money, on education and training. However, this income sharing arrangement seems to be much less risky than a student loan. Losing a job after graduating with a student loan at best postpones loan repayments and sometimes not even that. The main reason to get the 4-year traditional degree with the sunk upfront costs is the expectation of better job and income prospects. Unfortunately, there are many cases where this traditional education gamble fails and in retrospect, the shorter, no upfront fee education would have been better.

Re:It's a 5 month "Degree"

[guruevi]

Sounds like your bud has some other problems as well. No way you can't find a job if you have any experience, degree or training certification. We have a hard time filling openings, our HR department is a bit slow and candidates get scooped not even a week after being available and this is an issue across the country.

My local McD is advertising $12.60, Walmart $15 as a minimum and I don't even live in any big city. If you want to work you can.

Re:It's a 5 month "Degree"

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in a town with a 36% unemployment rate. Walmart receives a lot of applications (ones they never even review because timing matters). Most people don't get an interview. I was actually rejected by an interviewer at Walmart in the early/mid-2000s, but was luckily, on my way out, stopped by the head of HR, who listened to my hard luck story of impending eviction and went over their heads to hire me. I was being passed up because I worked a government job previously, was laid off, but was making "too much" ($12/hr) at that time, and no minimum wage employer would touch me. My mother has been unemployed for over 6 years, despite having 18 years working in the energy industry and even returning too school to get an AAS just to make sure she met the current requirements to be employed in the industry (a degree that didn't teach her anything she didn't already know), just to be considered for employment, despite her years of experience. I paid to fly her around the US to test and interview for various plant positions, and she just can't get hired, even with exceptional scores on tests and great interviews. She isn't getting hired at Walmart or Dollar General or McDonald's or gas stations either. There are a lot of mechanisms at play in being employable & gainfully employed.

I remember the days when I was applying for hundreds of positions (before the internet made it easy) and had few, if any, callbacks, for purely menial jobs: shoe stores, grocery stores, fast food, restaurants, call centers, clerical, etc. Now, I work in tech and have for many years, but without living in a major tech hub, it can be very difficult to go from one position to the next without gaps in your employment, even with a lot of experience and large skillset. When there is only one opening at a company and thousands of applicants, it's often a mix of luck, nepotism, and pedigree. Now, you can easily apply for hundreds with a click of a button, and sure, you'll hear from a ton of recruiters, and you may even have interviews that go very well, but will you be that one they select? If there is always 100+ applicants for a single position, there isn't a guarantee you'll ever be "the one". Perhaps you will get lucky. Perhaps you'll have to start mowing lawns and shoveling snow if you live somewhere where there isn't stiff competition, but I don't know where that place exists.

As for coding bootcamps, I think they are a waste of money and (often) used by people who lack the soft skills needed to be good developers, they can't learn on their own, they lack the discipline and self-motivation to pick up books, read docs, and utilize free resources online. I support initiatives to help people learn in micro-courses at their own pace (preferably at little to no cost) because you are giving them the tools, and they have to choose whether to pick them up or abandon them as well as whether to dig in further on their own, through their own research, to learn a topic at greater depth. Coding bootcamp graduates have caused a significant flood to the tech industry that has begun to devalue workers (salary) and make it harder for any entry-level and junior candidates to land their first job, whether or not they attended a bootcamp. Yes, maybe these intensives initially sprung up to help people, an idealistic mission statement, but at its core, it's really all about the money. It's better to NOT advertise that you went to one so that you have a greater chance at being considered, at least this is what I've heard from hiring managers and those who have been in the industry for the last 20+ years. Leave it off your resume.

Re:It's a 5 month "Degree"

[Shaitan]

You only pay 15% of your earnings, not 15% of your initial salary for 2yrs. If you lose the job you don't pay but if you get a new one you'll have to pay from that.

They actually have a staffing platform for finding gigs ranging from 1mo-FT

Re:It's a 5 month "Degree"

[MAXOMENOS]

Those other problems might well have to do with geography. The job market for IT in some cities is white hot, and in others it's quite chilly.

Re:It's a 5 month "Degree"

[Oligonicella]

Yeah, no. I was in the business in 1990. What you described in your last paragraph simply is not true.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[oic0]

As someone who has done boot camps before, never a 5 month one, but still, what you learn in them doesn't stick very well because of the accelerated pace. You need to use it as soon as you get out for it to form into long term memories.

Re:Looks like a bad deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Total payback is capped at $30,000. They also paid you $10,000. So the most this can cost you is $20,000. If you earn less than $40,000 they take nothing.

Salary Payback Net Cost
$40,000 0 - $10,000 = -$10,000
$60,000 2*$9000 - $10,000 = $8,000
$80,000 2*$12000 - $10000 = $12,000
$100,000 2*$15000 - $10000 = $20,000

If you were earning less than $50,000 before you did this, it looks like a good deal.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[ShanghaiBill]

what you learn in them doesn't stick very well because of the accelerated pace.

According to TFA, many of the people signing up for these bootcamps are recent college graduates. They are finding out that their degrees are worthless, so they are hoping to learn something useful in a crash course.

If they had put more thought into their college major, they could have learned to code over 4 years instead of 5 months.

How Education SHOULD work

[Anonymous Coward]

This model is fantastic.

Think about how modern education is currently conducted, regardless of public or private university, student loan or cash payment:
The student puts money down upfront for an uncertain outcome at an institution that, once payment is received, has no vested interest in the student even completing courses, let alone finding rewarding employment. In fact the institution is financially rewarded for keeping the student as a student for as long as possible.

In modern education, ALL the risk is laid in the lap of the student.

This model completely reverses this insanity. The student has virtually no risk up front besides their invested time. The institution has a financial incentive in student in multiple ways:
#1 Keep them a student for as short a time as possible, the longer they're a student the more they have spend on the student
#2 Find rewarding employment. The more money the student makes as a result of their success, the more money the company makes, then the more students they can invest in and so and so forth.

This is a genius model and it's how the airline and trucking industries are moving towards as finding qualified applicants has become a very difficult endeavour.

Re:How Education SHOULD work

[Anonymous Coward]

And forgot to mention:

This company takes 15% of your salary for 2 years.

"Free education" advocates want to take 30% for the rest of your life.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[BringsApples]

I think this is designed to be applied to states like Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. I live in Alabama and I can tell you that people will line up for this sort of ...thing.

Take my job, please

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Find me a new job and you can have 5% for 1 year.

Re:Take my job, please

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Where can I apply for a phone app job? I wanna get the hell out of deeply embedded.

Re:Take my job, please

[hcs_$reboot]

I heard McDonald's is hiring. You're welcome. Bank details to follow.

Re:Take my job, please

[tepples]

I admit I'm moving the goalposts, but let me try to narrow the search:

Find me a job that pays living expenses in the part of the country where the rest of my family lives and you can have 5 percent for one year.

Boot camps are a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife gradually moved from being a business analyst into support and maintenance on the IT side of her organization, but she didn't really have much programming experience. So her employer sent her to (and paid for!) a C# "coding" bootcamp. After a little probing I determined it wasn't just about C# but Microsoft's whole MVC-pattern framework. Ok, fine.

She's pretty smart, so she passed with flying colors and got her precious certificate. And I'm sure if she had a computer with visual studio or whatever it's called, she can click click click and create a basic app for entering and storing and retrieving whatevers. Nothing fancy, but definitely basic functionality, nothing wrong with that. Cool. So: good job, bootcamp.

Then I found out she doesn't know what a for loop is. Nice "coding" bootcamp ya got there.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[HornWumpus]

Always include the complete job description back at them in the margin in 2 pt, white on white text.

They prefer to waste your time over there's, you just have to be smarter than some HR drone. You should not be at all concerned about wasting their time, they don't care about wasting yours.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[Darinbob]

But #2 has to have extensive retraining. Well, so does #1 of course. But if those are the only two candidates then go digging for more resumes.

Nope, it's just the degree

[rsilvergun]

He gets the rejections in about 2 hours or less, even if it's late at night. There are scam jobs out there ($40k/yr, 80hr/week, bring your own car, no we don't pay mileage, yes you will drive all over this 150+ mile wide city) and there's the weekend graveyards, and there's the folks offering $10/hr for 6+ years of experience and training. Everybody else demands a college degree because, well, they can get it. And if all else fails there's the H1-B program.

Re:Nope, it's just the degree

[ElizabethGreene]

It sounds like your bud needs to move.

I was in a similar pickle in Charlottesville Virginia in ~2002. An ISP had gone out of business dumping me and over 100 other technically skilled workers into a tiny labor pool. Six months of unemployment* and fervent job searching from North of DC all the way down to Richmond yielded nothing. I packed up, moved back to Middle Tennessee, and found a job in under two weeks.

It was crazy hard, but it was the right thing to do. It was obvious that staying in Charlottesville would mean not working in IT anymore, and I wasn't willing to give it up.

* This isn't technically accurate. I was unemployed for three months and then took a job as a welder to keep the lights on while continuing my IT job search. I quit the welding job to move.

Re:Nope, it's just the degree

[tepples]

It sounds like your bud needs to move.

Which changes the question to how to find a job (like your welding job) in order to save up enough money to cover to moving to a more lucrative area (like your Middle Tennessee) and surviving there for a few months while seeking a job in your preferred field.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[Shaitan]

Yeah but 2 won't get an interview with your company, in fact if comments you've made previously are an indication 2 could have solved classically unsolvable computation problems or solved a few with previously thought impossible efficiency and you'd toss his resume in the trash because it doesn't list a degree.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[Shaitan]

Of course but that is true of anything you learn in college as well. You just cut out the cruft they use to pad it, accelerate it how long it actually takes to learn that material. Either way if you actually want it to be functional you need to couple it with experience. These things are for entry level gigs. Sadly finding somewhere that doesn't want you to already have experience for an entry level position is going to be tough these days.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[Shaitan]

"TFA isn't clear, but it looks like they pay you $2000 per month, yet you are still responsible for paying tuition that exceeds that. So YOU are paying THEM in net payments even while you are still taking the class. "

I can't find anything on their website indicating that you pay any tuition at all.

They pay $2000/mo for the camp, if you get a job paying more than $40k/yr they get 15% for 2yrs with a cap of $30k paid to them.

It doesn't sound like the worst plan for a new college student, especially if it enables them to get an entry level position at a company with tuition reimbursement.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[ShanghaiBill]

More like the HR person only actually sends you Candidate 1 if that.

If HR is the gatekeeper for technical hiring, then you work for a dysfunctional organization.

HR's job is to do the paperwork, not make the decisions.

Hiring good people is the most important competency that an organization can have.

It is astounding how many companies are so bad at it.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[Shaitan]

TFA actually has info from someone in the program. They have you working projects, she indicated she's already completed 15. Afterward they don't guarantee placement but they have an optional staffing platform for gigs 1mo-contract to hires. So you produce actual work output as part of the camp.

I mean at face value it isn't that unreasonable. You don't need 4yrs to learn most development especially web front/backend development and getting it in one place alongside practical experience is all to the good. Technically it is a little sketchy wanting participants to work on projects the company is getting paid for AND wanting them to pay back what they make is a bit greedy but like you said, you DO need things to practice on and it will help build something for a resume if you are entry level or making a career change.

What is very sketchy to me is the 30hr minimum. They have an activity tracker app that monitors your usage to make sure you are actively working on everything for at least 30hrs a week and have people competing to log as many hours as possible 45-60hrs+. Which makes it dramatically lower than minimum wage AND they want to pay up to 3x whatever they are giving you back. Sweatshop style.

Re:Sorta, you've got to think in terms of time

[larryjoe]

The trouble with these sorts of phony degrees is they won't get you past HR filters designed to hire and H1-B over an American. You need a 4 year degree for that.

I think this is the crucial point, i.e., is this type of 5-month training phony or real? Despite good intentions, the only thing that matters is getting a job. There are plenty of fake diploma mills that are fake because the chance of getting a real job based on that degree is small. If this 5-month program doesn't lead to a job, then it's also phony. But the free, 5-month phony program is still better than the costly, longer phony program, as the only real risk is time.

With the diploma mills, it's clear that the business model is to fleece the banks and the students long enough to abscond with the profits. There is no profit possibility with the 5-month program unless the students end up with jobs. So, the 5-month program administrators are either delusionally incompetent or boldly visionary. I suppose there's a third possiblity, i.e., the Uber grab for VC money with a business model that is known to be unprofitable.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[ShanghaiBill]

But #2 has to have extensive retraining.

#2 has shown he can learn on his own, without needing babysitting.

But if those are the only two candidates then go digging for more resumes.

For a $20/hour code-monkey position? In today's economy, this is as good as you are gonna get.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[Shaitan]

It isn't mentioned in the TFA either.

The sketchy part is they having you working on projects they are being paid for in order to get that $2k/mo, they push for 30hrs minimum but also push competition on number of hours worked coming to 45-60hrs so that equates to dramatically lower than minimum wage. So basically you work for less than minimum wage for 5months learning on the job (but apparently the requirements push for previous coding experience) and then have to pay back up to 3x that for the privilege of having worked below minimum wage.

The requirement does expire if you don't find a gig paying at least 40k within 5yrs.

The only bright side there is that you'll have a portfolio of projects when done.

You don't go to college to be a coder

[DogDude]

You don't get a 4 year degree to write code. You either learn it yourself, or go to a community college.

Re:You don't go to college to be a coder

[tepples]

You get a 4 year degree in order to get past HR departments that are under the misconception that you do get a 4 year degree to write code.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[ShanghaiBill]

I can't find anything on their website indicating that you pay any tuition at all.

TFA states that tuition for the course is $14,987.

It doesn't sound like the worst plan for a new college student

According to TFA the people running the bootcamp have a history of involvement in other scammy organizations.

especially if it enables them to get an entry level position at a company with tuition reimbursement.

TFA implies that employers don't place much, if any, value in the certification.

It is really just a piece of paper that says "I failed an IQ test."

Take a math boot camp instead

[manu0601]

Modern Labor takes 15 percent of their salary for the next two years. For example, if they find a job that pays $80,000, they'll pay Modern Labor $24,000 over two years.

Is it just me, or is this more 30% than 15%?

Re:Take a math boot camp instead

[hcs_$reboot]

Is it just me of slashdot doesn't send reply notifications anymore?

Re:Take a math boot camp instead

[Obfuscant]

Is it just me, or is this more 30% than 15%?

It's just you.

Illegal arrangement?

[neurocutie]

I thought such contracts were illegal or invalid.
NIH had similar requirements that if your education or training was paid thru an NIH fellowship, you had to "payback" by working in the field of training for several years. That arrangement was later ruled to be illegal indenturing.

Should make it a form of loan.

Re:Illegal arrangement?

[ceoyoyo]

Easy enough to get around that. Make it a loan, with an interest rate and payback schedule calculated to yield 15% of the maximum expected salary over two years. Then forgive any overrun if the salary is less than the max.

You'd have to be completely nuts to sign such a thing, but people are stupid.

This is how slavery starts

[themusicgod1]

It starts with 15%. Then it goes to 20%. Then 25%. Then 50%. ...sooner or later you get your education paid for, but the cost is ~100% servitude

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[Shaitan]

TFA is titled "This Company Will Pay You to Learn to Code, and Take 15 Percent of Your Income Later" written by Samantha Cole on 3/28/2019

You are referencing the next similar topic but unrelated FA on the page titled, "The CEO of a Failed For-Profit College Started a Coding Bootcamp" written by Jordan Pearson 2/24/2016.

There is no tuition stated or implied in TFA.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[Shaitan]

"TFA implies that employers don't place much, if any, value in the certification."

That is going to be on an individual basis. You can apply for an entry level position with a resume that says "Voted Most likely to hangglide in high school" and "Shaved roast beef with precision at Arby's for six months" or you can put those AND "Attended Modern Labor Development Bootcamp" and reference the 15-20 production projects you contributed to and show examples of your work. You are getting shafted in that this is really on the job training for less than minimum wage being called a boot camp and then you are supposed to pay them back 15% of your salary for the next two years for the priviledge of having been given that gig. It's an extra bonus because they have a staffing board to get gigs off of and presumably get some kind of cut from that if the students use it as well.

Whether self study, a course, or a degree all it really shows is initiative towards learning, anything beyond that is experience and a track record and as an employer you can't or at least shouldn't expect an entry level employee to have one. You can self study or you can do Khan's but a boot camp which includes actual inbound for profit tasks is probably going to be more efficient. When you self study you have lots of gaps you don't know are there.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[Shaitan]

According to the TFA it will. I don't see why it wouldn't since they get 15% of your salary if that enables you to get a job or higher paying job. The have a profit incentive to make you look good, and their students all looking good only makes them look better and their services and staffing board a better sell.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[Shaitan]

MOD DOWN, mistaken and inaccurate. My own post is redundant but this correction needed to be more visible.

TFA is titled "This Company Will Pay You to Learn to Code, and Take 15 Percent of Your Income Later" written by Samantha Cole on 3/28/2019

You are referencing the next similar topic but unrelated FA on the page titled, "The CEO of a Failed For-Profit College Started a Coding Bootcamp" written by Jordan Pearson 2/24/2016.

There is no tuition stated or implied in TFA nor shady implications and details you refer to.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[rtb61]

I would just sit them down in front of a computer, assign them a programming task and watch them complete it and make sure the program runs. Then inspect the code for neatness, logic, compactness and accuracy and of course how long it took. The problem would be relatively simple but require some complex logic to compete. The best three then go on to be interviewed to evaluate psychological worth, how good a team player are they and honestly I would be tempted to send the final person to a psychiatrist for an psychopathy evaluation so as to exclude psychopaths and narcissists, who are always disruptive in the workplace.

The resumes and various bits of paper only about getting to interview stage, mainly used to exclude people, those that go in the WPB file (waste paper basket). There are plenty of people who can program but not so many who can does so quickly and efficiently and be a positive in terms of the work social environment. A happy workplace is a far more productive environment than an unhappy one. That testing for psychopathy and narcissism, a bit costly but hey a few hundred dollar test versus ten even hundreds of thousands of dollars (be it stolen proprietary data, stolen company property, in office conflicts and fights or simply primitive sexual assaults, that test will reduce those risk a lot, seriously well worth the investment).

I wonder if employment agencies and insurance companies could come together ie insure the worth of an employee at time of employment and cover the employer for things like the legal cost of sexual harassment in the workplace or the theft of proprietary data. The insurance company would then carry out the test to minimise risk, as part of the employment agencies employee evaluations. You could quite profitably provide insurance cover for employee caused losses, with proper evaluations, allowing employment agencies to guarantee the value of their placements.

Why is everyone bashing this bootcamp?

[wyattstorch516]

The typical bootcamp typically charges around 15 K. The student usually spends around three months in training with no income and at the end is on his own to find a job. The school will offer assistance in putting together a resume for the student but after that the student must rely on his networking and interview skills to find employment. Success was very high at first but has dramatically cooled down as more students graduate. At least with this arrangement if the student never finds work then he is at least not out of pocket any money. The school will be very motivated to make sure its students find employment after graduation in order to receive income. How does the school ensure an outcome of steady employment at good wages? By being more selective in admissions than other bootcamps. What is breaking the bootcamp model is that these schools are enrolling anybody who wants to come in without regards to aptitude. The end results are poor coders who have dim job prospects.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[smallfries]

They already have a proud history of schemes like this that stretches back over hundreds of years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[dwpro]

What sort of work would you expect a 'code monkey' to do? This value proposition has always eluded me.

Re: Looks like a bad deal

[tehcyder]

if you can speak German, they will pay you $19k to lie in a space bed for two months while they spin it for space research.

Does being able to say "ja" and "nein" count, or are they all fussy about being fluent and shit?

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[AuMatar]

And my bet is they take that 15% even if not related to coding. For example if I go to the bootcamp, can't find a coding job, but 2 years later luck into a sales job that pays 40K a year, I'm paying that 15%.

Re:Looks like a bad deal

[Shotgun]

And after two and a half years, you have a career (or at least a job) and two years of work experience.

If you can afford it, a university will cost you 15 to 20K per year, not provide you with a stipend to cross the gap, and take four years. At the end of all that, you'll have 100K of debt and no work experience.

For someone starting out, coming from meager means, getting started fast is more beneficial than the "castle in the sky" university. This program would offer a large swath of people hope...a way out. A four year degree is not even a consideration, no matter how smart they are.

Once they have the low end job making a decent wage, they can then work on a 4 year degree, usually with the company they're working for picking up the tab on tuition, fees, and books. It's how I got through college without debt.

Re: Looks like a bad deal

[Shotgun]

How is this any different than a typical 4 year degree? At least they have a vested interest in getting you placed in a job somewhere. It'll probably be a crap job, but I've been in positions before that were "great places to be from".

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[parkinglot777]

That is going to be on an individual basis. You can apply for an entry level position with a resume that says "Voted Most likely to hangglide in high school" and "Shaved roast beef with precision at Arby's for six months" or you can put those AND "Attended Modern Labor Development Bootcamp" and reference the 15-20 production projects you contributed to and show examples of your work.

Your comparison doesn't make sense. If someone, who is applying for a tech job, includes anything else but tech related experiences in his/her resume, then the person is very likely not to be selected. This is a known way of presenting your resume -- show only relevant experiences to the job applied. Though, this also enable another issue where people exaggerate their experiences/skills to look better than their real ones.

You can self study or you can do Khan's but a boot camp which includes actual inbound for profit tasks is probably going to be more efficient.

That is not the case here, at least for now. From TFA -- "Although people enrolled in Modern Labor’s income sharing agreement are not working on projects that directly benefit the company or its clients, Larson said, the company isn’t ruling that out for the future." The projects/tasks that they have been on may or may not be as good as they attempt to advertise. They don't disclose them in detail for now, so I can't say anything more about it.

To me, the overall looks good, but that is the whole marketing ploy of this type of TFA -- advertising. Everything they have in TFA is all about advantages of itself over others (including traditional way). There would never be any real disadvantages to join the company. From what I see, the company just hopes that it will become something like a training facilities for other tech companies in the future (a business type that no one yet is successful).

Well, it is still new, so people don't really see what can go wrong in the future (which it will). One thing I already see that it could be a big problem in the future is that they aren't teaching about a correct concept to solve a problem but rather how to copy-and-paste working codes. Most anyone can code, but that doesn't mean the code quality (including the way to solve a problem) would be the same...

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[Obfuscant]

It is worse than that. TFA isn't clear, but it looks like they pay you $2000 per month, yet you are still responsible for paying tuition that exceeds that.

I don't see anything in TFS, TFA, or on the Modern Labor website that says there is any tuition fee.

Since these are "online" courses, their net cost to educate you is near zero.

The fine website talks about being assigned projects under the leadership of a project manager, with code reviews. This is not "near zero" cost.

Re: How about NO? Lol what the

[courtneyangotti]

Hello, it is me Courtney the vlogger I was commenting on someone elseâ(TM)s misinformation but saw this just wanted to say the 30 hours is all you have to do but they want you to go at your own pace so some people will want to use more time and move at a slower pace it has never been needed to do more but all three of us are working on different things some days and we help each other move along with tips that work for each other. I totally appreciate you sharing the knowledge !!! -Courtney Angotti Aka Courtney tech

Re: How about NO? Lol what the

[courtneyangotti]

We do not copy paste codes not sure where this information is from? You do not learn to code without a little struggle and doing your own research that is what we are doing there is less hand holding than my previous front end bootcamp I attended. Feel free to pose these questions on my Courtney tech vlog and ask someone whoâ(TM)s in the program. I will answer to the best of my ability. I keep everything 100 and I also ask my boss to share his input before I answer :) thanks Courtney tech Courtney Angotti

Re: How about NO? Lol what the

[courtneyangotti]

I tried to answer this already sorry if itâ(TM)s double postðY(TM) but this is actually incorrect. We do not have to ever go over 30 hours is available so you may take your time learning without pressure itâ(TM)s at your own pace. We are all three doing slightly different things on daily basis but close to the same place on our own. If you have any questions from someone in the program please ask on my vlog ! Courtney tech / Courtney Angotti

Re: How about NO? Lol what the

[courtneyangotti]

There is no tuition . This is just to help you focus on studying and not working 40 hours while trying to immerse yourself in program itâ(TM)s proven quite helpful for me . -Courtney tech Courtney Angotti cohort #1

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[Shaitan]

"Your comparison doesn't make sense. If someone, who is applying for a tech job, includes anything else but tech related experiences in his/her resume, then the person is very likely not to be selected. This is a known way of presenting your resume -- show only relevant experiences to the job applied."

And what precisely is it that you expect to be present on the resume of a person applying for their first tech job? There are no previous experiences to list and it is insane to claim there are labor shortages if you are refusing to hire people into entry level that don't have any. Everyone has to start somewhere.

You can't submit a blank piece of paper so you put whatever separates you from everyone else applying for their first tech job. Whatever minor job you held to show early maturity and work ethic, geeky hobbies/extracurriculars, etc. The claim you've self-studied is nice and sets you apart if true but the company won't know how true it is until some point after hiring so you won't get interviewed on the basis of that claim.

Informal education like this essentially counts as self-study to most employers anyway but at least at the end of this camp you'd have actual experience to list on you resume.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[jpaine619]

Then pay for your education upfront. This isn't a bad deal for someone who has no money. Investors expect to make a profit. Hell, all college is is an investment in your education. You fork over huge sums of money and hope that later you'll get a job that pays well enough to make it a worthwhile investment. This removes the gamble for YOU. If you get a shitty job, they'll lose a ton of money..

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[jpaine619]

it will help build something for a resume

If you think for a second that your name will be on whatever you've coded up for them, you're a fool.

What is your point? If you're an employee of XYZ corp, you don't get to have your name on the product either. Work for hire is owned by the company cutting the paychecks. Sure you might end up in the credits, but Activision is under no obligation to do so. If you're going to a school, that you are being PAID to attend, you're an employee, Jack..

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[jpaine619]

Ignore the WORK FOR HIRE. I dunno why I typed that.. I meant "Work done while under employment". Just had an argument with another person regarding independent contractors and I think my brain is still there.

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[tepples]

What is very sketchy to me is the 30hr [per week] minimum.

Might that have something to do with a threshold in the US Affordable Care Act or some other labor law?

Re:How about NO? Lol what the

[tepples]

#2 has shown he can learn on his own, without needing babysitting.

#2 hasn't shown that he can learn industry best practices for quality control or security. Instead of a full stack developer, you get a full Stack Overflow developer who is more skilled at using the clipboard than anything else.

Employers that require candidates to explain gaps

[tepples]

If someone, who is applying for a tech job, includes anything else but tech related experiences in his/her resume, then the person is very likely not to be selected. This is a known way of presenting your resume -- show only relevant experiences to the job applied.

Unless the employer specifies otherwise in the job posting. I've seen a few employers that explicitly require candidates to explain all gaps in the candidate's employment history since high school graduation.

Does autism imply psychopathy?

[tepples]

That testing for psychopathy and narcissism, a bit costly but hey a few hundred dollar test versus ten even hundreds of thousands of dollars (be it stolen proprietary data, stolen company property, in office conflicts and fights or simply primitive sexual assaults, that test will reduce those risk a lot, seriously well worth the investment).

Autism spectrum disorder used to be called "autistic psychopathy". How do autistic candidates score on the "psychopathy" scale that you use? I imagine that the leaders of an employer or employment agency don't want it to end up the target of a disability discrimination lawsuit.

Translate the C standard into a C compiler

[tepples]

If you find that you've fully specified what the software you're building is supposed to do, you might have also just finished implementing it.

If for some reason that is not true, you should stop everything and write a code generator that accepts your specification as input.

I'd be interested to see a proof of concept that automatically translates ISO's international standard for the C language and the datasheet of the Intel 80386 CPU into a working C compiler.

Re:Translate the C standard into a C compiler

[Aighearach]

Try harder.

Just assume, for your first reading, that I'm saying something that is literally true, and obviously correct to experts. See if there is a way to parse the words for that to be true. If so, then you understood me. If it sounds like it would be easily dismissed, you probably selected different definitions for the various words I used than the ones that make sense in the context.

So obviously, if you understood what I was saying, and you understand that it is unlikely that you would "automatically translate ISO standards into a working C compiler," then you can understand that just because a standard is also described using the word "specification" does not in any way imply that it is "fully specified."

It is as if I stated that a glass partially empty, or partially full, is not full, and you offered as a refutation a glass that was merely "filled as high as the user intended."

Or arguing that because somebody said 80% is good enough that therefore 80% = 100%. Nope.

The C standard specifies various things, but it does not specify what the most of the features of a compiler even are, much less "fully."

And OTOH, on a daily basis I write data files that describe APIs, and code generators that consume those data files and output C code, and other languages too. IMO it would be moronic to try to write a compiler as a proof of concept for the technique, though. If you want examples, there are lots of parsers that are fully specified and can be fed into generators outping implementations in different languages. That's because in the case of parsers, it is worthwhile to specify things that narrowly. In most cases that is only desirable within the context of in-house tools; things you release would need to be so portable that full specification carries a lot of technical debt into the future. It is a huge investment in the default case; you'd need billions of dollars worth of effort to build a useful compiler that way. And compilers don't have a lot of value, because we already have good compilers.

Finding the money to move

[tepples]

How do people raised in cities where the market is "quite chilly" find the money to move to cities where it "is quite hot"?

Re:Finding the money to move

[MAXOMENOS]

They usually don't.