ETA: Note that I work for App Academy. So take all I say with a grain of salt. I’d love it if one of my classmates would confirm this for me.
Further edit: I retract the claim that this is strong evidence of rationalists winning. So it doesn’t count as an example of this.
I just finished App Academy. App Academy is a 9 week intensive course in web development. Almost everyone who goes through the program gets a job, with an average salary above $90k. You only pay if you get a job. As such, it seems to be a fantastic opportunity with very little risk, apart from the nine weeks of your life. (EDIT: They let you live at the office on an air mattress if you want, so living expenses aren’t much of an issue.)
There are a bunch of bad reasons to not do the program. To start with, there’s the sunk cost fallacy: many people here have philosophy degrees or whatever, and won’t get any advantage from that. More importantly, it’s a pretty unusual life move at this point to move to San Francisco and learn programming from a non-university institution.
LWers are massively overrepresented at AA. There were 4⁄40 at my session, and two of those had higher karma than me. I know other LWers from other sessions of AA.
This seems like a decent example of rationalists winning.
EDIT:
My particular point is that for a lot of people, this seems like a really good idea: if there’s a 50% chance of it being a scam, and you’re making $50k doing whatever else you were doing with your life, then if job search takes 3 months, you’re almost better off in expectation over the course of one year.
And most of the people I know who disparaged this kind of course didn’t do so because they disagreed with my calculation, but because it “didn’t offer real accreditation” or whatever. So I feel that this was a good gamble, which seemed weird, which rationalists were more likely to take.
I’m one of Solvent’s App Academy grads here. Unclear to me whether this is indicative of LWer’s superior rationality, and to what extent it’s because word about App Academy has gotten around within the LessWrong community. For me, the decision process went something like:
Luke recommended it to me.
I asked Luke if he knew anyone who’d been through it who could vouch for the program. He didn’t, but could recommend someone within the LessWrong community who’d done a lot of research into coding bootcamps.
I talked to Luke’s contact, everything checked out.
After getting in, I sent the contract to my uncle (a lawyer) to look at. He verified there were no “gotcha” clauses in the contact.
So I don’t know how much of my decision was driven by superior rationality and how much was driven by information I had that others might not (due in large part to the LessWrong community.) Though this certainly played a role.
(EDIT: And in case anyone was wondering, it was a great decision and I’d highly recommend it.)
Unrelatedly to my other response: uh, move to San Francisco? That… costs a lot of money. Even if only for nine weeks. Where did you live for the duration?
Moving to San Francisco has a lot of expenses other than housing expenses, including costs for movers, travel costs (and the costs of moving back if you fail), costs to stop and start utilities, storage costs to store your possessions for 9 weeks if you live in the office, and the excess everyday costs that come from living in an area where everything is expensive. It’s also a significant disruption to your social life (which could itself decrease your chances of finding a job, and is a cost even if it doesn’t.)
I think this falls into the category of not assuming everyone talks like a LW-er.
Someone who has moved in the past or known someone who has moved might not remember (at least without prompting) each of the individual items which make moving cost. They may just retain a generalized memory that moving is something to be avoided without a good reason.
But guess what? When it comes to making decisions that should take into account the cost of moving, remembering “moving should be avoided without a good reason” will, if their criteria for “good reason” are well-calibrated, lead to exactly the same conclusion as having a shopping list of moving costs in their mind and knowing that the movers are $500 and the loss of social links is worth 1000 utilons etc. even if they can’t articulate any numbers or any specific disadvantages of moving. Just because the people didn’t actually cite those reasons, and wouldn’t be able to cite those reasons, doesn’t mean that they weren’t in effect rejecting it for those reasons.
And yes, this generalizes to people being unable to articulate reasons to avoid other things that they’ve learned to avoid.
This is an extremely cogent articulation of something I’ve been wanting to articulate for a while (but couldn’t, because I’m the sort of person who just remembers “you shouldn’t move without a good reason). I would strongly encourage you to write a top level post about this.
I guess the takeaway here is that when someone on LessWrong talks about something being an obvious win, I should take it with a grain of salt, and assume a strong prior probability of this person just having very different values from me.
It’s assumed that you go to App Academy with the interest of getting a high paying job without paying too much for that opportunity, and being very confident of your success.
It’s also assumed you want to be able to program, and would imagine it to be fun in the future, if it is not already.
Humans acclimate to conditions relatively quickly.
It’s relatively easy to improve your living conditions with earplugs, night eyewear, and a mattress cover.
Having people around you to debug when you are too exhausted to is a significant boon for progression in programming skill.
That said, it’s understandable if your values differ.
That name highly suggests “I actually called myself a troll right in my username and those idiots at LW didn’t even realize I’m a troll when it’s right there in front of them in black and white”.
This is the first time I hear about this training program, but my impression (as somebody living outside the US) is that at the moment there is a shortage of programmers in the Silicon Valley, and therefore it is relatively easy, at least for people with the appropriate cognitive structure (those who can “grok” programming), to get a relatively high-paying programming job, even with minimal training. I suppose this is especially true in the web app/mobile app industry, since these tend to be highly commodified, non-critical products, which can be developed and deployed incrementally and have often very short lifecycles, hence a “quantity over quality” production process is used, employing a large number of relatively low-skilled programmers (*).
Since the barriers to entry to the industry are low, evaluating the effectiveness of a commercial training program is not trivial: just noting that most people who complete the program get a job isn’t great evidence. You would have to check whether people who complete the program are more likely to get a job, or get higher average salaries, than people who taught programming themselves by reading a few tutorials or completed free online courses like those offered by Code.org, Coursera, etc. If there was no difference, or the difference was not high enough to pay back the training program cost, then paying for it would be sub-optimal.
(* I’m not saying that all app programmers are low-skilled, just that high skill is not a requirement for most of these jobs)
And/or “shortage of programmers ticking all the boxes on this highly specific technology stack we’re using”. I get the impression that the greatest advantage of these development bootcamps from a hiring perspective is having a turnaround time short enough that they can focus narrowly on whatever technologies are trendy at the moment, as opposed to a traditional CS degree which is much more theory-centric and often a couple years out of date in its practical offerings.
It seems to me they already tend to offer quite high salaries. Further increasing them could increase the number of available programmers, although there are going to be both short-term and long-term availability limits. And obviously, companies can’t afford to pay arbitrary high salaries.
More specifically, I suppose that much of this labor demand comes from startups, which often operate on the brink of financial viability. Startups have high failure rates, but a few of them generate a very high return on investment, which is what makes the whole startup industry viable: VCs are as risk averse as anybody else, but by diversifying their investments in many startups they reduce the variance of their return and thus obtain a positive expected utility. However, if failure rate goes up (for instance due to increased labor costs) without the other parameters changing, it would kill the whole industry, and I would expect this to occur in a very non-linear fashion, essentially as a threshold effect.
Are you asking what makes people self-motivated, have burning curiosity, and be willing to just dive headlong into new fields of study?
I have no idea, but I suspect carefully choosing one’s parents helps :-)
There is also the standard stereotype of high-functioning autistics with superhuman ability to focus, but I don’t know how well it corresponds to reality.
Few people have the mental starmina to just teach themselves 8 hours a day via reading a few tutorials and complete free online courses.
True, but I suspect that the effect of training time runs into diminishing returns well before you reach 8 hours a day, in particular after you have been doing it for a few days.
It also likely that the enviroment will make it easy to network with other programmers.
I think there are many smart people that have issues with akrasia. Being in an enviroment with other people who also work makes it much easier to just sit down and follow the course.
The fact that the deal with App Academy is that you only pay when you get a job also makes it in their interest that the logistics of the job search are settled.
For someone without a programming job the way to find work as a programmer might not seem straightforward even after completing a bunch of tutorials.
For this description the only reason I won’t go to App Academy is that it’s in the US. If I could just do this is a a European city I would likely pursue it because it’s a path that’s much more straightforward than my current one.
I’m not saying that they offer no value, I’m saying that the fact that they have high hiring ratios statistics is, by itself, not strong evidence that they offer enough value to justify their price.
I’ve wondered why more people don’t train to be software engineers. According to wikipedia, 1 in 200 workers is a software engineer. A friend of mine who teaches programming classes estimates 5% of people could learn how to program. If he’s right, 9 out of 10 people who could be software engineers aren’t, and I’m guessing 8 of them make less in their current job than they would if they decided to switch.
One explanation is that most people would really hate the anti-social aspect of software engineering. We like to talk a lot about how it’s critical for that job to be a great communicator etc., but the reality is, most of the time you sit at your desk and not talk to anyone. It’s possible most people couldn’t stand it. Most jobs have a really big social factor in comparison, you talk to clients, students, patients, supervisors, etc.
does not imply that all those people can learn to be software engineers. Software engineering is not just programming. There are a lot of terrible software engineers out there.
App Academy was a great decision for me. Though I just started looking for work, I’ve definitely become a very competent web developer in a short period of time. Speaking of which if anyone in the Bay Area is looking for a Rails or Backbone dev, give me a shout.
I don’t know if I agree that my decision to do App Academy had a lot to do with rationalism. 4//40 is a high percentage but a small n and the fact that it was definitely discussed here or at least around the community pretty much means it isn’t evidence of much. People in my life I’ve told about it have all been enthusiastic, even people who are pretty focused on traditional credential-ism.
Don’t dismiss what non-LWers are trying to say just because they don’t phrase it as a LWer would. “Didn’t offer real accreditation” means that they 1) are skeptical about whether the the plan teaches useful skills (doing a Bayseian update on how likely that is, conditional on the fact that you are not accredited), or 2) they are skeptical that the plan actually has the success rate you claim (based on their belief that employers prefer accreditation, which ultimately boils down to Bayseianism as well).
Furthermore, it’s hard to figure the probability that something is a scam. I can’t think of any real-world situations where I would estimate (with reasonable error bars) that something has a 50% chance of being a scam. How would I be able to tell the difference between something with a 50% chance of being a scam and a 90% chance of being a scam?
I don’t think that they’re thinking rationally and just saying things wrong. They’re legitimately thinking wrong.
If they’re skeptical about whether the place teaches useful skills, the evidence that it actually gets people jobs should remove that worry entirely. Their point about accreditation usually came up after I had cited their jobs statistics. My impression was that they were just looking for their cached thoughts about dodgy looking training programs, without considering the evidence that this one worked.
Their point about accreditation usually came up after I had cited their jobs statistics.
If their point about accreditation was meant to indicate that they are skeptical that the plan leads to useful skills or to getting a job, then having them bring it up when you cite the job statistics is entirely expected. They brought up evidence against getting a job when you gave them evidence for getting one.
(And if you’re thinking that job statistics are such good evidence that even bringing up something correlated with lack of jobs doesn’t affect the chances much, that’s not true. There are a number of ways in which job statistics can be poor evidence, and those people were likely aware that such ways exist.)
To elaborate a bit, one form of deceptive figures I’ve heard about is to only count successes as percentages of people who go through the entire program. It makes sense to do this to some degree since you don’t want to count people who dropped out after a day, but depending on how the program is run, it’s not hard to weed out a lot of people part of the way through and artificially increase your success rate.
There’s also the difference between the percentage of people who get jobs and the percentage who keep them, and the possibility that past performance covers a time period where the job market was better and won’t generalize to your chance of getting a job from the program now. Not to mention that success rate partly depends on the people who take the course—if most of the people who take the course are, say, high school graduates with high aptitude but no money for college, their success rate might not translate to the success rate for an adult who moves from another area.
And there’s the possibility of overly-literal wording. Has everyone who has gotten a job gotten a job based on a skill learned during the program? Is an “average salary” a mean or median?
Then there’s always the possibility that the success rate is simply false. Sure, false advertising is illegal,. but with no oversight, how’s anyone supposed to find that out?
I don’t know specifically about App Academy, but I’ve found a hacker news thread where there is some speculation that these “coding bootcamps” might inflate their statistics by having a selective enrollment interviews that screens off most people who are not already employable and/or hire their own students as instructors or something after they complete the program, so that they can be counted as employed, even for a short time.
Any comment on this? (News article a couple of days ago on gummint regulators threatening to shut down App Academy and several similar named organisations.)
ETA: Note that I work for App Academy. So take all I say with a grain of salt. I’d love it if one of my classmates would confirm this for me.
Further edit: I retract the claim that this is strong evidence of rationalists winning. So it doesn’t count as an example of this.
I just finished App Academy. App Academy is a 9 week intensive course in web development. Almost everyone who goes through the program gets a job, with an average salary above $90k. You only pay if you get a job. As such, it seems to be a fantastic opportunity with very little risk, apart from the nine weeks of your life. (EDIT: They let you live at the office on an air mattress if you want, so living expenses aren’t much of an issue.)
There are a bunch of bad reasons to not do the program. To start with, there’s the sunk cost fallacy: many people here have philosophy degrees or whatever, and won’t get any advantage from that. More importantly, it’s a pretty unusual life move at this point to move to San Francisco and learn programming from a non-university institution.
LWers are massively overrepresented at AA. There were 4⁄40 at my session, and two of those had higher karma than me. I know other LWers from other sessions of AA.
This seems like a decent example of rationalists winning.
EDIT:
My particular point is that for a lot of people, this seems like a really good idea: if there’s a 50% chance of it being a scam, and you’re making $50k doing whatever else you were doing with your life, then if job search takes 3 months, you’re almost better off in expectation over the course of one year.
And most of the people I know who disparaged this kind of course didn’t do so because they disagreed with my calculation, but because it “didn’t offer real accreditation” or whatever. So I feel that this was a good gamble, which seemed weird, which rationalists were more likely to take.
I’m one of Solvent’s App Academy grads here. Unclear to me whether this is indicative of LWer’s superior rationality, and to what extent it’s because word about App Academy has gotten around within the LessWrong community. For me, the decision process went something like:
Luke recommended it to me.
I asked Luke if he knew anyone who’d been through it who could vouch for the program. He didn’t, but could recommend someone within the LessWrong community who’d done a lot of research into coding bootcamps.
I talked to Luke’s contact, everything checked out.
After getting in, I sent the contract to my uncle (a lawyer) to look at. He verified there were no “gotcha” clauses in the contact.
So I don’t know how much of my decision was driven by superior rationality and how much was driven by information I had that others might not (due in large part to the LessWrong community.) Though this certainly played a role.
(EDIT: And in case anyone was wondering, it was a great decision and I’d highly recommend it.)
Unrelatedly to my other response: uh, move to San Francisco? That… costs a lot of money. Even if only for nine weeks. Where did you live for the duration?
They let you live at the office. I spent less than $10 a day. Good point though.
Moving to San Francisco has a lot of expenses other than housing expenses, including costs for movers, travel costs (and the costs of moving back if you fail), costs to stop and start utilities, storage costs to store your possessions for 9 weeks if you live in the office, and the excess everyday costs that come from living in an area where everything is expensive. It’s also a significant disruption to your social life (which could itself decrease your chances of finding a job, and is a cost even if it doesn’t.)
You make a good point. But none of the people I’ve discussed this with who didn’t want to do App Academy cite those reasons.
I think this falls into the category of not assuming everyone talks like a LW-er.
Someone who has moved in the past or known someone who has moved might not remember (at least without prompting) each of the individual items which make moving cost. They may just retain a generalized memory that moving is something to be avoided without a good reason.
But guess what? When it comes to making decisions that should take into account the cost of moving, remembering “moving should be avoided without a good reason” will, if their criteria for “good reason” are well-calibrated, lead to exactly the same conclusion as having a shopping list of moving costs in their mind and knowing that the movers are $500 and the loss of social links is worth 1000 utilons etc. even if they can’t articulate any numbers or any specific disadvantages of moving. Just because the people didn’t actually cite those reasons, and wouldn’t be able to cite those reasons, doesn’t mean that they weren’t in effect rejecting it for those reasons.
And yes, this generalizes to people being unable to articulate reasons to avoid other things that they’ve learned to avoid.
This is an extremely cogent articulation of something I’ve been wanting to articulate for a while (but couldn’t, because I’m the sort of person who just remembers “you shouldn’t move without a good reason). I would strongly encourage you to write a top level post about this.
… huh. Could you elaborate on this, please? How’s that work? Do they have actual housing? What is living at the office like?
They don’t have actual housing.
There are three rooms and one open space to put beds / storage in.
80%+ of beds are air mattresses people bought at Target.
Living at the office means you have to sign up at a nearby gym if you wish to shower.
It also means no privacy.
The showers in the nearest gym occasionally turn to cold water. (about 1 in 15 times)
The nearest gym is ~7 mins away walking and costs $130 for three months membership.
There are no housing costs.
Lights typically go off at 11 pm − 12 am
Residents have to wash dishes and take out the trash, and generally pick up after themselves.
There are ~15 residents per active cohort.
Food costs are ~$10 / day if you eat out for lunch and dinner, and ~$4 / day if you make food.
Each sleeping space is ~20 square meters. (there are four)
If you sleep in the last sleeping space, you have to move your shit during the day.
Thank you for the info.
I guess the takeaway here is that when someone on LessWrong talks about something being an obvious win, I should take it with a grain of salt, and assume a strong prior probability of this person just having very different values from me.
Possible things to consider are:
It’s assumed that you go to App Academy with the interest of getting a high paying job without paying too much for that opportunity, and being very confident of your success.
It’s also assumed you want to be able to program, and would imagine it to be fun in the future, if it is not already.
Humans acclimate to conditions relatively quickly.
It’s relatively easy to improve your living conditions with earplugs, night eyewear, and a mattress cover.
Having people around you to debug when you are too exhausted to is a significant boon for progression in programming skill.
That said, it’s understandable if your values differ.
May I ask why your name is “troll”?
That name highly suggests “I actually called myself a troll right in my username and those idiots at LW didn’t even realize I’m a troll when it’s right there in front of them in black and white”.
This is the first time I hear about this training program, but my impression (as somebody living outside the US) is that at the moment there is a shortage of programmers in the Silicon Valley, and therefore it is relatively easy, at least for people with the appropriate cognitive structure (those who can “grok” programming), to get a relatively high-paying programming job, even with minimal training.
I suppose this is especially true in the web app/mobile app industry, since these tend to be highly commodified, non-critical products, which can be developed and deployed incrementally and have often very short lifecycles, hence a “quantity over quality” production process is used, employing a large number of relatively low-skilled programmers (*).
Since the barriers to entry to the industry are low, evaluating the effectiveness of a commercial training program is not trivial: just noting that most people who complete the program get a job isn’t great evidence.
You would have to check whether people who complete the program are more likely to get a job, or get higher average salaries, than people who taught programming themselves by reading a few tutorials or completed free online courses like those offered by Code.org, Coursera, etc.
If there was no difference, or the difference was not high enough to pay back the training program cost, then paying for it would be sub-optimal.
(* I’m not saying that all app programmers are low-skilled, just that high skill is not a requirement for most of these jobs)
“Shortage of programmers” often means “shortage of programmers willing to work for the salaries we offer”.
And/or “shortage of programmers ticking all the boxes on this highly specific technology stack we’re using”. I get the impression that the greatest advantage of these development bootcamps from a hiring perspective is having a turnaround time short enough that they can focus narrowly on whatever technologies are trendy at the moment, as opposed to a traditional CS degree which is much more theory-centric and often a couple years out of date in its practical offerings.
It seems to me they already tend to offer quite high salaries.
Further increasing them could increase the number of available programmers, although there are going to be both short-term and long-term availability limits. And obviously, companies can’t afford to pay arbitrary high salaries.
More specifically, I suppose that much of this labor demand comes from startups, which often operate on the brink of financial viability.
Startups have high failure rates, but a few of them generate a very high return on investment, which is what makes the whole startup industry viable: VCs are as risk averse as anybody else, but by diversifying their investments in many startups they reduce the variance of their return and thus obtain a positive expected utility. However, if failure rate goes up (for instance due to increased labor costs) without the other parameters changing, it would kill the whole industry, and I would expect this to occur in a very non-linear fashion, essentially as a threshold effect.
Few people have the mental starmina to just teach themselves 8 hours a day via reading a few tutorials and complete free online courses.
If you go with your mattress to App Academy it takes effort to not spent time programming when all the people around you are programming.
It also likely that the enviroment will make it easy to network with other programmers.
It’s actually a defining characteristic of hackers, except that it’s more like 16 hours a day.
It depends on the teacher. If you have a specific well defined project than a good hacker can work his 16 hours focused on the project.
From the people I know few have the same ability for the kind of general tutorial learning that provides broad knowledge.
I think I certainly spend many days where I spent most of my time learning but it wasn’t the kind of focused learning you have in school.
Which teacher? ”...mental stamina to just teach themselves”
If that’s the case do you have any idea what makes them so exceptional?
Are you asking what makes people self-motivated, have burning curiosity, and be willing to just dive headlong into new fields of study?
I have no idea, but I suspect carefully choosing one’s parents helps :-)
There is also the standard stereotype of high-functioning autistics with superhuman ability to focus, but I don’t know how well it corresponds to reality.
You might consider this interesting.
I do, thanks.
True, but I suspect that the effect of training time runs into diminishing returns well before you reach 8 hours a day, in particular after you have been doing it for a few days.
Agreed.
I think there are many smart people that have issues with akrasia. Being in an enviroment with other people who also work makes it much easier to just sit down and follow the course.
The fact that the deal with App Academy is that you only pay when you get a job also makes it in their interest that the logistics of the job search are settled.
For someone without a programming job the way to find work as a programmer might not seem straightforward even after completing a bunch of tutorials.
For this description the only reason I won’t go to App Academy is that it’s in the US. If I could just do this is a a European city I would likely pursue it because it’s a path that’s much more straightforward than my current one.
I’m not saying that they offer no value, I’m saying that the fact that they have high hiring ratios statistics is, by itself, not strong evidence that they offer enough value to justify their price.
I’ve wondered why more people don’t train to be software engineers. According to wikipedia, 1 in 200 workers is a software engineer. A friend of mine who teaches programming classes estimates 5% of people could learn how to program. If he’s right, 9 out of 10 people who could be software engineers aren’t, and I’m guessing 8 of them make less in their current job than they would if they decided to switch.
One explanation is that most people would really hate the anti-social aspect of software engineering. We like to talk a lot about how it’s critical for that job to be a great communicator etc., but the reality is, most of the time you sit at your desk and not talk to anyone. It’s possible most people couldn’t stand it. Most jobs have a really big social factor in comparison, you talk to clients, students, patients, supervisors, etc.
I suspect that most people don’t think of making the switch.
This...
does not imply that all those people can learn to be software engineers. Software engineering is not just programming. There are a lot of terrible software engineers out there.
App Academy was a great decision for me. Though I just started looking for work, I’ve definitely become a very competent web developer in a short period of time. Speaking of which if anyone in the Bay Area is looking for a Rails or Backbone dev, give me a shout.
I don’t know if I agree that my decision to do App Academy had a lot to do with rationalism. 4//40 is a high percentage but a small n and the fact that it was definitely discussed here or at least around the community pretty much means it isn’t evidence of much. People in my life I’ve told about it have all been enthusiastic, even people who are pretty focused on traditional credential-ism.
Don’t dismiss what non-LWers are trying to say just because they don’t phrase it as a LWer would. “Didn’t offer real accreditation” means that they 1) are skeptical about whether the the plan teaches useful skills (doing a Bayseian update on how likely that is, conditional on the fact that you are not accredited), or 2) they are skeptical that the plan actually has the success rate you claim (based on their belief that employers prefer accreditation, which ultimately boils down to Bayseianism as well).
Furthermore, it’s hard to figure the probability that something is a scam. I can’t think of any real-world situations where I would estimate (with reasonable error bars) that something has a 50% chance of being a scam. How would I be able to tell the difference between something with a 50% chance of being a scam and a 90% chance of being a scam?
I don’t think that they’re thinking rationally and just saying things wrong. They’re legitimately thinking wrong.
If they’re skeptical about whether the place teaches useful skills, the evidence that it actually gets people jobs should remove that worry entirely. Their point about accreditation usually came up after I had cited their jobs statistics. My impression was that they were just looking for their cached thoughts about dodgy looking training programs, without considering the evidence that this one worked.
If their point about accreditation was meant to indicate that they are skeptical that the plan leads to useful skills or to getting a job, then having them bring it up when you cite the job statistics is entirely expected. They brought up evidence against getting a job when you gave them evidence for getting one.
(And if you’re thinking that job statistics are such good evidence that even bringing up something correlated with lack of jobs doesn’t affect the chances much, that’s not true. There are a number of ways in which job statistics can be poor evidence, and those people were likely aware that such ways exist.)
To elaborate a bit, one form of deceptive figures I’ve heard about is to only count successes as percentages of people who go through the entire program. It makes sense to do this to some degree since you don’t want to count people who dropped out after a day, but depending on how the program is run, it’s not hard to weed out a lot of people part of the way through and artificially increase your success rate.
There’s also the difference between the percentage of people who get jobs and the percentage who keep them, and the possibility that past performance covers a time period where the job market was better and won’t generalize to your chance of getting a job from the program now. Not to mention that success rate partly depends on the people who take the course—if most of the people who take the course are, say, high school graduates with high aptitude but no money for college, their success rate might not translate to the success rate for an adult who moves from another area.
And there’s the possibility of overly-literal wording. Has everyone who has gotten a job gotten a job based on a skill learned during the program? Is an “average salary” a mean or median?
Then there’s always the possibility that the success rate is simply false. Sure, false advertising is illegal,. but with no oversight, how’s anyone supposed to find that out?
I don’t know specifically about App Academy, but I’ve found a hacker news thread where there is some speculation that these “coding bootcamps” might inflate their statistics by having a selective enrollment interviews that screens off most people who are not already employable and/or hire their own students as instructors or something after they complete the program, so that they can be counted as employed, even for a short time.
What does almost mean in percentages?
How many people drop out of the program and how many complete it?
Of the people who graduated more than 6 months ago and looked for jobs (as opposed to going to university or something), all have jobs.
About 5% of people drop out of the program.
Any comment on this? (News article a couple of days ago on gummint regulators threatening to shut down App Academy and several similar named organisations.)
It will probably be fine. See here.
You have, I take it, already gotten a job as a result of finishing App Academy?
I did, but the job I got was being a TA for App Academy, so that might not count in your eyes.
Their figures are telling the truth: I don’t know anyone from the previous cohort who was dissatisfied with their experience of job search.
Indeed it does not. I don’t count your experience as an example of the OP.
That’s… an awfully strange phrasing. Do you mean they all found a web development job as a result of attending App Academy? Or what?
Pretty much all of them, yes. I should have phrased that better.
My experience was unusual, but if they hadn’t hired me, I expect I would have been hired like my classmates.
Out of curiosity, why did you take the TA job? Does it pay more than $90k a year?