* They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is the source of active lawsuits
No we did not.
We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), which we share with investors because that indicates how much we get paid vs. how much we spend. The other is (hired students/graduated students), which we share with prospective students because that's what they want to understand and what every school shares.
Those were both called "placement" in different contexts to different people, but the numbers that we report externally are always hired students/graduated students (and even that isn't simple, as there are many different definitions of "hired," and different cohorts of students who are job searching or not, and various time lags around when we learn a student is hired or not), but this is not unique to us as a school. (Though an ISA incentivizing people to _not_ tell us when they are hired until tax returns are do perhaps is a little bit unique to us.)
* They dodged California regulators then lied to students about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020.
Neither of those things are true. Our counsel told us we didn't need to register with the BPPE because we didn't operate physical classrooms (this was a somewhat novel concept in 2017). They reasoned that if the BPPE were going to claim that online schools would need to register in every state there was a student, that the claim would be if you have a single student who attends online classes from a state you have to register as a school in that state. Correspondingly, teaching anything on the Internet would require you to register separately and abide by varying regulations with every state educational body in the United States. The BPPE said they were going to regulate online schools, and sent us a letter with a threat to fine us. We immediately submitted our registration, and the registration approval process took just over a year, and the BPPE reduced the fine to a minimum level. There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the experience any student had in any way.
Now we have a very large legal team, and are regulated separately and uniquely in every state in the US, often using laws that don't contemplate virtual classrooms or online learning in any way, and that's just to exist as a school in the first place. It's a complete nightmare that needs reform, and the vast, vast majority of schools are simply below the radar enough that they don't get fined, but it's incredibly difficult and expensive in the United States simply to be in compliance with each state where you might have as few as one or two students.
Beyond that fact, entirely online school where students don't pay unless/until they're hired is a round peg that doesn't fit into the square holes of existing financial regulation either.
* They launched an unpaid intern program, which created backlash int he tech community.
Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us back. It was successful and operates to this day.
* They told students they couldn't discharge their debt, which was a lie that got them into even more legal trouble
This is another misconception, but we were actually in the wrong here. Because an ISA isn't a traditional student loan, if a student doesn't get a job the ISA immediately goes away after a five year deferment period. We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove that clause. We happily did so, but that clause didn't harm anyone.
> We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true, but don't care. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), the other (hired students/graduated students)
"86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year."
Let's run the math on current outcomes, which I believe you've called, "the best they've ever been." 994 students graduated and 453 got a job making $50k or more. We're already at 45%, and that's before narrowing it down to, "within six months."
You may try to argue, "Not all of those 994 students count as 'job seeking,'" as if it's totally normal that 32% of graduates give up looking for jobs. That's moot. There was no fine print.
Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs?
> There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the experience any student had in any way.
They told you to cease operation. You didn't. After the BPPE news came to light, you told students that no school has ever been shut down for continuing to operate.
One point of the lawsuits are the students who felt they should have been told about the whole BPPE situation before signing up. I get why you didn't want them to know, because according to the law, the ISAs issued before you were in compliance are invalid. Yet you're still trying to collect, which I'd say very much impacts students.
> Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us back. It was successful and operates to this day.
Within hours of the tech community calling you out on this, you apologized. Then you deleted the apology. I find it amazing that your strategy is to just pretend none of that happened.
> We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove that clause.
Your contract said: "this extension of credit is a qualified educational loan and is subject to the limitations on dischargeability in bankruptcy contained in Section 523(a)(8) of the United States Bankruptcy Code."
It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
Oh boy, you keep taking all sorts of things out of context and comparing all sorts of things that don't make any sense to each other.
A couple months ago I said our outcomes currently are the best they've ever been. That is a different set of students than those included in that outcomes report, and it is from a smaller subset than an entire years' worth of average placement. If you try to take a very specific comment and take it out of context to prove it false, it just gets very tiresome. I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense.
> Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs?
Our outcomes report includes zero students who signed NDAs, and there were zero students who signed NDAs of any kind in 2021.
The number of students who have signed NDAs _ever_ is tiny, probably <5. I obviously can't share all of the details publicly, but in every instance where an NDA was involved was when a student unequivocally was going to owe us money but we tried to be overly generous and forgive that tuition without them encouraging swarms of other students to do so. That was probably a mistake, in retrospect. I think we tried to be overly generous here, and it bit us.
> When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid."
This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work.
> It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement between the parties - we'll see how it shakes out. But again, there's no malintent here, simply our lawyers doing the best they can to fit into a regulatory regime where laws are unclear (and at times even directly conflict).
> After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called out your blog post as deceptive.
The DFPI isn't commenting on that clause in this, they're commenting on a sentence in our blog post (which our legal team thought they had agreed to) that said (i'm paraphrasing) we fixed the ISA to make it as the DFPI had requested.
The DFPI wanted us to amend to say that they're not necessarily saying that _everything_ that is in the ISA is what they want, but that we did clear up the thing that they asked us to clear up.
I think the important point here is that you're trying to spin this as malice and evil committed by an evil company, when in fact this is actually clarifying fine print of legal documents between multiple regulatory bodies.
OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing, and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good."
I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge. You clearly think we're an evil company and are never going to cease attempting to connect whatever dots you can find to prove that, but just know that you're wrong, and we're nothing more than a whole bunch of people doing our absolute best to sustainably help folks improve their lives, and that we have _thousands_ of success stories of having done so.
I think if you met the people who are working day in and day out at BloomTech you would see there's not a malicious bone in the body of anyone working there, and we're trying to do something really difficult and help millions of folks move into tech and change their lives in very ambiguous regulatory waters. We're not yet successful in reaching millions, but there are many thousands of success stories, and I think our rates of success and what we charge are incredibly fair in any scenario. If you went around trying your hardest to find good things to say about the work that we do you would find just as much (if not more) to point to.
Just wanted to say you have done a good job explaining here. Unfortunately people love to concentrate on negative outcomes without thinking about the positive. On balance the few, arguably "bad" things Lamda has done seem to be hugely outweighed by the positive.
i was going to sit this one out, but i want to +1 the above with more than just an upvote. Austen seems to be arguing and explaining all the happenings in good faith with someone who appears to be hell-bent on "catching" him with something by misconstruing things.
i have never understood why Lambda/Bloomtech has so many haters but the other commenter here appears to me to be in that camp.
Austen is a terrible person and has been caught lying dozens of times and always hides behind the "we're just good people trying to help others" line to distract from the fact he and the rest of the lambda school staff (which is just all of the un-hired grads so they can boost their already pathetic placement rates) are scammers and frauds.
Calling someone a terrible person, liar, scammer and fraud with little evidence is not a good look. Even if all your points are true (Austen has refuted at least a few), "terrible person" is a huge stretch.
> I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense.
You keep running in circles around a very simple statement that was on the front page of your website: "86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year."
Just tell me how you got to 86%, because that's wildly inconsistent with years of outcomes data, in addition to the leaks.
> This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work.
I'm sorry, did you just lie to my face, say, "This is fair" and try move on?
I'll be honest, I can't follow the story you're trying to tell. It sounds way more complex than what everyone watched unfold.
Your FAQ at launch clearly says it's unpaid. You had a product manager on Hacker News trying to defend the program while all the commenters explained, "This is an unpaid intern program and probably illegal." He even tried the same, "Well our lawyers said it was ok." After the Twitter backlash, you tweeted and deleted an apology, and then started acting like none of that stuff happened.
As for "no student ever did any unpaid work," didn't you pilot the program for months before publicly announcing it? (This is a rhetorical question. At this point I lack faith you'll tell the truth.)
>> > It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
> Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement
Let me get this straight. You're saying, "There's no legal precedent, but hey, it might be true? So we threw it in!"
> OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing
You blocked me, making it impossible to reply.
> and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good."
Despite the block, I said: "Your students publish their homework to GitHub. Half a cohort failed to grasp memory management, but you rubber stamped them through the program.
You even hired one of those students to be a section lead, to teach other students."
"I am not publicly linking to the students who struggled with it, because it’s not their fault. But I did share the GitHub projects with two senior iOS developers I trust, and they agreed these students didn’t get it."
So to answer your challenge: memory management. I have sign-off from two senior, ex-Apple iOS devs. Please wire that money to the National Student Legal Defense Network, who seems to be handling that lawsuit against you.
> I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge.
It's interesting that you think this is all about you.
I said, "After looking through Lambda School’s curriculum, I’d say students are going to struggle with very basic questions you’ll get on first phone screens," and "Out of ten student projects available, five should have failed."
Yes, you had a page in the curriculum on memory management. You also rubber-stamped through people who didn't understand it, and even contracted one of those people to not-help other students on the topic.
Anyone can link someone to a page about a topic and say it's covered, but the difference between a Udemy course and $30k worth of training is the expectation that someone will actually look at homework.
Anyway, the reason you won't explain the 86% placement number claim is that it was true for one cohort in 2018. That's why you only submitted a single report to CIRR. At scale, the number has always been somewhere between 30% and 50%, but that's easier to obfuscate by coming up with your own methodology.
There's a strong parallel with the time you claimed 100% of your UX cohort was hired, without disclosing that only one student graduated. You said it's ok because you tweeted, "VERY SMALL SAMPLE SIZE."
And I'm sure you'll argue you didn't lie moments ago about the Fellows program due to what the word "launched" should mean. You have shown a pattern of deflecting the substance of criticism by focusing on technicalities.
Maybe this worked out for you in a different life. I suspect you've gathered so many critics, you're "attacked at all sides," because you're now among engineers. They just take your data, plug it into a spreadsheet, and let the facts speak for themselves.
But I don't think this had to be. There's an alternate timeline where you did a mea culpa, cut out the shenanigans, and the tech community washed the bad taste out of its mouth. This could have been an incredible reception arc. Instead, Paul Graham enabled you with that whole "haters" pep talk, and things went downhill from there. So it goes.
Don't really know the situation too well but I really appreciate these explanations. I think what people often misunderstand about Bloom and other bootcamps is
1) education is really really hard in general and software engineering is a really hard topic. I'd argue the default is most won't succeed.
2) Bootcamps like this are fighting an uphill battle because of selection bias. If you're applying to a bootcamp like this it's probably because you couldn't get into a college or you did but dropped out or don't have the money, etc. People think it's bizarre when 30% of grads stop looking for a job but it makes sense. These are people from all walks of life with different constraints than the average student.
3) Regulatory schemes in general is batshit crazy in the US. Messing up here and there is not always indicative of malintent, especially for a startup.
This is certainly a problem domain that needs to be solved imo so I'm rooting for Bloom unless they really prove to be harmful. We need better pipelines for people with talent and motivation to climb the social ladder and learn new skills outside of traditional academia.
Austen, I bet it takes you a ton of time to write all this up and I want you to know it's appreciated. It's really insightful to see your perspective and insight on all these topics.
There are different ways to measure placement percentages.
* You can measure percentage of enrolled students who get hired.
* You can measure percentage of graduates who get hired.
* You can measure percentage of students who get hired making more than $50k/yr.
* You can measure percentage of students who get hired making more than $50k/yr within six months of graduation.
Those are all different placement rates.
Say 100 students enroll, 80 graduate, 60 get hired.
Investors would want to know what percent of students get hired (because you outlay costs for 100 students and get repaid for 60). The answer is 60/100 = 60%.
Student outcomes reports say what percentage of graduates get hired. So you say 60/80 = 75%.
Those numbers are different. They are also both completely correct.
If I were your lawyer I would advise you to delete this comment as it would likely be used against you in court as proof of your pattern of misrepresentations.
But you do you, I guess.
At any rate enough people have been made aware of your lies that the harm you can continue doing is limited.
You can surely see they are helping a lot of people, in addition to what you believe on the negative side of things. Not trying to be snippy or offer a trick question, but genuinely, what do you get out of this? Surely it's not worth your time. Even if he is the biggest scammer on the planet you are probably better off spending your time on constructive things.
Nice try. The same question applies to you, since you’ve jumped from one comment thread to another defending a sketchy business in the midst of a downfall.
Is that how we now treat execs who bother to come directly address criticism aimed at their companies on HN?
This is one the few places on the web that happens. You can still disagree with him if you want, but coming here to talk with us directly is respectable IMO. Focus on the arguments and not ad hominem.
- Employment stats. The fact that you use the same term to mean different things to different people is prima facie evidence of an intent to misrepresent.
- Requirement to register with the BPPE. A physical classroom has not been a threshold requirement for registration with the BPPE since at least 2009. The relevant statutes are available online. Also note that online classrooms were not "novel" in 2017 as you claim, so that's an additional misrepresentation. If you claim that your lawyer advised you contrary to the explicit written language of the relevant statutes, you would have clear grounds to sue them for malpractice, and even if you chose not to sue them, the Bar would be interested in disciplining them.
- Claim of unique regulation burden. No, you're dealing with the same regulations that apply to all private schools in the jurisdictions in which they operate.
- ISA. It was found to be illegal. By itself it could be innocuous, but combined with the other deliberate misrepresentations there is evidence of exploitative intent.
And that's just your statements on HN. Don't get people started on the misrepresentations you've made elsewhere.
What is meant by "this is fair" if not a tacit admission that you lied about launching an unpaid intern program?
If you define a lie as any stated falsehood that you have not tried to explain away, then of course we will not be able to find one that satisfies — you've made sure of it!
It's the same method you use to reach your "86% making over $50k within 6 months" number.
But "less" doesn't mean "not", and if we allow "you're such a scumbag liar" then we might as well not have any guidelines at all. Please don't post like this again.
Hmm, it is interesting to me that sometimes when clear evidence conflicts with an existing mental model it’s easier to create imaginary evidence than to adjust the mental model.
lol completely agree. there is ample clear evidence you're a scumbag liar yet you continue to create imaginary evidence that you're actually a good person.
When we were a much smaller company I would take a lot of time to respond to communicate with folks directly, and I learned a lot from it, and think everyone benefited from that level of direct communication.
As we got bigger we got an expensive PR firm who built a big wall around me and put everything I said through review 8 times to massage it for _just the right tone_. There are too many other variables to know whether that was the right move or not, but it always felt wrong to me.
I now regard that as a mistake, as I do many other "big company" things we did. (Broadly, my mental model for success was that we needed to grow up and become a "big company." Now I'm of the opinion that to be a successful company should actively fight against everything that feels "big company." Fewer meetings, more focus on the little details, etc.)
So I don't know that it will work, but I'm intentionally carving out time to keep my ear to the ground and be responsive directly.
This seems unnecessarily aggressive as a general comment. Part of what makes HN interesting is the CEO's (and other high profile individuals at least in the tech industry) that sometimes comment. Certainly I think a CEO should have the time to write something on HN.
That's not a charge to attend career fairs; our partner companies pay us for white glove recruiting services, advanced access to grads, and for us to find and deliver unique sourcing criteria from our student body.
It costs us a lot of money to offer those services, and I think that program _almost_ covers its own costs, but has been a big winner.
The purpose is to create a relationship that helps learners get hired, and it's been succesful.
“Career fairs” as such haven’t been very successful for us, so we don’t run them, but it’s not because we charge for them. There are other mechanisms to meet grads (and our most successful connections are 1:1, not many:many) but until recently when we had some major hiring partners come in for our backend program most of our grads were hired by companies that don’t pay anything.
They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is a source of active lawsuits.
They dodged California regulators and then lied to students about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020.
They launched an unpaid intern program, which created a backlash in the tech community.
They told students they couldn't discharge their debt, which was a lie that go them in even more legal trouble.
I could go on and on, but the recurring pattern is them doing something reprehensible and the "attack" is "getting caught."