> You are quite literally selling tech savvy people their future

It's a bit overkill. You can just do it yourself. Plenty of resources available for free. Students have to put the work in regardless.

I went to an in person bootcamp. There was nothing they taught that wasn't available elsewhere. It cost around $20,000 just for tuition, plus I paid SF rent and living expenses. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

The biggest benefit imo was being around smart motivated people doing the same thing. It was much easier to work from 9 am to 8 pm 6 days a week if you were around others smart motivated people doing the same. Also being able to talk to people about what you were learning helped tremendously. It helped to clear up misconceptions, develop mental models, ect. Working on group projects helped me to learn to read others code and to learn git. The network I developed has proven useful in later job searches and just in general keeping abreast of developments. It was honestly the best 6 months of my life.

Not everything was perfect obviously. My biggest gripe is the outcomes were oversold. I remember being told they had a 99% placement rating within 3 months. Each cohort was somewhere around 33 people. That would mean that around 1 person for every 3 cohorts would not get a job within 3 months. However just in my cohort, 5 did not have a job within 3 months. Within 6 months all but two had jobs, but still, 95% in 6 months is not 99% within 3. Other than outcomes I had a few gripes with how the teaching was done. Overall though it was a great experience for me.

I went to a traditional in-person bootcamp (not Lambda School), and I believe it accelerated me into a job ~4 months earlier than what I could have done on my own. The bootcamp had several key advantages over self study:

- Easier to put in 40-60 hours per week in a structured environment vs having the discipline to do that at home week after week - Less time wasted on figuring out what topics you need to study in the first place - Daily access to a senior engineer that you can ask questions to - Good advice on how to land the first job

In my case I think those benefits were absolutely worth $20k+. Yes, I could have gotten the same result on my own given more time to study, but every job and promotion I've had since then would have come a few months later.

this is what I don't get though. Why mortgage your future earnings to take a MOOC from a random startup employee when you can get the same from a world class professor for free?

The idea before was at least partly that you get a great deal more structure, feedback and accountability than you do in any university. Now that all seems to have been jettisoned but a learning community with a schedule and a curriculum is worth something. Udemy courses plus a knowledgeable lecturer and a lot of TAs who know the material less well but can solve most problems and a schedule of full time study/building for nine months would absolutely be worth Lambda’s upfront or ISA cost for a lot of people. I paid £10,000 for a Master’s that was basically a textbook subscription service with access to past exam papers and two graded essays per module.

You learn something completely different in a comp sci course. Regardless why mortgage your future earnings when you can learn everything for free?

Because most people can’t. Self-directed learning is brutally hard and most people can’t do it even with a detailed road map. Without even that the competition rate will drop even further. To a first approximation the only people who complete MOOCs are those who already have degrees. The kind of people who can compete freecodecamp by themselves are very close to the ones who can work through a Math textbook by themselves, doing all the exercises.

If you can't do that then I'd argue you're not cut out to be a developer. As someone doing hiring I would never hire someone who had difficulty in doing any of the things you mentioned are difficult. You've basically listed the things I value in a hire.

You can "just" do a lot of things yourself. The premise of all services is that they help you reach a certain outcome more efficiently and/or effectively.

No single service will be valuable to everyone. There might be services that provide no added value to anyone, but I would argue those are not actually services.

I was quite shocked to read about this sort of behavior from the founder (this is from the Reddit thread, so may be wrong):

    "Caleb Hicks was asked why he wouldn't give students a survey on how they liked the changes and he said he "wasn't going to run the school on a survey"."

What a way to respond to your users giving you feedback about the direction of the process/entity they bought into.