West Virginians Now Say Code School Promising Jobs Was a Fraud (msn.com) 184
"Two years after dozens of West Virginians left their jobs to take classes from Mined Minds, a nonprofit that promised to teach them to write computer code, former students have filed a lawsuit claiming the entire operation was a fraud," according to a report:
The program promised a better life and room for career advancement, which resonated with people in Appalachia, where career opportunities are limited. According to the New York Times, Mined Minds offered a paid apprenticeship in which students learned to code as they earned $10 an hour... [Students were also told they'd be paid while taking the classes -- which they discovered wasn't true on their first day of class] after many left their jobs to take the 16-week boot camp, which eventually stretched weeks longer than promised.
Many students dropped out. Those who stayed say they were given vague assignments with little instruction and told to "Google it" when they had questions... Only ten students made it to the final weeks of the program, and just one graduated. He now delivers takeout.
The Times reports that the program received a $1.5 million grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission -- though the lawsuit from former students quickly grew to at least 60 plaintiffs. On Twitter this afternoon, one of the program's founders described the Times' story as "mostly false," arguing that it was based on the "same crazy lawsuit from 2017" with "no new developments."
But the Times also reported more complaints from this April at the code school, from employees who said they were fired for offenses like failing to make enough new LinkedIn connections, not submitting their resumes for review, or for failing to read the self-help book The Start-Up of You.
Many students dropped out. Those who stayed say they were given vague assignments with little instruction and told to "Google it" when they had questions... Only ten students made it to the final weeks of the program, and just one graduated. He now delivers takeout.
The Times reports that the program received a $1.5 million grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission -- though the lawsuit from former students quickly grew to at least 60 plaintiffs. On Twitter this afternoon, one of the program's founders described the Times' story as "mostly false," arguing that it was based on the "same crazy lawsuit from 2017" with "no new developments."
But the Times also reported more complaints from this April at the code school, from employees who said they were fired for offenses like failing to make enough new LinkedIn connections, not submitting their resumes for review, or for failing to read the self-help book The Start-Up of You.
They shouldn't worry.... (Score:5, Funny)
...Trump says there will be coal mining jobs galore for them.
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" Mined Minds "
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Oh for fuck's sake, it's SIEG. S.
With a Z, you get dangerously close to Ziege, which means goat. And you sound like one.
Re:They shouldn't worry.... (Score:5, Funny)
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...Trump says there will be coal mining jobs galore for them.
Give it another 5 years and likely there will be, most people don't understand that if you closure a mine even a strip mine it usually takes 1.5-5 years to "re-certify" it back into operation. Problem though, even when you try to stop the bleeding in progress it keeps going on for awhile. Happens in every industry. Just like what happened with NAFTA. Manufacturing plants moved to Mexico from Canada and the US, and it was ~15 years of bleeding jobs as more companies closed up every year unable to compet
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...Trump says there will be coal mining jobs galore for them.
Give it another 5 years and likely there will be
Oh please, get a grip. Coal is OVER in this country and it's never coming back. It's too expensive, too destructive to the environment, and has ZERO long-term future.
Coal mining and production has been dropping for decades and nothing is going to change that. No amount of lies by you or President Temper-Tantrum is going to reverse the death of coal as an energy source.
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First of all, miners in Appalachia aren't funding anything for anyone. Red states consistently receive way more in federal funding than their taxes supply. In reality, the blue states are funding the red ones.
Secondly, it's the rightwing that consistently refers to themselves as "real Americans" and treat anyone on the coasts as if they are somehow not. So if anyone is treating another like "excess people" it's the right.
They should worry (Score:1)
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...Trump says there will be coal mining jobs galore for them.
Yep, another lie of Trump's that people fell for. Coal is OVER in this country and it's never coming back. It's too expensive, too destructive to the environment, and has ZERO long-term future.
Coal mining and production has been dropping for decades and nothing is going to change that. No amount of lies by an ignorant president is going to reverse the death of coal as an energy source.
It's no different than the decline in buggy-whip manufacturing that occurred when automobiles started appearing.
Their first
Re: They shouldn't worry.... (Score:4, Informative)
It wasn't so much "that" he lied. Politicians lie. Do they lie 10,000+ times in public over 2 years? Not until recently. Do they lie about their contacts with autocratic enemies of the US? Not to this extent. Who lies about their father's birthplace?
The same guy who lied about the former President's birthplace. The #1 liar in the American public. Donald Jumpsuit Drumpf, the traitor.
It's not "that he lied" a couple times lol. That's as shameful as Kendall's insistence that Kavanaugh was almost not confirmed because of his expressed love for beer, as opposed to rape attempts and perjury.
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It goes beyond lies, to the point where people have given up on the truth. They know he lies, they don't care, they assume everything is a lie and just believe whatever they feel like believing, and he encourages it.
Political arguments around Trump are not about what is true and what isn't, they are about which narrative you prefer. The famous "alternative facts".
Agreeing with AmiMoJo somehow (Score:1)
The republicans are driven by their feels. They take the lie as long as it feels good.
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That's as shameful as Kendall's insistence that Kavanaugh was almost not confirmed because of his expressed love for beer, as opposed to rape attempts and perjury.
And right there, you show you are full of carp.
He didn't commit perjury, and he didn't attempt rape. All that happened only in your fevered imagination.
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Who lies about their father's birthplace?
And here is a completely new dimension: Why?
Why would you lie about something that is so easily dispelled and doesn't give you any advantage?
Re: The WaPo? (Score:2, Informative)
Have you been living under a rock, Trump lies continuously.
Re: The WaPo? (Score:1)
Shove your whattaboutism up your stupid reactionary ass.
Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of m (Score:3, Informative)
"“Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”"
It didn't destroy Bill Clinton's Presidency and there's no reason why a probe into Russian interference in the elections should be the end of an innocent President. It wasn't even about him.
He knew he was guilty of conspiracy and so do you.
At best you're a Russian troll, at worst you're a Trumpette that still won't accept all the Trump Tower lies you were fed, the lies about Trump meetings with Russian Intelligen
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To be fair his comment was a moment of (surprising) clarity for him as he was talking about introduction of a special counsel always ruins a presidency and especially makes a second term that much harder. It wasn't whether or not he had been doing back door shenanigans with the Russkies
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I guess it's only fair, since Russian prostitutes did a number one on him.
Re: They shouldn't worry.... (Score:1)
Did anyone ever dare to think that this whole "learn to code" initiative was not designed as a scam from the very beginning?
Seek greener pastures (Score:1, Insightful)
For so many West Virginians, if they want to improve their conditions, the only way to do this is to leave the state.
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And have West Virginia pay...
umm...
With what?
Silicon Valley Class System (Score:1, Insightful)
No way is some kid with a hick accent and (god forbid) a degree from some Southern university getting past their first phone interview for a tech firm. They will always be "flyover" as far as Silicon Valley is concerned, regardless of talent or merit.
Welcome to the iClass system. Should have gone to an Ivy League and learned to speak with the right accent.
Re: Silicon Valley Class System (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because these places don't like social mobility. Competition is good for the labor market but a threat to the upper classes and college grads have a tendency to move away where they are useless to the master class back home.
The constant discouragement can't be understated if you've never lived in an industrial town.
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Over. Thank the car and telephone.
One generation of outbreeding is 99% effective.
There is even hope for the Arabs. But first they've got stop marrying first cousins.
No hope for the English royals though.
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Then I pickup my 'Missouri coat'. Curl it.
It's old Swedish army surplus arctic gear, outer layer.
I keep it around for just those moments, but I don't live in the bay area, or even downtown sac, which is full of bay aryan wannabes. Close enough to go to bay area meetings when needed, but somewhat sane.
I did have an effectively heaterless bug back then.
CA east of the coast range is basically a normal state. Granola is concentrated on the coast.
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IMHO 16 weeks may be enough to learn everything that is to learn. From that point on, what you need is several years of practice.
Non profit without a 501c3 result? (Score:3)
And a dead website. Here's the NYT article mentioned in the post..
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... [nytimes.com]
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If I pay real dollars on a class, I expect the instructor to have some level of competence and not have "google it" as answer for every question. Sure, there might be questions they won't be able to answer right away, and in this case what they would do is google it themselves and then point me to the correct solution online.
I've been to classes which costed thousands of dollars and found out my self-taught knowledge on the subject exceeds the instructors'. But when you start something from scratch, there's
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To be fair, "google it" is how 53% of software is written now. 86% of that is code copy/pasted from Stack Exchange.
Re:Proof (Score:5, Insightful)
looking $hi7 up is a huge part of coding
Ah, the kids of today. It is actually possible to learn how to program without access to Stack Overflow. Indeed, it's better to learn that way.
Also who the fuck is scared of the word shit?
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Also who the fuck is scared of the word shit?
Nobody's "scared" of it; it's just classier not to use it all the time.
(And it's also fun to use euphemisms and substitute characters simply because it spins up certain folks, lol)
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Ah, the kids of today. It is actually possible to learn how to program without access to Stack Overflow.
Sure, I could spend a small fortune on paperback books every year just to keep up with changes in the latest release of multiple languages. The author will show me the solution that he thinks is best and I won't get exposed to different opinions.
I mean, I'm with you. I'm not excited about the thought about being surrounded by developers that only vaguely grasp what the code that they write does. Good developers should really learn what's going on under the hood. The problem I see is that these coders were e
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Yes. I learned how to use it without access to the web too.
Any other silly questions?
Re:Proof (Score:5, Interesting)
No. Fuck it, NO!
What you get that way is cargo-cult programmers. People who copy/paste code without having the foggiest idea what that code actually does behind the scenes. What these people do is slap together black boxes and string them together haphazardly, resulting in code that would beg "kill me" if it could talk.
And you don't even want to think about how secure that code is.
Tim Cook (Score:2)
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Tim Cook is the guy who thought it's a good idea to remove the phone jack from his flagship product, create a front on a hand held device that's 100% touch sensitive (leaving me wondering where the fuck to actually hold that device without doing half a dozen selections you don't want to make) and unlock it by having the thief hold it in front of your face.
I wouldn't take anything this guy assured me of serious if I got paid for doing so.
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"they were told to Google it". If that is not coding then I don't know what is
stackoverflow
damage = loss of mind share (Score:1)
the real damage is that if a legitimate/genuine operation did try to offer something similar, they'd be run out of town - this culture of over-promising and swindling needs to be addressed somehow.
Gee, who woulda thought (Score:2)
That some school promising jobs would be connected with fraud.
I'd almost be inclined to call the tuition a tax on the stupid.
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I said "almost"... although yeah, technically you are correct.
As I remarked elsewhere, legitimate institutions with a job placement program for people who successfully complete their program or area of study will only ever say that they have a certain historic level of success with job placement, and I know of at least one which even said that they aren't even legally allowed to say that they can actually guarantee a job, although in the next breath they still boasted a 95% successful placement. This fi
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Why is the government guaranteeing loans for an institution that supposedly "guarantees" jobs?
*ANY* organization that dares to make such a claim along the lines of promising a job after successful completion of a study or program is deserving of very close examination at least.... and speaking for myself, I've never heard of anyone promising it who wasn't also doing something else that they weren't legally supposed to do. I've even heard reputable institutions essentially *admit* as much in their recru
Did they really "promise" anything? (Score:1)
I'm not sure you can really teach someone programming. If someone really want's to learn how to code, they can just do it on their own. Download the JRE and just figure things out little-by-little. They have to want to learn it. Read stuff on the Web. And actually yes, "Google it". Last I checked, they don't teach programming in College. If you're a compsci major, you're just expected to know how to code already. So every serious coder is pretty much self-taught. Yeah, it might be nice to have some place to
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I agree with your comment. Everything you need to learn programming is readily available on the Web, including reams of source code from open source projects. The real issue is, given modern software tools, there is little need for "warm body" coders who do not also understand computer science. Gaining a working understanding of computer science is an enormous endeavor, and no 16 week boot camp is going to help much. If you did not demonstrate aptitude for math and science in school, your chances as a c
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The real issue is, given modern software tools, there is little need for "warm body" coders who do not also understand computer science.
What the fuck? 99% of programming jobs need little to no computer science knowledge.
Gaining a working understanding of computer science is an enormous endeavor,
Gaining enough computer science for a successful career as a software engineer however takes a few evenings reading shit online.
Most jobs don't involve devising new complex algorithms or redesigning compilers.
There are jobs that have strong requirements in mathematics and applied programming, but things like genuine data science jobs are still a miniscule fraction of the programming roles out there.
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Google, luxury!
When I was a kid, we learned to code from a 6502 'programming manual' (basically a list of opcodes)...
If you tell that to kids today, they won't believe you.
You can spot the possible future coder young. They work puzzles, not so much 1000 piece puzzles, logic puzzles, chinese wood block, rubiks etc.
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Well,
assembly is relatively easy. How else would you learn assembly as by a book with a list of the op codes?
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Nice. We just had datasheets, and you had to order them. They took three weeks to arrive. Before you could actually program you had to get the damned clock circuit to behave well enough that the processor would deign to operate, then you had to find one of those precision screwdrivers small enough to flip the DIP switches.
Could be worse though. My parents learned to program by punching cards and mailing them off to the nearest university with a computer. They'd get the syntax error back, also by mail.
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We punched our cards by hand, with a flint tool and an EBCDIC table tattoo.
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My grandparents had to worry about their computers unionizing. And feed them too.
Had a bunch of ex-Miners in my city (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, it's why would you? They guys I knew went through even crappier programs than this. And even if you could, can you work 'em 80 hours a week for 40 hours of Salary like you can with the H1-Bs?
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The New Green Deal would be much better for them. Local manufacturing and installation jobs, decently paid, not easy to export or replace with H1-B.
It _can't_ be exported or replaced with H1-Bs (Score:3)
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And even if you could, can you work 'em 80 hours a week for 40 hours of Salary like you can with the H1-Bs?
So to fight H1Bs you prefer ... the open borders party?
You're thinking of Hilary Clinton (Score:1)
Look, we need immigration. Otherwise we'll go the way of Japan. Fact is industrialized nations don't have enough kids to maintain the population much less grow it. And without growth your 401k comes to a screeching halt.
What we need is social programs and guarantees so that the wealth generated by those immigrants gets passed around to everyone. Right now
Government training is a fraud (Score:1)
Fraud? Sounds like every government jobs program ever.
To be fair (Score:1)
"Google it" is actually a pretty common method of solving a lot of programming questions. I have long since lost count of the number of times I've googled something when I was stuck and found an example bit of code on some forum or another that I then adapted.
In no way am I defending any other part of this operation, which does indeed sound like a scam.
Re:To be fair (Score:5, Interesting)
"Google it" is a solution when you already know what you're doing and are trying to find what API call is responsible for what you have in mind.
It's a HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE thing to suggest to someone who does NOT know what they're doing yet. Because here's what's going to happen: They will google their question, they will find some code (that they can't even determine whether it does what they want or whether the person who wrote it knows just barely more than they do, i.e. instead of jack shit all just shit all), they will copy that code and fiddle around with it until it does what they want. Or at least until the 3 cases they try work, rest assured they won't try edge cases or even consider security. And how could they, they don't even know what to look for.
PLEASE don't tell someone who has barely an idea what coding is about to "google it"!
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"Google it" is a solution when you already know what you're doing and are trying to find what API call is responsible for what you have in mind.
I agree with that but would like to remind you that exactly may end up being 80% of your job as a professional. Finding out how basic things like data access or keyboard/mouse IO or user interface buttons are handled in the framework that someone decided earlier to use in the project you are in this month.
And the better you get at that, the more often you'll be put into different project teams to put out the current fire....
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I'm all for it. I call that "total job security".
Yes, I'm in IT security and part of my job is finding security flaws in software, why do you ask?
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At least those people look up how to do something! Much better than thinking you know better...
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When I do know better, I usually also have the proof of concept to show it.
Unless you are genuinely interested ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... you shouldn't seek to get a coding job. Yeah, it's good money, but so is being a good plumber. And those are way more useful to society most of the time.
None the less, I do hope this pseudo training joint gets sued for fraud. We have this type of shop in Germany too and their output of useful coders is limited to those who were passionate about it in the first place.
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Being a plumber is a sewerly shitty job though, drains you out.
Stop with these bullshit programs! (Score:3)
Programming isn't business administration. Shoveling bullshit into heads is not going to cut it. It's not even going to make you a bad programmer, it's not going to accomplish ANYTHING.
If you only want code monkeys, go ahead. Not that it will accomplish much because code monkeys are already a dime a dozen and I foresee that by 2030 there is no use for them anymore because we already see the onset of programming tools that abstract away the coding part to the point where automatic code creation has in some areas become a reality. If anything, what we need is people who are able to write those code creators and optimize the code. Something that these "learn programming in 16 weeks" people will not be able to because that requires you to understand the math behind it and know that the Big O-Notation isn't some sort of porn grading scheme.
There is a reason why every computer science course I know starts with the assumption that you CAN actually write code. It's the foundation. Not the end result. And that foundation is something you can very easily build yourself, provided you have the interest.
And if you don't, what the hell are you doing here? If you're in it for the money, forget it. First, if you only care about money, there's other areas that are FAR better paid (try finance and administration) and second, to get paid (fairly) big bucks in this area, you have to be good. Really, really good. And that in turn requires you to, you guessed it, have the interest and aptitude.
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Did you ever write any programs, just for yourself, without any prospect of payment, even before you ever took any computer courses? If not, you might not be a coder.
Do you dread the possibility of being propelled up into management, where you will have little or any time to get your hands dirty with actual coding, even if it means a bit more money? If not, you might not be a c
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A very good analysis.
When I switched to IT security, the one thing I missed the most is that I can't no longer fix things. My job now is to find the flaws and then hand them back to others to fix them. This was what turned me off of IT administration too, since I was supposed to hire people to fix stuff instead of doing it.
That really sucks. It just doesn't feel right when you know what's wrong, know what you'd have to do to fix it and not be allowed to fix the damn thing.
My solution was that I now develop
Like vultures (Score:2)
I saw this yesterday, my thoughts (Score:2)
West Virginians Now Say Code School Promising Jobs Was a Fraud
I saw this, and it hurts me deeply that it happened. For-profit vocational schools are a racket, an unregulated syndicate that prey on the needy.
There, I said it. Someone has to. This country has a fucked-up way of treating vocational education, leaving it wide open for predators to do their thing.
Now, code academies work. I've seen it happen. But it does require some conditions. Typically, it is someone that already posses a 2 or 4 year college degree doing a transition into coding. A degree is needed
If Politicians Really Wanted to Help People (Score:2)
Age of students? (Score:1)
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If the stories are true, many were told this was a paid course, as in they'd get paid to do it.
I did this four week course on Theoretical Physics (Score:5, Funny)
No maths required, they made it really simple. Then I got this cool job working with particle physics earning $200,000 per year.
You can do it to!
Just sign up at
www.takeyourmoney.com
True!
Wait, shouldn't that be (Score:2)
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.edu we're accredited somehow.
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Funny enough, a lot of great theoretical computer scientists and programmers are gay.
But being gay does not make you a great theoretical computer scientist and programmer.
It ain't bijective.
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Actually red states have more gays than blue states, which is the crazy part of your denial of your own homosexuality, while you publicly obsess lol.