
Viking Code School - parenthetically
http://www.vikingcodeschool.com
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rip747
"Participants will need to complete a binding job search agreement and must be
willing to relocate for a job if they reside outside of selected cities."

Really? So basically you have no choice but to relocate if they can't place
you in a job where you live.

Also, they never say what type of programming job they can give or if you have
a choice on accepting the job or not. what if you graduate and they get you a
job across the country that paying $50K a year? do you have to accept it or
pay the tuition fee?

also the curriculum posted on the site, isn't that detailed on what you will
learn.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
So don't sign up. For some this is the golden ticket into the middle class,
and worth the price.

I'm guessing its really a trainer/recruiter for a contracting firm. But so
what? That's a great first job for a graduate - lots of experience quickly.

~~~
rip747
middle class is all relative to salary and location. if you're making $50K a
year and living somewhere in North Dakota, then yes, you're probably well
above middle class. But making $50K and living in LA, well, you're in poverty.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Somebody in Africa would have a different opinion of poverty.

~~~
joepie91_
That was kind of the point.

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6d0debc071
The problem I have with this is that a certain percentage of people will get a
job anyway. I could, theoretically speaking, set up a school that promises you
only pay if you get a job - teach nothing - and then rake in the profits.

Where this falls on a line between 100% of people get a job and only the
background rate get a job is questionable - and I'd be interested to see the
degree of investment that they place in each student because there will be
Kelly Criterion that determine how rational it is for them to gamble on that
at any particular point of value-add to the student.

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parenthetically
The interesting part of this is the "don't pay if you don't get hired" part of
the policy. Sure, a couple of the big in-person boot camps have that, but I've
never seen it online-only.

~~~
DaFranker
The trick here is the required 2000$ deposit upon obtaining a reserved spot in
the course. This 2000$ is refunded (with fees deducted, I would guess) 6
months after the end of the course if _no_ job offers were made to you.

I'm guessing that receiving a 40k/yr offer from a small-town business on the
other side of the country means they clap their hands and claim their prize.
Of course they want you to have the biggest salary you/they can find within 6
months, but other than that, location and conditions and other factors are
irrelevant. If that's all they can find for you, they'll take it, and from
what I could tell of the fine print you either take it too or pay the
remaining 10800$ in full immediately.

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vkjv
At risk of admitting tl;dr... how long do you have to find a job? For example,
if I find a job programming 10 years after graduating from an accredited
university, do I need to pay them?

~~~
parenthetically
Spoiler Warning: The fine print says 6 months.

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some_furry
The Iron Yard (Orlando, FL) is also a coding school that guarantees a job to
its graduates. They don't offer the same "don't pay if you don't get hired"
policy, to my knowledge.

I can't vouch for the efficacy of either, but learning programming from 0 in N
weeks and guaranteed employment seems... unlikely.

~~~
parenthetically
I don't think any of these boot camps promise 0 to N anymore; most require
weeks or months of prep work and strong demonstrated interest.

~~~
some_furry
If you're going to put in months of "prep work", you don't _really_ need a
boot camp to learn how to be a programmer. At best, it's an expensive job
placement program that forces you to do a lot of homework to cover their own
reputation. Which is brilliant.

Background: I've been programming for over a decade; I'm self-taught and I've
taught a handful of other people very early in their programming careers. Even
the folks who mastered the fundamentals didn't really grasp the advanced
concepts in a few weeks (probably due to being really busy with work, etc.).

Also, I rather dislike the term "software engineer" when referring to
developers who have not been licensed:
[http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/positions/Engineertitle0213.pd...](http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/positions/Engineertitle0213.pdf)

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Kalium
"Complete software engineers", eh? Does that mean things required for modern
software engineering, like complexity theory and relational calculus?

Or are they just skipping over this?

~~~
hashberry
It is also my pet peeve to call a Web Developer a Software Engineer. It's
rather antiquated. Being a full-stack webdev is about knowing how all the
different pieces fit together.

~~~
Kalium
I suspect they're relying on the confusion. A fully educated software engineer
likely has a long and remunerative career ahead of them. A web developer may
not, and one trained this way almost certainly lacks the breadth of skills
required for said career as a software engineer.

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dogma1138
12K$ tuition, a contract that forces you to not only accept any job offers but
also relocate for them... eh ok...

Most public 2-year collages cost 3-5K (Google, not experience so forgive me if
I'm off by a bit, and yes that doesn't cover board and living expenses but
neither does the 12K for the 7 months you go to this school) a year, you can
get an associate in applied Science degree in programming for about the same
costs as that course and most likely lower.

This looks more like an indenture scam than a coding school. And while their
teaching might be top notch you will probably won't be hired into a top tier
company with a 100K+ salary just because you've attended an online course no
matter how good it was.

At best you will end up working for some filling some low paid job for some
generic software company.

What sad is that they are also most likely being paid by the companies they
arrange jobs for just like any other recruitment company does.

Their curriculum is also a bit meh, I really don't see the value of coding
schools that don't integrate math into their curriculum. I'm sorry but there's
a good reason why college degrees in Comp. Sci or Software Engineering are
mostly maths. It's fairly tough facing actual programming challenges without
it, now I'm not saying every programmer, eh sorry "coder" has to have MSc
level of math but quite a bit of it is actually important into forming how a
programmer "thinks" even if they are not directly implementing it in their
programming.

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VikingCoder
Boy given my user name, it seems like I should try this out!

