You sound like somebody who has never actually tried suing somebody.
Lawsuits are hard. They take years, are very stressful, and you generally need significant up-front capital to make them happen. Then if (if!) you win a lawsuit the cash doesn't magically appear when the judge bangs his gavel; there's a whole process for trying to extract your money. And if they have spent the money and are now broke? Well, basically, tough shit.
And of course, winning a lawsuit and recovering money doesn't actually turn back the clock on the lost time and heartache. It just means you've managed to get some of your cash back. Which may feel like a very poor return, and is certainly a waste.
And that's even before we get to the various theoretical reasons that regulation makes sense here. For example, there's an information asymmetry: these instant schools know a ton more about what they're selling than their customers do, making it much easier for them to exploit. Plus they're selling training; students, by definition, are missing a lot of important knowledge and are outsiders to the industry. The normal feedback loops of commerce work best with repeat purchases; one-time purchases greatly restrict the invisible hand's power. And if nothing else, we need a regulator to make sure that the statistics are solid.
As somebody who has hired developers in CA and will likely do so again, I think this is great. I don't want bright young people getting fucked over. I want them to enter the industry in a way that gives them a real shot at a career.
Thanks for your perspective. You are correct, I have never personally sued anyone. I was given a great opportunity by one of these such programs and it has completely changed my life for the better. That's not to say all of them provide the same for all students, but I believe they deserve a fair defense at this point.
Glad to hear it. But given that, you should be strongly in favor of reasonable regulation.
These programs cost basically nothing to start, and the major qualification needed is marketing expertise, not technical or educational skill. And, as others have pointed out, the profits could be substantial.
No barrier to entry, an uneducated market susceptible to manipulation, and no easy way to evaluate product quality means that even if the early entrants are perfectly good, the incentives are such that I'd expect a lot of their competitors to be fools or scam artists, unable to deliver good results. In which case, the whole thing will get a bad reputation, harming not only a lot of students, but the programs who are doing well.
As a parallel, consider food quality and safety regulation. It's hard for a consumer to tell what's in a sausage. It's to the benefit of all quality sausage-makers to have enough regulation to make sure their competitors are all doing a reasonably good job. If any fool or criminal can jump into the business, the best case is that good producers will be trying to compete with companies using 30% dog food and old meat. But more likely is that a bunch of people will get sick, causing a giant scare where people, unable to tell good from bad, stop buying all sausage.
Lawsuits are hard. They take years, are very stressful, and you generally need significant up-front capital to make them happen. Then if (if!) you win a lawsuit the cash doesn't magically appear when the judge bangs his gavel; there's a whole process for trying to extract your money. And if they have spent the money and are now broke? Well, basically, tough shit.
And of course, winning a lawsuit and recovering money doesn't actually turn back the clock on the lost time and heartache. It just means you've managed to get some of your cash back. Which may feel like a very poor return, and is certainly a waste.
And that's even before we get to the various theoretical reasons that regulation makes sense here. For example, there's an information asymmetry: these instant schools know a ton more about what they're selling than their customers do, making it much easier for them to exploit. Plus they're selling training; students, by definition, are missing a lot of important knowledge and are outsiders to the industry. The normal feedback loops of commerce work best with repeat purchases; one-time purchases greatly restrict the invisible hand's power. And if nothing else, we need a regulator to make sure that the statistics are solid.
As somebody who has hired developers in CA and will likely do so again, I think this is great. I don't want bright young people getting fucked over. I want them to enter the industry in a way that gives them a real shot at a career.