Percentage of earnings is just equity. They're different, but not ethically. Slavery would be forcibly taking 100% of an individual's equity, but given that ISAs are both optional and a minor percentage (Lambda's was 18% when I went thru), the comparison is unreasonable.
ISAs are equity in the student's future performance, up to a cap. This can result in paying a huge premium for relatively small amount of effort (a $30k cap for 6 months of online class is comparable to a semester at uni), but with 2 key advantages: a money-back-guarantee and accessibility.
With a fixed-cost tuition program, students who can't afford to pay don't go. This prices out students who would benefit from the program. There is also no recourse if you can't get a job from uni. How do u know if the teachers instructed you properly? Imagine paying $20k for the wrong instruction. Yikes.
The only time an ISA works against the student's favor is when the schools go after students who got a job working in something unrelated (which Lambda appears to have done a lot of) or students who were super successful, because they overpay for the instruction. The latter isn't that bad given the risk-free nature of the ISA, and the former can be resolved with legal action and regulation (which is what's happening).
That's just my $0.02, although I was a Lambda Grad who did the ISA and didn't have any issues.
Another piece of anec-data: I had a non-CS degree coming into Lambda, which definitely helped me during recruitment time. I think that had I gone into a CS program, I would have done fine and possibly even landed a better gig than I got after Lambda, but I didn't want to shell out $50k over 2 years on the chance of that happening, so I was happy to take the ISA. 5 years post-grad, I'm making 4x what I was making pre-Lambda, and my ISA was paid off after 2 years, but as is true with most things: your mileage may vary.
Buying equity in a person is literally what indentured servitude is.
Someone making a deal to give up their future earnings for several years in exchange for a trip to the American colonies and a better life isn't fundamentally different than giving up your future earnings to a coding bootcamp in exchange for a trip to FAANG.
The difference is in the degree of future earnings ceded.
Isn’t there a big difference in the amount of freedo between an indentured servant and somebody with an ISA?
An indentured servant was generally forced to work a specific job until things were paid back (and often at below market wages). Somebody with an ISA is free to do whatever they wish, they just have to pay
yOu cAn'T tRulLy bE fReE iF yOu cAn'T sELL yOuRsELf iNtO sLaVeRy.
I remember this take. It's the kind of thing that only makes sense in a dorm room full of financially secure people that ignore that this is simply creates a slave class of economically disadvantaged.
This is a useful bit of knowledge, but to guard against people making irrational judgments about Accenture, it's important to note that (1) It was primarily Anderson's consulting divisions that went to Accenture, and (2) these large auditing firms have offices all over the US and world, and in these types of cases, it was really only a branch or two that were complicit in the fraud.
In the same way that we shouldn't condemn the employees of <INSERT TECH COMPANY> because senior leaders decided to <Censor/Abuse/Manipulate users> we shouldn't condemn otherwise ethical accountants because of the misdeeds of their colleagues - especially when they pass more stringent ethical requirements than developers.
Ironically, people couldn't differentiate the isolated incident, and AA liquidated/sold because no one wanted to do business with them. [0]
"Ironically, people couldn't differentiate the isolated incident, and AA liquidated/sold because no one wanted to do business with them."
"Ironically" is not the word you should be looking for, there. "Fittingly", or "Unsurprisingly", perhaps. Even if you know not all the apples in the barrel were bad, you know that it was a barrel with more than one bad apple, so you throw that barrel out.
Ironically, people often dismiss the scale of a problem by saying it was limited to a few "bad apples", when the point of the apple/barrel metaphor is that one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch, so having one bad apple in it is just as bad as every apple being rotten.
The tech examples will often involve employees directly responsible for building, improving and maintaining the systems of abuse that are central to the ill deeds of the senior leaders you're referring to. The senior leaders can't do what they do without those systems.
This concept is fundamentally why 4,000 of Google's employees staged a protest against Google working on AI systems for the military. They have an inkling about what such systems will be used for.
So it begs the obvious question about how complicit you are if you build software systems that you know are going to be used for immoral things; that you know ahead of time how they're going to be used by said senior leadership. To say nothing of the fact that often said systems are built for the sole purpose of enabling abuse, so there's very little question about the line of moral responsibility (whether of privacy or in the aiding of censorship in authoritarian nations, et al). This obviously isn't a new debate within tech though, it goes all the way back in the industry (eg IBM's counting machines).
> how complicit you are if you build software systems that you know are going to be used for immoral things
There's another path to not building and not participating it. It might be possible to be subversive and design these systems to best fit your values:
"My bias was always to build decentralization into the net. That way it would be hard for one group to gain control. I didn’t trust large central organizations. It was just in my nature to distrust them." -- Robert Taylor
Working on my CPA certification - 1 more test to go!
Proposing to my girlfriend of 7 years next month.
Quit my public accounting job in March to do a bootcamp - finish up in a month or so.
Complacency is what I felt in my job. I just got promoted in December and was on a pretty easy path to senior, when I realized that I was unfulfilled professionally and that was leading me to waste my personal time trying to find fulfillment. I probably played about 15 hours+ of PvP videogames to try to scratch the competitive itch I have each week. I was a pretty mediocre friend, and a rather uncommitted partner. I quit PvP videogames, started working out 5+ times a week, and committed to being a better partner to my hopeful fiancé.
My only advice as a peer would be to stop optimizing for what is impressive and optimize for what makes you fulfilled. Fulfillment will lead to satisfaction and purpose, which I think will lead to happiness. I've been trying to live by the same advice for the past 4 months - and I've never been happier.
>> Proposing to my girlfriend of 7 years next month.
Advice from an older person here - don't wait until you are 30+ to start trying, if you want to have kids. You will all benefit from having more health and energy when under 30.
Sure health and energy are helpful when raising kids. But what about wisdom and perspective? I would think it really depends on the person and how prepared they feel with respect to having kids - mentally and physically.
Wisdom and perspective are not necessarily correlated with age.
Your second sentence is correct, each individual needs to judge roughly the right time based on mental,physical and financial situations.
For me there was never going to be a right time so I'm glad it happened when it did (29) as it's tiring and I want to have as much good health as I can to enjoy my children.
