California Cracks Down On Unlicensed Exchange Of Knowledge

Because you can’t just share your experience, knowledge and expertise with other people willy-nilly. The government must license that sort of thing.

Hacker boot camps have sprung up across the world in recent years, offering crash courses in the art and science of computer programming. These schools are particularly prevalent in the San Francisco Bay Area, the heart of the tech world. And in a place where demand for coders just keeps going up, the schools are very popular.

But now these Silicon Valley schools have a problem.

Over the past month, California regulators sent cease and desist letters to many of these hacker boot camps, saying they run afoul of the state’s educational laws, as first reported by Venturebeat. “They’re not properly licensed, and the law requires them to be licensed to offer an educational service like they are,” says Russ Heimerich, a spokesperson for the the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, or BPPE.

The next thing you know, the government will want to pick and choose who can and cannot disseminate information about current events too.

Oh, wait a minute. Some in Congress already want to do that.

The Orwellian implications aside, let’s be honest about what this is. It’s protectionism. California has a very large, and very expensive (to both taxpayers and students) university system, and the last thing they want is competition from a bunch of upstarts providing more focused and efficient training.