As a counterpoint, in 25 years and probably as many jobs, only one or two places have cared about my degree and that was just another red flag on top of the pile of red flags those places already had.
That being said, the difficulty is getting that first experience at a reputable company. After that, at least in my industry, it's all reputation and the interview. Nobody in mining cares where you were schooled if you have experience.
network effect, a roadmap, peers, milestones set for me so i don't waste time, and an institution that i can put on a resume. most importantly free up front.
i'm a dropout with no savings, on-and-off homeless for the past few years. i've been playing with tech since i was a kid but not in any capacity that looks professional. the pandemic has ironically given me stability and opportunity to try and get my foot in the door. a somewhat respected program that provides a structured environment and job leads at the end is breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
and if it doesn't pan out and i go back to tossing pizza for minimum wage, at least there's no debt like last time.
Just wanted to say, best of luck in your studies and search for better work.
I was in a similar situation about ten years ago, hitting bottom and roughing it. Being a stubborn mule of sorts, I kept trying, learning, went through countless jobs in different fields; all the while, I pursued the joy of programming. Eventually, a side project I was doing for fun (and as a learning experience) became the foot in the door, as proof of my abilities.
In my case, much of it was luck - but as they say, you make your own luck too. And the rest was mostly just "showing up" and "being there".
> i've been playing with tech since i was a kid
I believe this is the essence and heart of becoming a software developer, and you got it!
You can learn everything you need on your own without a degree or bootcamp. All you need is a starter project and an interest. You can Google everything.
Pick an easy language. I recommend Javascript or Python. There's a wealth of learning material and you can use these two languages to build a wide variety of things.
Pick something fun: a simple game, an interactive website, a blog, etc. Make it your objective, and instill in yourself a deep desire to make it. But don't get caught up on making it perfect.
Read a tutorial or two, experiment, and try to apply what you learned to the thing you want to build.
It'll take a lot of time. Whatever time you think it takes, multiply that figure by three. Don't stress out. You can't conceive of all the roadblocks or what you don't know.
If you get stuck, ask questions on Reddit, StackOverflow, Discord, etc. Learning how to ask questions builds your mental model of how this stuff fits together. Eventually you'll be able to answer a lot of your own questions.
This is weird to me because the kind of person who can go away, learn, and make something by themselves seems to be ticking a lot of the boxes software development teams need (even if only at junior level.)
It's not weird when you see how broken and unserious hiring is just about everywhere in the industry. On top of that the pipeline to hiring entry level/junior programmers is dominated by newly graduated college students, and of those any particular large company with the best salaries is going to prioritize former positively reviewed interns. The intern path is a sweet one if you can take it but is closed to people not part of the college system (and often companies won't take interns until the student has completed their third year).
I do still think it's quite possible to bootstrap a programming career without a degree or any formal certification. In some ways it's easier now than say 15 years ago, in some ways it's harder. But hustling is key. There's hustling on the material you need to learn (which is going to be off-putting to many programmers who started for the joy, not the hustle) but there's more important hustling outside of that which well-meaning advice on e.g. what programming language to learn always misses. It helps to see universities, bootcamps, contracting agencies, consulting/freelancing groups, well-connected recruiters, etc. as all being opportunities that take some of the burden of hustling off of you, deciding which ones to try and take advantage of is then partially dependent on how much you can do yourself. It's not helpful to blanket-recommend anything and even when talking to an individual they need to do their own introspection and surface results of that in order to receive useful targeted advice.
Not sure what changed in lambda school, but it's probably not a good year to do any boot camps period.
My alma matter, insight data sciences program, folded last week. Laid off most staff. Grateful for their training, but not surprised that model couldn't survive this year. At the same time I'm hearing offers are starting to skyrocket for some specialists! Let's see how things evolve in 2021!
Yes. And it’s a kind of debt that actively disincentives getting a raise if that raise pushes you just above 50k. Since at that point you’ll start owing Lambda school 17% of your salary for 2 years. It actually does what people who don’t understand progressive tax rates think the tax system does.
Can you imagine going to Lambda school, not getting a good education, not getting a much higher paying job, then being stuck unable to get incremental raises past $50,000 so you don’t end up down $8,500 for 2 years?
The only difference is that people can opt in lambda school but they don't get to choose with progressive tax rates.
The voluntariness of a transaction makes the difference between a payment and theft, between consensual sex and rape.
Progressive taxes will just punish high middle class people for creating more value than low middle class people, making it harder for them to join the class of actual rich people who can structure their income so as to pay minimal taxes (like big corps do).
You’re missing the point of the analogy. Progressive taxation doesn’t produce a cliff where you’re potentially better off if you make less money.
The higher rates only apply to money over the threshold.
Lambda school works the way many people think the US tax system works (but doesn’t). When you make over X, all of your money is taxed at Y. So it’s better to make X - 1 than X + 1.
Your ISA is a sunk cost. Obviously, if you can afford to, many people will be better off in the long term having it paid off, but going from making $4,208 a month at a $49,500 salary, then getting a small raise to $50,000 and making $3,493/month is not something a lot of people can afford. Especially when you consider how that $715/month you're losing by bumping your income could be going to debt that won't expire if you just wait out the 5 years under that cap. This is especially true if you've had a few years under $50,000 before even having the chance to edge up over $50k. It can very much be in your financial interest to not take a raise, if offered.
Yeah, that's it. "Once you begin making at least $50,000 a year, you will owe Lambda 17% of your monthly income until you reach the cap or the terms of your ISA expire."
So if you go from $49,999 to $50,000 you now owe them $50,000 * 0.17, or $8,500.
"Now wait just a minute, FemmeAndroid. If you're just getting a raise at your current job, that won't be covered unless you're a web dev."
Now I don't know about you, but I like doing good work, and I'm a developer at heart, even if I don't have a fancy CS degree or even a Bootcamp diploma. But every desk job I've had has ended up involving development, since I can usually help automate parts of my job. It's worked out well for me, and I'd imagine anyone who comes out of a bootcamp like this without a new job will at least try and leverage their coding experience to improve their current job, get a raise, or get a promotion. Your job might not be 'web developer' but your job will start to involve the skills you learned at Lambda school.
'You will owe payments toward your ISA if your job requires skills you learned at Lambda School, even if your title isn't "Web Developer" or "Data Scientist."'
Heck, even if you start a business, and grow it from the ground up, as soon as you make $50,000 a year, you immediately drop back down $8,500. (They explicitly call out 'Self-employed' as an eligible job on the page linked.) Even if you just get a second job that reasonably only makes a bit of money, you fall into this trap. (They explicitly call out 'Second Job' on the page linked.)
You will be stuck in this catch-22 of not having an incentive to make over $50,000 unless you can make the jump to a little over $60,000 or so for 60 months. That's point 3 on the linked website. "[You are bound by the terms of the ISA until you pay 17% for 24 months, you pay out $30k, or...] You did not make over $4,167/month or did not have a qualifying job, and therefore "deferred" your monthly payments for a total of 60 months."
All the above quotes come from your linked page. I was just simplifying the facts of that very page into a fairly big problem with how it's structured.
Heck, you can even see what I'm talking about by using their own calculator. Go to https://lambdaschool.com/isa-calculator and jump between making $49,500 and $50,000 a year, and you'll see you go from owing nothing to owing nothing a month to $715 a month while only making $4,208. That's a huge leap.
You can think in terms of ROI only if you have enough resources to dedicate 48 months to study. Otherwise it's just a race against time to become profitable.
That is, to be able to think in terms of ROI is a privilege.
If you're using both the degree and the bootcamp to achieve the same goal (e.g. a paying job), then surely being ready for employment sooner is preferable?
No. I can get a paying job right out of high school, while someone going to medical school will be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for over a decade. If you are just looking at wealth at age 25, people working in fast food made better choices than doctors. Yet somehow, 10 years later, the doctors are ahead.
Clearly that is an extreme example, but it illustrates the point - getting a paying job quickly does not mean it is the best answer for long-term salary and career growth. Getting any old coding job just to get one is not the same thing as getting the full education that comes from a degree. That doesn't make it the wrong answer... getting a job matters. But if you are comparing long-term outcomes, you need to look at it with more context.
The analogy doesn't scale because additional years of fast-food work don't add anything to your prospects. On the other hand, additional years of software development add a lot to your employability so the value of getting your first job is much higher. Once you have several years of experience, the lack of a 4-year degree is far less harmful to your employability.
You can get a degree for muuuuch less in europe. In france it'd be something like 1k€ at most over your whole post-high-school studies unless you go to specialized art school or something like that.
(Did all my studies in France at public schools (university).)
I think the fee was 300€/year, most of it was headed toward paying mandatory access to the university library. That would be 300x5=1500€ (~2k$) for a complete engineering degree.
Lets not forget that all this is paid with tax money though. You will sort of pay back these studies when paying your taxes once working :)
In Italy, it depends on how much money you have.
Under a certain threshold you don't pay anything, most people pay something, I had to pay full price which was around 3k per year.
Also, forget having a campus, classrooms looks like they haven't been renovated in 200 years, you need your own computers because labs are too outdated, professors salaries are a joke, professors keep mixing their personal interests / companies with university - basically getting free work out of students for their businesses, majority of students move out of Italy after graduating because high taxes and bureaucracy make it impossible for profitable business to start up (estimated 250k€ in taxes invested in education lost per student).
I'd rather live in Italy than other countries but I won't uniquely for tax reasons.
Back when I was in school, I looked hard at all the options for studying abroad in France and found none with tuition even close to that cheap for even just a semester or summer.
I suspect the prices you're talking about are heavily subsidized and only if you're French (which the OP probably isn't).
Actually those costs will be the same across the EU/EEA but yes if you're coming from somewhere else unless your government will cover the cost you will be paying for it.
Where do you come from ? If it's from the US, sure, it's quite more expensive. If it's from another european country, or a poor country, it should be cheap.
In my case, that was half a lifetime ago. I'm mid-career now and doubt I'd ever study at a school in France unless maybe it's just for language study.
I'm guessing the OP is in the US if they're talking about Lambda School, but even the full foreigner price for your school looks substantially less expensive than Lambda.
or Germany, where the only cost you might have is for the public transport ticket or something like that, and even this is often optional…I am actually curious why there are not so many students from the USA in German universities? Or is this due to language?
I assume this is because the US is not an EU member, so studying in Germany is not under the same conditions for them as for other EU members.
Also, Germany is somewhat difficult to navigate if you don't speak German, since you reach many roadblocks where people don't speak English (this is different in Denmark, but Denmark's nationalist party has abolished bachelor studies in English, so much for that).
Foreign students usually don't fall under the same funding and have to pay full price, while EU citizens are entitled to the same level of support as localssl.
Which leads to fun times where English had to pay max UK rate at Scottish universities but EU citizens paid the same as Scots.
Except for Baden-Württemberg, which has tuitions for non-EU-students (1.5k€ per semester afaik), it is irrelevant whether you are German, EU-citizen or from somewhere else. The only tuitions you might have is for studying too long.
Depends; do you get 48 months worth of education in 6 months? I doubt it. A lot of learning also takes time to process, to settle in.
That said, half my 4 year software engineering education was hands-on, figure-it-out-yourself stuff; a year of internships and a ton of group projects.
48 months of education still costs more, even if you get more benefit from it. And if you can't afford the time commitment then it doesn't matter how much benefit you might derive from it as it's not an available option.
Bit of a fallacy to think you’ve become a better programmer by spending $5,000 per month on instruction instead of $625 per month, isn’t it? Or that the student with 6 months instruction is somehow more employable than the student with 48 months?
Neither is employable off the bat, and it takes time for someone with zero experience to be valuable.
That makes question who is more employable: a student with 48 months of University, or someone with 6 months of Lambda and 2.5 years of real world experience? Note, I assumed the Lambda grad had a year unemployed.
Fun fact: $30k is almost exactly how much the Swedish student loan gives you for 5 years of full time study, which I used to pay for everything (housing, food, clothes, computers, books for school etc).
If you're able to score affordable housing (~$300/month is not uncommon for student accommodation and if sharing even $150~200 is not unheard of) it's not that much of a stretch. Also big difference between Stockholm (and to some extent Gothenburg) and the rest of the country in living costs.
My friend did his Masters from Finland and said his monthly expenses were about 200-300 Euros in his first year. I think he spent a bit more in subsequent years after getting a part-time job. That's 18000+ euros if extended to 5 years.
Don't overestimate living expenses in a 500 year old walkable town with a small university in a --socialist democracy-- country that cares about its citizens.
Sorry. But I am Pakistani. From my perspective, if the government is providing free health coverage, subsidized accommodation to students, free education [0], and good public transit, then it is fulfilling the ideals of socialists. However, the label of the actual system might be different, which is totally fair.
[0] I think Finland is now charging a small tuition fee, at least for non-EU students.
The rate of state ownership of capital is fairly high in the Nordics, though. In that sense, they're relatively socialist countries.
Maybe they're not "really socialist", but then by that standard, is there a "really capitalist" country? Even the US, which is probably the most capitalist "developed" country, has some state ownership of production.
A lot of these were advocated for and often implemented by (originally) socialist democratic parties so I can see where you're coming from, but I think that a 'real' socialist democracy would be going a good step further.
There’s some Baptists-and-bootleggers nonsense going on between right-wing Republicans tarring center-left policies as “socialist” and avowed socialists doing the same to bait-and-switch voters into supporting them.
Seriously? What's up with people who couldn't even list the basic tenets of various political systems suddenly being for this or against that, on the basis of name alone?
Minor rant, but the greatest tragedy of recent American politics (1980+) has been convincing people they're dumb and will never be as smart as others. It's set up a terrible cycle of (1) listen to "experts," (2) forget that one can do one's own thinking, (3) parrot expert views back to your peers, (4) feel secretly ashamed of your own ignorance, (5) become more strident in "your" views, GOTO (1).
It really frustrates me these days when almost everything has to have a pro or anti identity. The extent to which the population has divided itself thanks to this excessive labelling is truly mind-boggling.
Is it really that difficult to discuss something without having to choose what fucking side you're on, or having it chosen for you based on a series of shallow value judgments?
Well, here in America, we don't believe that Capitalism and "society" should coexist together. The people help sustain Capitalism - not the other way around. Also, we don't believe in providing such communist things as healthcare for everyone, because we strongly believe Capitalism does NOT benefit from a strong and healthy workforce.
My family of four spends less than $15K per year for necessities in Sweden (housing, clothes, food, car ins, phone, internet, other utilities), so I can believe that a single student could live for $6000 per year if they have roommates or live in student housing. We live in a very small town and rent a nice house for less than $500/month, so of course your choices will make all the difference. We couldn't do this in Stockholm or Gothenburg, for example.
Ah, yes, I maybe should mention that my house is about 50 m from the Baltic? The view of our bay is a significant benefit. Of course, it's covered with ice for several months of the year, and not everybody likes that. >.<
I'm really sorry that I don't have accurate numbers at hand, but I can give you some estimates. I will also note that the SEK/USD exchange rate is not quite the same as when it sort of got fixed in my mind. I think of it as about 10:1, but I guess it's really more like 8.3:1, so instead of approx. $15K USD maybe it's more like $18K.
Anyway, here are some numbers that I know or can give pretty accurate details for:
Rent under 4500 SEK/mo
Phone data SEK 400 per 6 mo. -- pay as you go - 20 GB for 6 months and never have had to add more. Wifi at home, on the train, and both in the city center and at the University means I rarely use my own.
Phone calls SEK 100 has lasted me god knows how long for minutes. I don't think I add minutes more frequently than every six months or so.
Car insurance is something like SEK 2500 or 3000 per year for a <10 year old car.
Food ~1500 SEK per week -- we are vegetarian and rarely buy anything fancy; we also grow fruit and veg in the summer; this of course can be quite variable, with some weeks being SEK 1200 and others SEK 2000 or more.
Utilities: we have a geo heat pump; we don't pay very much in utilities; we mostly charge our EV at the train station for free.
Clothes: H&M primarily, Amazon.de occasionally (I guess we have Amazon.se now too) -- my wife and I don't buy new clothes very often, though my children definitely need new stuff regularly. Still, we don't spend very much on clothes, but I will freely admit that this is the one I don't have as much sense of.
So, minus an exact number on utilities and clothes, it looks like a bit more than SEK 10,000 per month. Add some exact amount for utilities and clothing, and I think we are within a $15K-18K range.
350eur for rent. 200eur for food. 25eur for internet, no car needed. Utilities included in student rental, otherwise 30eur. clothing and fun things: everything else.
Current system provides a government backed loan at 0.00% interest of up to 800eur/month, which you then need to pay back depending on income in 35 years. (Much like ISA, but with the government). You get 100eur/month for health insurance (basic health insurance costs the same). and 100 euro/month for renting. These last 2 are based on income and available for everyone under a certain income limit. (Almost all students are below this limit)
We had a system where you received 300/month and could then get a loan on top of it. But that was replaced by the neoliberals.
Their numbers are a bit off the mark. You'd get $45k in loans and $20k in grants over five years, so a total of $65k. But yes, as a student it's completely possible to get by on this amount.
Not sure about Sweden, but in Finland there is definitely some subsidised student housing. That said, as a student in the Netherlands I rented a room for 250 euros a month, so I think the 6k a year may not be that far off.
$30K is the loan which is usually 1-2% APR. In Finland, which more or less copies Sweden policies, also gives you subsidized housing (50% or around 250€, which ever is less, median where I went to was around 400€ for 1bd apartment), subsidized food (2€ lunch and dinner every day of the week, median lunch when eating out is around 10€), and around another 250€ a month in general student aid. There are also a lot miscellaneous student discounts for public transportation and it is common for private companies to also offer a slight discount to students only.
Your numbers are way out of date. If you start studying today you can expect to get about $45k in loans plus $20k in subsidies over 5 years, assuming you study full time and pass enough of your courses.
Do not think that's correct. The loan part is about 9300 USD per year (40 weeks full time study), which sums up to about 46500 over five years. On top of that is a grant of about 3900 USD that you don't have to pay back. Reference : https://www.csn.se/languages/english/student-grants-and-loan...
Lambda School pushes "income sharing agreements" where
once you're paid over $50k you pay back 17% of your income until you've paid back $30k.
Depending on your opinion, it's either a brilliant investment in students, aligning the interests of the school and the students - or it's a loan by a slightly different name, fooling the naive into overpaying for instruction from teachers who barely make minimum wage.
For the consumer therefore it matters what the actual value of the thing they bought for $30k is.
Will it lead to a $150K job, or a $80K job?
Will not doing it lead to a $80K job?
For the company, what risk do they have if most students will earn over 50K regardless of the quality of their product?
I'm not good at economics, but I think one can look at this deal from both the consumer and the provider and see that there are flaws from both sides. Trust is key.
And in this context trust doesn't scale, you need good teachers for every [class size] students. That means profit only scales linearly with good teachers (the scarce resource).
Marketing scales though, and what matters to the consumer is how much they believe the actual value is compared to the competition for what they believe their options are.
How many people do you hire from other places? I'm never hiring anyone again if I can help it, so I'm not the target either, and this sort of post seems to imply this is a huge loss for Lambda but I'm not sure it is.
The bootcamp I went to had someone with a perfect SAT and an engineering degree from Princeton. She is wicked smart and works for google. You would be crazy not to hire her just because she went to a bootcamp.
> fooling the naive into overpaying for instruction from teachers who barely make minimum wage.
Regular degrees are pretty much just like that as well
The problem with regular degrees is not their actual cost. It's that you're sold (and most people want to buy) the experience. That's where they compete (and what "drives costs" up).
Don't play that game. Though of course not studying in an Ivy League univ. means you don't get to be buddy buddy with the next Mark Z which might just offer you a job at a nice place because you were buddies and oh this "entry level job" starts at 200k and there's your student loans sorted. But that's if you're moderately lucky and are competent at either tech and/or some form of people skills.
(before I "something something public education something something it's cheaper to study somewhere else even considering relocation costs")
In theory the ISA should incentivize the bootcamp to work hard on the student's behalf. If they don't get high-paying jobs, the bootcamp doesn't get paid back.
From what I've read though, they actually bundle the ISAs and sell them off to investors--just like the mortgage-backed securities that led to the 2008 financial crisis. So the bootcamp's real incentive would be to generate as many ISAs to sell as possible, not to make sure the ISAs are any good.
When you're selling a securitized asset, you need to show the quality of that asset. You can't just pull together a pile of shit and call it AAA (Yes, 2008 was a thing, and wrong, but lets not assume here that Lambda is borderline to committing fraud).
If the ISAs don't perform, then Lambda will (likely) have no future in selling them. Do you really think they're risking their future cash flow in order to bundle up as much bullshit as they can right now?
This is roughly how UK student loans work too. You typically borrow £55k for a three-year degree, but then repay at 9% of your annual earnings above £26,575.
There's also a rule that the remaining debt is cancelled 30 years after you graduate. Most people (perhaps not most programmers) won't repay the whole debt within 30 years. So for them, this is essentially a kind of tax, rather than a debt.
The dirty secret of free market capitalism is that you can basically open a lemonade stand with sign "HAPPINESS" and charge any amount. There are some hopelessly thick people out there, and a shortcut to success is taking advantage of them. Probably many of these students paying $30k could not even complete a college application before a deadline. I don't know how these "entrepreneurs" can sleep at night.
One thing to keep in mind about the 30k number. Unless it's changed it is percentage based with a min. If you're making less then 50k it's nothing, if you're making 50k it's 17k in repayment. If you're making a 150k it's capped at 30k, but you're paying 2125 dollars a month until you hit that.
It's 17 percent of your salary for 2 years or you hit 30k repayment whichever is first. If you don't make over 50k, or don't get a job in a related field (which includes things like IT support I believe) it disappears.
You can kind of see why a student would think that the bootcamp is aligned with their interests. They want you to get a high paying job so they get paid more, and if you don't succeed you owe nothing.
I went through this, and my salary went up 2.25 times what it was previously. I also enjoy my job significantly more. To me this was worth 30k.
Why didn't I just teach myself? A few reasons, one is motivation/accountability, another is structure, and a third was a hope that career services would help me on the other side. I won't claim it was my smartest move, it got me out of the hole I was in.
Edit: want to be clear I'm not recommending doing this, I'm just saying what my/other students I talked to decision process was
there have been a few prominent criticisms of lambda school recently but it is all anecdotal and disorganized. closest in my mind was fulligin's takedown on NYMag (https://vincentwoo.com/2020/05/19/on-lambda-school/ which found some bad facts but was sensationalized beyond proportion imo, still, make up your own mind)
very hard to tell what specific allegations and changes have been made without also needing to question the source (as a former bootcamper who nearly quit his bootcamp, I know how every bootcamp has a set of dissatisfied customers, but that in my mind doesn't invalidate the good work it does for the rest).
has someone rounded up the basic facts and chronology so we can form some kind of objective story?
Since you asked for specifics, there is a comment in the original reddit thread where OP talks about a sort of "bait-n-switch" type situation going on in the current cohort where they go into a lot more detail.
For the initiated, it shouldn't be too hard to verify.
yeah. this is really bad. austen's in here responding so its not constructive for me to play armchair CEO but i really hope they fix up their act. they were on to a good thing.
> there have been a few prominent criticisms of lambda school recently but it is all anecdotal and disorganized.
Keep in mind that unlike most products, Lambda School purchasers have an incentive to praise Lambda School regardless of the truth.
These are all young people looking to jump start their careers with the benefit of a glamorous Lambda School education. They don’t benefit by publicly admitting that it wasn’t a good education, or by cooperating with journalists to post national headlines about how their only credentials in this industry came from a bad program.
From what I've seen, there's some mentality among current students to keep your head down so you don't get kicked out for criticizing it before you land the job. Also, it's probably more like 40% or less new grads, it seems to mainly be people changing careers right now. Bootcamps are a bit less than "glamorous" now, and the pandemic shook things up for a lot of people, especially coming from retail/restaurants/small businesses.
Most open world reviews i.e. non curated ones I have seen for Lambda school have been negative to at best neutral. I believe they have a place in the education market if they do it right. Model is good enough but execution appear to be severely lacking.
He may not be intimately familiar with the actual situations of the students from his PoV (mostly throguh conversations with Austen or his team).
But then again, this is far from the first time a negative comment has come out against Lambda. And his position hasn't changed so far. So, there is that.
When I spoke to Allred about this, he indicated that he and pg did not have a particularly close relationship. If this is true, it seems likely that pg's vocal patronage is mostly based on the theory, not practice, of Lambda.
are you suggesting pg sometimes takes a strong public position on things he doesn't actually know too too much about? Some of which he has a financial interest in? Could be.
The biggest mistake ls could make is not recognizing how little room there is for (perceived) failure with their product. It is among the most impactful, personal products you can buy online (considering life time and money investment).
Customers will understandably be in a vulnerable place. You are not exactly selling someone a boat. You are quite literally selling tech savvy people their future and they know how to use social media. Those who are brave enough to voice their troubles with education in the open – which is a stigma, maybe so than ever – will have no trouble finding an empathic, educated audience.
This is akin to treading in self-driving space: Every player is super aware of the non-existent room for error. The whole space has constantly been 3-5 major consecutive incidents away from imploding under the sheer pressure of human perception.
ls cannot merely be slightly better than established programs in giving people an education and a job. You have to outperform by a substantial margin to get everyone on board when you inject yourself into peoples lives to this extent. You ALSO have to convince everyone that you do.
I was quite shocked to read about this sort of behavior from the founder (this is from the Reddit thread, so may be wrong):
"Caleb Hicks was asked why he wouldn't give students a survey on how they liked the changes and he said he "wasn't going to run the school on a survey"."
What a way to respond to your users giving you feedback about the direction of the process/entity they bought into.
this is what I don't get though. Why mortgage your future earnings to take a MOOC from a random startup employee when you can get the same from a world class professor for free?
Because most people can’t. Self-directed learning is brutally hard and most people can’t do it even with a detailed road map. Without even that the competition rate will drop even further. To a first approximation the only people who complete MOOCs are those who already have degrees. The kind of people who can compete freecodecamp by themselves are very close to the ones who can work through a Math textbook by themselves, doing all the exercises.
If you can't do that then I'd argue you're not cut out to be a developer. As someone doing hiring I would never hire someone who had difficulty in doing any of the things you mentioned are difficult. You've basically listed the things I value in a hire.
The idea before was at least partly that you get a great deal more structure, feedback and accountability than you do in any university. Now that all seems to have been jettisoned but a learning community with a schedule and a curriculum is worth something. Udemy courses plus a knowledgeable lecturer and a lot of TAs who know the material less well but can solve most problems and a schedule of full time study/building for nine months would absolutely be worth Lambda’s upfront or ISA cost for a lot of people. I paid £10,000 for a Master’s that was basically a textbook subscription service with access to past exam papers and two graded essays per module.
I went to a traditional in-person bootcamp (not Lambda School), and I believe it accelerated me into a job ~4 months earlier than what I could have done on my own. The bootcamp had several key advantages over self study:
- Easier to put in 40-60 hours per week in a structured environment vs having the discipline to do that at home week after week
- Less time wasted on figuring out what topics you need to study in the first place
- Daily access to a senior engineer that you can ask questions to
- Good advice on how to land the first job
In my case I think those benefits were absolutely worth $20k+. Yes, I could have gotten the same result on my own given more time to study, but every job and promotion I've had since then would have come a few months later.
I went to an in person bootcamp. There was nothing they taught that wasn't available elsewhere. It cost around $20,000 just for tuition, plus I paid SF rent and living expenses. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.
The biggest benefit imo was being around smart motivated people doing the same thing. It was much easier to work from 9 am to 8 pm 6 days a week if you were around others smart motivated people doing the same. Also being able to talk to people about what you were learning helped tremendously. It helped to clear up misconceptions, develop mental models, ect. Working on group projects helped me to learn to read others code and to learn git. The network I developed has proven useful in later job searches and just in general keeping abreast of developments. It was honestly the best 6 months of my life.
Not everything was perfect obviously. My biggest gripe is the outcomes were oversold. I remember being told they had a 99% placement rating within 3 months. Each cohort was somewhere around 33 people. That would mean that around 1 person for every 3 cohorts would not get a job within 3 months. However just in my cohort, 5 did not have a job within 3 months. Within 6 months all but two had jobs, but still, 95% in 6 months is not 99% within 3. Other than outcomes I had a few gripes with how the teaching was done. Overall though it was a great experience for me.
You can "just" do a lot of things yourself. The premise of all services is that they help you reach a certain outcome more efficiently and/or effectively.
No single service will be valuable to everyone. There might be services that provide no added value to anyone, but I would argue those are not actually services.
I think that there's another factor to this. The cohorts have grown over time. When you have thirty people in the entire cohort the experience is going to be very different then when you have 130 or more. The earlier students reviews are going to read a lot different then later student ones.
Investors will only ever speak positively of their portfolio companies.
Lambda school receives high praise in general because so many of us tech types want their value proposition to be true. Just look at how negative the comments about traditional colleges are whenever the topic comes up on HN. Or look at all of the concern about growing student debt loads. Or the concern that 4 year college degrees are not teaching CS students what they need to actually function in real world software jobs.
Lambda School arrived on the scene with a new business model that claims to fix all of that, and they did it as a highly-praised YC startup. It seemed like a home run.
Yet I’ve heard so, so many stories like the OP’s about how they’ve dropped the ball on the educational quality of their programs.
They seem to be approaching this as a typical startup problem where they start with the ugliest MVP that people will pay for and then incrementally improve it only where absolutely necessary to keep the money coming in.
This works if you’re selling a SaaS tool to some company on a monthly basis, but it doesn’t work when you’re taking critical years of young people’s early careers and charging them on the tail end.
Even worse, their customers have an incentive to downplay all of the problems. No one benefits by trashing the source of their education and only career credentials, so instead they say how great it was no matter what. We’re starting to see people pull back the curtain and show what’s really happening.
They're closed for Covid19 right now. But if you can wait for them to open up, this is a good place to look into - https://www.42.us.org/ or https://www.42.fr/ (if you're in Europe).
42-styled schools also exist, generally loosely affiliated. A friend of mine started CODAM (42 in Amsterdam, essentially; https://www.codam.nl/) around a year ago and has been quite happy so far. I recently started working with him on a couple projects and honestly I can tell the education and the syllabus he got was high quality.
42 SV in Fremont has closed down for good. Students have been transferred to an online curriculum managed from Paris and were kicked out of the dorms in a rather hastily and stresful manner. Despite having its own flaws, I was a great fan of 42 and think this is a shame
Does anybody know any private school following the same philosophy for kids education?
I think finding different forms of education will be especially important for boys: girls thrive in the current school environment but boys seems to do much worse.
The people doing such bootcamps are either going to try it, hate it and say bye; or they're going to be the type of people who are determined.
To quote the guy:
"People in my cohort don't even understand basic Javascript and I'm not faring much better. I'm nowhere ready for a job. Now I have to find an education elsewhere and probably teach myself because now I don't trust bootcamps.
Also, I will have to pay it back...because I will get a job in tech and I will make at least 50k within 5 years. I'm not going to let the disappointment of Lambda stop me from doing so. It sucks that I will have to pay them even though they won't be the reason I get there and despite their misleading me and other students as to what their program contained."
Similar to the people getting hired at Google, Twilio, it's because they took the Bootcamp and a ton of self-study. The ton factor becomes lower if you go to a brick university that forces challenging material and theory.
> The ton factor becomes lower if you go to a brick university that forces challenging material and theory.
I'm just not sold on this. If you want to be able to actually work in software development then whether you're going to a bootcamp or a university there's going to be ton of extra-curricular learning and practice that you need.
I've worked with quite a lot of fresh university graduates over my career and you can tell which ones have actually practised beyond doing the required coursework, because they understand to some degree how software is developed professionally. The ones who didn't do further learning can certainly write code to some degree, and would completely demolish me in some sort of competitive algorithm contest, but they're going to stumble on things like using git and automated testing. They're also going to have trouble taking requirements and working out what to do with them.
Bootcamp graduates tend to be somewhat the other way round, they get the professional side of things, but struggle with the actual software development because they have a shallow knowledge of each element.
It's upsetting to see Lambda making so many negative headlines because it truly is in a position to do the most Good and provide the most value (especially after Dev Bootcamp and Hack Reactor were acquired).
I attended Dev Bootcamp in early 2013, when bootcamps were still largely unknown, and had a transformative time. Just stellar teachers all around that compensated for any perceived weakness in curriculum. The industry business model hasn't changed much, so this implies to me that a bootcamp is really only as good as its instructors and the amount they care.
Having researched and hired people from bootcamps Dev Bootcamp did seem to be one of the best. I was sad when it folded. It seems they were pushed out by lower quality companies with better marketing (eg Lambda).
At this point I have to believe there is a financial bottleneck limiting their growth. As you said, they’re i a prime position to shake up the industry with world class education under a new business model. They’ve had a staggering amount of positive press in the past few years.
Yet time and time again we hear about they’re using this opportunity to basically test how much they can get away with in terms of educational quality.
The optimistic take is that they’re bootstrapping their way into being able to afford top quality instructors after the cash flow is established.
The cynical take is that they’re getting hooked on the easy boot camp cash while the market is hot and they’d rather expand as fast as possible than invest in quality education.
I just hope they don’t sour the business model before someone figures it out.
> finally, my first day. and i was immediately disappointed to learn that the "team leads" in charge of grading our designs and reviewing our work.... were actually students two months ahead of us. two months!!!!
Wow. While not an exact analogy, something about that makes me want to say MLM/"pyramid scheme"
> i was so depressed. i started sleeping longer hours, i lost all enthusiasm. i was ashamed to tell my partner. i was genuinely struggling and still am.
As I would be too in that position, I really sympathize. They are taking advantage of people and that has consequences, it isn't just a "failed startup".
I've seen this pattern before with other bootcamps. If you want to advertise "99% employment after 3 month", the people who aren't succeeding have to go somewhere. Failing them out of the program is one way, but also hiring the borderline cases you couldn't fail out is another.
It sounds like this in this case it's not recent grads, it's the people still paying the bootcamp, who are grading other's work. That is one way to reduce costs!
Even worse, since the curriculum changes so much there's a chance that the person grading you is three months ahead, and also hadn't actually originally gone through the unit they need to grade at all.
I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0]. I guess that counts toward their "placement" stats!
Not only that, but Lambda seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]
What is sad to me looking from the outside it is that it didn’t have to be that way. Most of negative reviews seem to boil down to too many students, not enough support, not professional enough course management. Symptoms of growing pains. But why Lambda School had to grow that much that fast? It didn’t. It shouldn’t. It was at the expense of their students.
Lambda School seemed a great idea from the start, revolutionary even. And the investors (pg mostly) would praise how insanely ambitious the founder was. Then I started following him on Twitter and saw that. He had that drive to be the Facebook of education, the slack of boot camps. But education doesn’t work that way. A new Facebook user can start using it 4 hours a day from the first day and get all the value they expect. A student can’t. Students need time and support to learn. But Lambda and its founder couldn’t wait for that if they wanted to become a unicorn.
I know the incentives are there to have exponential Silicon Valley hyper growth. But there are also incentives to be a company that still exists and it is big 20 years from now. And there are ethical decisions that could be made despite of the incentives.
Even being a YC company, I believe it didn’t have to be that way.
Edit: thanks for the link, great article. ”Land grab” is a great term for what I currently think about Lambda School. Except the “land” is people’s life and hopes.
A lot of these companies are in the “the only reason it’s a good price is we are burning VC money” and “the only reason we have VC money is our promise to grow” zone. Customers can enjoy watching the slow motion train crash.
That's why I consider startups a Faustian bargain. You get easy access to capital, in exchange for your company's soul. And the devil always comes to collect. The problems start where this deal causes collateral damage on the market - harming customers directly, or indirectly by preventing competitors who aren't looking for an exit from existing.
> indirectly by preventing competitors who aren't looking for an exit from existing.
This is huge, and definitely hurts in the short term, but could it actually be good in the long term? Let's say the break-even price for Service A is $x/mo/user. Nobody really knows the technical problems underlying A, but startups #1-3 get venture funding and start offering Service A for .75x, for a couple years each, burning a few million in some dentist's or VC's capital each and build a huge staff to figure out the tech. Eventually one of the companies gets acquihired and two of them fail.
Bootstrapped Startup #4 opens shop, offers A to 1.15x, and hires engineers from startups 2 and 3 who know the tech inside and out. Consumers get a great product.
I worry that those startups #1-3 burn a good chunk of their money on customer acquisition, not on solving technological problems (though scale creates its own problems too). That money would be unnecessarily wasted. I also doubt a huge staff is needed to figure out the tech part.
But I understand your point: startups can be viewed as economy's distributed R&D. Speculative investment makes a lot of sense - it could be that without startups #1-3, #4 wouldn't exist because it couldn't afford the risk of developing an innovative product. But my main gripe is how VC-backed startups repay the investment - they're being pressured into user-hostile and sometimes antisocial business models. It's so common that these business model became accepted as standard these days! So perhaps a way forward isn't to reduce venture funding, but curtail the socially destructive business models directly.
Imo, bootstrapped startups can only exist feasibly in the B2B space. And definitely not in the B2C space. Would Uber have succeeded if it were bootstrapped (with higher pricing), or would it have spawned enough copycats during its slow growth phase who would soon make it infeasible to scale up and hire the kind of engineers that a venture like ridesharing would need?
> or would it have spawned enough copycats during its slow growth phase who would soon make it infeasible to scale up and hire the kind of engineers that a venture like ridesharing would need?
Would that be a problem? At least from the point of view of a customer, I don't want a single megacorp owning the market (and let's cut the marketing BS: Uber is not a startup, and hasn't been for a while; it's a multinational corporation). More "copycats" is usually better, as they compete (until they start racing to the bottom, but that's another issue entirely).
I was talking about Uber circa 2009. Were it bootstrapped, we would have seen 5-6 loss making entities competing against each other by 2014 - and Uber wouldn't have likely expanded outside the US.
I understand. But I don't consider Uber's success a good thing - it was a ruthless company that cornered the market through illegal and antisocial behavior, and unfortunately set a path for other startups to follow. I believe we'd be better off if Uber died very early, and allowed one of their above-board competitors to disrupt the taxi space.
The sad truth is, there probably isn’t a tradeoff here. ITT Tech survived and grew for almost half a century while offering many students a worse experience at a higher price than the worst I’ve ever seen Lambda School accused of.
interestingly, from joel
"With all of Microsoft’s muscle, money, and marketing skill, they are just not going to be able to break into auctions or instant messaging, because the network effects there are so strong."
I remember AIM well (used AOL until they became TalkTalk), but I also remember using MSN messenger even more and being much more ubiquitous, granted that could have been generational (I wasn't a teenager until the mid-naughties). Ultimately it seems MSN did win out.
It's funny that you say that, because I grew up in the same time frame (graduated high school in 2006) and I don't think I ever touched MSN Messenger. Where I was, it was AIM all the way.
So perhaps less generational, more just the network effects that existed on the ground.
It's more that the less ambitious founders would be willing to "settle" for decent-but-not-unicorn outcomes for their companies, which are not the outcomes that VCs are looking for.
The VC-funded startup model will gladly have 99 out of 100 founders go bankrupt as long as the 100th starts a unicorn. Investors will push companies to take existential risks to achieve growth at all costs. Obviously, most founders are not OK with these odds and only the most delusional (if you want to spin it negatively) or ambitious (if you want to spin it positively) will go for it.
I get the feeling some older VCs are playing out their mid-life crises by vicariously enjoying the lifestyles of their "crazier" founders. Perhaps it would be better for the world if they just bought that motorbike or sports car instead.
Perhaps their success rate has gone down, but their absolute successes have grown enough for them to accept it. Perhaps they should add some more expensive tiers for better student support.
Take all absolute statements and mind-reading tricks on HN with a grain of salt.
If a manager says they don’t want heroics, it’s not reasonable to assume that they actually do want heroics but they’re somehow trying to communicate that to the team by speaking in opposites.
If someone says they want one thing then asks for the opposite, verbalize that you were following the original directive. Have a conversation like professionals and sort it out.
This HN comments that treat employers and managers like a foreign species that will only lie and abuse you are really not healthy. Learning how to establish healthy professional relationships with your managers as actual human beings is a critical workplace skill.
I don’t want heroes on my team. It isn’t sustainable. Heroics are discouraged in performance reviews and promotion considerations. Nobody will die if people aren’t working nights and weekends. If I see people engaging in what seems like heroics I will have a very serious chat with them to understand why they are doing it and make absolutely certain that it isn’t coming from any pressure to do so.
This reads like an idealized version of reality. Budgets exists, deadlines are a thing. "Don't be a hero" sounds like the mantra of an HR department at an insurance company; not what you want to hear from a founder trying to disrupt an industry.
Heroics can exist without them being a standardized thing. There are occasions when you need people who are willing to move mountains to get something done, and demonizing those kinds of efforts and the people who engage in them will make them scarce when you actually are in need.
a founder should be 'trying to' make a quality product that fits a need, not 'disrupt an industry' - 'industry disruption' is a consequence, not a goal - if one is seeking the latter without focusing on the former, ones priorities are skewed, and likely for reasons of promoting one's own self-importance.
> a founder should be 'trying to' make a quality product that fits a need, not 'disrupt an industry'
This 1000%.
The frequent use of the term "disrupt", just shows how much the culture has descended into degeneracy. When entrepreneurs and their backers are no longer making even a pretense toward things like progress, improvement, or even just running a profitable business, you know things have gotten bad. It seems like the model now is, "Hey, let's see if we can f--- up industry X, who cares if we actually improve anything or if our business is even viable, so long as we turn some established part of the economy on its head."
How so? I would argue that folks using millions of dollars in investment capital with no real goal other than to cause disruption, regardless of whether it helps anyone or even creates a viable business, is what's extraordinary.
Think for a second what a dumb goal 'disruption' is on it's own. That's what bored 15 year old's do to amuse themselves, they disrupt and break things simply to see something, anything, happen. As an earlier commenter pointed out, disruption is often a side effect of making a large change in an industry, typically in business this has meant changing something for the better.
When the side effect of causing disruption becomes the main goal of a business owner rather than creating value of some sort, I really don't know what to call that other than degenerate behavior.
"Move fast and break things" has a human cost, always, and at times the human cost can be tremendous. Ignoring that human cost is always a little sinister.
This evokes a disturbing image of VC's gambling on disruption events, the human costs and other consequences immaterial. Very well put and I wish this viewpoint could be spread further, I found it illuminating.
Founders building potentially billion dollar businesses (not $10m lifestyle companies) need to have a psychotic drive to achieve that goal.
That often creates tough work environments in the early stages of the company. To many people, failing to build that billion dollar company is the same as outright failing completely. They’ll do whatever it takes to get there. I’ve worked with engineers and designers that like this type of environment. I’ve worked with others that thought they did until it came time to actually pull an 80 hour week.
EDIT: Several downvotes, but only one reply. If you have issue with anything I said I'd appreciate a response.
this entire thread is about the 'semantics' of work effort - what constitutes 'heroics' and if they are needed / not needed, and what that indicates/does not indicate about the goals/motivation of the person involved -
Irrespective of whether one is building a potentially billion dollar business or 'only' a 10m lifestyle company, the goal and focus should still be on the usefulness of the product and fitting market need, and not 'disrupting an industry' with the product as a side goal - if it's the latter, it indicates the priorities are skewed; from experience, usually when 'heroics' are involved or priorities are skewed, it's ego to blame and not some external requirement.
Further, 'heroics' are context-dependent - if the external requirement actually requires what would be 'heroics' in a normal situation, 'heroics' are simply 'duty' in that case, and there exists a 'that case heroics' that would still be 'heroics' (and therefore indicative of likely-ego-driven skewed priorities)
"I can't believe an organization would _praise_ the rockstar mentality"
"If an organization doesn't praise the rockstar mentality, they are lying".
As others have noted, I tend to take people at their word. Of course, you can also ask people on the team during the interview process if they feel like that's true or not.
IME often they're over-compensating or projecting for a thing they know they want people to hear that they don't want to admit to.
It's "correct" to say "work-life balance" and "no heroes", but it doesn't generally NEED to be said in any normal circumstance; that they do say it is often because they do want the opposite of those things so they feel the need to point it out.
To me it's a form of the same thing that name-callers have when they call their adversaries names and you realize the charge they're levying against others is exactly what they themselves are/are doing; because they know they have whatever bad quality it's on their mind.
My original comment was too mean spirited, even for this alt account. I think what I meant to say is, Austen Allred does a good job of talking his book on Twitter. He also seems like a great Dad and partner.
This is disappointing, of course. We have 180+ people working really, really hard to make Lambda School the best experience it can be. At times we’ll fall short, and, as another poster pointed out, the margin for error is just razor thin; thousands of happy and successful students can be out there, but it’s the ones who don’t make it or have a good experience that cause us to lose sleep (and make it to the top of HN).
We take our responsibility in that regard very seriously; students come to us to change their lives and do something really, really difficult, and anything we do affects people in a very profound way.
To the parent’s point, in this particular instance I don’t think this student's frustrations are the result of too much growth or lack of resources per student. We haven’t really grown over the past year or so, and the school is still very well resourced. We have just north of 2,000 students and ~180 full-time staff members, the majority of which are student-facing. Those may be suboptimally distributed (they are, and always will be to some degree) but a cheap education as a result of aggressive cost cutting this is not. As such, the solution is much less exciting than “need to spend more money” or “need to grow more slowly.”
This student’s frustration comes from a series of changes we made simultaneously (something we avoid doing when we can). Some of these changes worked very well. Some did not. And this is the tricky part: some of the changes that a subset of students did not like are unquestionably for their benefit. So we’re working through those changes as well as debates around the trade-offs around, “Do we want our students to love us or be successful?”
The specifics of what students didn’t like: The first is a mentor/mentee program we set up within the school. Employers tell us literally every day they want students who truly understand the development and release cycle, and work on teams. We created a mentor/mentee program where every student has a chance to do that, and the result of that program so clearly creates better outcomes that employers ask specifically for students who have done that.
Some students love it. Some students see it as one more thing distracting them from writing more code, and believe the only thing that will determine their career success is ability to write code (as you all know, ability to write code is necessary but not sufficient to success as an engineer). We’re digging into the details of how and why it fails when it does. I don’t yet know what we’ll do there but the solution is likely more quiet and subtle iteration to the student experience.
The other change was our slowly winding down of the Team Lead program. We used to have a program where we would hire some students on short contracts to serve as something akin to TAs. Sometimes this worked very well, often times it didn’t work well, and the experience was brittle and unreliable, so we shifted that budget back into full-time roles. Doing so has revealed gaps that TLs were plugging that should have never existed (the majority of which should have been solved by software and not people from the get-go.)
So, Lambda School is not yet perfect and likely never will be. We’re properly resourced and not growing too quickly. We’re trying out best to make everyone we admit happy and successful. Turns out that’s extraordinarily difficult to do, and we’re doing the best we can, and I’m always open to any feedback on what we can or should do better.
I've never looked into Lambda School but some bits from this stand out to me.
> We have just north of 2,000 students and ~180 full-time staff members, the majority of which are student-facing.
2000/180 = 12 students per staff member. This seems high and "student-facing" is padding the numbers. "Customer Success" people are technically student-facing but not instructors, and number of instructors per student is the most important number that matters for quality
> This student’s frustration comes from a series of changes we made simultaneously
Do not make changes to ongoing cohorts
> Some students see it as one more thing distracting them from writing more code, and believe the only thing that will determine their career success is ability to write code
Isn't this something a school would be able to educate on? Why not introduce group projects (maybe you already have them)?
> 2000/180 = 12 students per staff member. This seems high and "student-facing" is padding the numbers.
It is very, very high.
I’d have to dig to find the exact numbers but about 90 are directly involved in instruction, project management, etc. Not including student support.
> Do not make changes to ongoing cohorts
We really try to avoid doing so, but in some instances it is impossible.
> Isn't this something a school would be able to educate on? Why not introduce group projects (maybe you already have them)?
We do have group projects and do try to educate here. Students will come back a year after being hired and say, “Wow, I thought x was a waste of time but it was extraordinarily useful” all the time.
I suppose it depends on what “changes” means. We specifically tell students (and they even sign a document that says) that we will make changes to aspects of the the experience during their time as a student (e.g. schedule, specifics of curriculum).
Students can be with Lambda for as long as 2+ years. Everything being frozen in time would be to their great detriment.
Generally speaking we do, and almost every change we made had an opt in/out option.
The only times we can’t do that (and that’s happened maybe 1-2 times in the history of Lambda School) is when it’s a change to teams of students that run across multiple cohorts.
I can imagine scenarios where a full refund would be make sense, but refund isn’t really appropriate when we’re talking about small changes in schedule, especially when everyone agreed such changes were possible.
Yeah, that's your prerogative. Personally, I'd eat some bad press by just making it a policy to always have opt-in changes across the board, or offer dissatisfied students refunds. And saying "everyone agreed such changes were possible" when you're essentially talking about the fine text of a contract only one side has the opportunity to define the terms of seems questionable. We aren't talking about two sides in a negotiation coming to a meeting of the minds. You created a contract with those terms, on top of an already questionably structured ISA. You can change the contract to make it more explicitly favorable to your students.
See my other thread here about how by not being a progressively structured ISA, you can cause the most harm to students who get the least out of your 'school.' Not to mention your securitizing of ISAs removes the argument for your model that you align your business with the success of your students.
But frankly, if the only thing you took out of this post is that the ISA structure is poor, without considering how you have all the power to set and enforce terms in your contract, I don't think I have much else I can say to try and help you. I think there are a lot of ways you can improve Lambda School to make it better for the people attending. And they don't involve deleting Reddit threads of criticism.
This is why I hate you and your product. You come in here and lie through your teeth repeatedly.
You sell yoyr ISAs which are already predatory. This means you dont give a flying fuck if students graduate because you get paid regardless, as opposed to the bullshit you spout about incentives being aligned.
More softball bullshut or speak answers.
Lambda needs to be sued into the groundlike ITT Tech and Hallmark. I for one can't wait.
>In the event we finance an ISA of a student who has not graduated we have to refund what we received if a student doesn't graduate.
Interesting, I didn't know this. I thought you just sold the ISA outright, which would retain some of the incentive but weaken it quite a bit. It's great to hear that that's not happening.
Right now it's technically structured as a sale to an SPV that is owned by Lambda, Lambda gets a small advance (<$5k/student) that we have to pay back before we get any additional cashflows.
It's still completely aligned, we just fast-forward some of the cash so we don't have to raise endless amounts of VC.
" Lastly, this arrangement will not affect the student experience during or after Lambda School."
As a student, I can confirm this is a lie. And you know it is because we have told you in Slack, we've told you on Twitter, we've told you on Reddit, and now you have to read about it on Hacker News.
"Small" is really exaggerating the changes. Schedule is just a small part of it. But while we're talking about schedule, many parents that are students at Lambda School struggled hard with the increase of meetings after the changes were implemented.
Do universities offer full refunds for the whole 4 years of a course if they had to change the curriculum while a student was studying there? If not, why such elevated expectations for a school that’s trying to align their interests with that of their students (school only gets paid if the student is financially successful), but not for other institutions that leave their students with massive debt that is not contingent on their student’s success?
University credits are transferable in a way a partial education from Lambda School is not, and you can pause at any time. Universities do let you stop part way through your education. Most universities do have options to get partial refunds that are more reasonable than the ones Lambda school seems to offer. Instate tuition across the US is also a fraction of Lambda School, with multiple options if you want to transfer credits.
For what it’s worth, major changes in curriculum do lead to refunds at schools. There have been two examples in my education where mid-year I had a graduate level class need to be rescheduled from a night class due to a professor’s illness. Both were fully refunded when I couldn’t fit the class into my work schedule. That seems to be pretty analogous here, and I wasn’t charged a percent based on how many weeks I attended the class before the change. I was just refunded the total amount of the course because I wouldn’t be able to gain its value. It wasn’t even a difficult process to get the refund, unlike the weeks of trying to get support it seems like the person in this situation attempted.
I think I would place ‘elevated’ expectations for refunds on a founder due to the elevated risk of trying a Startup’s unproven, expensive, and risky education model. I don’t think the expectations are ‘elevated’ but I also think your baseline for doing good for students shouldn’t be ‘it’s only as bad as I perceive the alternatives.’ I think we should strive to do better.
First, kudos for answering and not avoiding a group that you expect to hold (based on the linked post) adverse feelings. Good information, too. Education greatly benefits from more options; best of luck! Now for things that I think need work (I know little about Lambda school, so this is definitely an armchair strategist opinion):
First and foremost, as others pointed, is the growth plans. Education is hard to scale -- good educators deliver fantastic results; a very smart person droning on along a prewritten material adds no value. I doubt there is a way to quickly figure out how good a teacher a new hire is -- it will be clear after a semester or two, but not before. Thus good education needs long-term staff and careful hiring; both hard to scale.
> changes that a subset of students did not like are unquestionably for their benefit
Ouch. OUCH! Anytime someone is claiming that they do something for your benefit against your will, look for other motives. It is perfectly OK to limit options -- it is your business and you do not have infinite flexibility. But claiming it is good for the students rings hollow. Sorry. "We are tracking your web purchases to better serve you" (annoying advertisements).
I disagree with your last point. In many cases in teaching, the teacher knows the correct path better than the student. One example I've found is that when an experienced teacher says "Practice this. It's boring and you won't enjoy it and you'll wish you were doing something more exciting, but investing skill into it now will pay off later" I very rarely regret listening to them even if it seems totally useless at the time.
I have no objection to your example, but it is a very different case; it is convincing vs forcing.
In your example the teacher is arguing to convince you, the final decision maker, that something is long term worthwhile even if near term unpleasant (and most adults who sign up for a class will usually listen to the teacher). The original example is closer to the teacher locking the door and saying "you will not leave until you show me that you learned X". Which is a very different setup that, even if fruitful, few adults will find palatable. My 2c.
Some students see it as one more thing distracting them from
writing more code, and believe the only thing that will
determine their career success is ability to write code (as you
all know, ability to write code is necessary but not
sufficient to success as an engineer).
As an interviewer, engineer and lead myself, I'd say your students that think this are pretty darn close. If I get a junior candidate that can't code, I write them off and say goodbye.
I can teach dev lifecycle to a junior, and often need to because every business I've worked at as a lead has a totally different model. I can coach them on inter-team dynamics (and often have to). I can help them with culture fit to a point (if they're willing). What I can't do is teach them to be able to reason and write code and do the engineering work I hired them for.
From the Reddit post (and from other reviews), it sounds like the students are not performing well and sinking without learning this core skill -- most didn't understand enough to code in JS, for instance. This seems like a pretty dire failure in the part of the program itself.
Do you plan on at least giving these students a chance to retake prior units without further charging them for knowledge you should have already taught them?
Certainly agreed that being able to code is necessary. I’d argue it’s necessary and not sufficient.
> Do you plan on at least giving these students a chance to retake prior units without further charging them for knowledge you should have already taught them?
Students are actually strongly encouraged to retake units at no additional cost in order to move on to the next level, and in some instances we require it.
This is actually where some of the greatest frustration comes. It would be easy to close our eyes and wave people along but we have to say at times, “You’re not quite there yet, let’s keep working at it.” That’s not what students want to hear.
But you implemented changes so that the students themselves determine whether or not they want to flex? That's what happened the last two units for me... For two build weeks I was in a team of 8 people, and in both cases only one other person showed up. There were no repercussions for those that didn't attend build week and they continued on to the next unit regardless of whether or not they were ready. You grade yourself model and you flex yourself model is horrendous. I know some auto-grading has (very) slowly been implemented in earlier units, but essentially I went through 1/3rd of the program without any feedback other than my own, with two terrible teachers that were both new to teaching.
> This is actually where some of the greatest frustration comes. It would be easy to close our eyes and wave people along but we have to say at times, “You’re not quite there yet, let’s keep working at it.” That’s not what students want to hear.
I hear that this is good feedback, but looking at sugarwater's response that seemingly matches up w/ the original critique, maybe the current situation falls short of what you're trying to do, Austen?
These may be outliers, but from my perspective, the frustrations seem valid.
It's not an outlier of an experience. My cohort really did go through 2 units with no one looking at our assessments and assignments, and we determined whether or not we passed onto the next unit. It was an organizational mess.
I think that some of the issue with allowing students to retake is that there is a lot of pressure to continue the program regardless of skill because:
A) self judgement and passing leaves the unconfident people at a severe disadvantage regardless of their skill
B) it’s not codified in the contract that this is allowed. It’s a worry that a student will be ejected if they are not performing or worth the time investment by lambda.
That can look like missing resources or scheduling delays, which do seem to happen. It seems to be a normal event for cancellation for help from a tl or a technical hiccup not to be answered for several days.
Being able to read and write code in whatever language you claim to be proficient in on your resume is just table stakes imo. Being self taught I learned the whole team based development life cycle on the job. It was stressful. But it took maybe a month or two and I was proficient at git, setting up CI/CD, writing unit tests, and debugging things to just name a few.
I laud you being willing to teach a junior dev but I just find so many places are not open to hiring juniors at all.
Because its a total waste of money -- I'd be hiring someone who does not posess the requisite skills to do the base level job. My job is to create software solutions for the company by using my skills, and lead a team of engineers to produce a better solution. The role I hire a junior engineer for is the same: a much lower requisite skill level, yes, but skill nonetheless. I am not in the business of education -- that is literally what educators like Austen are for.
While the time spent teaching a blank slate how to be an engineer might benefit the person, it is literally throwing money away from the perspective of the company because it's not what I was hired to do.
Thanks for your response. I’ll take your word that the mistakes are not due to too much ambition and are not originated by biting more than what you can chew or a “land grab” market strategy. I have no primary knowledge on Lambda School to do otherwise.
But it is worth paying more attention to the frustrated students feedback. The OP one is about lack of team leaders and having “mentors” that are qualified just by having two more months of online classes than them. And it is not the first time a similar issue arises. Lambda School seems to always be justifying mistakes after some disgruntled student testimonial gets some traction.
My personal unsolicited advice: listen more to your students ahead of time and not employers. Employers are full of bullshit. They have a huge list of qualities that they want to see in a candidate, then go on to hire someone that is not at all like that, but the hiring manager liked (for whatever subjective reasons). It seems to be a wrong step to follow employers gospel and go against students expectations. You say that you know more about what students want and need than themselves. I doubt that. Give what students want: confidence that they learned something useful and, moreover, confidence that they can continue to learn about UX/software development through their career. That confidence in their knowledge will earn them jobs, not employers with no skin in the game telling you want they ideally want.
Don’t patronize your students. When you do, it feels from the outside that you are taking shortcuts to people’s education in favor of short term market share growth.
> The first is a mentor/mentee program we set up within the school. Employers tell us literally every day they want students who truly understand the development and release cycle, and work on teams. We created a mentor/mentee program where every student has a chance to do that, and the result of that program so clearly creates better outcomes that employers ask specifically for students who have done that.
One thing that jumps out at me is that students who have only just gone through the course themselves may not make the best mentors. They top x% percent probably make excellent mentors, but they rest still don't really know what they're doing themselves. You may want to actually build in some kind of assessment here and have mentoring as a "high performance track" (ideally with this being something the high-performing students can put on their resumes). I've seen this done very successfully in traditional schools (for children).
This is a fine response that provides real insight into how you see the problem and opportunity costs, and not typical CEO empty rhetoric. Good luck with your platform.
This is not an appropriate comment. If you can present your issues without personal attacks, it will be a more effective message. If you are a former student, then even though you are frustrated, surely you have specifics in your complaints?
> The specifics of what students didn’t like: The first is a mentor/mentee program we set up within the school. Employers tell us literally every day they want students who truly understand the development and release cycle, and work on teams. We created a mentor/mentee program where every student has a chance to do that, and the result of that program so clearly creates better outcomes that employers ask specifically for students who have done that. Some students love it. Some students see it as one more thing distracting them from writing more code,
The complaints i have seen around mentors in this thread and those linked are not that they don't see the user of a mentor/mentee program, but conversely that their mentor was not qualified or good at it. That's very different, they like the mentor/mentee program in theory, they don't think it's well executed.
Anyway, with 2000 students enrolled, it's possible that some groups/courses/teams/classes/whatever you call them are worse than others. We may only hear from those in the worst. But then the question is, how do you find out about these "failing" teams quickly, and how do you correct them, so those students still get the quality you aspire for. It's kind of too late after they've had months of a bad experience, they won't get those months back, of their lives, or of your program. What systems are in place to do that; what systems might be possible?
Because the other disturbing thing in linked threads is students who tried to contact you to say the teachers/lessons/other devices weren't up to your standards, and could not get an ear.
This, right here, is Lambda's biggest trick.
I created a hacker account just because of how much it infuriates me to see Austen doing it again here.
Austen is very very good at finding public criticism and responding to it. In contrast, in Lambda's slack, every criticism is automatically taken to private PM, to get it out of the way as soon as possible and to immediately shutdown any ensuing conversation. (A few times, when that didn't work, they turned off comments altogether.)
Lambda's strategy is to PRETEND to be responsive to feedback, to say a lot of pretty words and act concerned, while actually ignoring all of it.
For example, they created a student survey to see how students felt about removing the majority of paid teachers (team leads) and forcing us to be mentors instead.
One of the first questions?
"Do you agree that leadership is an important part of being a successful programmer?" (approximately)
The rest of the survey was the same. They weren't interested in getting feedback. They were interested in pretending to listen to feedback.
Austen is minimizing student frustration in this comment, acting like people are grumbling about minor changes.
He's ignoring the many many people who have written out long, articulate, arguments about how the changes damaged their education and removed the value of Lambda for them.
He also acts like he didn't delete every post in the Lambda subreddit that offered criticism over the last three months, without any response.
False honesty in threads like this is how Lambda gets away with being dishonest.
”Do you agree that leadership is an important part of being a successful programmer?"
I don’t have a horse in this fight, but the above is a generalization of what’s called Push Polling: polling in a way to change opinions and get a desired outcome, rather than to actually gather pre-existing opinions.
Also a lambda student, 100% agree. This was actually one of the biggest selling points for me, I dug up lots of old articles and reddit threads and weighed the criticism against his responses. I thought it was endearing and refreshing and a really good sign to see the CEO have these discussions in public. It still gets to me too, reading his responses in this thread, I still want to believe they will do well by their students, but their track record doesn't hold up. He is just a STELLAR marketer.
In Lambda slack, dissent is shut down immediately by "student success" staff directing you to DMs. Or an individual zoom chat, which is friendly and seemingly receptive to feedback, but ultimately pointless. A student-created poll with 90+ votes was posted after the changes went live, and it was taken down immediately, along with all feedback, to be replaced by their byzantine "More Transparent" survey system, conveniently delayed to be issued on a Friday evening, that could be twisted into yet another glowing report on the exciting new changes.
Lambda has plenty of real feedback and criticism (constructive and otherwise) and they have no interest in it. They make a very convincing show of listening and having meaningful discussions, but look at the form of the substantive changes. They've completely gutted their successful learning structure to replace it with something cheaper, and hide the damage in their reporting. But they're still "iterating" so we'll see, right?
My key criticisms:
1. Waves arms This, all of this. The dishonesty.
2. Removing TLs. The accountability and required meeting every day really made the difference between this and self-study. TLs were holding the program together.
3. Instituting self grading with no human evaluation, even for end-of-module tests. You can join "code review" group calls but it's voluntary, there's no one checking your work at the end of the section.
4. Cutting the curriculum (there is no python instruction) Opting into the "extended curriculum" just means you repeat the same thing twice.
If you're considering joining, also be aware that he deletes comments and tweets, and is the moderator of the subreddit. From what I've seen, the style is to allow the dissent, maybe even engage, and then quietly delete it later after things have blown over. What you see online may be curated even if it seems like it's outside the purview of Lambda official channels.
It’s like when the manufacturer responds to negative reviews on Home Depot. There’s no follow up from the customer so people just assume it was resolved.
I have zero skin in the game either way, but this is such a sad and dismissive response. At the surface polite and accepting critique, but underneath that putting all the blame on the student that paid a ridiculous 30k for this. Generalised 'most did like/benefit from this' to discredit the specific critique while not engaging with the issue of why the issues weren't fixed. Supposedly a 1:10 teacher:student ratio but no one fixed the problems mentioned by op or in the Reddit thread. Do they all only work 1h a month?
This post tells me all I ever needed to know about lambda. Clearly an irresponsible organisation more focused on image than value and with no respect for their supposed students.
If they get a tech job paying greater than $50,000 per year, then they pay some proportion of their pay, for a period of years, up to a maximum of $30k. So are you saying the student earned enough to pay $30k? Then they also earned a lot more than that after the program for themselves. If they didn’t earn more than $50k per year for a few years after lambda school, they pay nothing
I'd suggest you not minimize, disregard, and reinterpret criticism, especially if it's repeated and widespread. It's better to learn from criticism than to try to twist it into something else (into something you think you already know and can control). The latter comes across as disingenuous and only makes the (already obvious to everyone else) problem worse.
I don't know the specifics, but your answer as CEO of Lambda School is a great answer. Most CEOs in your position would have not provided this level of details. Or answered at all.
This is what happens when you suppress complaint and disagreement internally. The truth will come out. It always does. You can choose to ignore that truth or justify your position which this post certainly does. Take any substance and press down on it and does it stay contained within it's original shape as force multiplies or does it expand outward?
Lambda School made 2 promises to students when I joined. 1. They promised that students would always have access to the most up to date curriculum that was offered. This is no longer true. 2. They promised a network that connected students to alumni in an ever expanding community. They started separating alumni from the student workspace in Slack months ago. That community doesn't exist.
These are the 2 most fundamental promises that Lambda School made to students and it has broken both. Add to this incompetence or indifference the damaging changes that have been made to the curriculum and no one can reasonably accept the same price tag, $30K, for the diminished service, unaccountable support and lower quality curriculum product.
Students aren't the only population at Lambda School who are unhappy with these changes that Allred claims, "some of the changes that a subset of students did not like are unquestionably for their benefit". If this is true why is Lambda School losing or in the process of losing key instructors further degrading the quality of the product.
Lambda School can no longer rely on student referrals for driving growth in enrollment. Lambda School current and future instructor departures will continue the downward spiral. Allred seems to believe he can will the bleeding to stop. A bit of humility and self awareness would be a better path for him to consider over his protestations. Those on the inside at Lambda School recognize his words as nonsense.
Complete lack of empathy in this response. Not even “I’m sorry to hear this” or “sorry that you had this experience.” You just go straight into defence mode instead of genuinely wanting to understand the posters experience. Sorry, but you don’t get brownie points just for responding as the CEO, when it’s evident in this response and others that you don’t truly care about the people that you are serving. You are much more interested in managing the reputational risk of your business.
“We’re properly resourced and not growing too quickly.”
All of this after saying things are suboptimally distributed.
Austen, you constantly snake your way out of accountability and admitting bad things come from your school. Why don’t you just man up and fix the problems and take a hit to your profit margin? Don’t get into education if it’s a money grab, you dumb schmuck.
I dont know anything about Lambda's failures to serve students other than most students are upset at paying for less than steller experiences (most of the other prestigious bootcamps share this), but my gut tells me I dont think they grew to fast, its just the calibur of student went down, i feel like the hot new bootcamp of the day is able to get really bright and/or qualified students. More average learners require more time and resources and the nonspecial sauce will NOT get them a dream job in less than a year which is the opposite of what all of the marketing leads u to beleive for all the bootcamps.
Lambda seems to have been trying to branch out to more normal learners.
Students that dont share those bright/already qualified credentials, do benifit a little bit of a "rub" effect by being associated with those bright/qualified students, and get to study/work with them during the course of the bootcamp so everyone wins in the short term. For average learners without significant backround IT knowledge or a prestigious degree, realistically they are going to need more than 3-6 months or a year to get a cushy programming job in the US (which seems to be what all of the bootcamps advertise they can offer students).
I consider myself an average/below average speed learner, took a bootcamp, i was surprised to learn the guy i was pair programming with had a CS degree from MIT lol. Some devs already had work programming experience, but most of us normies benifited by pairing with them and talking to them about problems/code/computers/study habits.
I think some CS grads come out of school with a lack of practical framework knowledge, i mean like React or Ruby on Rails, rather than spend 5 months learning/building on their own, these top tier students choose to learn/build in a managed environment so it takes them 3 rather than 5 months. They are promised assistance with applying to jobs as well which can be a nerve wrecking process for a university grad. If you have the money and want to jump into the work force ASAP it makes sense to me.
The in person bootcamps ive found have had great community vibes to them. Fun being surrounded by fellow students/teachers, schools all have fun/studious/interesting faculty and students.
I taught the first few weeks of a FREE intro to software engineering bootcamp and had a few lower tier university CS grads who were happy with the curriculum/services rendered, they would just tune me out when i was covering something they already knew and would study/program while the less informed students would work through problems/Q/A with me.
I've seen web dev classes in colleges that are spread out on a semester where they basically learn whichever framework the university decided to teach. Doesn't take 3 months of full time work, more like 6 hours per week including labs.
I highly doubt someone from MIT CS would go that route and pay for a bootcamp, considering how easy it's for them to get internships at companies where they are going to learn it on the job anyways.
Like i said, if you can spare the cash, and want to do a bootcamp, it might make sense for you,
I wouldnt discredit all of the bootcamps as useless money wasters, everyone has different goals/aspirations reasons for doing a bootcamp rather than jumping straight into the workforce. The MIT CS guy did end up getting a great dev job right out of the program.
> The MIT CS guy did end up getting a great dev job right out of the program.
I have no doubts he would. I'm doubting his very existence. Or, pretty sure he didn't pay retail on the bootcamp.
I think going from absolutely no code experience to 70K by doing a 6 months bootcamp is simply impossible. The many articles on lambda illustrate that.
For someone with a real CS or Engineering degree, I wouldn't waste any time or money on a bootcamp unless my employer was paying for it.
If you are accusing me of lying im not lol. I assume he got north of 125k for a top dev job not 70k
You could grow a lot as an engineer in three months in the right environment assuming a guided curriculum is able to channel your energies in the right places and teachers/fellow students are able to help as well. I imagine you could also be bored for 3 months, or overly stressed for 3 months, and have negative feelings in regards to that experience. Like most things in life, its not right for everyone and its not wrong for everyone.
I have lots of friends who've paid for coding bootcamps, most are rather content with the services provided. I know some students as well that feel they were swindled out of cash because they weren't able to get a top tier job right out of the program and resorted to previous career path that they were already unhappy with.
I think its great that the good bootcamps that show success are trying to branch out to more normal learners, not just the greatly gifted or qualified (like an Ivy league degree) few, it is a noble sign that these schools are trying to expand using their special sauce to help more averagely qualified student transition into professional software engineering. Ivy league schools, do not do this. They have hundreds of years of success and don't feel the need to teach more students every year. (in regards to their on campus facilities not online programs that clearly dont offer the same experience)
If Lambda or the other top tier bootcamps capped their programs at 10 students a year or cohort, all of whom had ivy degrees or significant personal experience, all of whom who would get jobs immediately out of school, they would better be able to keep their graduation rates/salary rates top notch, they wouldnt have any students complaining online,
I commend them for trying to expand and help more students, and im sure they will stumble and get better as time goes on.
None of the good bootcamp schools that I am aware of just ignore feedback, because they know students will stop going to the school if feedback is ignored as they dont have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding like universities do.
I'm just really surprised. I wonder if he paid retail for the bootcamp, that's all. I could very well see why the bootcamp operators would want a student like that on their graduate lists.
> They have hundreds of years of success and don't feel the need to teach more students every year.
"I signed up for 18 months of programming... They suddenly reduced it to 12 months. As of yesterday, I've withdrawn after 4 months as this is not the program that was sold to me. I completed 22% of the program...but under their new reduction, they said I owe 37%"
Seems like they would have a good case for getting their money back, but might need to consult a lawyer.
Well, it's even better for the student because the tuition is paid via an income-sharing agreement. That means you don't have to try to "get your money back" — you just have to defend yourself if they actually sue you for a share of your earnings.
This means that Lambda would have to deal with the bad optics of "suing their students" (which sounds worse than simply refusing to give refunds).
If Lambda did actually sue, students would have to defend themselves. But it's always better to be the party that starts out having the thing at issue (i.e., the money).
You're probably right, though I think the press would still present this as "coding bootcamp sues its students". The fact that the process is unfolding in front of an arbitrator doesn't change the fundamental story.
But good luck getting money out of a student without actually getting a judgement. They'd basically be limited to reporting it to credit agencies and just asking them to pay.
A arbitration agreement isn't enough to get a bank or an employer to hand over any money from the student.
I'm not particularly familiar with arbitration and the resulting paperwork, nor with financial claims against another party.
However, I do know that minutes of mutual settlement can be filled with a court, and the court will, based on the affidavit of filing, enforce it as if that court had ruled.
And for instance, this is in a Arbitration submission agreement I found: "The parties agree to abide by and perform any award(s) rendered pursuant to this Submission Agreement. The parties further agree that a judgment and any interest due thereon, may be entered upon such award(s) and, for these purposes, the parties hereby voluntarily consent to submit to the jurisdiction of any court of competent jurisdiction which may properly enter such judgment."
i.e. "act as if a court ordered it, 'cause they have in effect"
So you are right that a binding arbitration agreement probably isn't enough, but filed with a court, and filed with either bank or employer, it should be enough.
It's not just filing with a court. You have to appear before a judge to ask for a default judgement, and the defendant can offer a defense (the options are narrow in scope, but not nonexistent).
This was in the context of the optics of 'suing their students'. So you serve the student, pay a lawyer to appear in court to ask for a default judgement, then student offers a defense, and a judge potentially grants the judgement. There's functionally no difference with respect to optics.
Also ISAs have not been heavily litigated, so no one really knows what would happen if a company tries to enforce them.
That's a good point. I would think that even if the owner of the loans is a third party, the income documentation would probably still flow through Lambda. So if a student refused to provide income information to Lambda based on the claim that the program fundamentally changed mid-stream, then presumably Lambda would have to be the one to sue them (not the owner of the loan).
The thing about efficient markets is that lucrative activities which don't produce much value—borderline scams—can block activity which would be highly wealth creating. For example, there could be a huge untapped retail market for financial derivatives such as interest rate and fx hedges. However, it's very hard to access this market because historically anyone who has started selling such products has pivoted towards targeting degenerate gamblers in order to fleece them. Normal people who want to hedge conclude that it's better to live with the risk than to be the sucker.
Here we can see that there are lots of people who are prepared to make significant personal sacrifices to work in the software industry. The industry itself is crying out for more people and new people. But it literally doesn't make economic sense, either for universities or for new players such as bootcamps, to train people properly. It's vastly more lucrative to confuse them and then rip them off. It's hard to see a simple market mechanism which can resolve this, as opposed to rebuilding something similar to the gatekeeping and signalling functions around universities, commonly regarded as broken nowadays.
Just because it’s more lucrative to rip people off doesn’t mean it doesn’t make financial sense to run a good code bootcamp. That’s like saying it doesn’t make sense to work because it’s more lucrative to steal or live off welfare.
But sure, it’s a common problem in a market economy. Presumably issues of information asymmetry should be alleviated in the days of the internet.
> Just because it’s more lucrative to rip people off doesn’t mean it doesn’t make financial sense to run a good code bootcamp.
The good code bootcamp wont be able to compete in the sort term. The scam version will first attract more customers in short term and destroy overall trust in the long term.
But it doesn't make economic sense to work rather than steal, unless there are enforced rules and sanctions against stealing. Most people who choose to work do so either because of the sanctions, or because of various reasons which are not about maximizing returns in a narrow economic sense.
The post didn't say that it made sense _relative_ to something else, it just said running a school in the proper way didn't make economic sense, and that is not true (except in the sense pointed out in another comment, that honest schools may be outcompeted).
My point is just that a project's economic viability doesn't depend on the relative merits of other projects.
If you are evaluating the viability of a specific project you don't vare if there are other projects that are even more profitable, you only care if the current one has a positive return on investment.
Of course when choosing between several projects, such as starting a school or launching a scam, then yes you would look at relative profitability (_and_ absolute of course).
Few people will hopefully find themselves choosing between those two options.
How does the internet 'alleviate issues of information asymmetry'?? I thought it was well understood that this has not generally happened, except in open markets for very transparent and easily comparable products.
Holiday accommodation for example, much less complex than coding bootcamps, is far from a solved problem.
> How does the internet 'alleviate issues of information asymmetry'??
Through threads like this. Many people thinking of entering Lambda school will google it, find bad reviews and critical discussion threads and reconsider.
"Alleviate" does not mean "eradicate", surely it's easier to evaluate schools and holiday homes nowadays, compared to 1980?
The problem is when you sell the truth and your competitors sell "all of our graduates earn 500k within two months of graduating", which one is going to get the customers?
Part of the problem is the students themselves who see six figures and think "I want a piece of that" without necessarily being interested. The code bootcamps take full advantage of this.
Learning to program is more like an old fashioned trade than a profession. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I mean that what should be happening is apprenticeships.
If "industry is crying out for more people", then it should be investing in that in the same way it does in every other part of the supply chain.
They should be hiring and training programmers, not externalizing their costs.
I did work briefly work for a small consultancy that decided to take on juniors, even though it was anticipated that for probably a year they woudln't be billing enough to cover their salary; because there weren't a lot of qualified applicants anyway where we were located, and as a sort of intentional public service to help people get into the field (especially underrepresented people etc).
Of course, the most skilled juniors quickly left for higher paying jobs elsewhere around when they started to actually make back their salaries in billing. There were no hard feelings, the company knew that could happen and could afford it, and of course, why wouldn't they? (I mean, I guess it was hoped that sometimes they would prefer working for the consultancy for a while). But it was a kind of experiment, and indeed the experiment showed it was not really a sustainable model, I think they stopped doing that.
I also did this with my consultancy along with reimbursing employees for passing certifications and paying for tuition. Three of them work for Microsoft now and one works for Amazon. Others are at other big firms. I don't regret how I invested in them and I think it is great that they are doing so well in their careers, but I will not make an unsecured investment like that again.
Yup. I guess one way to "secure" it would be to try to make them promise to keep working for you for a certain amount of time, but even if there's a legal way to do it, that just seems icky, who wants to force people to keep working for you when they don't want to, or the environment that will come from working with people who would rather be somewhere else but are being forced to stay. That's not a good solution.
In a standard tuition reimbursement situation, you have to stay at the company (even if you don't want to) and maintain a certain grade point average. Why can't software companies adjust to this but other kinds of employees can?
It's sad to read comments like yours because I'm a junior dev myself. I can't blame you, though, because as I pointed out above, it's all due to perverse incentives in this industry.
The problem, which I've commented on and experienced many times, is that companies don't have enough incentive to fund training of junior developers. In a culture where devs switch jobs every 2-3 years, there doesn't seem to be enough runway to train a junior to senior level before they get poached.
I wish there was a realistic solution to this problem other than bootcamps, but I don't know what it could be.
This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I think junior salaries need to come down a little bit (or senior salaries need to go up). When I was a Junior, I was making about 75% of a Senior role. There was no way I was worth 75% of a senior role. Better to have a true Junior role with lower salary, lower bar to entry, and more mentorship.
That's why there's a vesting schedule and stock compensation for engineers.
Unless you are Netflix and can attract and afford world wide talent, if you have no bonus or stock compensation you are much better hiring contractors for software.
The way apprenticeships traditionally worked is that the apprentice was bound to the master for a certain number of years, and his parents also often had to pay to have him taken on. The tension between needing trained labour, but not wanting your trained labour to walk out the door and seek employment elsewhere (literal meaning of 'journeyman') was resolved firstly by extremely severe constraints on the apprentice and his freedom, and secondly by pretty severe regulation of the master, to ensure quality of training, and prevent exploitation. In practice there still was a lot of exploitation.
Today neither employers not bootcamps would be able to take on risk/exert control over the apprentice's career to the extent optimal from a strictly economic point of view. You can look at the service-for-education deals offered by the military (for both low-skilled and highly skilled people) to get an example - no other organizations would be allowed to restrict a trainee's liberty to the same extent.
While I don't agree with the moral spin that is sometimes put on this of 'greedy juniors' getting trained up and then abandoning their benefactors for higher salaries, this is a real collective action problem, not just shortsightedness in behalf of employers.
I don't think we need to look at apprenticeships through a lens that is quite out of date. For example you can look at the apprenticeship schemes in the UK:
This only works with a lot of government support. If you don’t have the government’s ok to take more of the trainee’s surplus in year three than you could if they could just leave why bother training them in year one or two when they’re bloody useless or of marginal value? Unpaid internships exist for the same economic reason; for a long time in many fields the training being provided is worth more than the labour of the trainee. If you can’t get a return from the training why bother? That’s where the government comes in, either by allowing those kinds of contracts or by mandating apprenticeships or levying industry wide “taxes” so everyone pays for trainees’ development and gets the return from it more or less equally. Otherwise the logical thing to do is let someone else pay for the training and then immediately hire away the trainees without paying the costs of the training.
Do you think that apprenticeships in the UK have been successful in motivating training for shortage jobs with highly technical skills?
I don't think they have. I've seen reports which claim they are mostly used as a subsidy to training which was already taking place, as a workaround to pay workers less, and generally in low-skilled jobs.
Like the grandparent post, the UK model is guilty of assuming that the word "apprenticeship" together with a sort of folksy appeal to a golden era of apprentices will solve the hard problems of training and education.
I brought up the past model to show that apprenticeships in the past worked for a specific reason. Various models of apprenticeship/training/education fail today, because we have rejected what made them work in the past. We don't want / can't have a system where young people are completely under the control of an apprentice master for several years, unable to change jobs or live where they want. This is probably a good thing. But without it, the idea of apprenticeships makes little sense.
Yes, and despite this there is commonly resentment by academics of the time they spend mentoring graduate students who then leave for higher paid posts outside academia.
Interesting, the wikipedia right before your quote says that the "journey" "comes from the French journée (day)," as you say, charging for a day of work. But the next paragraph says:
> In parts of Europe, as in Late Medieval Germany, spending time as a wandering journeyman (Wandergeselle),[6] moving from one town to another to gain experience of different workshops, was an important part of the training of an aspirant master.
So I guess at least in some times/places journeymen also did actually journey? Whether wandering or not, I'd think the right to charge a fee for each day's work is also the right to leave at the end of the day if you'd like, having gotten paid. Unlike an apprentice who is tied to his master and does not get paid for a day's work, if he leaves he's out of work entirely.
You are misreading it. The semantics that someone goes from place to place is captured in the word "wandering", and is not repeated in "journeyman", which still refers to charging for a day of work.
I agree, but I think that in order for that to work, we would have to accept much lower salaries for junior/apprentice engineers (until they've proven they can add value). And maybe also a higher tolerance for firing engineers who are not working out early.
As it is, I'm not surprised companies are reluctant to bet on the potential of untrained engineers, _and_ the chance that they'll stick around long enough to make the investment worthwhile.
I'm sure there are a lot of inexperienced, uncredentialed engineers out there who would take a low-paying job with a significant chance of getting fired in 3 months. I was one of them. The alternative is to not get hired at all.
I agree completely with this! There is no real onramp for junior people. Personal anecedote incoming... feel free to skip.
For example my brother is a talented person with devops/sys admin/cloud skills. As someone who is more in the pure coding side of things, I go to him often with questions in his area. He has been tech oriented since a young age. He is also 30 with no comp sci degree and no work history besides driving Uber. No company would take a chance on someone like that if they have to pay a huge salary for it. But for a startup it would be a perfect moneyball opportunity to pay like $25 an hour or whatever. If he works out great you got a smart productive person for a cheap salary. It is a huge win. If not, dump him and try with someone else.
> Learning to program is more like an old fashioned trade than a profession
Sure. Learning to code is pretty much a trade at this point. Engineering isn't. There's a pretty big gap between a real engineer and someone who "learned to code" in high school.
Same as health care. Without regulations the industry would be full of snake oil. And yet the regulation kill innovation in the industry. Money all devolutes to scam. Look at digital money. Not even HN community can spot the "crypto" scams
The HN community gets around this by defaulting to thinking that everything in the space is a scam. Just saying "scam" 100% of the time will make you mostly right.
> For example, there could be a huge untapped retail market for financial derivatives such as interest rate and fx hedges. However, it's very hard to access this market because historically anyone who has started selling such products has pivoted towards targeting degenerate gamblers in order to fleece them.
Tangential, but this is pretty much emerging in the cryptocurrency/digital assets/decentralized finance (defi) space. To your point, out-right or borderline scams are a-dime-a-dozen there right now and there are plenty of incentives to cut corners in order to get growth, but there are a lot of ethical and promising projects as well.
Most people will not use the ethical projects that you mention, at least until perception of crypto changes, because they will associate crypto/defi either with full-on exit/Ponzi scams, or with experiences investing in Bitcoin and others right before the peak.
I think you're right, it's going to stay fringe for a while - which I think is for the better, as I think it will be another couple of years before the ecosystem is quite ready for a huge influx of new active non-tech/non-enthusiast users.
The rational part of me does not want BTC > $30k (or <~10k) within the coming months.
> scams can block activity which would be highly wealth creating
What's this phenomenon called?
"Spoiling the market"? "Shitting the bed"?
Basically, when inauthentic activity so increases transaction costs that the authentic market is harmed.
My aunt once had a pretty good cottage business selling bespoke wall paper stuff on eBay. Over time, inauthentic entries crowded out her real product. SEO, fakes, knockoffs, misnaming stuff. Her customers could no longer find her products thru eBay, even when using exact match search terms.
Sound familiar?
Using terms like "fraud" and "scam" seems grossly inadequate. I'm provisionally using "authentic" vs "inauthentic", which suck, for lack of better terms.
A parting thought: Somehow Amazon managed to become worse than eBay, for both vendors and customers. Amazon boosts their own brands. And has a separate payola lane for "sponsored" entries.
How exactly are students being ripped off? They pay nothing up front, and only pay lambda school afterwards if they are financially successful in a tech job.
> After I was a few Units in (3) and thus financially obligated to pay the ISA, they removed core components of the program.
> Where a mentor was paid to mentor you, you are now forced to mentor other students and vice versa.
So Lambda School is essentially an bait-and-switch pyramid scheme purporting to be an educational institution?
For-profit schools are scams in general, but this one sounds particularly scammy and unpleasant.
I'm not surprised to see it's being backed by YC. Yet another example of venture capitalists using their vast wealth to greedily build even more wealth, no matter who is abused in the process.
Yeah I noticed this pyramid scheme as well. I am sure some enterprising product manager suggested "let's have the students teach as part of their education, and we can tell them that teaching enhances learning!"
I and a lot of other students used the payment from mentoring to eat, and pay rent during the job search after graduation. The one thing that Lambda claimed it did, was never count anyone doing that as having been placed in a job. Forced mentorship sounds horrid, even when were paid a lot of people were not good at it. Making it required sounds like it could make that problem worse.
And it's even worse than that, because they offer the ISAs to investors to purchase. Meaning they're bait and switching both the student and investors.
Once you're in, why not forget about the quality and problems and just follow the program?
I have only ever gone to low level state schools, but one of my instructors told me that he wasn't there to teach me. He was there to guide me through the curriculum. That stuck.
Stick to the program, sweat out the X months. You'll come out as close to a programmer / designer / X as you would from any other path aside from some sort of paid internship where you can teach yourself on the job.
You could teach yourself. Many do. But most will not.
Couldn't you make this same argument for any school in the US?
Maybe We're getting vague here (my fault.) What do we actually mean by "teach yourself?" Nobody is spoon-feeding you knowledge. You get a curriculum to follow.
It seems to me that if you get through the program and then land a job from it, then you got some value from the program. Maybe you could have done that on your own. But if you're looking at a bootcamp to learn in the first place, then you probably weren't going to learn on your own anyways.
Well, a normal university provides much more support than Lambda school seems to do, lectures, graded homework, labs, exams etc, so my point was that if Lambda doesn't provide that and is only really a way to teach yourself, then 30k is too much.
University of course also provides a lot of things not directly related to the teaching, the student experience, a network, for some people the first experience of living on their own etc.
Let's say you have two programs to select from. One program has a 60% placement rate, but has horrible quality. The other has a 30% placement rate, but high quality. Let's say that an independent 3rd party does the quality assessment from invites to participate and from student feedback. This same body also finds that the employers and starting salaries for each program is roughly equal. Would you care about quality? I would select the first option. The higher placement rate has the greater value due to the greater probability of landing a job. It's like playing a pocket pair of Aces vs a pocket pair of Jacks in Texas Hold'em. I would consider the possibility of placing myself with a job as coming in with a pocket pair of 7's.
What else matters? I guarantee that you'll learn something through an intensive effort of pacing along with the curriculum. I'm also sure that it's not going to be enough to feel comfortable that first day of the job.
What's the placement rate? If that rate has plummeted or has always been horrible, then that's all I need to hear.
Maybe what they are really teaching is the process of getting yourself into a self-learning mode of work. I have to learn new things every day. I would bet my day looks similar to those in Lambda. Maybe it's a "wax on, wax off" sort of thing which looks like BS but actually works if you don't get hung up on things outside of the end-goal. As long as the employer placement numbers are good (and maybe they aren't,) then I'm a believer.
I personally studied theoretical physics and abstract geometry, plus a few years of classical languages so I think our priorities are pretty different...
My original point was simply that teach yourself-programs are well and good, that’s how I learned to program and I now work for a FAANG, but then you shouldn’t have to pay 30 k.
You're probably right, we speak different languages.
I feel 30K is meaningless if we're not talking about an ROI on that investment. Many software developers spend that on education at a university along with 4 years of their time. That education may get you started, then your experience takes over as the most important item on your future job searches. That first gig may have a huge effect on your future options (getting lucky with a high impact position with Google vs low impact at no name.) The more impressive your education, the better leverage you have to land that good first gig. In this case, spending far more than 30K on your education likely pays off huge. You didn't need to spend that, but you made a bet which increased your chances.
Spending 30K on a bootcamp may not have the same dramatic impact on your chances, but if it pushes you to focus on knocking out a curriculum and ends with multiple offers, then you could quickly recoup that money versus the alternative route. That alternative might be that you have less focus, requiring longer to gain the same skills and you need more time for a job search. That job search might end with a lesser paying job than Lambda may have lined up for you.
And paying for courses is a thing. Amy Hoy's 30 x 500 is $2000. I ran into an interesting copywriting course the other day which costs the same. Tiago Forte of Building a Second Brain has bundles which run in that range. It's reasonable that a program which runs 6+ months could cost 30K. You don't need any of these courses to learn the content, but I don't think that's the correct mindset. What will be the return on these courses? Will they help you speed up your alternative timeline? Will they help push you accomplish something you would otherwise flounder on? How long would most people take to create and follow a full time curriculum for landing that first programming gig? I bet most would give up before finishing. If the program gives you a better chance at finishing, then that's worth a lot.
All that said, I'm sure I would change my mind if I were to dish out 30K for a 6 month program and then the next week turned into a dumpster fire of courses. It's one thing to write about how you should stick to the program. It's quite another to pull out your card to pay 30K and then get hit with a feeling of heavy disappointment with the course material.
If you're self motivated enough to follow a curriculum on your own, you're probably much better off using online resources from MIT/Stanford/Harvard which are not only free but much better quality.
The learning environment described in the linked thread (200 students per teacher, plus blind leading the blind with volunteer mentors) sounds terrible at any price including $0.00. Many MOOCs have community boards, TA's, interactive assignments and cost little or nothing. If their plan is to just bundle that same experience with a job placement sales team and a private slack, then they'll just be yet another for-profit credential mill
Not really relevant but I'm basically the only person I know that thinks it's the coolest thing in the world that I can open up my computer and watch a lecture from MIT/Stanford/Harvard etc. in almost any thing I want. Such a great time to be alive for self-motivated people that like learning stuff!
Couldn't agree more. In fact, most students will look for outside resources because Lambda's resources are poor. In fact, one of my instructors shares a PDF of Grokking Algorithms to his students because the school's CS content is lacking.
I paid for the accountability, feedback, and support (which, was provided before I was financially committed). Why would I pay 30k to just teach myself when I can do that with YouTube, Udemy, and documentation?
I got drawn into Lambda School at the peak of their hype early last year and considered myself extremely fortunate when I got admitted into one of their pilot EU classes. Suffice it to say that the reality was...significantly poorer than advertised. Not only because of the much-discussed reasons which are true, but most importantly for me because they lied about having hiring partners in Europe when they didn't, and left the students to fend for themselves after graduating. Most of the students saw this happen with earlier cohorts and there was a steady trickle of dropouts while I was there. To top it off, around October last year, LS suddenly announced that they would be "pausing" the EU programs indefinitely to "focus on improving the student experience" which seriously drained student morale. I'm pretty sure no more than 35% of students who enrolled to Lambda EU have jobs currently and since they're not as loud as the Americans, their plight isn't really highlighted. Most of the students who managed to get hired either did it on their own, or were previously experienced and came to Lambda to improve their prospects. I managed to get a job through my own means, but would unequivocally consider enrolling to LS a mistake, and it's telling that they've not bothered to follow up with me for ISA payments.
Addendum:
This was the kind of delusional fever dream perpetuated by Austen that kind of attracted me to LS last year:
I was part of the very first EU cohort and you're 100% correct. Despite being starry-eyed and optimistic when starting out, cracks quickly began to show in the facade. Curriculum changes would be announced hours before that day's lessons would begin leaving both students and instructors baffled. There were students who simply hadn't mastered the material yet and were generally not ready to move on, yet were forced to go into the next unit lest the 'pass-rate' between cohorts would be less than 100%.
Frankly, having seen the average quality of their work, I wouldn't hire 70% of all Lambda students. I've seen a handful of really talented and hard-working students who've made the most of their LS experience, but for the majority that simply followed the curriculum and did the bare-minimum I wouldn't want them anywhere near my codebase.
Thus far, it seems that almost all students who got a job either spent numerous hours studying outside of normal classes, had previous experience going into it (such as myself), or generally got a lucky break. There are numerous students who are still without a job more than a year after graduation.
in "my country" programming bootcamps are considered as a big scam that rely on selling dreams to people like: becoming SE* in 3-6 months or some shit like that for N minimal wages
ofc bootcamps do work for some people (minority)
*let's not argue about developer vs engineer vs coder vs programmer
Where I live, education is free and quality is strictly controlled by the governement. It's a bit rigid and not perfect, but overall I think it works pretty well. For that reason, we are usually quite suspicious of private alternatives. It's not only universities, even sport clubs are often non-commercial structures and instructors are required to have official certifications.
Americans have a different mindset, they are more business-oriented, for the better and the worse.
On one hand if you're already a high income earning person, such the lawyer and you need to pivot it can be an option.
But they're targeting high school grads and others who aren't as prepared. I don't think you actually need any formal training to become a programmer, I don't and I do exceptionally well.
Once you add in investors who expect returns, why wouldn't lambda School enroll as many people as they could without any regard to education. Those who are motivated will learn on their own, find themselves entry level tech jobs and can be put up as an example of successful students.
Those who fail will be shown as too lazy to put in the effort.
If I was to advise a new student on what path to take, I had almost always say to go to college. The main advantage being that you can grow a real Social circle, and with the coming saturation of boot camp grads you'll have an actual degree.
For non-traditional students, such as working parents many state schools offer online curriculums which will be a much better fit versus an exploitive boot camp.
I think the ultimate question is whether it's markedly better on average than what the rest of the market can offer for $30k. Covid has reduced the value of almost all education services that aren't exclusively online, thus has Lambda's perceived reduction in value in line with the average reduction across the industry or is it uniquely bad?
people are trying to skip it in fields where it isn't really necessary. why waste time and resources if you dont have to? my buddy spent 6 years in higher education now he's clicking things in excel and pasting snippets in Apex. I'd argue that these 6 years were mostly a waste of time for him.
I suspect they set out with noble intentions and then realised it is a conversion-funnel game where they absorb the cost up front with the hope of recouping cost and profit later on. If 100% students passing through landed a job then the unit economics would work provided hard costs are low enough. Business might even be successful at 30% post Lambda School employment. However, as they scale that number will fall because the type of student they recruit might change and the pandemic also having a short term effect. As % post employment falls revenues fall and more students are needed to increase absolute revs. This could also go hand in hand with cost-cutting, of which there is evidence. All in all, an experiment in business model is taking place.
> All in all, an experiment in business model is taking place
Which is all businesses at that scale I think. You're not reinventing the wheel offering plumbing services in your local village.
I guess we have to think about how these experiments might play out and the risks involved as we participate in them. How will food delivery services change my community? What's the risk that an investment in personal education with this newly launched service won't pay off? What am I giving up by opening a free account with Facebook?
There's a strong likelihood that any of these experiments will blow up. Just as there's a strong likelihood that a direct investment in any of these companies won't pay off (especially as an early investor, which is at the point where we're likely using these services.) Maybe people shouldn't be so quick to jump in early, and more accepting of the mistake once they find out they placed a bad bet.
Agreed, early stage start ups are experiments in business models: "is there a market for x, can I charge $y for it and accept z as payment". In edtech start ups most folks forget who the customer is e.g
Altschool, a software company that used students as Guinea pigs.
443 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadOriginal post on Reddit is still there but I suppose OP may have feared that mods would remove it or something?
https://www.reddit.com/r/LambdaSchool/comments/kb87od/lambda...
In case it does get removed then try this link instead:
https://www.removeddit.com/r/LambdaSchool/comments/kb87od/la...
On the latter link make sure you then change the drop down from showing removed comments only to showing all comments.
But like I said as of yet the original post and comments are still there on Reddit.
This URL still uses archive.org but in a non broken format: https://web.archive.org/web/20201214092323if_/https://old.re...
What value do you see in Lambda (or any other similar program) that you don't when learning on your own? Is it the network effect? Just curious!
i'm a dropout with no savings, on-and-off homeless for the past few years. i've been playing with tech since i was a kid but not in any capacity that looks professional. the pandemic has ironically given me stability and opportunity to try and get my foot in the door. a somewhat respected program that provides a structured environment and job leads at the end is breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
and if it doesn't pan out and i go back to tossing pizza for minimum wage, at least there's no debt like last time.
I was in a similar situation about ten years ago, hitting bottom and roughing it. Being a stubborn mule of sorts, I kept trying, learning, went through countless jobs in different fields; all the while, I pursued the joy of programming. Eventually, a side project I was doing for fun (and as a learning experience) became the foot in the door, as proof of my abilities.
In my case, much of it was luck - but as they say, you make your own luck too. And the rest was mostly just "showing up" and "being there".
> i've been playing with tech since i was a kid
I believe this is the essence and heart of becoming a software developer, and you got it!
Pick an easy language. I recommend Javascript or Python. There's a wealth of learning material and you can use these two languages to build a wide variety of things.
Pick something fun: a simple game, an interactive website, a blog, etc. Make it your objective, and instill in yourself a deep desire to make it. But don't get caught up on making it perfect.
Read a tutorial or two, experiment, and try to apply what you learned to the thing you want to build.
It'll take a lot of time. Whatever time you think it takes, multiply that figure by three. Don't stress out. You can't conceive of all the roadblocks or what you don't know.
If you get stuck, ask questions on Reddit, StackOverflow, Discord, etc. Learning how to ask questions builds your mental model of how this stuff fits together. Eventually you'll be able to answer a lot of your own questions.
Block out an entire weekend and go for it.
I do still think it's quite possible to bootstrap a programming career without a degree or any formal certification. In some ways it's easier now than say 15 years ago, in some ways it's harder. But hustling is key. There's hustling on the material you need to learn (which is going to be off-putting to many programmers who started for the joy, not the hustle) but there's more important hustling outside of that which well-meaning advice on e.g. what programming language to learn always misses. It helps to see universities, bootcamps, contracting agencies, consulting/freelancing groups, well-connected recruiters, etc. as all being opportunities that take some of the burden of hustling off of you, deciding which ones to try and take advantage of is then partially dependent on how much you can do yourself. It's not helpful to blanket-recommend anything and even when talking to an individual they need to do their own introspection and surface results of that in order to receive useful targeted advice.
- A source of anecdotes about how I solved problems I faced
- Something that proved I wasn't at absolute zero
- A good ice breaker in the interview, I made a snake game that was styled after one on Nokia phones, it came up a bunch
My alma matter, insight data sciences program, folded last week. Laid off most staff. Grateful for their training, but not surprised that model couldn't survive this year. At the same time I'm hearing offers are starting to skyrocket for some specialists! Let's see how things evolve in 2021!
All of this is valid IF the bootcamp works. In this case, that may not be the case.
But doing lambda school is going into debt, isn't it? A different kind of debt but a debt nonetheless.
Can you imagine going to Lambda school, not getting a good education, not getting a much higher paying job, then being stuck unable to get incremental raises past $50,000 so you don’t end up down $8,500 for 2 years?
Progressive taxes will just punish high middle class people for creating more value than low middle class people, making it harder for them to join the class of actual rich people who can structure their income so as to pay minimal taxes (like big corps do).
The higher rates only apply to money over the threshold.
Lambda school works the way many people think the US tax system works (but doesn’t). When you make over X, all of your money is taxed at Y. So it’s better to make X - 1 than X + 1.
https://lambdaschool.com/isa is there data, and I am sure there is more. Can you reference your post to what they state they charge for?
So if you go from $49,999 to $50,000 you now owe them $50,000 * 0.17, or $8,500.
"Now wait just a minute, FemmeAndroid. If you're just getting a raise at your current job, that won't be covered unless you're a web dev."
Now I don't know about you, but I like doing good work, and I'm a developer at heart, even if I don't have a fancy CS degree or even a Bootcamp diploma. But every desk job I've had has ended up involving development, since I can usually help automate parts of my job. It's worked out well for me, and I'd imagine anyone who comes out of a bootcamp like this without a new job will at least try and leverage their coding experience to improve their current job, get a raise, or get a promotion. Your job might not be 'web developer' but your job will start to involve the skills you learned at Lambda school.
'You will owe payments toward your ISA if your job requires skills you learned at Lambda School, even if your title isn't "Web Developer" or "Data Scientist."'
Heck, even if you start a business, and grow it from the ground up, as soon as you make $50,000 a year, you immediately drop back down $8,500. (They explicitly call out 'Self-employed' as an eligible job on the page linked.) Even if you just get a second job that reasonably only makes a bit of money, you fall into this trap. (They explicitly call out 'Second Job' on the page linked.)
You will be stuck in this catch-22 of not having an incentive to make over $50,000 unless you can make the jump to a little over $60,000 or so for 60 months. That's point 3 on the linked website. "[You are bound by the terms of the ISA until you pay 17% for 24 months, you pay out $30k, or...] You did not make over $4,167/month or did not have a qualifying job, and therefore "deferred" your monthly payments for a total of 60 months."
All the above quotes come from your linked page. I was just simplifying the facts of that very page into a fairly big problem with how it's structured.
Heck, you can even see what I'm talking about by using their own calculator. Go to https://lambdaschool.com/isa-calculator and jump between making $49,500 and $50,000 a year, and you'll see you go from owing nothing to owing nothing a month to $715 a month while only making $4,208. That's a huge leap.
The idea is also that this aligns the school's incentives with the student's: if the student doesn't prosper, the school doesn't get paid.
The max you will have to pay is 10% of your discretionary income (10% of income above 1.5x the poverty level).
That is, to be able to think in terms of ROI is a privilege.
Clearly that is an extreme example, but it illustrates the point - getting a paying job quickly does not mean it is the best answer for long-term salary and career growth. Getting any old coding job just to get one is not the same thing as getting the full education that comes from a degree. That doesn't make it the wrong answer... getting a job matters. But if you are comparing long-term outcomes, you need to look at it with more context.
I think the fee was 300€/year, most of it was headed toward paying mandatory access to the university library. That would be 300x5=1500€ (~2k$) for a complete engineering degree.
Lets not forget that all this is paid with tax money though. You will sort of pay back these studies when paying your taxes once working :)
In Bordeaux it's ~200€ for licence and ~300€ for master, but yeah, lowballed that a little bit.
But ! Note that in France almost 40% of university students get the state grant (https://www.campusmatin.com/vie-campus/experience-etudiante/...) - and thus don't even have to pay the inscription fee.
> Lets not forget that all this is paid with tax money though. You will sort of pay back these studies when paying your taxes once working :)
People in the US pay income tax, too - https://www.companow.com/us-vs-france-where-do-you-pay-the-m...
Also, forget having a campus, classrooms looks like they haven't been renovated in 200 years, you need your own computers because labs are too outdated, professors salaries are a joke, professors keep mixing their personal interests / companies with university - basically getting free work out of students for their businesses, majority of students move out of Italy after graduating because high taxes and bureaucracy make it impossible for profitable business to start up (estimated 250k€ in taxes invested in education lost per student).
I'd rather live in Italy than other countries but I won't uniquely for tax reasons.
Back when I was in school, I looked hard at all the options for studying abroad in France and found none with tuition even close to that cheap for even just a semester or summer.
I suspect the prices you're talking about are heavily subsidized and only if you're French (which the OP probably isn't).
Where do you come from ? If it's from the US, sure, it's quite more expensive. If it's from another european country, or a poor country, it should be cheap.
I'm guessing the OP is in the US if they're talking about Lambda School, but even the full foreigner price for your school looks substantially less expensive than Lambda.
Also, Germany is somewhat difficult to navigate if you don't speak German, since you reach many roadblocks where people don't speak English (this is different in Denmark, but Denmark's nationalist party has abolished bachelor studies in English, so much for that).
Which leads to fun times where English had to pay max UK rate at Scottish universities but EU citizens paid the same as Scots.
That said, half my 4 year software engineering education was hands-on, figure-it-out-yourself stuff; a year of internships and a ton of group projects.
Depending on your university, focused education vs scattershot education, this actually sounds about right.
https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/state/
That makes question who is more employable: a student with 48 months of University, or someone with 6 months of Lambda and 2.5 years of real world experience? Note, I assumed the Lambda grad had a year unemployed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_financial_aid_(Sweden)
You also get, I think, about $150 a month housing allowance.
So on top of your $150 + 4×$84 = ca. $500 monthly income, you only need to take about $800 a month as a loan to survive. (Remember, no tuition fees.)
Don't overestimate living expenses in a 500 year old walkable town with a small university in a --socialist democracy-- country that cares about its citizens.
In Nordic countries, we don't really like it when Americans call us socialist democracies. We are market economies like everyone else. Here's a take from the Danish prime minister: https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9650030/denmark-prime-ministe...
[0] I think Finland is now charging a small tuition fee, at least for non-EU students.
Otherwise Bismarck's 19th century Prussia would be socialist
Communism says that there isn't any individual property.
Scandinavian countries have never been socialist.
Maybe they're not "really socialist", but then by that standard, is there a "really capitalist" country? Even the US, which is probably the most capitalist "developed" country, has some state ownership of production.
Minor rant, but the greatest tragedy of recent American politics (1980+) has been convincing people they're dumb and will never be as smart as others. It's set up a terrible cycle of (1) listen to "experts," (2) forget that one can do one's own thinking, (3) parrot expert views back to your peers, (4) feel secretly ashamed of your own ignorance, (5) become more strident in "your" views, GOTO (1).
Is it really that difficult to discuss something without having to choose what fucking side you're on, or having it chosen for you based on a series of shallow value judgments?
Democratic socialism is not averse to capitalism and understands that the private sector has a role to play.
But it also assumes that government has responsibilities to its citizens that amount to more than a minimal set of rights.
Up until Reagan, the US had similar policies, with the one exception of health care.
After $500 for rent that’s only $750 left. Food: $500? Cell phone/ internet:$70? Clothing: goodwill? Car insurance: $100? Utilities:?
Anyway, here are some numbers that I know or can give pretty accurate details for:
Rent under 4500 SEK/mo
Phone data SEK 400 per 6 mo. -- pay as you go - 20 GB for 6 months and never have had to add more. Wifi at home, on the train, and both in the city center and at the University means I rarely use my own.
Phone calls SEK 100 has lasted me god knows how long for minutes. I don't think I add minutes more frequently than every six months or so.
Car insurance is something like SEK 2500 or 3000 per year for a <10 year old car.
Food ~1500 SEK per week -- we are vegetarian and rarely buy anything fancy; we also grow fruit and veg in the summer; this of course can be quite variable, with some weeks being SEK 1200 and others SEK 2000 or more.
Utilities: we have a geo heat pump; we don't pay very much in utilities; we mostly charge our EV at the train station for free.
Clothes: H&M primarily, Amazon.de occasionally (I guess we have Amazon.se now too) -- my wife and I don't buy new clothes very often, though my children definitely need new stuff regularly. Still, we don't spend very much on clothes, but I will freely admit that this is the one I don't have as much sense of.
So, minus an exact number on utilities and clothes, it looks like a bit more than SEK 10,000 per month. Add some exact amount for utilities and clothing, and I think we are within a $15K-18K range.
350eur for rent. 200eur for food. 25eur for internet, no car needed. Utilities included in student rental, otherwise 30eur. clothing and fun things: everything else.
Current system provides a government backed loan at 0.00% interest of up to 800eur/month, which you then need to pay back depending on income in 35 years. (Much like ISA, but with the government). You get 100eur/month for health insurance (basic health insurance costs the same). and 100 euro/month for renting. These last 2 are based on income and available for everyone under a certain income limit. (Almost all students are below this limit)
We had a system where you received 300/month and could then get a loan on top of it. But that was replaced by the neoliberals.
Hope that enlightens it a bit.
But otherwise yes. And I didn't live a very frugal life and I didn't have a lot of funds when I started out, just enough for furniture and similar.
Maybe it was less before?
Depending on your opinion, it's either a brilliant investment in students, aligning the interests of the school and the students - or it's a loan by a slightly different name, fooling the naive into overpaying for instruction from teachers who barely make minimum wage.
Will it lead to a $150K job, or a $80K job?
Will not doing it lead to a $80K job?
For the company, what risk do they have if most students will earn over 50K regardless of the quality of their product?
I'm not good at economics, but I think one can look at this deal from both the consumer and the provider and see that there are flaws from both sides. Trust is key.
And in this context trust doesn't scale, you need good teachers for every [class size] students. That means profit only scales linearly with good teachers (the scarce resource).
Marketing scales though, and what matters to the consumer is how much they believe the actual value is compared to the competition for what they believe their options are.
Regular degrees are pretty much just like that as well
The problem with regular degrees is not their actual cost. It's that you're sold (and most people want to buy) the experience. That's where they compete (and what "drives costs" up).
Don't play that game. Though of course not studying in an Ivy League univ. means you don't get to be buddy buddy with the next Mark Z which might just offer you a job at a nice place because you were buddies and oh this "entry level job" starts at 200k and there's your student loans sorted. But that's if you're moderately lucky and are competent at either tech and/or some form of people skills.
(before I "something something public education something something it's cheaper to study somewhere else even considering relocation costs")
From what I've read though, they actually bundle the ISAs and sell them off to investors--just like the mortgage-backed securities that led to the 2008 financial crisis. So the bootcamp's real incentive would be to generate as many ISAs to sell as possible, not to make sure the ISAs are any good.
Edit: Found my own. Oof.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
Two AMP redirects in one link? Sheesh.
If the ISAs don't perform, then Lambda will (likely) have no future in selling them. Do you really think they're risking their future cash flow in order to bundle up as much bullshit as they can right now?
Why not? They've already been proven to falsify the employment rates of their students. Their marketing material is significantly off from reality.
Obviously they could be telling the companies buying the ISAs the truth though.
There's also a rule that the remaining debt is cancelled 30 years after you graduate. Most people (perhaps not most programmers) won't repay the whole debt within 30 years. So for them, this is essentially a kind of tax, rather than a debt.
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-tui...
For some reason this isn't widely known on HN.
It's 17 percent of your salary for 2 years or you hit 30k repayment whichever is first. If you don't make over 50k, or don't get a job in a related field (which includes things like IT support I believe) it disappears.
You can kind of see why a student would think that the bootcamp is aligned with their interests. They want you to get a high paying job so they get paid more, and if you don't succeed you owe nothing.
I went through this, and my salary went up 2.25 times what it was previously. I also enjoy my job significantly more. To me this was worth 30k.
Why didn't I just teach myself? A few reasons, one is motivation/accountability, another is structure, and a third was a hope that career services would help me on the other side. I won't claim it was my smartest move, it got me out of the hole I was in.
Edit: want to be clear I'm not recommending doing this, I'm just saying what my/other students I talked to decision process was
very hard to tell what specific allegations and changes have been made without also needing to question the source (as a former bootcamper who nearly quit his bootcamp, I know how every bootcamp has a set of dissatisfied customers, but that in my mind doesn't invalidate the good work it does for the rest).
has someone rounded up the basic facts and chronology so we can form some kind of objective story?
For the initiated, it shouldn't be too hard to verify.
Looks like the entire course and support being paid for basically changed.
Keep in mind that unlike most products, Lambda School purchasers have an incentive to praise Lambda School regardless of the truth.
These are all young people looking to jump start their careers with the benefit of a glamorous Lambda School education. They don’t benefit by publicly admitting that it wasn’t a good education, or by cooperating with journalists to post national headlines about how their only credentials in this industry came from a bad program.
It’s interesting that pg is a big fan though.
...as an investor.
He may not be intimately familiar with the actual situations of the students from his PoV (mostly throguh conversations with Austen or his team).
But then again, this is far from the first time a negative comment has come out against Lambda. And his position hasn't changed so far. So, there is that.
He seems to have a lax definition of the word "earnest". (See his latest blog post.)
quoted from: richajak, the not-so-wise man
Customers will understandably be in a vulnerable place. You are not exactly selling someone a boat. You are quite literally selling tech savvy people their future and they know how to use social media. Those who are brave enough to voice their troubles with education in the open – which is a stigma, maybe so than ever – will have no trouble finding an empathic, educated audience.
This is akin to treading in self-driving space: Every player is super aware of the non-existent room for error. The whole space has constantly been 3-5 major consecutive incidents away from imploding under the sheer pressure of human perception.
ls cannot merely be slightly better than established programs in giving people an education and a job. You have to outperform by a substantial margin to get everyone on board when you inject yourself into peoples lives to this extent. You ALSO have to convince everyone that you do.
It's pretty unfair and also pretty exciting.
It's a bit overkill. You can just do it yourself. Plenty of resources available for free. Students have to put the work in regardless.
- Easier to put in 40-60 hours per week in a structured environment vs having the discipline to do that at home week after week - Less time wasted on figuring out what topics you need to study in the first place - Daily access to a senior engineer that you can ask questions to - Good advice on how to land the first job
In my case I think those benefits were absolutely worth $20k+. Yes, I could have gotten the same result on my own given more time to study, but every job and promotion I've had since then would have come a few months later.
The biggest benefit imo was being around smart motivated people doing the same thing. It was much easier to work from 9 am to 8 pm 6 days a week if you were around others smart motivated people doing the same. Also being able to talk to people about what you were learning helped tremendously. It helped to clear up misconceptions, develop mental models, ect. Working on group projects helped me to learn to read others code and to learn git. The network I developed has proven useful in later job searches and just in general keeping abreast of developments. It was honestly the best 6 months of my life.
Not everything was perfect obviously. My biggest gripe is the outcomes were oversold. I remember being told they had a 99% placement rating within 3 months. Each cohort was somewhere around 33 people. That would mean that around 1 person for every 3 cohorts would not get a job within 3 months. However just in my cohort, 5 did not have a job within 3 months. Within 6 months all but two had jobs, but still, 95% in 6 months is not 99% within 3. Other than outcomes I had a few gripes with how the teaching was done. Overall though it was a great experience for me.
No single service will be valuable to everyone. There might be services that provide no added value to anyone, but I would argue those are not actually services.
Lambda school receives high praise in general because so many of us tech types want their value proposition to be true. Just look at how negative the comments about traditional colleges are whenever the topic comes up on HN. Or look at all of the concern about growing student debt loads. Or the concern that 4 year college degrees are not teaching CS students what they need to actually function in real world software jobs.
Lambda School arrived on the scene with a new business model that claims to fix all of that, and they did it as a highly-praised YC startup. It seemed like a home run.
Yet I’ve heard so, so many stories like the OP’s about how they’ve dropped the ball on the educational quality of their programs.
They seem to be approaching this as a typical startup problem where they start with the ugliest MVP that people will pay for and then incrementally improve it only where absolutely necessary to keep the money coming in.
This works if you’re selling a SaaS tool to some company on a monthly basis, but it doesn’t work when you’re taking critical years of young people’s early careers and charging them on the tail end.
Even worse, their customers have an incentive to downplay all of the problems. No one benefits by trashing the source of their education and only career credentials, so instead they say how great it was no matter what. We’re starting to see people pull back the curtain and show what’s really happening.
They're closed for Covid19 right now. But if you can wait for them to open up, this is a good place to look into - https://www.42.us.org/ or https://www.42.fr/ (if you're in Europe).
Does anybody know any private school following the same philosophy for kids education?
I think finding different forms of education will be especially important for boys: girls thrive in the current school environment but boys seems to do much worse.
Sugata Mitra tried this in Indian villages called "Hole in the wall project".
You can google any of Sudbury schools, democratic schools or Summerhill.
To quote the guy: "People in my cohort don't even understand basic Javascript and I'm not faring much better. I'm nowhere ready for a job. Now I have to find an education elsewhere and probably teach myself because now I don't trust bootcamps.
Also, I will have to pay it back...because I will get a job in tech and I will make at least 50k within 5 years. I'm not going to let the disappointment of Lambda stop me from doing so. It sucks that I will have to pay them even though they won't be the reason I get there and despite their misleading me and other students as to what their program contained."
Similar to the people getting hired at Google, Twilio, it's because they took the Bootcamp and a ton of self-study. The ton factor becomes lower if you go to a brick university that forces challenging material and theory.
I'm just not sold on this. If you want to be able to actually work in software development then whether you're going to a bootcamp or a university there's going to be ton of extra-curricular learning and practice that you need.
I've worked with quite a lot of fresh university graduates over my career and you can tell which ones have actually practised beyond doing the required coursework, because they understand to some degree how software is developed professionally. The ones who didn't do further learning can certainly write code to some degree, and would completely demolish me in some sort of competitive algorithm contest, but they're going to stumble on things like using git and automated testing. They're also going to have trouble taking requirements and working out what to do with them.
Bootcamp graduates tend to be somewhat the other way round, they get the professional side of things, but struggle with the actual software development because they have a shallow knowledge of each element.
I attended Dev Bootcamp in early 2013, when bootcamps were still largely unknown, and had a transformative time. Just stellar teachers all around that compensated for any perceived weakness in curriculum. The industry business model hasn't changed much, so this implies to me that a bootcamp is really only as good as its instructors and the amount they care.
Yet time and time again we hear about they’re using this opportunity to basically test how much they can get away with in terms of educational quality.
The optimistic take is that they’re bootstrapping their way into being able to afford top quality instructors after the cash flow is established.
The cynical take is that they’re getting hooked on the easy boot camp cash while the market is hot and they’d rather expand as fast as possible than invest in quality education.
I just hope they don’t sour the business model before someone figures it out.
Wow. While not an exact analogy, something about that makes me want to say MLM/"pyramid scheme"
> i was so depressed. i started sleeping longer hours, i lost all enthusiasm. i was ashamed to tell my partner. i was genuinely struggling and still am.
As I would be too in that position, I really sympathize. They are taking advantage of people and that has consequences, it isn't just a "failed startup".
Not only that, but Lambda seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610
Lambda School seemed a great idea from the start, revolutionary even. And the investors (pg mostly) would praise how insanely ambitious the founder was. Then I started following him on Twitter and saw that. He had that drive to be the Facebook of education, the slack of boot camps. But education doesn’t work that way. A new Facebook user can start using it 4 hours a day from the first day and get all the value they expect. A student can’t. Students need time and support to learn. But Lambda and its founder couldn’t wait for that if they wanted to become a unicorn.
Isn't that obvious? They have investors. It's precisely what Joel writes about in https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-...
Even being a YC company, I believe it didn’t have to be that way.
Edit: thanks for the link, great article. ”Land grab” is a great term for what I currently think about Lambda School. Except the “land” is people’s life and hopes.
YC is a startup incubator. A startup, as defined by YC's founder, is a company that grows fast.
Trying to convince anyone in SV that this is extremely dumb or dangerous or unethical is a waste of time.
This is huge, and definitely hurts in the short term, but could it actually be good in the long term? Let's say the break-even price for Service A is $x/mo/user. Nobody really knows the technical problems underlying A, but startups #1-3 get venture funding and start offering Service A for .75x, for a couple years each, burning a few million in some dentist's or VC's capital each and build a huge staff to figure out the tech. Eventually one of the companies gets acquihired and two of them fail.
Bootstrapped Startup #4 opens shop, offers A to 1.15x, and hires engineers from startups 2 and 3 who know the tech inside and out. Consumers get a great product.
But I understand your point: startups can be viewed as economy's distributed R&D. Speculative investment makes a lot of sense - it could be that without startups #1-3, #4 wouldn't exist because it couldn't afford the risk of developing an innovative product. But my main gripe is how VC-backed startups repay the investment - they're being pressured into user-hostile and sometimes antisocial business models. It's so common that these business model became accepted as standard these days! So perhaps a way forward isn't to reduce venture funding, but curtail the socially destructive business models directly.
Would that be a problem? At least from the point of view of a customer, I don't want a single megacorp owning the market (and let's cut the marketing BS: Uber is not a startup, and hasn't been for a while; it's a multinational corporation). More "copycats" is usually better, as they compete (until they start racing to the bottom, but that's another issue entirely).
So perhaps less generational, more just the network effects that existed on the ground.
It seems to me that VC's often link ambition with intelligence and other assorted skills needed to get the job done.
The VC-funded startup model will gladly have 99 out of 100 founders go bankrupt as long as the 100th starts a unicorn. Investors will push companies to take existential risks to achieve growth at all costs. Obviously, most founders are not OK with these odds and only the most delusional (if you want to spin it negatively) or ambitious (if you want to spin it positively) will go for it.
If only ambition correlated with competence.
If this isn't a warning sign of a spectacular failure, I don't know what is.
Not to mention praising it, after all the ink spilled on "rockstar" "ninja" types and how bad they are, yet they still get kudos and praise.
If you ever have a manager that espouses the "we don't want the heroic cowboy type here", run, because that's EXACTLY what they want.
If a manager says they don’t want heroics, it’s not reasonable to assume that they actually do want heroics but they’re somehow trying to communicate that to the team by speaking in opposites.
If someone says they want one thing then asks for the opposite, verbalize that you were following the original directive. Have a conversation like professionals and sort it out.
This HN comments that treat employers and managers like a foreign species that will only lie and abuse you are really not healthy. Learning how to establish healthy professional relationships with your managers as actual human beings is a critical workplace skill.
Heroics can exist without them being a standardized thing. There are occasions when you need people who are willing to move mountains to get something done, and demonizing those kinds of efforts and the people who engage in them will make them scarce when you actually are in need.
a founder should be 'trying to' make a quality product that fits a need, not 'disrupt an industry' - 'industry disruption' is a consequence, not a goal - if one is seeking the latter without focusing on the former, ones priorities are skewed, and likely for reasons of promoting one's own self-importance.
This 1000%.
The frequent use of the term "disrupt", just shows how much the culture has descended into degeneracy. When entrepreneurs and their backers are no longer making even a pretense toward things like progress, improvement, or even just running a profitable business, you know things have gotten bad. It seems like the model now is, "Hey, let's see if we can f--- up industry X, who cares if we actually improve anything or if our business is even viable, so long as we turn some established part of the economy on its head."
This is an extraordinary claim.
How so? I would argue that folks using millions of dollars in investment capital with no real goal other than to cause disruption, regardless of whether it helps anyone or even creates a viable business, is what's extraordinary.
Think for a second what a dumb goal 'disruption' is on it's own. That's what bored 15 year old's do to amuse themselves, they disrupt and break things simply to see something, anything, happen. As an earlier commenter pointed out, disruption is often a side effect of making a large change in an industry, typically in business this has meant changing something for the better.
When the side effect of causing disruption becomes the main goal of a business owner rather than creating value of some sort, I really don't know what to call that other than degenerate behavior.
Founders building potentially billion dollar businesses (not $10m lifestyle companies) need to have a psychotic drive to achieve that goal.
That often creates tough work environments in the early stages of the company. To many people, failing to build that billion dollar company is the same as outright failing completely. They’ll do whatever it takes to get there. I’ve worked with engineers and designers that like this type of environment. I’ve worked with others that thought they did until it came time to actually pull an 80 hour week.
EDIT: Several downvotes, but only one reply. If you have issue with anything I said I'd appreciate a response.
Maybe you meant something more like "extreme" ?
Both can be true. You've no doubt seen the CEO/psychopath studies.
Irrespective of whether one is building a potentially billion dollar business or 'only' a 10m lifestyle company, the goal and focus should still be on the usefulness of the product and fitting market need, and not 'disrupting an industry' with the product as a side goal - if it's the latter, it indicates the priorities are skewed; from experience, usually when 'heroics' are involved or priorities are skewed, it's ego to blame and not some external requirement.
Further, 'heroics' are context-dependent - if the external requirement actually requires what would be 'heroics' in a normal situation, 'heroics' are simply 'duty' in that case, and there exists a 'that case heroics' that would still be 'heroics' (and therefore indicative of likely-ego-driven skewed priorities)
"I can't believe an organization would _praise_ the rockstar mentality"
"If an organization doesn't praise the rockstar mentality, they are lying".
As others have noted, I tend to take people at their word. Of course, you can also ask people on the team during the interview process if they feel like that's true or not.
Not that they didn't praise rockstars, but they specifically came out against them.
The only that's said that is you.
How does that work? Sincere question.
It's "correct" to say "work-life balance" and "no heroes", but it doesn't generally NEED to be said in any normal circumstance; that they do say it is often because they do want the opposite of those things so they feel the need to point it out.
To me it's a form of the same thing that name-callers have when they call their adversaries names and you realize the charge they're levying against others is exactly what they themselves are/are doing; because they know they have whatever bad quality it's on their mind.
Most of my tweets are randomness from what I’m experiencing or reading about that day.
Am I lonely? Interesting. My family keeps me pretty occupied. Though I suppose I could be to some degree. I suppose we all are.
I fully expect to see personal stuff on a personal twitter account, and don't expect it to be 100% focused only on the topic of someone's business.
This is disappointing, of course. We have 180+ people working really, really hard to make Lambda School the best experience it can be. At times we’ll fall short, and, as another poster pointed out, the margin for error is just razor thin; thousands of happy and successful students can be out there, but it’s the ones who don’t make it or have a good experience that cause us to lose sleep (and make it to the top of HN).
We take our responsibility in that regard very seriously; students come to us to change their lives and do something really, really difficult, and anything we do affects people in a very profound way.
To the parent’s point, in this particular instance I don’t think this student's frustrations are the result of too much growth or lack of resources per student. We haven’t really grown over the past year or so, and the school is still very well resourced. We have just north of 2,000 students and ~180 full-time staff members, the majority of which are student-facing. Those may be suboptimally distributed (they are, and always will be to some degree) but a cheap education as a result of aggressive cost cutting this is not. As such, the solution is much less exciting than “need to spend more money” or “need to grow more slowly.”
This student’s frustration comes from a series of changes we made simultaneously (something we avoid doing when we can). Some of these changes worked very well. Some did not. And this is the tricky part: some of the changes that a subset of students did not like are unquestionably for their benefit. So we’re working through those changes as well as debates around the trade-offs around, “Do we want our students to love us or be successful?”
The specifics of what students didn’t like: The first is a mentor/mentee program we set up within the school. Employers tell us literally every day they want students who truly understand the development and release cycle, and work on teams. We created a mentor/mentee program where every student has a chance to do that, and the result of that program so clearly creates better outcomes that employers ask specifically for students who have done that.
Some students love it. Some students see it as one more thing distracting them from writing more code, and believe the only thing that will determine their career success is ability to write code (as you all know, ability to write code is necessary but not sufficient to success as an engineer). We’re digging into the details of how and why it fails when it does. I don’t yet know what we’ll do there but the solution is likely more quiet and subtle iteration to the student experience.
The other change was our slowly winding down of the Team Lead program. We used to have a program where we would hire some students on short contracts to serve as something akin to TAs. Sometimes this worked very well, often times it didn’t work well, and the experience was brittle and unreliable, so we shifted that budget back into full-time roles. Doing so has revealed gaps that TLs were plugging that should have never existed (the majority of which should have been solved by software and not people from the get-go.)
So, Lambda School is not yet perfect and likely never will be. We’re properly resourced and not growing too quickly. We’re trying out best to make everyone we admit happy and successful. Turns out that’s extraordinarily difficult to do, and we’re doing the best we can, and I’m always open to any feedback on what we can or should do better.
> We have just north of 2,000 students and ~180 full-time staff members, the majority of which are student-facing.
2000/180 = 12 students per staff member. This seems high and "student-facing" is padding the numbers. "Customer Success" people are technically student-facing but not instructors, and number of instructors per student is the most important number that matters for quality
> This student’s frustration comes from a series of changes we made simultaneously
Do not make changes to ongoing cohorts
> Some students see it as one more thing distracting them from writing more code, and believe the only thing that will determine their career success is ability to write code
Isn't this something a school would be able to educate on? Why not introduce group projects (maybe you already have them)?
It is very, very high.
I’d have to dig to find the exact numbers but about 90 are directly involved in instruction, project management, etc. Not including student support.
> Do not make changes to ongoing cohorts
We really try to avoid doing so, but in some instances it is impossible.
> Isn't this something a school would be able to educate on? Why not introduce group projects (maybe you already have them)?
We do have group projects and do try to educate here. Students will come back a year after being hired and say, “Wow, I thought x was a waste of time but it was extraordinarily useful” all the time.
You sold students something you can't implement. Apologize and offer a full refund.
Students can be with Lambda for as long as 2+ years. Everything being frozen in time would be to their great detriment.
The only times we can’t do that (and that’s happened maybe 1-2 times in the history of Lambda School) is when it’s a change to teams of students that run across multiple cohorts.
But frankly, if the only thing you took out of this post is that the ISA structure is poor, without considering how you have all the power to set and enforce terms in your contract, I don't think I have much else I can say to try and help you. I think there are a lot of ways you can improve Lambda School to make it better for the people attending. And they don't involve deleting Reddit threads of criticism.
Edit: s/selling/securitizing
This is why I hate you and your product. You come in here and lie through your teeth repeatedly.
You sell yoyr ISAs which are already predatory. This means you dont give a flying fuck if students graduate because you get paid regardless, as opposed to the bullshit you spout about incentives being aligned.
More softball bullshut or speak answers.
Lambda needs to be sued into the groundlike ITT Tech and Hallmark. I for one can't wait.
You are incorrect in your understanding of how ISA financing works. Our interests and incentives remain aligned.
Interesting, I didn't know this. I thought you just sold the ISA outright, which would retain some of the incentive but weaken it quite a bit. It's great to hear that that's not happening.
I found https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-isa-... discussing this in more detail. Seems like everyone complaining about Lambda School ISA financing should just read that...
It's still completely aligned, we just fast-forward some of the cash so we don't have to raise endless amounts of VC.
As a student, I can confirm this is a lie. And you know it is because we have told you in Slack, we've told you on Twitter, we've told you on Reddit, and now you have to read about it on Hacker News.
For what it’s worth, major changes in curriculum do lead to refunds at schools. There have been two examples in my education where mid-year I had a graduate level class need to be rescheduled from a night class due to a professor’s illness. Both were fully refunded when I couldn’t fit the class into my work schedule. That seems to be pretty analogous here, and I wasn’t charged a percent based on how many weeks I attended the class before the change. I was just refunded the total amount of the course because I wouldn’t be able to gain its value. It wasn’t even a difficult process to get the refund, unlike the weeks of trying to get support it seems like the person in this situation attempted.
I think I would place ‘elevated’ expectations for refunds on a founder due to the elevated risk of trying a Startup’s unproven, expensive, and risky education model. I don’t think the expectations are ‘elevated’ but I also think your baseline for doing good for students shouldn’t be ‘it’s only as bad as I perceive the alternatives.’ I think we should strive to do better.
Don't pull Bill Clinton [1].
When enough people complain you made changes that are material and detrimental.
[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1998/09/bill-clinton-and...
These are not the changes OP is complaining about. Your responses kind of strike me as misdirection.
First and foremost, as others pointed, is the growth plans. Education is hard to scale -- good educators deliver fantastic results; a very smart person droning on along a prewritten material adds no value. I doubt there is a way to quickly figure out how good a teacher a new hire is -- it will be clear after a semester or two, but not before. Thus good education needs long-term staff and careful hiring; both hard to scale.
> changes that a subset of students did not like are unquestionably for their benefit
Ouch. OUCH! Anytime someone is claiming that they do something for your benefit against your will, look for other motives. It is perfectly OK to limit options -- it is your business and you do not have infinite flexibility. But claiming it is good for the students rings hollow. Sorry. "We are tracking your web purchases to better serve you" (annoying advertisements).
In your example the teacher is arguing to convince you, the final decision maker, that something is long term worthwhile even if near term unpleasant (and most adults who sign up for a class will usually listen to the teacher). The original example is closer to the teacher locking the door and saying "you will not leave until you show me that you learned X". Which is a very different setup that, even if fruitful, few adults will find palatable. My 2c.
I can teach dev lifecycle to a junior, and often need to because every business I've worked at as a lead has a totally different model. I can coach them on inter-team dynamics (and often have to). I can help them with culture fit to a point (if they're willing). What I can't do is teach them to be able to reason and write code and do the engineering work I hired them for.
From the Reddit post (and from other reviews), it sounds like the students are not performing well and sinking without learning this core skill -- most didn't understand enough to code in JS, for instance. This seems like a pretty dire failure in the part of the program itself.
Do you plan on at least giving these students a chance to retake prior units without further charging them for knowledge you should have already taught them?
> Do you plan on at least giving these students a chance to retake prior units without further charging them for knowledge you should have already taught them?
Students are actually strongly encouraged to retake units at no additional cost in order to move on to the next level, and in some instances we require it.
This is actually where some of the greatest frustration comes. It would be easy to close our eyes and wave people along but we have to say at times, “You’re not quite there yet, let’s keep working at it.” That’s not what students want to hear.
I hear that this is good feedback, but looking at sugarwater's response that seemingly matches up w/ the original critique, maybe the current situation falls short of what you're trying to do, Austen?
These may be outliers, but from my perspective, the frustrations seem valid.
I laud you being willing to teach a junior dev but I just find so many places are not open to hiring juniors at all.
Excuse me if I'm missing the obvious, but why can't you teach them that? Seems like it'd be right up your alley.
While the time spent teaching a blank slate how to be an engineer might benefit the person, it is literally throwing money away from the perspective of the company because it's not what I was hired to do.
But it is worth paying more attention to the frustrated students feedback. The OP one is about lack of team leaders and having “mentors” that are qualified just by having two more months of online classes than them. And it is not the first time a similar issue arises. Lambda School seems to always be justifying mistakes after some disgruntled student testimonial gets some traction.
My personal unsolicited advice: listen more to your students ahead of time and not employers. Employers are full of bullshit. They have a huge list of qualities that they want to see in a candidate, then go on to hire someone that is not at all like that, but the hiring manager liked (for whatever subjective reasons). It seems to be a wrong step to follow employers gospel and go against students expectations. You say that you know more about what students want and need than themselves. I doubt that. Give what students want: confidence that they learned something useful and, moreover, confidence that they can continue to learn about UX/software development through their career. That confidence in their knowledge will earn them jobs, not employers with no skin in the game telling you want they ideally want.
Don’t patronize your students. When you do, it feels from the outside that you are taking shortcuts to people’s education in favor of short term market share growth.
There can never be too many reminders to listen to student feedback. Thank you!
This seems like a bad frame to look at the situation from. We don’t know what we don’t know, and don’t always actually know what we want.
When I went to university there was a ton that I didn’t know. It took me at least a semester to get accustomed to how the institution ran.
If my university responded only to what I wanted and “needed” then I would be quite worried about the education they are serving.
Also optimizing for employer preferences seems to make sense you know... if you’re focused as a vocational style institute?
One thing that jumps out at me is that students who have only just gone through the course themselves may not make the best mentors. They top x% percent probably make excellent mentors, but they rest still don't really know what they're doing themselves. You may want to actually build in some kind of assessment here and have mentoring as a "high performance track" (ideally with this being something the high-performing students can put on their resumes). I've seen this done very successfully in traditional schools (for children).
The complaints i have seen around mentors in this thread and those linked are not that they don't see the user of a mentor/mentee program, but conversely that their mentor was not qualified or good at it. That's very different, they like the mentor/mentee program in theory, they don't think it's well executed.
Anyway, with 2000 students enrolled, it's possible that some groups/courses/teams/classes/whatever you call them are worse than others. We may only hear from those in the worst. But then the question is, how do you find out about these "failing" teams quickly, and how do you correct them, so those students still get the quality you aspire for. It's kind of too late after they've had months of a bad experience, they won't get those months back, of their lives, or of your program. What systems are in place to do that; what systems might be possible?
Because the other disturbing thing in linked threads is students who tried to contact you to say the teachers/lessons/other devices weren't up to your standards, and could not get an ear.
Austen is very very good at finding public criticism and responding to it. In contrast, in Lambda's slack, every criticism is automatically taken to private PM, to get it out of the way as soon as possible and to immediately shutdown any ensuing conversation. (A few times, when that didn't work, they turned off comments altogether.)
Lambda's strategy is to PRETEND to be responsive to feedback, to say a lot of pretty words and act concerned, while actually ignoring all of it.
For example, they created a student survey to see how students felt about removing the majority of paid teachers (team leads) and forcing us to be mentors instead. One of the first questions?
"Do you agree that leadership is an important part of being a successful programmer?" (approximately)
The rest of the survey was the same. They weren't interested in getting feedback. They were interested in pretending to listen to feedback.
Austen is minimizing student frustration in this comment, acting like people are grumbling about minor changes. He's ignoring the many many people who have written out long, articulate, arguments about how the changes damaged their education and removed the value of Lambda for them.
He also acts like he didn't delete every post in the Lambda subreddit that offered criticism over the last three months, without any response.
False honesty in threads like this is how Lambda gets away with being dishonest.
I don’t have a horse in this fight, but the above is a generalization of what’s called Push Polling: polling in a way to change opinions and get a desired outcome, rather than to actually gather pre-existing opinions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll
In Lambda slack, dissent is shut down immediately by "student success" staff directing you to DMs. Or an individual zoom chat, which is friendly and seemingly receptive to feedback, but ultimately pointless. A student-created poll with 90+ votes was posted after the changes went live, and it was taken down immediately, along with all feedback, to be replaced by their byzantine "More Transparent" survey system, conveniently delayed to be issued on a Friday evening, that could be twisted into yet another glowing report on the exciting new changes.
Lambda has plenty of real feedback and criticism (constructive and otherwise) and they have no interest in it. They make a very convincing show of listening and having meaningful discussions, but look at the form of the substantive changes. They've completely gutted their successful learning structure to replace it with something cheaper, and hide the damage in their reporting. But they're still "iterating" so we'll see, right?
My key criticisms: 1. Waves arms This, all of this. The dishonesty. 2. Removing TLs. The accountability and required meeting every day really made the difference between this and self-study. TLs were holding the program together. 3. Instituting self grading with no human evaluation, even for end-of-module tests. You can join "code review" group calls but it's voluntary, there's no one checking your work at the end of the section. 4. Cutting the curriculum (there is no python instruction) Opting into the "extended curriculum" just means you repeat the same thing twice.
If you're considering joining, also be aware that he deletes comments and tweets, and is the moderator of the subreddit. From what I've seen, the style is to allow the dissent, maybe even engage, and then quietly delete it later after things have blown over. What you see online may be curated even if it seems like it's outside the purview of Lambda official channels.
This post tells me all I ever needed to know about lambda. Clearly an irresponsible organisation more focused on image than value and with no respect for their supposed students.
Lambda School made 2 promises to students when I joined. 1. They promised that students would always have access to the most up to date curriculum that was offered. This is no longer true. 2. They promised a network that connected students to alumni in an ever expanding community. They started separating alumni from the student workspace in Slack months ago. That community doesn't exist.
These are the 2 most fundamental promises that Lambda School made to students and it has broken both. Add to this incompetence or indifference the damaging changes that have been made to the curriculum and no one can reasonably accept the same price tag, $30K, for the diminished service, unaccountable support and lower quality curriculum product.
Students aren't the only population at Lambda School who are unhappy with these changes that Allred claims, "some of the changes that a subset of students did not like are unquestionably for their benefit". If this is true why is Lambda School losing or in the process of losing key instructors further degrading the quality of the product.
Lambda School can no longer rely on student referrals for driving growth in enrollment. Lambda School current and future instructor departures will continue the downward spiral. Allred seems to believe he can will the bleeding to stop. A bit of humility and self awareness would be a better path for him to consider over his protestations. Those on the inside at Lambda School recognize his words as nonsense.
All of this after saying things are suboptimally distributed.
Austen, you constantly snake your way out of accountability and admitting bad things come from your school. Why don’t you just man up and fix the problems and take a hit to your profit margin? Don’t get into education if it’s a money grab, you dumb schmuck.
Lambda seems to have been trying to branch out to more normal learners.
Students that dont share those bright/already qualified credentials, do benifit a little bit of a "rub" effect by being associated with those bright/qualified students, and get to study/work with them during the course of the bootcamp so everyone wins in the short term. For average learners without significant backround IT knowledge or a prestigious degree, realistically they are going to need more than 3-6 months or a year to get a cushy programming job in the US (which seems to be what all of the bootcamps advertise they can offer students).
I consider myself an average/below average speed learner, took a bootcamp, i was surprised to learn the guy i was pair programming with had a CS degree from MIT lol. Some devs already had work programming experience, but most of us normies benifited by pairing with them and talking to them about problems/code/computers/study habits.
That surprises me.
Someone who could drink from the firehose should not need some bootcamp to learn web dev.
The in person bootcamps ive found have had great community vibes to them. Fun being surrounded by fellow students/teachers, schools all have fun/studious/interesting faculty and students.
I taught the first few weeks of a FREE intro to software engineering bootcamp and had a few lower tier university CS grads who were happy with the curriculum/services rendered, they would just tune me out when i was covering something they already knew and would study/program while the less informed students would work through problems/Q/A with me.
I've seen web dev classes in colleges that are spread out on a semester where they basically learn whichever framework the university decided to teach. Doesn't take 3 months of full time work, more like 6 hours per week including labs.
I highly doubt someone from MIT CS would go that route and pay for a bootcamp, considering how easy it's for them to get internships at companies where they are going to learn it on the job anyways.
Like i said, if you can spare the cash, and want to do a bootcamp, it might make sense for you,
I wouldnt discredit all of the bootcamps as useless money wasters, everyone has different goals/aspirations reasons for doing a bootcamp rather than jumping straight into the workforce. The MIT CS guy did end up getting a great dev job right out of the program.
I have no doubts he would. I'm doubting his very existence. Or, pretty sure he didn't pay retail on the bootcamp.
I think going from absolutely no code experience to 70K by doing a 6 months bootcamp is simply impossible. The many articles on lambda illustrate that.
For someone with a real CS or Engineering degree, I wouldn't waste any time or money on a bootcamp unless my employer was paying for it.
You could grow a lot as an engineer in three months in the right environment assuming a guided curriculum is able to channel your energies in the right places and teachers/fellow students are able to help as well. I imagine you could also be bored for 3 months, or overly stressed for 3 months, and have negative feelings in regards to that experience. Like most things in life, its not right for everyone and its not wrong for everyone.
I have lots of friends who've paid for coding bootcamps, most are rather content with the services provided. I know some students as well that feel they were swindled out of cash because they weren't able to get a top tier job right out of the program and resorted to previous career path that they were already unhappy with.
I think its great that the good bootcamps that show success are trying to branch out to more normal learners, not just the greatly gifted or qualified (like an Ivy league degree) few, it is a noble sign that these schools are trying to expand using their special sauce to help more averagely qualified student transition into professional software engineering. Ivy league schools, do not do this. They have hundreds of years of success and don't feel the need to teach more students every year. (in regards to their on campus facilities not online programs that clearly dont offer the same experience)
If Lambda or the other top tier bootcamps capped their programs at 10 students a year or cohort, all of whom had ivy degrees or significant personal experience, all of whom who would get jobs immediately out of school, they would better be able to keep their graduation rates/salary rates top notch, they wouldnt have any students complaining online,
I commend them for trying to expand and help more students, and im sure they will stumble and get better as time goes on.
None of the good bootcamp schools that I am aware of just ignore feedback, because they know students will stop going to the school if feedback is ignored as they dont have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding like universities do.
I'm just really surprised. I wonder if he paid retail for the bootcamp, that's all. I could very well see why the bootcamp operators would want a student like that on their graduate lists.
> They have hundreds of years of success and don't feel the need to teach more students every year.
That's what large public universities are for.
Universities tend to have career services offices that specialize in that and which are free for current students and at least recent alumni.
> If you have the money and want to jump into the work force ASAP it makes sense to me.
It's literally delaying entering the workforce, so it really doesn't make sense if you want to enter the workforce ASAP.
Seems like they would have a good case for getting their money back, but might need to consult a lawyer.
This means that Lambda would have to deal with the bad optics of "suing their students" (which sounds worse than simply refusing to give refunds).
If Lambda did actually sue, students would have to defend themselves. But it's always better to be the party that starts out having the thing at issue (i.e., the money).
A arbitration agreement isn't enough to get a bank or an employer to hand over any money from the student.
However, I do know that minutes of mutual settlement can be filled with a court, and the court will, based on the affidavit of filing, enforce it as if that court had ruled.
And for instance, this is in a Arbitration submission agreement I found: "The parties agree to abide by and perform any award(s) rendered pursuant to this Submission Agreement. The parties further agree that a judgment and any interest due thereon, may be entered upon such award(s) and, for these purposes, the parties hereby voluntarily consent to submit to the jurisdiction of any court of competent jurisdiction which may properly enter such judgment."
i.e. "act as if a court ordered it, 'cause they have in effect"
So you are right that a binding arbitration agreement probably isn't enough, but filed with a court, and filed with either bank or employer, it should be enough.
This was in the context of the optics of 'suing their students'. So you serve the student, pay a lawyer to appear in court to ask for a default judgement, then student offers a defense, and a judge potentially grants the judgement. There's functionally no difference with respect to optics.
Also ISAs have not been heavily litigated, so no one really knows what would happen if a company tries to enforce them.
There are other things that can happen. It looks like Lamba has been selling ISAs [0], [1]. These lawsuits would possibly not be coming from Lambda.
0 - https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/12/21135134/lambda-school-st...
1 - https://www.wired.com/story/how-we-learn-lambda-income-shari...
Here we can see that there are lots of people who are prepared to make significant personal sacrifices to work in the software industry. The industry itself is crying out for more people and new people. But it literally doesn't make economic sense, either for universities or for new players such as bootcamps, to train people properly. It's vastly more lucrative to confuse them and then rip them off. It's hard to see a simple market mechanism which can resolve this, as opposed to rebuilding something similar to the gatekeeping and signalling functions around universities, commonly regarded as broken nowadays.
But sure, it’s a common problem in a market economy. Presumably issues of information asymmetry should be alleviated in the days of the internet.
The good code bootcamp wont be able to compete in the sort term. The scam version will first attract more customers in short term and destroy overall trust in the long term.
My point is just that a project's economic viability doesn't depend on the relative merits of other projects.
I'm not sure this is true - certainly the opposite of this statement is the central thesis of most investment activity.
Of course when choosing between several projects, such as starting a school or launching a scam, then yes you would look at relative profitability (_and_ absolute of course).
Few people will hopefully find themselves choosing between those two options.
Holiday accommodation for example, much less complex than coding bootcamps, is far from a solved problem.
Through threads like this. Many people thinking of entering Lambda school will google it, find bad reviews and critical discussion threads and reconsider.
"Alleviate" does not mean "eradicate", surely it's easier to evaluate schools and holiday homes nowadays, compared to 1980?
Part of the problem is the students themselves who see six figures and think "I want a piece of that" without necessarily being interested. The code bootcamps take full advantage of this.
If "industry is crying out for more people", then it should be investing in that in the same way it does in every other part of the supply chain.
They should be hiring and training programmers, not externalizing their costs.
Why waste $$ training juniors, when for a fraction of that $$ you can poach a ready-trained senior from the company next door?
Every company wants someone else to take apprentices and carry the burden of on-the-job training
Of course, the most skilled juniors quickly left for higher paying jobs elsewhere around when they started to actually make back their salaries in billing. There were no hard feelings, the company knew that could happen and could afford it, and of course, why wouldn't they? (I mean, I guess it was hoped that sometimes they would prefer working for the consultancy for a while). But it was a kind of experiment, and indeed the experiment showed it was not really a sustainable model, I think they stopped doing that.
I wish there was a realistic solution to this problem other than bootcamps, but I don't know what it could be.
Unless you are Netflix and can attract and afford world wide talent, if you have no bonus or stock compensation you are much better hiring contractors for software.
Today neither employers not bootcamps would be able to take on risk/exert control over the apprentice's career to the extent optimal from a strictly economic point of view. You can look at the service-for-education deals offered by the military (for both low-skilled and highly skilled people) to get an example - no other organizations would be allowed to restrict a trainee's liberty to the same extent.
While I don't agree with the moral spin that is sometimes put on this of 'greedy juniors' getting trained up and then abandoning their benefactors for higher salaries, this is a real collective action problem, not just shortsightedness in behalf of employers.
https://www.apprenticeships.gov.uk/
I don't think they have. I've seen reports which claim they are mostly used as a subsidy to training which was already taking place, as a workaround to pay workers less, and generally in low-skilled jobs.
Like the grandparent post, the UK model is guilty of assuming that the word "apprenticeship" together with a sort of folksy appeal to a golden era of apprentices will solve the hard problems of training and education.
In general I also think a lot of the praise for apprenticeships is misplaced and viewed through rose tinted lenses.
The title "journeyman" refers to the right to charge a fee for each day's work. :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeyman#Origin
> In parts of Europe, as in Late Medieval Germany, spending time as a wandering journeyman (Wandergeselle),[6] moving from one town to another to gain experience of different workshops, was an important part of the training of an aspirant master.
So I guess at least in some times/places journeymen also did actually journey? Whether wandering or not, I'd think the right to charge a fee for each day's work is also the right to leave at the end of the day if you'd like, having gotten paid. Unlike an apprentice who is tied to his master and does not get paid for a day's work, if he leaves he's out of work entirely.
As it is, I'm not surprised companies are reluctant to bet on the potential of untrained engineers, _and_ the chance that they'll stick around long enough to make the investment worthwhile.
I'm sure there are a lot of inexperienced, uncredentialed engineers out there who would take a low-paying job with a significant chance of getting fired in 3 months. I was one of them. The alternative is to not get hired at all.
For example my brother is a talented person with devops/sys admin/cloud skills. As someone who is more in the pure coding side of things, I go to him often with questions in his area. He has been tech oriented since a young age. He is also 30 with no comp sci degree and no work history besides driving Uber. No company would take a chance on someone like that if they have to pay a huge salary for it. But for a startup it would be a perfect moneyball opportunity to pay like $25 an hour or whatever. If he works out great you got a smart productive person for a cheap salary. It is a huge win. If not, dump him and try with someone else.
At a certain price-point they are.
> Learning to program is more like an old fashioned trade than a profession
Sure. Learning to code is pretty much a trade at this point. Engineering isn't. There's a pretty big gap between a real engineer and someone who "learned to code" in high school.
Tangential, but this is pretty much emerging in the cryptocurrency/digital assets/decentralized finance (defi) space. To your point, out-right or borderline scams are a-dime-a-dozen there right now and there are plenty of incentives to cut corners in order to get growth, but there are a lot of ethical and promising projects as well.
The rational part of me does not want BTC > $30k (or <~10k) within the coming months.
What's this phenomenon called?
"Spoiling the market"? "Shitting the bed"?
Basically, when inauthentic activity so increases transaction costs that the authentic market is harmed.
My aunt once had a pretty good cottage business selling bespoke wall paper stuff on eBay. Over time, inauthentic entries crowded out her real product. SEO, fakes, knockoffs, misnaming stuff. Her customers could no longer find her products thru eBay, even when using exact match search terms.
Sound familiar?
Using terms like "fraud" and "scam" seems grossly inadequate. I'm provisionally using "authentic" vs "inauthentic", which suck, for lack of better terms.
A parting thought: Somehow Amazon managed to become worse than eBay, for both vendors and customers. Amazon boosts their own brands. And has a separate payola lane for "sponsored" entries.
> Where a mentor was paid to mentor you, you are now forced to mentor other students and vice versa.
So Lambda School is essentially an bait-and-switch pyramid scheme purporting to be an educational institution?
For-profit schools are scams in general, but this one sounds particularly scammy and unpleasant.
I'm not surprised to see it's being backed by YC. Yet another example of venture capitalists using their vast wealth to greedily build even more wealth, no matter who is abused in the process.
I have only ever gone to low level state schools, but one of my instructors told me that he wasn't there to teach me. He was there to guide me through the curriculum. That stuck.
Stick to the program, sweat out the X months. You'll come out as close to a programmer / designer / X as you would from any other path aside from some sort of paid internship where you can teach yourself on the job.
You could teach yourself. Many do. But most will not.
Maybe We're getting vague here (my fault.) What do we actually mean by "teach yourself?" Nobody is spoon-feeding you knowledge. You get a curriculum to follow.
It seems to me that if you get through the program and then land a job from it, then you got some value from the program. Maybe you could have done that on your own. But if you're looking at a bootcamp to learn in the first place, then you probably weren't going to learn on your own anyways.
University of course also provides a lot of things not directly related to the teaching, the student experience, a network, for some people the first experience of living on their own etc.
What else matters? I guarantee that you'll learn something through an intensive effort of pacing along with the curriculum. I'm also sure that it's not going to be enough to feel comfortable that first day of the job.
What's the placement rate? If that rate has plummeted or has always been horrible, then that's all I need to hear.
Maybe what they are really teaching is the process of getting yourself into a self-learning mode of work. I have to learn new things every day. I would bet my day looks similar to those in Lambda. Maybe it's a "wax on, wax off" sort of thing which looks like BS but actually works if you don't get hung up on things outside of the end-goal. As long as the employer placement numbers are good (and maybe they aren't,) then I'm a believer.
My original point was simply that teach yourself-programs are well and good, that’s how I learned to program and I now work for a FAANG, but then you shouldn’t have to pay 30 k.
I feel 30K is meaningless if we're not talking about an ROI on that investment. Many software developers spend that on education at a university along with 4 years of their time. That education may get you started, then your experience takes over as the most important item on your future job searches. That first gig may have a huge effect on your future options (getting lucky with a high impact position with Google vs low impact at no name.) The more impressive your education, the better leverage you have to land that good first gig. In this case, spending far more than 30K on your education likely pays off huge. You didn't need to spend that, but you made a bet which increased your chances.
Spending 30K on a bootcamp may not have the same dramatic impact on your chances, but if it pushes you to focus on knocking out a curriculum and ends with multiple offers, then you could quickly recoup that money versus the alternative route. That alternative might be that you have less focus, requiring longer to gain the same skills and you need more time for a job search. That job search might end with a lesser paying job than Lambda may have lined up for you.
And paying for courses is a thing. Amy Hoy's 30 x 500 is $2000. I ran into an interesting copywriting course the other day which costs the same. Tiago Forte of Building a Second Brain has bundles which run in that range. It's reasonable that a program which runs 6+ months could cost 30K. You don't need any of these courses to learn the content, but I don't think that's the correct mindset. What will be the return on these courses? Will they help you speed up your alternative timeline? Will they help push you accomplish something you would otherwise flounder on? How long would most people take to create and follow a full time curriculum for landing that first programming gig? I bet most would give up before finishing. If the program gives you a better chance at finishing, then that's worth a lot.
All that said, I'm sure I would change my mind if I were to dish out 30K for a 6 month program and then the next week turned into a dumpster fire of courses. It's one thing to write about how you should stick to the program. It's quite another to pull out your card to pay 30K and then get hit with a feeling of heavy disappointment with the course material.
The learning environment described in the linked thread (200 students per teacher, plus blind leading the blind with volunteer mentors) sounds terrible at any price including $0.00. Many MOOCs have community boards, TA's, interactive assignments and cost little or nothing. If their plan is to just bundle that same experience with a job placement sales team and a private slack, then they'll just be yet another for-profit credential mill
Addendum: This was the kind of delusional fever dream perpetuated by Austen that kind of attracted me to LS last year:
https://www.coursereport.com/blog/lambda-schools-europe-inco...
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/people/after-us-india-wi...
Frankly, having seen the average quality of their work, I wouldn't hire 70% of all Lambda students. I've seen a handful of really talented and hard-working students who've made the most of their LS experience, but for the majority that simply followed the curriculum and did the bare-minimum I wouldn't want them anywhere near my codebase.
Thus far, it seems that almost all students who got a job either spent numerous hours studying outside of normal classes, had previous experience going into it (such as myself), or generally got a lucky break. There are numerous students who are still without a job more than a year after graduation.
So like, the Fyre of coding bootcamps. But still better than Siraj Raval?
ofc bootcamps do work for some people (minority)
*let's not argue about developer vs engineer vs coder vs programmer
Americans have a different mindset, they are more business-oriented, for the better and the worse.
On one hand if you're already a high income earning person, such the lawyer and you need to pivot it can be an option.
But they're targeting high school grads and others who aren't as prepared. I don't think you actually need any formal training to become a programmer, I don't and I do exceptionally well.
Once you add in investors who expect returns, why wouldn't lambda School enroll as many people as they could without any regard to education. Those who are motivated will learn on their own, find themselves entry level tech jobs and can be put up as an example of successful students.
Those who fail will be shown as too lazy to put in the effort.
If I was to advise a new student on what path to take, I had almost always say to go to college. The main advantage being that you can grow a real Social circle, and with the coming saturation of boot camp grads you'll have an actual degree.
For non-traditional students, such as working parents many state schools offer online curriculums which will be a much better fit versus an exploitive boot camp.
People love to champion the business model and they simply assume that the education part is easy.
Meanwhile, Lambda appears to be cashing in on those assumptions to sell a sub-par product.
Which is all businesses at that scale I think. You're not reinventing the wheel offering plumbing services in your local village.
I guess we have to think about how these experiments might play out and the risks involved as we participate in them. How will food delivery services change my community? What's the risk that an investment in personal education with this newly launched service won't pay off? What am I giving up by opening a free account with Facebook?
There's a strong likelihood that any of these experiments will blow up. Just as there's a strong likelihood that a direct investment in any of these companies won't pay off (especially as an early investor, which is at the point where we're likely using these services.) Maybe people shouldn't be so quick to jump in early, and more accepting of the mistake once they find out they placed a bad bet.