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Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

lambdaschool.com

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Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#181

Post by kilim1202 »

austenallred wrote: post #7

Hey, co-founder of Lambda School here. We launched our online CS academy with no upfront tuition almost two years ago. Now with thousands of students enrolled and hundreds already employed and paying back we wanted to take the next step and open up access to folks who couldn’t afford to pay to survive while attending. Of course, that introduces significant risk on our part, as students still only pay us back if they…

how do you guys make sure student pays back? What if student just goes MIA and never pays back?

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#182

Post by icedchai »

austenallred wrote: post #14
bluedevilzn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you collect the money? What's preventing a student from not paying you?

We get students’ tax returns to verify income and they sign a contract. What’s stopping them from not paying is the American contract law system which is severely underrated.

Is there any concern about them sending fake tax returns?

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#183

Post by opportune »

JamesBarney wrote: post #121
opportune wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a waste of time to teach. It takes maybe a few hours to learn almost everything there is to know about branching or merge conflicts. You should learn the hard things in school, not the minutiae or trivia you would learn in your first month of any job. When I was in school I'm glad I went out of my way to take all the math-heavy and theoretical classes I could, and no classes like "modern web design" or…

What are you doing professionally that your math heavy and theoretical classes are a force multiplier and what classes were they?

Data science (although I do a lot less of that now, I still work exclusively with data). And taking lots of general AI/math classes outside of just ML also generally taught me better problem solving strategies. You would be surprised how often planning, constraint satisfaction, optimization, graph theory etc. come up in every day life. And the upper level algorithms classes I think also improved my problem solving creativity. Compilers and (intro level) theory of computation were pretty useful too.

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#184

Post by hiei »

paxy wrote: post #135
hiei wrote: post #86

RE: Those interviewing at Lambda (rejected) Luck of the draw with who decides to interview you, I had a guy from the admissions team with zero enthusiasm essentially just reading off of a list of questions. I tried to answer well but giving off good energy from a dead duck is hard. I also was more practical with my answers of wanting to get into coding, jump in profession, curious, experience as a BA, writing technic…

This is standard tech recruiting even outside of Lambda

If it were an HR screening I would agree but I think there is some responsibility on the interviewer to remain engaged.

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#185

Post by austenallred »

clanmachine wrote: post #154
austenallred wrote: post #7

Hey, co-founder of Lambda School here. We launched our online CS academy with no upfront tuition almost two years ago. Now with thousands of students enrolled and hundreds already employed and paying back we wanted to take the next step and open up access to folks who couldn’t afford to pay to survive while attending. Of course, that introduces significant risk on our part, as students still only pay us back if they…

While I am very happy for this but this will over the time out downward pressure on the developer wage. Today, atleast in US it requires taking significant debt/risk to become a developer which keeps away the people who are risk averse. I seriously suggest stopping this program otherwis there will be massive supply of developers resulting in huge wage drop.

The number of engineering openings is growing much faster than a single school can.

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#186

Post by austenallred »

icedchai wrote: post #182
austenallred wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We get students’ tax returns to verify income and they sign a contract. What’s stopping them from not paying is the American contract law system which is severely underrated.

Is there any concern about them sending fake tax returns?

The IRS copies us on their returns. So, no.

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#187

Post by t0mmycollison »

_JasonE wrote: post #174

Hey Lambda team. Congratulations on the ISA program and living stipend! I'm sorry for having so many questions. We have an ISA program as well and I found these to be the most important questions people have about coding bootcamp ISAs: 1. Do the payments begin if the new job is not in-field (not related to Software Engineering)? 2. Is there a grace period or deadline (depending on your point of view) before the payme…

1. The language around what counts as in-field is in our ISA. It's more dependent on what skills you use in your job as opposed to your title. You can see a sample ISA we use at https://lambdaschool.com/faq/.

2. You pay nothing between when you finish the technical portion of the class and when you get a job, and after you start your job, there's a 30-day grace period.

2. The payments stop if you stop working. You can think of them as being 24 monthly repayments that will pause if you lose your job.

3. It does, but only after they finish the technical portion of the class, and they're using the skills they learned. We do look at things on a case-by-case basis.

4. Nope! We don't care about your credit score or your debt load. Things get tricky if you have a fraud conviction, but anything short of that won't impact our decision.

Hope this helps!

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#188

Post by tptacek »

JamesBarney wrote: post #117
kasey_junk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under no circumstances would I be happy if my degree program taught me how to use git. I can’t think of a single skill more stupid to learn in university. My degree came a lot cheaper than the modern ones but if I got a similar experience now as then I wouldn’t feel cheated. My undergraduate provided opportunities to program lisps & assembly & write published articles on data structures & I literally went to the loca…

> I can’t think of a single skill more stupid to learn in university. I can (for an aspiring software engineer) - real analysis, differential equations, number theory

What CS curriculum includes number theory?

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#189

Post by JamesBarney »

tptacek wrote: post #188
JamesBarney wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can’t think of a single skill more stupid to learn in university. I can (for an aspiring software engineer) - real analysis, differential equations, number theory

What CS curriculum includes number theory?

University of Texas at Austin. Their cs department is(or at least was) heavily influenced by Dijkstra so it was extra heavy on the theory(especially math) and extra light on the software engineering. By the end I was pretty good at proofs and dog shit at development.

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#190

Post by tptacek »

JamesBarney wrote: post #189
tptacek wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What CS curriculum includes number theory?

University of Texas at Austin. Their cs department is(or at least was) heavily influenced by Dijkstra so it was extra heavy on the theory(especially math) and extra light on the software engineering. By the end I was pretty good at proofs and dog shit at development.

I don't see it listed there; I do see mandatory Calc 2-3 and linear algebra (the linear algebra is useful!).
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