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Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

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Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#111

Post by gexla »

Grustaf wrote: post #100
gexla wrote: post #96

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…

Of course you could teach yourself, but why pay 30 k for the pleasure of doing that?

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.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#112

Post by ethbr0 »

philwelch wrote: post #93
sampo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> socialist democracy 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...

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).

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#113

Post by mxcrossb »

soneca wrote: post #75
Tomte wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But why Lambda School had to grow that much that fast? 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-...

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 a…

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.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#114

Post by Grustaf »

jacobion wrote: post #89
Grustaf wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#115

Post by zo1 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #79
blntechie wrote: post #14

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. It’s interesting that pg is a big fan though.

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…

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.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#116

Post by jokethrowaway »

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #77
bambax wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not wanting to go into debt either But doing lambda school is going into debt, isn't it? A different kind of debt but a debt nonetheless.

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 stu…

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).

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#117

Post by akanet »

swyx wrote: post #13

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 ques…

sensationalized? how dare you. it was all completely factual reporting

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#118

Post by Grustaf »

gexla wrote: post #111
Grustaf wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you could teach yourself, but why pay 30 k for the pleasure of doing that?

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 boot…

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.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#119

Post by rswail »

jacobion wrote: post #78

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 toward…

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.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#120

Post by jgalt212 »

soneca wrote: post #62

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, revolutio…

> praise how insanely ambitious the founder was

It seems to me that VC's often link ambition with intelligence and other assorted skills needed to get the job done.

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