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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

#141

Post by pc86 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #123
mxcrossb wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#142

Post by rorykoehler »

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…

> You are quite literally selling tech savvy people their future

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.

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

#143

Post by vba »

Tomte wrote: post #66
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…

> 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-...

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.

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

#144

Post by marcinzm »

jgalt212 wrote: post #120
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.

I'd argue that you can hire employees for intelligence and other assorted skills but without an ambitious founder few startups would succeed.

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

#145

Post by jo032 »

rorykoehler wrote: post #142
jstummbillig wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You are quite literally selling tech savvy people their future 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.

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?

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

#146

Post by ImprobableTruth »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #90
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...

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.

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.

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

#147

Post by rorykoehler »

jo032 wrote: post #145
rorykoehler wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are quite literally selling tech savvy people their future 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.

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?

You learn something completely different in a comp sci course. Regardless why mortgage your future earnings when you can learn everything for free?

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

#148

Post by alexpetralia »

crumbshot wrote: post #95

> 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 an…

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!"

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

#149

Post by jacobion »

rswail wrote: post #119
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.

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.

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

#150

Post by tvanantwerp »

michaelt wrote: post #42
st1x7 wrote: post #8

People are paying ~$30k for bootcamps? Why not get a degree at that point?

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.

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.

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