Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

Please please please under no circumstances attend Lambda, everything the poster says is true. Two weeks before the end of CS for me they initiated a pass/fail for a test that we were never taught anything about and then mandated that you repeat the entire CS curriculum if you weren’t able to pass it. They said that it didn’t matter that I passed all of my sprints and scored 100% on the unit assessment, that I needed to repeat a class (along with 3/4 of my cohort) just to pass this test. They never owned up to the fact that they didn’t teach the material on the test, as was evident by the fact that they removed ALL GitHub projects in CS and replaced them with Codesignal challenges. I messaged “Student Success” for weeks and was ignored and when they did deign to respond to me it was a generic canned response that addressed none of my issues save “Deal with it”. I took to speaking about the problems in the open channels and I was removed from Slack and forcefully “withdrawn” from Lambda. It is utter chaos there.

It’s interesting you say that, because that’s what I tell people on my team, and I mean it.

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.

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.

CEO of Lambda School here.

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.