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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

#221

Post by texasbigdata »

Mikho wrote: post #196

Happens when a business model is to sign up as many people as possible for the ISA (Income Sharing Agreement) and then immediately monetize that ISAs by selling them with a discount to a 3rd party. That's basically Lambda business model. The main part is to sign up as many people as possible since in mean hard cash right away for every account that became locked in the debt. Education is just an irrelevant theme-tric…

Anytime you securitize an asset like that credit quality gets heavily scrutinized. From a working capital perspective you can cause a real liquidity crunch if you’re simultaneously a) growing and b) deteriorating factored asset quality leading to lower advance rates on subsequent tranches in the SPV. Restated in English, if you’re taking payday loans and your income is declining you’re about to have a bad time.

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

#222

Post by aczerepinski »

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.

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.

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

#223

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

Mikho wrote: post #196

Happens when a business model is to sign up as many people as possible for the ISA (Income Sharing Agreement) and then immediately monetize that ISAs by selling them with a discount to a 3rd party. That's basically Lambda business model. The main part is to sign up as many people as possible since in mean hard cash right away for every account that became locked in the debt. Education is just an irrelevant theme-tric…

> ... then immediately monetize that ISAs by selling them with a discount to a 3rd party

Is that really true? If so, this is shocking to me. If LS sells the ISA, then, obviously, they are no longer "aligned" with their students' success. What's the point of their "revolutionary" arrangement then? This makes perfect sense out of the jumble of anecdotes I'm reading.

From further below: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/12/21135134/lambda-school-st.... In other words, yes, this is what's happening, and it's a disaster, for exactly the stated reason.

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

#224

Post by JacobSuperslav »

rubidium wrote: post #178
checkyoursudo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s pretty remarkable... can you give more details on monthly budget: After $500 for rent that’s only $750 left. Food: $500? Cell phone/ internet:$70? Clothing: goodwill? Car insurance: $100? Utilities:?

Europe is cheaper than most people think. My family of 3 spends less than 20k/year including renting a house in Spain, 100 meters from the shore

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

#225

Post by skylanh »

gnicholas wrote: post #91
thinkingemote wrote: post #74

"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 su…

I imagine they have the elusive and ever present "arbitration clause" where they don't actually have to actually sue their students.

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

#226

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

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.

Can't get any more ambitious than Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

If only ambition correlated with competence.

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

#227

Post by jrochkind1 »

nikanj wrote: post #140
rswail wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Junior programmers suffer from the tragedy of the commons. 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

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.

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

#228

Post by austenallred »

airdweia wrote: post #202

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…

Hey airdwea,

I’m sorry you were frustrated by the GCA assessment. We don’t use assessments as a means of harming students, but we do genuinely want to make sure that you are ready to move onto the next level before doing so. I understand this can be frustrating.

This particular assessment, you’re correct, is not a direct map to the previous couple weeks of content, but rather a summative general assessment that covers material taught over longer periods of time. Anyone who is interested can google “CodeSignal General Coding Assessment” and find the assessment.

I don’t believe we’ve removed anyone from Slack for voicing concerns, but if you’d like to email me austen@lambdaschool.com I’ll look into it.

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

#229

Post by barry-cotter »

rorykoehler wrote: post #147
jo032 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#230

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

darkerside wrote: post #188
tvanantwerp wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, no…

This is a pretty damning assertion. Got a source? Edit: Found my own. Oof. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

Two AMP redirects in one link? Sheesh.

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