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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

#231

Post by loufe »

zimpenfish wrote: post #125
dna_polymerase wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could ask the same question for any university program. It's the degree that opens doors. HR doesn't care for your EdX or udemy certs.

As a counterpoint, in 25 years and probably as many jobs, only one or two places have cared about my degree and that was just another red flag on top of the pile of red flags those places already had.

That being said, the difficulty is getting that first experience at a reputable company. After that, at least in my industry, it's all reputation and the interview. Nobody in mining cares where you were schooled if you have experience.

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

#232

Post by arenaninja »

austenallred wrote: post #210
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…

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 (an…

I've never looked into Lambda School but some bits from this stand out to me.

> We have just north of 2,000 students and ~180 full-time staff members, the majority of which are student-facing.

2000/180 = 12 students per staff member. This seems high and "student-facing" is padding the numbers. "Customer Success" people are technically student-facing but not instructors, and number of instructors per student is the most important number that matters for quality

> This student’s frustration comes from a series of changes we made simultaneously

Do not make changes to ongoing cohorts

> 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

Isn't this something a school would be able to educate on? Why not introduce group projects (maybe you already have them)?

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

#233

Post by barry-cotter »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #135
arvindamirtaa wrote: post #15

I just want to give a quick shout out to 42. They're closed for Covid19 right now. But if you can wait for them to open up, this is a good place to look into - https://www.42.us.org/ or https://www.42.fr/ (if you're in Europe).

I've read their philosophy and it sounds great Does anybody know any private school following the same philosophy for kids education? I think finding different forms of education will be especially important for boys: girls thrive in the current school environment but boys seems to do much worse.

> Does anybody know any private school following the same philosophy for kids education?

You can google any of Sudbury schools, democratic schools or Summerhill.

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

#234

Post by blntechie »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #223
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/2020/2/1…

It is known that they package and sell the ISAs like other credit products. But regarding their alignment with student success, it’s to their benefit that these ISAs realizes i.e. students succeed as the ISA quality determine how much they can sell them for.

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

#235

Post by jrochkind1 »

akanet wrote: post #122
arvindamirtaa wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s interesting that pg is a big fan though... ...as an investor. He may not be intimately familiar with the actual situations of the students from his PoV (mostly throguh conversations with Austen or his team). But then again, this is far from the first time a negative comment has come out against Lambda. And his position hasn't changed so far. So, there is that.

When I spoke to Allred about this, he indicated that he and pg did not have a particularly close relationship. If this is true, it seems likely that pg's vocal patronage is mostly based on the theory, not practice, of Lambda.

are you suggesting pg sometimes takes a strong public position on things he doesn't actually know too too much about? Some of which he has a financial interest in? Could be.

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

#236

Post by [deleted] »

austenallred wrote: post #210
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…

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 (an…

[deleted]

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

#237

Post by Grustaf »

gexla wrote: post #155
Grustaf wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let's say you have two programs to select from. One program has a 60% placement rate, but has horrible quality. The other has a 30% placement rate, but high quality. Let's say that an independent 3rd party does the quality assessment from invites to participate and from student feedback. This same body also finds that the employers and starting salaries for each program is roughly equal. Would you care about quality?…

I personally studied theoretical physics and abstract geometry, plus a few years of classical languages so I think our priorities are pretty different...

My original point was simply that teach yourself-programs are well and good, that’s how I learned to program and I now work for a FAANG, but then you shouldn’t have to pay 30 k.

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

#238

Post by bertjk »

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…

Wait.. so they were securitizing their ISAs? I had no idea they were doing that. It is a brilliant twist I didn't expect, and that also causes me to lose all respect for them. I liked the ISA idea before, but this... is perverse.

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

#239

Post by jrochkind1 »

joshxyz wrote: post #39

Relevant experience I've read from twitter months ago: https://mobile.twitter.com/watsonwaswrite/status/12309001266...

> finally, my first day. and i was immediately disappointed to learn that the "team leads" in charge of grading our designs and reviewing our work.... were actually students two months ahead of us. two months!!!!

Wow. While not an exact analogy, something about that makes me want to say MLM/"pyramid scheme"

> i was so depressed. i started sleeping longer hours, i lost all enthusiasm. i was ashamed to tell my partner. i was genuinely struggling and still am.

As I would be too in that position, I really sympathize. They are taking advantage of people and that has consequences, it isn't just a "failed startup".

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

#240

Post by austenallred »

arenaninja wrote: post #232
austenallred wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (an…

I've never looked into Lambda School but some bits from this stand out to me. > We have just north of 2,000 students and ~180 full-time staff members, the majority of which are student-facing. 2000/180 = 12 students per staff member. This seems high and "student-facing" is padding the numbers. "Customer Success" people are technically student-facing but not instructors, and number of instructors per student is the mo…

> 2000/180 = 12 students per staff member. This seems high and "student-facing" is padding the numbers.

It is very, very high.

I’d have to dig to find the exact numbers but about 90 are directly involved in instruction, project management, etc. Not including student support.

> Do not make changes to ongoing cohorts

We really try to avoid doing so, but in some instances it is impossible.

> Isn't this something a school would be able to educate on? Why not introduce group projects (maybe you already have them)?

We do have group projects and do try to educate here. Students will come back a year after being hired and say, “Wow, I thought x was a waste of time but it was extraordinarily useful” all the time.

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