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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

#291

Post by thelastwave »

numbsafari wrote: post #258
michaelcampbell wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> praise how insanely ambitious the founder was If this isn't a warning sign of a spectacular failure, I don't know what is. Not to mention praising it, after all the ink spilled on "rockstar" "ninja" types and how bad they are, yet they still get kudos and praise. If you ever have a manager that espouses the "we don't want the heroic cowboy type here", run, because that's EXACTLY what they want.

Your logic seems rather self-contradictory here: "I can't believe an organization would _praise_ the rockstar mentality" "If an organization doesn't praise the rockstar mentality, they are lying". As others have noted, I tend to take people at their word. Of course, you can also ask people on the team during the interview process if they feel like that's true or not.

I don't think he said the absence of a positive affirmation, but the positive assertion of a negative value.

Not that they didn't praise rockstars, but they specifically came out against them.

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

#292

Post by checkyoursudo »

JacobSuperslav wrote: post #224
rubidium wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah, yes, I maybe should mention that my house is about 50 m from the Baltic? The view of our bay is a significant benefit. Of course, it's covered with ice for several months of the year, and not everybody likes that. >.<

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

#293

Post by gigatexal »

mondoshawan wrote: post #262
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…

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). As an interviewer, engineer and lead myself, I'd say your students that think this are pretty darn close. If I get a junior candidate that can't co…

Being able to read and write code in whatever language you claim to be proficient in on your resume is just table stakes imo. Being self taught I learned the whole team based development life cycle on the job. It was stressful. But it took maybe a month or two and I was proficient at git, setting up CI/CD, writing unit tests, and debugging things to just name a few.

I laud you being willing to teach a junior dev but I just find so many places are not open to hiring juniors at all.

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

#294

Post by eoinlynch95 »

Lambda School was the hardest thing I've done. I learned a lot and happy with it but have been having a really hard time finding a job. I am in the EU. Today I spoke to a recruiter who suggested a few changes in my CV. Lambda's staff for helping graduates find jobs are not doing a good job. I've been trying to get endorsed and don't know how many times I had to message different people about getting it sorted.

Overall, Lambda is great and worth doing but its not perfect. Everyone there means well but there needs to be better structure.

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

#295

Post by ecshafer »

forgingahead wrote: post #273
austenallred wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cover…

Why are people downvoting this? The CEO of the company being discussed is replying to people voicing their concerns. If you think he's saying something wrong, write a comment to it. Don't simply downvote it. Too many sensitive trigger-fingers here.

Because its obviously an empty PR response that dismisses the legitimate criticism of the scam/product.

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

#296

Post by austenallred »

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #286
austenallred wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking we do, and almost every change we made had an opt in/out option. The only times we can’t do that (and that’s happened maybe 1-2 times in the history of Lambda School) is when it’s a change to teams of students that run across multiple cohorts.

So in those rare circumstances, why not offer refunds to those who don't want to stay with Lambda School after the change?

I can imagine scenarios where a full refund would be make sense, but refund isn’t really appropriate when we’re talking about small changes in schedule, especially when everyone agreed such changes were possible.

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

#297

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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.

Investors will only ever speak positively of their portfolio companies.

Lambda school receives high praise in general because so many of us tech types want their value proposition to be true. Just look at how negative the comments about traditional colleges are whenever the topic comes up on HN. Or look at all of the concern about growing student debt loads. Or the concern that 4 year college degrees are not teaching CS students what they need to actually function in real world software jobs.

Lambda School arrived on the scene with a new business model that claims to fix all of that, and they did it as a highly-praised YC startup. It seemed like a home run.

Yet I’ve heard so, so many stories like the OP’s about how they’ve dropped the ball on the educational quality of their programs.

They seem to be approaching this as a typical startup problem where they start with the ugliest MVP that people will pay for and then incrementally improve it only where absolutely necessary to keep the money coming in.

This works if you’re selling a SaaS tool to some company on a monthly basis, but it doesn’t work when you’re taking critical years of young people’s early careers and charging them on the tail end.

Even worse, their customers have an incentive to downplay all of the problems. No one benefits by trashing the source of their education and only career credentials, so instead they say how great it was no matter what. We’re starting to see people pull back the curtain and show what’s really happening.

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

#298

Post by thelastwave »

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…

This is a fine response that provides real insight into how you see the problem and opportunity costs, and not typical CEO empty rhetoric. Good luck with your platform.

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

#299

Post by nrmitchi »

tvanantwerp wrote: post #150
michaelt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, no…

When you're selling a securitized asset, you need to show the quality of that asset. You can't just pull together a pile of shit and call it AAA (Yes, 2008 was a thing, and wrong, but lets not assume here that Lambda is borderline to committing fraud).

If the ISAs don't perform, then Lambda will (likely) have no future in selling them. Do you really think they're risking their future cash flow in order to bundle up as much bullshit as they can right now?

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

#300

Post by nikanj »

bennysonething wrote: post #216
brandmeyer wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also tragedy of the commons: Why invest in training when you can expect employees to get poached by the company next door in only 1-2 years?

Most of the poaching happens (well to me anyway) because the jobs became unbearable. And because it was the only way to get decent salary increases.

It's easier to afford bigger salaries for seniors if you don't have to carry the budget burden of unproductive juniors
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