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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

#301

Post by ryanSrich »

bertjk wrote: post #238
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.

What exactly is wrong with it? They’re still heavily incented to get their students hired. If all they’re selling is F tier contracts then eventually they’ll dry up. They clearly need to continue pumping out students capable of repaying those loans.

This simply gives them a way to tap into the cash they would get in the future, just a few years earlier. And if there’s a 3rd party that wants to take on that risk I see no issue with it.

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

#302

Post by confidantlake »

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

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I think junior salaries need to come down a little bit (or senior salaries need to go up). When I was a Junior, I was making about 75% of a Senior role. There was no way I was worth 75% of a senior role. Better to have a true Junior role with lower salary, lower bar to entry, and more mentorship.

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

#303

Post by [deleted] »

Grustaf wrote: post #118
gexla wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you make this same argument for any school in the US? Maybe We're getting vague here (my fault.) What do we actually mean by "teach yourself?" Nobody is spoon-feeding you knowledge. You get a curriculum to follow. It seems to me that if you get through the program and then land a job from it, then you got some value from the program. Maybe you could have done that on your own. But if you're looking at a boot…

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…

[deleted]

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

#304

Post by FemmeAndroid »

austenallred wrote: post #296
FemmeAndroid wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, that's your prerogative. Personally, I'd eat some bad press by just making it a policy to always have opt-in changes across the board, or offer dissatisfied students refunds. And saying "everyone agreed such changes were possible" when you're essentially talking about the fine text of a contract only one side has the opportunity to define the terms of seems questionable. We aren't talking about two sides in a negotiation coming to a meeting of the minds. You created a contract with those terms, on top of an already questionably structured ISA. You can change the contract to make it more explicitly favorable to your students.

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

#305

Post by gexla »

Grustaf wrote: post #237
gexla wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're probably right, we speak different languages.

I feel 30K is meaningless if we're not talking about an ROI on that investment. Many software developers spend that on education at a university along with 4 years of their time. That education may get you started, then your experience takes over as the most important item on your future job searches. That first gig may have a huge effect on your future options (getting lucky with a high impact position with Google vs low impact at no name.) The more impressive your education, the better leverage you have to land that good first gig. In this case, spending far more than 30K on your education likely pays off huge. You didn't need to spend that, but you made a bet which increased your chances.

Spending 30K on a bootcamp may not have the same dramatic impact on your chances, but if it pushes you to focus on knocking out a curriculum and ends with multiple offers, then you could quickly recoup that money versus the alternative route. That alternative might be that you have less focus, requiring longer to gain the same skills and you need more time for a job search. That job search might end with a lesser paying job than Lambda may have lined up for you.

And paying for courses is a thing. Amy Hoy's 30 x 500 is $2000. I ran into an interesting copywriting course the other day which costs the same. Tiago Forte of Building a Second Brain has bundles which run in that range. It's reasonable that a program which runs 6+ months could cost 30K. You don't need any of these courses to learn the content, but I don't think that's the correct mindset. What will be the return on these courses? Will they help you speed up your alternative timeline? Will they help push you accomplish something you would otherwise flounder on? How long would most people take to create and follow a full time curriculum for landing that first programming gig? I bet most would give up before finishing. If the program gives you a better chance at finishing, then that's worth a lot.

All that said, I'm sure I would change my mind if I were to dish out 30K for a 6 month program and then the next week turned into a dumpster fire of courses. It's one thing to write about how you should stick to the program. It's quite another to pull out your card to pay 30K and then get hit with a feeling of heavy disappointment with the course material.

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

#306

Post by PragmaticPulp »

Siira wrote: post #186
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #181

Just going to throw this out there... The value of top schools is the professors and instruction. The administration, not so much. Perhaps the startup should be in how to automate and standardize university administration so that the majority of tuition goes to the educators. - https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2011/administ...

Most of the value is actually in signaling and the peer group.

That doesn’t contradict the idea that the value is in the top quality professors.

Much of the signaling value is that the person has already spent four years studying under top quality professors and managed to pass without dropping out or failing out.

The idea that someone can get admitted to a top university and then somehow graduate without managing to learn at a high level and pass all of their courses is basically a myth.

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

#307

Post by MivLives »

st1x7 wrote: post #8

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

One thing to keep in mind about the 30k number. Unless it's changed it is percentage based with a min. If you're making less then 50k it's nothing, if you're making 50k it's 17k in repayment. If you're making a 150k it's capped at 30k, but you're paying 2125 dollars a month until you hit that.

It's 17 percent of your salary for 2 years or you hit 30k repayment whichever is first. If you don't make over 50k, or don't get a job in a related field (which includes things like IT support I believe) it disappears.

You can kind of see why a student would think that the bootcamp is aligned with their interests. They want you to get a high paying job so they get paid more, and if you don't succeed you owe nothing.

I went through this, and my salary went up 2.25 times what it was previously. I also enjoy my job significantly more. To me this was worth 30k.

Why didn't I just teach myself? A few reasons, one is motivation/accountability, another is structure, and a third was a hope that career services would help me on the other side. I won't claim it was my smartest move, it got me out of the hole I was in.

Edit: want to be clear I'm not recommending doing this, I'm just saying what my/other students I talked to decision process was

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

#308

Post by MivLives »

isaacaderogba wrote: post #174

Awh man, this is a bummer. I attended Lambda School from April-November 2019. I was in the Web Dev unit for 4 months and a Team Lead for the remainder. I got a job early so didn't get to do Labs or Computer Science, though I've heard they weren't great experiences. I'm not 100% looped in what's happening with Lambda anymore (they removed the Alumni from the student Slack channels), but I hope they're able to turn thi…

Computer science and labs kept changing. When I went through they were doing C. Apparently they don't do that anymore. The order of the two kept flipping too from what I remember.

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

#309

Post by confidantlake »

degrews wrote: post #161
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.

I agree, but I think that in order for that to work, we would have to accept much lower salaries for junior/apprentice engineers (until they've proven they can add value). And maybe also a higher tolerance for firing engineers who are not working out early. As it is, I'm not surprised companies are reluctant to bet on the potential of untrained engineers, _and_ the chance that they'll stick around long enough to make…

I agree completely with this! There is no real onramp for junior people. Personal anecedote incoming... feel free to skip.

For example my brother is a talented person with devops/sys admin/cloud skills. As someone who is more in the pure coding side of things, I go to him often with questions in his area. He has been tech oriented since a young age. He is also 30 with no comp sci degree and no work history besides driving Uber. No company would take a chance on someone like that if they have to pay a huge salary for it. But for a startup it would be a perfect moneyball opportunity to pay like $25 an hour or whatever. If he works out great you got a smart productive person for a cheap salary. It is a huge win. If not, dump him and try with someone else.

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

#310

Post by rahkiin »

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:?

Here in Dutch students it is more like this:

350eur for rent. 200eur for food. 25eur for internet, no car needed. Utilities included in student rental, otherwise 30eur. clothing and fun things: everything else.

Current system provides a government backed loan at 0.00% interest of up to 800eur/month, which you then need to pay back depending on income in 35 years. (Much like ISA, but with the government). You get 100eur/month for health insurance (basic health insurance costs the same). and 100 euro/month for renting. These last 2 are based on income and available for everyone under a certain income limit. (Almost all students are below this limit)

We had a system where you received 300/month and could then get a loan on top of it. But that was replaced by the neoliberals.

Hope that enlightens it a bit.

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