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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

#381

Post by 908B64B197 »

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

That's why there's a vesting schedule and stock compensation for engineers.

Unless you are Netflix and can attract and afford world wide talent, if you have no bonus or stock compensation you are much better hiring contractors for software.

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

#382

Post by 908B64B197 »

joshxyz wrote: post #39

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

I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0]. I guess that counts toward their "placement" stats!

Not only that, but Lambda seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610

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

#383

Post by 908B64B197 »

rswail wrote: post #119
jacobion wrote: post #78

The thing about efficient markets is that lucrative activities which don't produce much value—borderline scams—can block activity which would be highly wealth creating. For example, there could be a huge untapped retail market for financial derivatives such as interest rate and fx hedges. However, it's very hard to access this market because historically anyone who has started selling such products has pivoted toward…

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.

> industry is crying out for more people

At a certain price-point they are.

> Learning to program is more like an old fashioned trade than a profession

Sure. Learning to code is pretty much a trade at this point. Engineering isn't. There's a pretty big gap between a real engineer and someone who "learned to code" in high school.

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

#384

Post by ExLambdaStudent »

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, right here, is Lambda's biggest trick. I created a hacker account just because of how much it infuriates me to see Austen doing it again here.

Austen is very very good at finding public criticism and responding to it. In contrast, in Lambda's slack, every criticism is automatically taken to private PM, to get it out of the way as soon as possible and to immediately shutdown any ensuing conversation. (A few times, when that didn't work, they turned off comments altogether.)

Lambda's strategy is to PRETEND to be responsive to feedback, to say a lot of pretty words and act concerned, while actually ignoring all of it.

For example, they created a student survey to see how students felt about removing the majority of paid teachers (team leads) and forcing us to be mentors instead. One of the first questions?

"Do you agree that leadership is an important part of being a successful programmer?" (approximately)

The rest of the survey was the same. They weren't interested in getting feedback. They were interested in pretending to listen to feedback.

Austen is minimizing student frustration in this comment, acting like people are grumbling about minor changes. He's ignoring the many many people who have written out long, articulate, arguments about how the changes damaged their education and removed the value of Lambda for them.

He also acts like he didn't delete every post in the Lambda subreddit that offered criticism over the last three months, without any response.

False honesty in threads like this is how Lambda gets away with being dishonest.

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

#385

Post by sugarwater »

shay_ker wrote: post #378
sugarwater wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you implemented changes so that the students themselves determine whether or not they want to flex? That's what happened the last two units for me... For two build weeks I was in a team of 8 people, and in both cases only one other person showed up. There were no repercussions for those that didn't attend build week and they continued on to the next unit regardless of whether or not they were ready. You grade you…

> This is actually where some of the greatest frustration comes. It would be easy to close our eyes and wave people along but we have to say at times, “You’re not quite there yet, let’s keep working at it.” That’s not what students want to hear. I hear that this is good feedback, but looking at sugarwater's response that seemingly matches up w/ the original critique, maybe the current situation falls short of what yo…

It's not an outlier of an experience. My cohort really did go through 2 units with no one looking at our assessments and assignments, and we determined whether or not we passed onto the next unit. It was an organizational mess.

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

#386

Post by thebean11 »

austenallred wrote: post #256
borishn wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Do not make changes to ongoing cohorts > We really try to avoid doing so, but in some instances it is impossible. You sold students something you can't implement. Apologize and offer a full refund.

I suppose it depends on what “changes” means. We specifically tell students (and they even sign a document that says) that we will make changes to aspects of the the experience during their time as a student (e.g. schedule, specifics of curriculum). Students can be with Lambda for as long as 2+ years. Everything being frozen in time would be to their great detriment.

> schedule, specifics of curriculum

These are not the changes OP is complaining about. Your responses kind of strike me as misdirection.

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

#388

Post by WalterGR »

ExLambdaStudent wrote: post #384
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…

This, right here, is Lambda's biggest trick. I created a hacker account just because of how much it infuriates me to see Austen doing it again here. Austen is very very good at finding public criticism and responding to it. In contrast, in Lambda's slack, every criticism is automatically taken to private PM, to get it out of the way as soon as possible and to immediately shutdown any ensuing conversation. (A few time…

”Do you agree that leadership is an important part of being a successful programmer?"

I don’t have a horse in this fight, but the above is a generalization of what’s called Push Polling: polling in a way to change opinions and get a desired outcome, rather than to actually gather pre-existing opinions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll

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

#389

Post by lifteatdev »

austenallred wrote: post #349
catern wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the event we finance an ISA of a student who has not graduated we have to refund what we received if a student doesn't graduate. Interesting, I didn't know this. I thought you just sold the ISA outright, which would retain some of the incentive but weaken it quite a bit. It's great to hear that that's not happening. I found https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-isa-... discussing this in more de…

Right now it's technically structured as a sale to an SPV that is owned by Lambda, Lambda gets a small advance ( It's still completely aligned, we just fast-forward some of the cash so we don't have to raise endless amounts of VC.

" Lastly, this arrangement will not affect the student experience during or after Lambda School."

As a student, I can confirm this is a lie. And you know it is because we have told you in Slack, we've told you on Twitter, we've told you on Reddit, and now you have to read about it on Hacker News.

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

#390

Post by learc83 »

mhaymo wrote: post #250
learc83 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re missing the point of the analogy. Progressive taxation doesn’t produce a cliff where you’re potentially better off if you make less money. The higher rates only apply to money over the threshold. Lambda school works the way many people think the US tax system works (but doesn’t). When you make over X, all of your money is taxed at Y. So it’s better to make X - 1 than X + 1.

Only if you place no value on paying off your ISA. Once the ISA is paid off, the "cliff" disappears. Obviously this is quite different to taxes.

ISA expires after 5 years, so there's definitely a range where making more money during that 5 years will cost you more overall.
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