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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

#401

Post by wyclif »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #227
nikanj wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 skille…

The problem, which I've commented on and experienced many times, is that companies don't have enough incentive to fund training of junior developers. In a culture where devs switch jobs every 2-3 years, there doesn't seem to be enough runway to train a junior to senior level before they get poached.

I wish there was a realistic solution to this problem other than bootcamps, but I don't know what it could be.

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

#402

Post by ptero »

anchpop wrote: post #396
ptero wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, kudos for answering and not avoiding a group that you expect to hold (based on the linked post) adverse feelings. Good information, too. Education greatly benefits from more options; best of luck! Now for things that I think need work (I know little about Lambda school, so this is definitely an armchair strategist opinion): First and foremost, as others pointed, is the growth plans. Education is hard to scale…

I disagree with your last point. In many cases in teaching, the teacher knows the correct path better than the student. One example I've found is that when an experienced teacher says "Practice this. It's boring and you won't enjoy it and you'll wish you were doing something more exciting, but investing skill into it now will pay off later" I very rarely regret listening to them even if it seems totally useless at th…

I have no objection to your example, but it is a very different case; it is convincing vs forcing.

In your example the teacher is arguing to convince you, the final decision maker, that something is long term worthwhile even if near term unpleasant (and most adults who sign up for a class will usually listen to the teacher). The original example is closer to the teacher locking the door and saying "you will not leave until you show me that you learned X". Which is a very different setup that, even if fruitful, few adults will find palatable. My 2c.

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

#403

Post by wyclif »

mcculley wrote: post #269
jrochkind1 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 skille…

I also did this with my consultancy along with reimbursing employees for passing certifications and paying for tuition. Three of them work for Microsoft now and one works for Amazon. Others are at other big firms. I don't regret how I invested in them and I think it is great that they are doing so well in their careers, but I will not make an unsecured investment like that again.

It's sad to read comments like yours because I'm a junior dev myself. I can't blame you, though, because as I pointed out above, it's all due to perverse incentives in this industry.

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

#404

Post by wyclif »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #327
mcculley wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also did this with my consultancy along with reimbursing employees for passing certifications and paying for tuition. Three of them work for Microsoft now and one works for Amazon. Others are at other big firms. I don't regret how I invested in them and I think it is great that they are doing so well in their careers, but I will not make an unsecured investment like that again.

Yup. I guess one way to "secure" it would be to try to make them promise to keep working for you for a certain amount of time, but even if there's a legal way to do it, that just seems icky, who wants to force people to keep working for you when they don't want to, or the environment that will come from working with people who would rather be somewhere else but are being forced to stay. That's not a good solution.

In a standard tuition reimbursement situation, you have to stay at the company (even if you don't want to) and maintain a certain grade point average. Why can't software companies adjust to this but other kinds of employees can?

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

#405

Post by RyanGoosling »

confidantlake wrote: post #329
RyanGoosling wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s worthless. I’m not hiring someone from some bootcamp

The bootcamp I went to had someone with a perfect SAT and an engineering degree from Princeton. She is wicked smart and works for google. You would be crazy not to hire her just because she went to a bootcamp.

Engineering degree + bootcamp is a different story...

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

#406

Post by ghufran_syed »

estaseuropano wrote: post #394
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 have zero skin in the game either way, but this is such a sad and dismissive response. At the surface polite and accepting critique, but underneath that putting all the blame on the student that paid a ridiculous 30k for this. Generalised 'most did like/benefit from this' to discredit the specific critique while not engaging with the issue of why the issues weren't fixed. Supposedly a 1:10 teacher:student ratio but…

If they get a tech job paying greater than $50,000 per year, then they pay some proportion of their pay, for a period of years, up to a maximum of $30k. So are you saying the student earned enough to pay $30k? Then they also earned a lot more than that after the program for themselves. If they didn’t earn more than $50k per year for a few years after lambda school, they pay nothing

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

#407

Post by ghufran_syed »

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?

Do universities offer full refunds for the whole 4 years of a course if they had to change the curriculum while a student was studying there? If not, why such elevated expectations for a school that’s trying to align their interests with that of their students (school only gets paid if the student is financially successful), but not for other institutions that leave their students with massive debt that is not contingent on their student’s success?

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

#408

Post by ghufran_syed »

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…

How exactly are students being ripped off? They pay nothing up front, and only pay lambda school afterwards if they are financially successful in a tech job.

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

#409

Post by regretful_llama »

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…

Also a lambda student, 100% agree. This was actually one of the biggest selling points for me, I dug up lots of old articles and reddit threads and weighed the criticism against his responses. I thought it was endearing and refreshing and a really good sign to see the CEO have these discussions in public. It still gets to me too, reading his responses in this thread, I still want to believe they will do well by their students, but their track record doesn't hold up. He is just a STELLAR marketer.

In Lambda slack, dissent is shut down immediately by "student success" staff directing you to DMs. Or an individual zoom chat, which is friendly and seemingly receptive to feedback, but ultimately pointless. A student-created poll with 90+ votes was posted after the changes went live, and it was taken down immediately, along with all feedback, to be replaced by their byzantine "More Transparent" survey system, conveniently delayed to be issued on a Friday evening, that could be twisted into yet another glowing report on the exciting new changes.

Lambda has plenty of real feedback and criticism (constructive and otherwise) and they have no interest in it. They make a very convincing show of listening and having meaningful discussions, but look at the form of the substantive changes. They've completely gutted their successful learning structure to replace it with something cheaper, and hide the damage in their reporting. But they're still "iterating" so we'll see, right?

My key criticisms: 1. Waves arms This, all of this. The dishonesty. 2. Removing TLs. The accountability and required meeting every day really made the difference between this and self-study. TLs were holding the program together. 3. Instituting self grading with no human evaluation, even for end-of-module tests. You can join "code review" group calls but it's voluntary, there's no one checking your work at the end of the section. 4. Cutting the curriculum (there is no python instruction) Opting into the "extended curriculum" just means you repeat the same thing twice.

If you're considering joining, also be aware that he deletes comments and tweets, and is the moderator of the subreddit. From what I've seen, the style is to allow the dissent, maybe even engage, and then quietly delete it later after things have blown over. What you see online may be curated even if it seems like it's outside the purview of Lambda official channels.

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

#410

Post by dukes82 »

tharne wrote: post #358
a123b456c wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The frequent use of the term "disrupt", just shows how much the culture has descended into degeneracy. This is an extraordinary claim.

> This is an extraordinary claim. How so? I would argue that folks using millions of dollars in investment capital with no real goal other than to cause disruption, regardless of whether it helps anyone or even creates a viable business, is what's extraordinary. Think for a second what a dumb goal 'disruption' is on it's own. That's what bored 15 year old's do to amuse themselves, they disrupt and break things simply…

This evokes a disturbing image of VC's gambling on disruption events, the human costs and other consequences immaterial. Very well put and I wish this viewpoint could be spread further, I found it illuminating.
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