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Lambda School lays off 65 employees

lambdaschool.com

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Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#21

Post by lifer555 »

idoh wrote: post #9

That's too bad. I'm rooting for Lambda School, they are trying hard to innovate in the area of education. Maybe ISAs are the future, maybe not, but the traditional university track of spending out $100K+ is clearly not the future. They should have been really excelling during the 2020 year of covid, I wonder where things went wrong. Anyone know?

I am a recent LS graduate. The program is a total shit show. I was able to get a job but I would never recommend it to anyone. They are just very good at marketing. Great idea, terrible execution.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#22

Post by a_lieb »

rightsizing wrote: post #4

Never heard of a right-sizing before. The linguistic hurdles of execs will never cease to amaze me!

"Rightsizing" is a weird one, because it's occasionally used for benign stuff like reducing the rate of hiring. Much like "enhanced interrogation techniques," the broader meaning provides shelter for what it's really used for most of the time.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#24

Post by toomuchtodo »

idoh wrote: post #9

That's too bad. I'm rooting for Lambda School, they are trying hard to innovate in the area of education. Maybe ISAs are the future, maybe not, but the traditional university track of spending out $100K+ is clearly not the future. They should have been really excelling during the 2020 year of covid, I wonder where things went wrong. Anyone know?

Aligning educational incentives is hard because no one wants to take the risks (a student who could be a 1x-10x developer or just wash out) and the costs (quality engineering talent that could be making serious money in industry) on.

Traditionally, you’d expect technology companies to have a pipeline to identify and cultivate junior talent (an apprenticeship). Instead, they rather pass the buck to leetcode and bootcamps. Quality engineers are expensive, so you have to operate your bootcamp similar to the traditional higher education TA model (low paid teaching the paying). Are ISAs predatory? Hard to say, depending on what you think of equity, free will, determinism, and “someone has to take the chance and pay for this.”

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#25

Post by ZephyrBlu »

symlinkk wrote: post #7

Kind of weird seeing this after following Austen on Twitter for so long, he is always bragging on there about how well they’re doing. I guess things aren’t always as great as they seem!

After seeing him on HN a few times it's really no surprise. He always seems to spin things positively. He even does it in this post.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#26

Post by granzymes »

jampekka wrote: post #13
rightsizing wrote: post #4

Never heard of a right-sizing before. The linguistic hurdles of execs will never cease to amaze me!

What amazes me even more is how this doublespeak has any effect at all anymore. Are there still people who don't see through this? Or are the execs in such a bubble they believe it themselves?

I wonder to what extent it has simply become a term of art. In biology, a specimen that is killed in the course of an experiment is described as "sacrificed" and has been for over a hundred years.

We expect certain words in a layoff press release, and so the writers of those press releases use those words.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#27

Post by pilingual »

lifer555 wrote: post #21
idoh wrote: post #9

That's too bad. I'm rooting for Lambda School, they are trying hard to innovate in the area of education. Maybe ISAs are the future, maybe not, but the traditional university track of spending out $100K+ is clearly not the future. They should have been really excelling during the 2020 year of covid, I wonder where things went wrong. Anyone know?

I am a recent LS graduate. The program is a total shit show. I was able to get a job but I would never recommend it to anyone. They are just very good at marketing. Great idea, terrible execution.

What about it makes you say that?

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#28

Post by teruakohatu »

Can someone explain how you can train Data Scientists in 6 months? What jobs do these grads walk into?

The tech prerequisite is: "You should feel extremely comfortable with how a computer works including: touch-typing, web browsers, search engines, and basic computer programs."

The Curriculum:

Stats, Linear Algebra AND Data Wrangling: 4 Weeks

Modeling: 3 Weeks

Data Engineering, Databases, SQL, Productionisation: 3 Weeks

Machine Learning, NLP, Neural Networks: 3 Weeks

Python, OOP, Algorithms & General CS: 3 Weeks

Project work: 3 Weeks

At that pace over so many subject is anyone walking out able to remember what a dot product or a t-test is from week 1?

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#30

Post by elliekelly »

hobs wrote: post #20
fridif wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, while I'm no "corporate simp", it is entirely possible that a company has hired too many people and needs to fire them to return to the "right size" for profitability to be sustained.

We needed to reduce headcount to maintain profitability. You can keep some marketing speak without being absolutely full of it.

> We needed to reduce headcount to maintain profitability.

Is Lambda School profitable? They’re still pretty new. And in an entrenched/moderately regulated space. I’d be surprised.

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