Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lambda School lays off 65 employees

lambdaschool.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 275 posts

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#81

Post by benmller313 »

wbronitsky wrote: post #32

The levels of inhumanity and doublespeak in here are staggering. This post attempts to euphemize 65 people losing their incomes, and probably healthcare, to the point that it reads almost as farce. Not to mention what the impact will be on those remaining, students and staff alike. "...they believe it's impossible to make this model work. We strongly disagree." This is wildly insensitive to those involved. I find it…

I've never been laid off before but I think you can be empathetic of the people laid off here without treating them like emotional simpletons.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#82

Post by thelean12 »

breck wrote: post #78
thelean12 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Austin seems to take corp-speak to another level. See his response when they settled with the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26948258

> "they had to settle" I am an outsider, but clearly looks to me like they chose to not fight that battle, which was just legal thuggery. Colleges in the U.S. are a racket that make the mafia look like a bunch of amateurs. The Bankruptcy Exception for student loans is one of the most corrupt scams going on in the USA today.

I didn't put much thought into that phrasing. Changed it to "settled" instead to better reflect reality.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#83

Post by nr2x »

teruakohatu wrote: post #57
nr2x wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure "data wrangling" boils down to god-tier regex knowledge - which is less theoretical heavy-lifting than an acquired art that comes with practice.

It is more than that and it is what Data Scientists spend a significant amount of time doing. Real world data is extremely messy and a lot of time is often spent understanding what exactly the data is, changing it from wide to long, deciding how to deal with missing values etc. This highly cited paper is a good introduction to the subject: https://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.pdf

Yes, I’ve been doing this for 20 years, I’m aware.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#84

Post by medvezhenok »

mrcartmenez wrote: post #60
potatoman22 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh, you could come close to condensing 1-2 college courses into 4 weeks. It wouldn't be fun though.

There’s decent science on why this isn’t possible. Basically you need to space things out to give the brain time to work out what to put into long term memory

It's possible, but for very few people. I went to MIT and there were stories of people there taking ~12-16 classes a semester which theoretically averages out to a course a week (though they ran concurrently and it's a crazy course load for the average person). To be fair, the people who could do that were way on the right of the distribution and it's hard to convey just how fast they could pick things up (think of them as the equivalent of an NBA player vs the average MIT student as a D1 athlete).

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#85

Post by paxys »

temp8964 wrote: post #65

I hope they success. The traditional higher education is becoming more and more a scam. Federal government is backing almost all the student loans, but universities automatically increase their tuitions. The student loan crisis is a clear indication that this model is not working. For the past 20 years, in-state public university tuitions have increased more than 200% [1]. Now the total student loans count to approxi…

If you look at how much these bootcamps charge (both in terms of tuition and income sharing), college is by far the cheaper option.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#86

Post by mxschumacher »

jurassic wrote: post #79
mxschumacher wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you have a STEM degree, what value can you derive from short introductory classes on linear algebra, Python and relational databases? Countless truly excellent and free/cheap resources on these topics exist and you don't have to give a way a significant percentage of your yearly salary.

I think the value is similar to the value of a personal trainer. There's no rocket science involved in maintaining fitness, but many people find value in the added accountability and planning support.

I really like the idea of a talented tutor helping with subjects I struggle with. Even if it costs thousands of dollars this can be a great investment. The offer would have to be focused, customized and beyond the basics. Given the materials that are out there (MIT open courseware comes to mind) it is really beyond me why people spend so much.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#87

Post by whymauri »

sandofsky wrote: post #42
teruakohatu wrote: post #28

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 We…

You assign precourse work that rejects 98% of applicants. That helps select students with existing experience, sometimes even STEM degrees. According to the example contract on their site, their income share agreements last up to seven years. Even if they fail to teach a student anything, the student can spend years studying on their own (or even get a degree), and still owe money.

>You assign precourse work that rejects 98% of applicants.

I think a good model for this is the Insight Fellowship. By selecting mostly STEM Ph.D. graduates, the pool of students already has some relevant background/foundation. The focus can then be on the tools and methods for applying DS in a corporate/business setting, which is actually relevant for jobs.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#88

Post by fridif »

andrew_ wrote: post #35
fridif wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I used to be against the technical interview process, but now I wholeheartedly believe in every facet of it (Leetcode, book knowledge, project based behavioral questions, system design). The quicker everyone learns these important concepts, non of which are taught in school or in bootcamps, the quicker one gets to be productive in programming.

leetcode/hackerrank is the worst thing to happen to tech interviews this decade.

Explain your reasoning, and I will explain mine.

While some of the leetcode questions have tedious edge cases and ambiguous logic, there is no doubt in my mind that lists, trees, arrays, queues, maps, graphs, sorting, binary searching, and memoization are crucial for being an amazing programmer

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#89

Post by mehlmao »

breck wrote: post #78
thelean12 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Austin seems to take corp-speak to another level. See his response when they settled with the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26948258

> "they had to settle" I am an outsider, but clearly looks to me like they chose to not fight that battle, which was just legal thuggery. Colleges in the U.S. are a racket that make the mafia look like a bunch of amateurs. The Bankruptcy Exception for student loans is one of the most corrupt scams going on in the USA today.

>legal thuggery

Lambda lied to their students for years about loan dischargeability. They were told to stop by the regulator, so Lambda did. The regulator did nothing to penalize them.

Post reply on HN