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

111–120 of 275 posts

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#111

Post by maximilianroos »

lifer555 wrote: post #99
seriousquestion wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you could do it over, what would you do instead to get the job?

I don't really regret attending Lambda School because it gave me structure that I needed, but I just got super lucky. I joined right before they made a ton of terrible changes to the program. I would either attend a better/different bootcamp or self teach and start working on solo projects. I participated in a few different hackathons and learned a whole lot more than I did during my 9 months at Lambda School.

Did your classmates also get good jobs, on average?

> I joined right before they made a ton of terrible changes to the program

What were these?

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#112

Post by google234123 »

calderarrow wrote: post #95
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…

I think most people who would be considering bootcamps are comparing it to a traditional 4-year college curriculum -- at least I did. I enrolled in the full-time web program a few years back and this was the back-of-the-napkin math I used to make my decision: Total Hours of College: 4 years, of which 2 years are "core" coursework and 2 years are general education. 2 Years * 2 semesters per year * 15 weeks per semeste…

General education courses do not take up half the course work. Moreover, you are suppose to spend 2-3 hours working out of class for every hour in class. You realize you have to study and do homework outside of class... No one considers a bootcamp to be comparable to an degree at a good university.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#113

Post by amitamit »

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…

To be fair, there are at least three distinct groups: 1) Employees being let go 2) Employees continuing 3) Students - current and prospective

Any statement has to balance the message across these three. For example, a statement that's "too negative" about future prospects risks spooking people in #3 - causing further damage to the business, as well as to people in #2.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#115

Post by google234123 »

medvezhenok wrote: post #84
mrcartmenez wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

They don't allow that at MIT anymore. Anyway, I have a feeling those stories got exaggerated over time.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#116

Post by elevenoh »

void_mint wrote: post #37
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?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26946972 Not all degrees are 100k. Lots of STEM degrees pay themselves off. The real issue is the time commitment. Most code school students (IME) are career changers that can't afford to spend 2-4 years changing skillsets. Also, Lambda School caps ISA at 30k, which I would argue is insane for a 6 month fulltime program. To your 100k example, college is actually cheaper.

Waterloo CS/Eng coop for instance, often pays itself off.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#117

Post by galaxyLogic »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #50
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…

That seems like an odd course setup for a DS. I'm not a DS but kind of learn about it as a hobby, but I think if you cut the course down to just the first 2 topics people would have a better foundation. All the DB related stuff seems like a bonus, ML should be easy to pick up if you have good LinAlg and stats knowledge and Python you can pick up along the way. I also agree on your last point. I don't understand how s…

The last point is important. When you're in a university you take different courses over the years but they often reuse or are based on some of the material covered in earlier courses. You learn by repetition and as you go into more advanced topics you can often understand better what you learned before - because you learn connections between things.

But when you need to learn a lot of things in a short period of time you don't have time to reflect and think how it all works together.

I find this often in my programming projects. Each sub-project requires a lot of focus and concentration. That seems to make it easy to forget about the previous (sub-)project almost totally. Putting in lots of new stuff into your brain means some older stuff gets pushed out of there.

The more you learn the more you forget. The only way to fight this is to try to understand the connections between the sub-topics, but if you are in a hurry you don't have time for that.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#118

Post by tetrahedr0n »

nrmitchi wrote: post #67
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…

I kind of suspect it's a bit of a light-weight Pareto principle: you can gain 70-80% high-level knowledge (note that I said knowledge , not understanding ), which is enough to get started with some real-world applications with sufficient handholding and mentoring. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing , but expectations should be set appropriately. If you've pre-screened to select for candidates who would be…

I think this is correct, re: the Pareto principle.

I'm a Lambda grad (Full stack web, not DS) and at the end of the program, I was knowledgeable about a lot more than I understood; and that also includes being knowledgeable about a lot of my shortcomings that I was painfully unaware of before Lambda.

A year after Lambda working as a SWE and I am now finally starting to feel a sense of domain... I hesitate to call it expertise, so lets say domain 'comfort' when it comes to building and maintaining react or react-like FE applications and node BE apis. I've had a mentor at my company since I started and mentorship is necessary for anyone coming out of a bootcamp with no prior industry experience, IMO.

The expectations set within the bootcamp are reasonable, IMO. Instructors never made it seem like we were going to fully internalize everything we were being bombarded with. Practicing what you learn is crucial to turning any of the things taught into a skillset, and that is made very clear.

I imagine the outcomes are pretty good for those who get through the program, as well. They were great for me and most of my cohort peers that I keep in contact with. The ISA model, IMO, makes a lot of sense and I'd be surprised if Lambda couldn't make it work in the long run.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#119

Post by sg47 »

bpodgursky wrote: post #2

Looks like a refocusing on the full-time program. Doesn't seem _too_ surprising, given how many part-time programs (ie, Coursera) have struggled to retain users distracted by jobs and life. I hope they figure it out. 4-year university education for everyone is a broken model, and students deserve a cheaper path that doesn't eat half a decade of their life.

I feel that immersive programs are the way to go. Teach each subject in 3 month chunks. Candidate can continue to apply for jobs with the skills they have learnt. Let's say they have acquired enough skills to find jobs at the 3rd, 6th or 9th month, they can leave the program. This compulsion to finish 4 years is nonsense.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#120

Post by TechBro8615 »

mehlmao wrote: post #89
breck wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Didn't they lie by wrongly saying the loan can't be discharged through bankruptcy? Surely that would make candidates less likely to join Lambda?

Why is it even in their interest to say that? It's not like them saying it makes it true. And if it were true, it would mean that Lambda is a bigger risk for the student who therefore may be less likely to apply.

Post reply on HN