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Lambda School lays off 65 employees

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Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#221

Post by sugarwater »

recent_ds_grad wrote: post #175

Reading this feels a bit unfortunate, I was looking forward to making a post on next week's 'Who's Hiring May 2021' thread having finished their data science curriculum recently then polishing up my resume & personal site over the weekend. Going through a fully remote bootcamp backed by YC seemed like an excellent fit to be done in 6 months right around when second wave covid was about to hit, having been doing Adven…

Can agree with you 100% about Unit 3 in the data science track.

I know a few of my peers that walked out without even setting up their local development (because they were on windows and there was little help or instruction for students with windows).

But I'm glad you got something good out of CS and Labs. I'd describe CS as neutral for me... It was just grinding CodeSignal. Labs was extremely disorganized and suffered from a lack of leadership and its sudden shortened length (from 2 months to 1 month).

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#222

Post by havernator »

bigiain wrote: post #204
dnautics wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

serious question: Why isn't there a service "personal trainer for coding"? Not so much for juniors looking to get into the industry, but... I'm sure there's a continuous pipeline of high-value people who would pay $$$ to keep them accountable to doing say three coding exercises a week while they are getting ready to switch jobs or are between jobs.

Perhaps because one of the "three virtues of great programmers" is hubris - which Larry Wall optimistically defined as "The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about." but which also/really means "Excessive pride or self-confidence." I suspect many/most coders think a "personal trainer for coding" is a great idea - for other people (especially their idio…

Hubris drives you to re-build things you shouldn't... which is how you learn why they work the way they do. And maybe to try things you "shouldn't", which end up working out OK fairly often.

Is my take on how that's a virtue.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#223

Post by wyclif »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #75

Anecdotally we are seeing a lot of slack at the junior dev end of the labor market, and a popping of the bootcamp bubble. But make no mistake, this is mission accomplished not mission failed for some. We're the last best-paid skilled trade, and Capital is after us.

What do you mean by "slack at the junior dev end of the market?"

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#224

Post by wyclif »

andrew_ wrote: post #126
bpodgursky wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you quite appreciate the volume of utterly incompetent candidates (with plausible resumes) companies get for every software dev opening. It's a deluge, and no company on earth can deal with interviewing them all. The only realistic alternative to hackerrank is to do strict university filtering, only interviewing candidates who come from ranked universities. This is obviously terrible. Hackerrank, even t…

I'm not sure you appreciate the volume of utterly incompetent interviewers and processes now out there. I have 20 years of experience, a sizable catalog of open source work available for browsing, and yet even at this level I'm subjected to the nonsense that is leetcode. Another beef - I have yet to see an exercise which is remotely relevant to the work being done. Shuffling arrays, regurgitating interview preparatio…

The sad fact that Leetcode is still a required part of the interview process for a developer with 20 years of experience shows that there is no social trust in this industry. Company B has no faith that Company A employs competent developers. That needs to change. Perhaps what is needed is a standard competency that everyone in the network agrees to.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#226

Post by Ericson2314 »

wyclif wrote: post #223
Ericson2314 wrote: post #75

Anecdotally we are seeing a lot of slack at the junior dev end of the labor market, and a popping of the bootcamp bubble. But make no mistake, this is mission accomplished not mission failed for some. We're the last best-paid skilled trade, and Capital is after us.

What do you mean by "slack at the junior dev end of the market?"

"slack" means there's more supply than demand. Imagine a bunch of strings, maybe some sort of graph, that aren't being pulled very tight.

So in this case there are more junior devs than the employers want to hire.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#227

Post by throwawayboise »

wyclif wrote: post #147
908B64B197 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone ever tried hiring someone with no experience and turning him into a productive developer/QA/OPs in 6 months on the job?

They have. There are companies in the UK that hire Oxbridge grads from the humanities with no tech experience whatsoever and train them. In the States, IBM has a similar apprenticeship programme that lasts for 1 year.

In the mainframe era (e.g. up until the late 1990s maybe?) the big US consulting firms did the same thing. Andersen Consulting would hire smart history and english majors and teach them COBOL in 6 weeks and then dispatch them to a client site to work 60 hours/week. Granted their approaches, designs, and code were highly standardized, but the work got done.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#228

Post by fridif »

andrew_ wrote: post #135
fridif wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you truly believe that the measure of amazing programmer is churning out bullshit exercises on a timed call, I can only state that I'm thankful we don't work together. It's incredibly audacious gate-keeping and I'd dare say, discriminatory. It ignores disabilities, social adjustment conditions, etc that wouldn't impact daily work. I know too many incredible engineers that don't think in the way that those timed ex…

I do agree with you that the system blocks more people than it should. Personally, I think there should be many more apprenticeships than there are currently. There are many technical roles that can be fulfilled by people of all backgrounds.

But, for the most serious roles, there needs to be skill scrutiny and performance under pressure.

Think of the difference between a performing artist and a music teacher. Both are vital roles and have related but distinct skill sets. The performing artist must have everything drilled and ready to go on stage, much like a heart surgeon shouldn't be doing research on the operating table.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#229

Post by painfulpox »

sutterbomb wrote: post #205
painfulpox wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am about to start with a company through the Fellowship program on Monday. There is a staffing agency that we are paid through. The pay isn't phenomenal, but it is a buck or two above a living wage for the state you reside in. If the company decides they like us and want to keep us on, then they reimburse Lambda for what they paid us during the Fellowship. We aren't locked into the Lambda pay rate if we are hired,…

Above a living wage means what exactly? Above minimum wage?

Good question. I didn't really pry into other's situations. I was told compensation was based on state, and I really only know my own extremely well. I will tell you Bernie Sanders would approve, and then some, but for my particular area of the state (where most of us live, figures) it is probably deficient by about 3 dollars.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#230

Post by lifer555 »

bboylen wrote: post #122
lifer555 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me ~4 months. I interviewed with a handful of really great companies and made it to the final round with 4. Companies are definitely willing to interview/hire self taught developers. LS career services overall were pretty useless, but there were a few staff members who helped give guidance and I am really grateful for that. Try and find someone in the field who can help mentor you.

That's helpful and reassuring, thank you. I'm hoping to start attending in person tech events/meetups soon. Hopefully people are excited to be able to meet new people again :) Congratulations by the way!

Thank you!! And good luck :) I also recommend checking out apprenticeships. Asana, Twilio, and Twitter are just a few companies that have apprenticeships that specifically target self taught/bootcamp grads.
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