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Lambda School lays off 65 employees

lambdaschool.com

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Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#231

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.

What aspects of mentorship did you find useful? I have made an effort to reach out to potential mentees, but the interaction falls apart when it becomes very clear that all they really need is for someone to give them a job or introduce them to someone who will give them a job.

My mentors helped me create my resume/portfolio, prep for interviews, find different resources, looked over my cover letters, put me in touch with their connections, and were just there for overall guidance and support.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#232
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was the job search? Was LS' career services useful at all? I'm a self taught dev that is going to start looking for a job in a few months

Things might have changed since I finished the program, but their career services were effective for me.

That's great!

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"motivated reporter" Strange way to describe oneself as a reporter isn't it? Shouldn't a reporter's goal to be to follow the facts where ever they lead devoid of any particular motive?

Off-topic, is there any cue in the above comment to indicate 'motivated' should be read as 'has a defined motive' vs 'enthusiastic / hard-working' ?

Well, if you click through and look at the OPs work they have previously written an article about the company they describe as, "basically accused the school and its chief officer of fraud".

On the comment itself though it is looking for former employees and stressing the anonymous source angle. If I'm promising not to reveal the identities off the bat I'm clearly fishing for negative views on something. Have you ever read an article where an anonymous source said something glowingly positive about a subject?

I sort of agree that Lambda School is probably over selling itself but if I were looking to learn more about it in a balanced manner I would probably use more neutral language when soliciting information.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#234
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems highly likely to me that if you get someone who excels on the steep parts of learning curves, 6 months studying the right things would be just as effective (if not more) than 4 years doing mostly busy work. I don't know what you were doing in college but anyone who can learn four years of material in six months probably doesn't need Lambda School in the first place.

If you cut out the commute, obsession with socializing, 1x speed inefficient lectures, impersonal general purpose homework, breadth first class catalog that try to get you well rounded - the necessary material for most professionals is not four years worth. "I never use what we learned at school, professional life is very different" is a very old meme. Where I live, colleges prepare you to be able to choose to be man…

You don't actually have to socialize that much in college. And most students don't have that long commute.

I don't think you should need college degree to code. But I don't think I could learn what I learned there in 6 months either.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#235

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 suffer…

“ 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).”

I remember the pains in undergrad of trying to get tensorflow to correctly make use the gpu on a windows machine. Not fun!

Anyways, not trying to be rude here, but this is pretty concerning to read. If someone needs to have their handheld through installs then I’m not sure how effective I’d ever expect them to be in any autonomous role with any ambiguity (hint: data science requires both). Even more concerning if this is at a later stage of the curriculum.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#236

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…

A friend of mine got a data scientist job at a well-known tech company after a summer-long bootcamp. He had previous experience, though, doing some academic-track work in a scientific field. So the training was giving him a more solid background in an area that he was kind of informally nudging into in the first place.

Technically the prerequisites are very loose but the best success stories I hear are usually more like, someone got a STEM degree but actually not all of those degrees translate into well-paying jobs, after this boot camp they were able to shift over to a data science career.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#237

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.

Yup I still consider myself junior level and the only available positions I see are senior.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#238

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…

> Disclosure: I have no contractual agreements with an ISA.

Does this mean you paid up front?

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#239

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…

I’m not sure how lambda could help with the jump to mid level engineer. That’s up to you once you start at a job... the main issue I see is that one has to compete with actually scientists (PhDs) that have many years of formal education and work on addressing hard problems.

Also, exceeding the max number of credit hours while at university is a mistake. Classes should only be a part of a university experience. Good students takes advantage of the other opportunities such and internships and working in research groups. If you want more education then go to grad school.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#240
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find this to be true as well. Almost all the openings I see are for senior devs.
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