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Lambda School lays off 65 employees

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Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#241

Post by doktorhladnjak »

elliekelly wrote: post #19
908B64B197 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the signal to noise ratio for bootcamp is very low. You might get a diamond in the rough sometimes but it's so inefficient compared to a hiring pipeline from real schools. Lambda now has a program where you can "try" one of their graduates for a few weeks free of charge. Contrast that with the signing bonuses you see negotiated at serious career fairs... That should give you an idea how much people…

> Lambda now has a program where you can "try" one of their graduates for a few weeks free of charge. Any idea how this works? It seems like it would be difficult to have such a program without running afoul of labor laws. Does Lambda have the equivalent of a temp staffing agency subsidiary to facilitate this program?

When it was first announced, the students weren’t paid. There was massive outcry on Twitter and elsewhere that this was an illegal violation of labor laws so Austen changed his tune and said Lambda would pay the students minimum wage.

There are so many shady, obvious blunders like this when it comes to Lambda School

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#242

Post by gher-shyu3i »

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…

It's obviously trying to jump on the data science hype train and make quick money while making exaggerated promises.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#243

Post by cbozeman »

least wrote: post #199
NationalPark wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are the actual stats: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cpa.asp About 45% of high school graduates enroll immediately in a 4 year program.

Statistics of enrollment percentage doesn’t really describe the culture surrounding college in the United States, though. Plenty of people don’t end up going to college but that certainly hasn’t stopped it being considered a panacea for employability in this country. This is still being pushed by politicians. It’s still what pretty much every parent hopes for their children as well. On this website I’ve seen people d…

> On this website I’ve seen people derisively describe people as not college educated.

This is unfortunate, because I've met quite a few very smart people who never went to college, or who started but had life circumstances that pulled them away before they were able to complete a degree.

College is not a panacea and the sad but honest truth is that most jobs do not require a college degree. Most of the jobs in America can easily be done with on-the-job training; we've just seen companies shift to a model where they want to offload those costs to the American worker by letting them spend $50,000 to $250,000 and four years of their lives "proving" they can get an education that many of them don't really need, and don't really want in the first place.

We also allowed well-meaning people to pass laws preventing companies from conducting IQ tests and thereby sorting people as was done many years ago. I know this is true because years ago I used to eat lunch with the Director of Human Talent Acquisition at my company almost every day, and we would discuss this. He was a very engaging gentleman in his mid-70s with an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of current and past HR topics, philosophies, and controversies. He had worked for a well-known Fortune 50 company for almost 35 years before "retiring" to my company, a mere Fortune 1000 player. He can recall using IQ tests to sort applicants into positions for which we now demand bachelor's degrees, or in some cases, even master's degrees.

A bit sad, if you ask me. Our culture should be progressing, not regressing...

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#244

Post by imtringued »

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've thought about the Lambda School model, sure the funding model is good, however the problem is what that funding is being used for. If you could work on the material on your own and hire a TA paid by the hour to grade your assignments, give feedback and provide assistance, basically only pay for the services that you actually need then the cost for a degree would go down massively.

What Lambda School is trying to do right now is just fish for good students and hope they graduate as quickly as possible so they can collect as many ISAs as possible for as little cost as possible.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#245

Post by villgax »

Do they themselves hire folks they train? This is akin to Byju's in India with WhiteHatJr coding classes for kids by milking the parents fear of not wanting their kids to be left out. That monster ended up unleashing a fake kid to be used in their Ads & launching completely useless & random app(which they themselves create & pass off to parents) onto play stores & boasting about it with Twitter a/c's of kids who are not old enough to even register an account. The only shade that they hide behind is that they hire only women teachers, nobody out here is denigrating on that point yet they try to make that the case by hiring sub-par faculties.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#246

Post by andrew_ »

fridif wrote: post #228
andrew_ wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

Are we going to ask a symphonic performer to produce scales during an interview, a heart surgeon to suture a laceration? We would not, it would be insulting for a myriad of reasons.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#247

Post by confidantlake »

fridif wrote: post #228
andrew_ wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

The vast majority of software jobs do not need performance artist skills. Most of the pressure is deadline pressure, not "stage" pressure.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#248

Post by sugarwater »

jwilber wrote: post #235
sugarwater wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's in the third month of the curriculum, after primarily only working with Google Colab in the previous two.

Keep in mind that a majority of the students have never seen or touched a command-line, and trying to install various tools resulted in a lot of errors for a lot of students, troubleshooted by TLs that were only students 2+ months ahead.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#249

Post by hobs »

elliekelly wrote: post #30
hobs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then say margins, runway, etc - just say what's happening.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#250

Post by AlwaysRock »

dnautics wrote: post #152
jurassic wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

There are programming tutors on wyzant and other services. I suspect a lot of people learning to code who already have a coding friend/person in their life do this informally.
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