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Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

businessinsider.com

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Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#131

Post by emaginniss »

ggreer wrote: post #67
akanet wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you conceive of the school as - is it an educational institution that has an incentive to improve the lives of each one of its students, incurring variable cost for each? Or is it a fishing expedition to land as many students as possible for as cheaply as possible, and letting the ones who were going to get jobs on their own anyway pay for the rest?

If we judged colleges by the same standards, I doubt they'd come off better. Normal colleges are fishing expeditions to land as many students as possible for as cheaply as possible and burden students with inescapable debt. Students have to pay even if they don't graduate or get a good job. 4-year graduation rates are below 50%. After 6 years, only 62% of college students have gotten a 4-year degree. The rest are stu…

Source control is not in the domain of computer science. You're thinking of software engineering. Many CS grads become software engineers (myself included) and we apply the concepts that we learn from CS in our jobs.

CS teaches us:

- How computers work (assembly, compilers)

- Logic and math (automata theory, set theory, numerical analysis)

- How to make computers do what we want (algorithms, data structures, performance)

If they taught you how to use subversion, that data might be useless by the time you graduate. Hopefully, the other stuff they taught you will make you able to better understand source control.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#132

Post by ghaff »

xtracto wrote: post #111
spoonjim wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does any country do a decent job of retraining 70 year old men for developer positions? This does not need to be a high priority for a society if the 70 year old can afford a roof of their head and a meal.

My thought was around those lines: 60/70 year olds shouldn't be struggling to get retrained. They should be able to live the rest of their lives in retirement. Society should take care of their elders. That's where I would start a UBI program if I could. Sure, if anyone wants to use their time to learn something new that would be a plus for them.

Well, we sort of do. It's called social security. Now, you could argue that social security by itself only supports a pretty spartan lifestyle. But any UBI proposal is probably even less money.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#133

Post by abecedarius »

skrebbel wrote: post #100
sam0x17 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They run into enough problems with objectness just learning map / filter / reduce. I've seen so many angry / frustrated students trying to use a for each loop to iterate over an Array only to find that although this works in most languages, in js these just loop over the fucking KEYS of the object (which now opens up the discussion about how `obj[1]` is not a key but `obj['hey']` is a key and the differences therein.

I wonder if there would be a market for a "stricter mode" version of JavaScript that simply does not allow you to use the legacy features that are so quirky. Eg just disallow for...in to be used at all (but allow for...of) No iterating over objects except via eg Object.entries No inheriting objects from other objects (ie no prototypal inheritance) No var No anonymous functions (ie only named function declarations or…

I haven't tried it, but somewhere in that neighborhood: https://github.com/endojs/Jessie

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#134

Post by ska »

ResearchCode wrote: post #74
wly_cdgr wrote: post #47

Having majored in English Literature at an Ivy, let me just say, 30% is a pretty damn good industry placement rate. That said, I'm sure the large majority of those people could have done just as well through self-study and $1-2k worth of MOOCs

While not having majored in medicine myself, I see no reason why CS couldn't have a 99% placement rate too.

It's an interesting point, not just the placement rate but the graduation rate for medical schools is very high (barring a few last-chance, offshore type places if I understand correctly).

I never did it but have watched the process from a few different viewpoints. My impression is that the gatekeeping on the entry side is pretty strong (not just exam results, good schools may have multiple interviews before letting you in) but they also have ton of resources available to help you if you are bogged down. This latter part is helped by high tuition.

As for the vetting, as far as I can see they are fine with a bunch of false negatives, which results in more homogeneity than may be desired. It doesn't seem to be particularly empirical.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#135

Post by jesuis_14 »

gkop wrote: post #115
jesuis_14 wrote: post #9

I'm curious about the future of Lambda School. Apparently, the co-founders have been lying about the numbers for years like there's no tomorrow, but the money still came in. It's pretty clear that the business is not sustainable nor does it have much hope of becoming profitable even in the short term.In addition, the school's reputation is tarnishing, and there have also been a few clashes with the institutions that…

Austen will get a soft landing. Look at the circle jerk of YC and YC-adjacent cheerleaders that have gone to bat for Lambda School.

Funny how the pg was rooting for him by calling Allred "relentlessly resourceful" while it was clear even to naive ears and eyes that it was the lies that were relentless and the resources were mostly talking a great game, but with no results to back it up.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#136

Post by ghaff »

herbturbo wrote: post #82
sam0x17 wrote: post #24

It isn't just Lambda School. I mentor for [insert large coding bootcamp here] and I will say things have been going badly across the board for more than 50% of students. They recently had to cut a lot of staff, and completion rates seem to hover around only 50-60% when you take into account all the students they remove from this calculation when they withdraw for "personal reasons". The employment numbers I don't hav…

That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people. Isn't that just a case of some students having natural ability where a large percentage do not? If being a good developer was only about knowing syntax and wri…

I very much doubt it's exclusively "natural ability" (whatever that means exactly. I suspect that most people who are really motivated to finish and can set aside the time to do so can get the certificate even if they don't have the whatever to become really good developers.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#137

Post by Daishiman »

devteambravo wrote: post #72
arthurwu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did it suck?

Students graded students papers. Racism. Unending trolling on Slack. Peers panicking as they realize the program was not "finished". (ie: We were paying beta testers) Being roped in to the web dev program when I didn't want to be a dev (This happened after the UX program was shut down). I could write a book

Move fast and break people.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#138

Post by akanet »

vorador wrote: post #114
akanet wrote: post #8

Hi I wrote this piece and am perhaps still better known here as the founder of CoderPad, etc. I'm happy to answer any questions throughout the day, so long as they are on-topic and civil.

Would love to hear a bit about what got you interested in journalism and in lambda school – thank you!

I saw a really silly tweet one of their former execs made and then just started gathering information about them for fun. I tried to get a friend who was a writer to do the story, but she eventually told me to fuck off and do it myself. It took a little bit of convincing myself that such a thing it was possible, but it was a very enjoyable journey.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#139

Post by [deleted] »

rossdavidh wrote: post #110

So, I learned to code at an odd program at Univ. of Texas - Austin, essentially a bootcamp for coders that began in the 1970's and still runs today. They take about 9 months to get you to a beginning programmer level, then you program (for UT administration) up through a kind of apprenticeship. It worked very well, and the washout rate has historically been about 10%; that is, 90% of those initially admitted go on to…

[deleted]

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#140

Post by ghaff »

bwing wrote: post #102
gigatexal wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this sums up the issue with bootcamps: "That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people." Some folks thrive in this environment either by natural ability or their learning style and others do not. For…

Because they have minimal admissions filter and constantly tell students not to give up, to fight imposter syndrome, student testimonials, "this is the toughest thing you'll ever do but it's so worth it." College is gated by GPA and standardized test scores. You can quibble over the effectiveness and wisdom of this specific gate, but the upside is that mediocre students aren't going to spend a year and $30,000 convin…

It almost seems as if there should be a book or a website the gist of which is: "If you can't and don't want to plug through the concepts and problems here, you're wasting your money to go to a bootcamp."

Heck, there are "intro" (OK, some of them aren't really) MOOC classes that, while more theoretical in some cases, should give you a pretty good idea if this is something you're really willing to devote a lot of time and money to.

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