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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

#171

Post by 908B64B197 »

bwing wrote: post #70

I was at Lambda when they announced the switch from 9 to 6 months and the elimination of paid team leaders. The feedback was universally negative. In a channel for open student discussion, Austen Allred deleted a poll from Slack because of how lopsided the reaction was. He explained the deletion by saying the poll was "misleading." Students then got a survey "explaining" why the change was actually a good thing by as…

I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0]. I guess that counts toward their "placement" stats!

Not only that, but Lambda seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]

I don't think I've seen a single hire out of a bootcamp work out in the end. Except a few cases where the person actually came from a STEM degree from a good school (and more crucially, already had some exposure to programming during the degree) but it's unclear to me that they actually needed the bootcamp and not just a good primer on modern software development and something like the Missing Semester [2] or a few classes at their school covering software engineering.

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610

[2] https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

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

#172

Post by effingwewt »

0des wrote: post #167
devteambravo wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who aren't equipped to deal with it, mainly. People who won't fight back. It's disgusting

Your testimony sounds a lot like those of the peers I have who were from ITT Tech.

And Hallmark, and every single other for-profit school ever.

And Lambda is worse as they take off the top from future earnings.

Glad this dumpster fire is big enough to garner serious attention finally.

Can't wait till austen et al come into the thread with their PR bullshit and lies as per usual.

edit- tale->take

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

#173

Post by autarch »

alasdair_ wrote: post #92

"Lambda School placed only 30% of its 2020 graduates in qualifying jobs during the first half of 2020. This figure is in stark contrast to the 74% placement rate it advertised for its 2019 graduates" It's almost as if something happened in 2020 that reduced the number of open positions available...

> It's almost as if something happened in 2020 that reduced the number of open positions available...

Did it? My impression has been that software dev jobs have exploded (or maybe continued to explode) during COVID. Maybe there was a bit of a slowdown in the first half of 2020?

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

#174

Post by spamizbad »

akanet wrote: post #120
spamizbad wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to say I'm a big fan of your journalism and CoderPad. One question I have about this: Do you think Lambda is uniquely problematic in this space or are they perhaps a more typical case? Are others worse? Anecdotally, back in 2019 I asked our internal recruiter to reach out to Lambda school to see about graduate resumes sent our way for jr software development positions. He emailed them but claims they were…

I think Lambda is an unusually bad bootcamp owing to their financialization strategy and also lack of prior educational experience in their leadership. I think there are good bootcamps, but the well is being poisoned a bit here.

Wouldn't Caleb Hicks, one of their founders, qualify as having education experience? https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebhicks/ -- I mean, it looks mostly like biz/corporate education stuff, and dev training experience seems to be narrowly focused but I guess it's not nothing.

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

#175

Post by ciberado »

sam0x17 wrote: post #35
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…

One huge mistake I think a lot (but not all of) the bootcamps are making is taking the easy route of simply using JavaScript to teach both frontend and backend. JavaScript is a TERRIBLE first programming language. I usually have to spend 2-3 sessions per mentee explaining the idiosyncrasies of JavaScript, where some of the OOP concepts actually come from, and how things work in other languages to put into context the…

My experience is quite different: I used to love to teach introductory courses using JS. Using an omnipresent and familiar tool like the browser as the IDE and the super-powerful debug system integrated on it is a big plus for newbies.

Also, the language has clear defects, but they irritate much more the experienced folks than the rookies (that are not so surprised when encountering inconsistencies).

Oh, and I have also trained many people using Java, and I initiated my dev career with Java 0.99 (or 0.98?). Most of my courses started with the sentence "let me tell you a joke: public static void main(String[] args)" :)

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

#176

Post by lozenge »

gameswithgo wrote: post #86
bwing wrote: post #70

I was at Lambda when they announced the switch from 9 to 6 months and the elimination of paid team leaders. The feedback was universally negative. In a channel for open student discussion, Austen Allred deleted a poll from Slack because of how lopsided the reaction was. He explained the deletion by saying the poll was "misleading." Students then got a survey "explaining" why the change was actually a good thing by as…

Why don't companies just speak plainly about these kinds of changes? "We are doing this to cut costs, which we need to do to [Survive/Buy a Yacht/Whatever]" People tend to be really understanding when you are brutally honest, and brutally cynical when you bullshit them even a little.

Because legal.

The students would understand, yes, but not accept getting something other than what they signed up for.

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

#177

Post by kregasaurusrex »

I'm a Lambda School data science graduate that's currently looking for a job, have been doing plenty of leetcode problems and DS&A studying recently. Resume & contact info is available on my profile if your company has any openings or if you just want to chat.

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

#178

Post by skrebbel »

threatofrain wrote: post #156
skrebbel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's something which can be done at build time, such as through a linter.

Some of it would need to be runtime checks to be fully consistent and unsurprising, I think.

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

#180

Post by lozenge »

lostinquebec wrote: post #160
sunny--tech wrote: post #98

> “Danner, who invested $1 million shortly after Lambda School's Series A, compared the complaints to his own experience launching the charter school Rocketship Education, which received public backlash for teaching elementary-school students on laptops without instructors for part of their day. "They said we were experimenting on the backs of children," Danner said. "But when SpaceX launched their first five rockets…

> last time I checked, SpaceX wasn’t promising 80% of its rockets would work back in its early days. Is your criticism that these places are making false promises, or: > “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work when the “things” are humans, not code and technology. RCTs and placebos work exactly this way. People literally die to help us learn what does and does not work. We lost 8-9 months of COVID-19 deaths because…

People joining trials aren't given fake information about how 70% of participants are given immunity from COVID...
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