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

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

#361
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's a reasonable point of view. The other way to go on that is you're in an country whose culture you don't understand which as a wildly corrupt, crony-riddled military dictator and nobody has any rights at all. Do you want locally bottled Coke(tm) with the red label and dynamic ribbon for your very thirsty child or locally bottled "Odin's Thirst Quencher! (est. 2021)"? Coke are going to enforce quality control…

>But the higher issue is information. Should you be able to sell the same product with a very different quality under the same name? Barq's famously does this and doesn't seem to have any issues.

Barq's make their product garbage and sell it for the same price with the same name as product they sold before? With no issues? Really?

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

#362
post #264

The problem with any education is how do you figure out the actual value added? We all know that kid who would learn stuff regardless of what environment he was put in, and his opposite. And then probably a fair few in the middle where the environment actually matters. When you're looking at outcomes, how do you know which school is worth paying for? I'm facing this issue myself right now for my primary school kids.…

> The problem with any education is how do you figure out the actual value added? Answer: with a randomised controlled trial. That is, the school randomly rejects a number of applicants who meet the enrolment criteria, then it follows up after 5 years to see if the accepted students are significantly better off than the rejected candidates (eg. in terms of income). Austen Allred, the CEO of Lambda School, has already…

Doesn't it need to be doubly randomized? They'd have to accept people they'd otherwise reject?

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

#363
post #99

I come from the failed Lambda School UX program. It wasted more than a year of my life. And to add insult to injury, after having succeeded in learning UX on my own + finding employment, I now send them a mortgage payment's worth of $$$ every month, until I reach that $30k limit. What a damn scam.

I wonder how many university students are jealous of you? I spent three years doing a Bachelor of Engineering, which I consider three years lost. The piece of paper got me a job, but I certainly felt I was less valuable after finishing the degree than I was before it (negative learning is a thing).

Why do you feel that you were less valuable after you completed your degree?

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

#364
post #333
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep redrafting a blog post in my head about this cycle and how it means that even though the world is getting better, every specific brand is getting worse. (There was a wonderful post about Starbucks specifically that I now can't find, talking about how they grew their reputation by having hand-made coffee that people loved before switching to machine brewing that required less skill and people wouldn't hate). I…

Not every brand is getting worse. Some are staying the same, and some are improving. The regulation you suggest seems a bit silly. If transparency is good for a brand, companies can already implement it. (And if customers don't care enough to pay for transparency, why force them to?) What's the externality that your proposed regulation is trying to internalize? Also keep in mind that disclosure regulations put an und…

> What's the externality that your proposed regulation is trying to internalize?

The externality is the cost of staying informed. The theorems about the efficiency of a free market assume perfect information. If someone reads Consumer Reports and decides that brand XYZ is making a good product they want to buy, but brand XYZ switches to producing lower-quality products in between when the review is written and when the reader buys the thing, then we lose all the benefits that the free market was supposed to give us.

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

#365
post #321
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, learning useful skills while declaring bankruptcy. Something tells me you've never even come close to walking in those shoes. The second you stop generating profit, the state starts treating you like a broken toy.

Guess again my friend. Ate old canned food for a very long time while my parents declared bankruptcy as a kid - twice - so we at least had a roof over our head, and wore the same two shirts for years too. My Mom finished a 4 year degree several years afterwards that helped us pull out of the economic collapse of the aerospace industry in the area that had trapped us - and was studying late in the night to do it. Whil…

> my parents

the battle cry of every 20-something laissez faire evangelist

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t compare uni and bootcamps because they’re a false equivalency as someone else pointed out. The sole purpose of a bootcamp is to get a job afterwards. That’s why they market their job placement rates so much. Uni, video courses, and MOOCs are for education. Not everyone uses them to get a job, so job placement for a video course or uni compared to bootcamp doesn’t give you much info. Anecdote: I did a self-p…

Wish someone told me before I got $300,000 into debt that my liberal arts degree wasn't going to help me get employment. My university was certainly not up front about that. And if they had been honest about the fact that the degree was worth fuckall in the job market I would have not wasted my money there.

Bankruptcy law should somehow apply to school loans after 7 years. Bankruptcy puts some of the onus of bad, ill-advised loans on the lender. Bankrupcy law partially aligns lender goals with borrower goals, as they then have a vested interest in your success.

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

#367

IAMA Former founder @ Hack Reactor, one of the larger coding bootcamps. I left Hack Reactor some time after selling to Galvanize in 2018. I now run a clean energy startup and am commenting as a bystander (no insider knowledge @ Lambda). Here are some thoughts in no particular order. Feel free to AMA as well. 0) Bootcamps are extremely sensitive to complaints to their regulators. If you are eg. seeking a refund for mo…

> 1) Many bystanders think the ISA business model is predatory. I've seen it compared to slavery. I've talked with hundreds of low-income, high-promise people, and ISAs are 1000% more attractive to that audience than more conventional debt-like instruments, even debt-like instruments with forgiveness protocols. When people talk about what's good for low-income students, and say it's not ISAs... I don't think these people have a cohesive theory of educational access??? I can't explain it.

Yeah, the state pays for education and people like you pay taxes to the state.

Anything else trends toward slavery.

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

#368

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…

Can you link to this programme please? Do they accept people who can't legally work in the US?

No, it's for people who are legal to work for UT, in fact. While in the program, you are an employee (albeit with a lower salary than after you complete it). They ask that you commit to working for UT for 3 years at least. It's meant to fill UT's need for developers for their administrative systems.

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

#369
post #335
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In respect to Sea World the more realistic strategy is either run at a minor loss until the real estate is profitable or squeeze dry ASAP and sell. Or the timeless play of load it with debt, payout themselves and declare bankruptcy. Of course there are other PE businesses that are ran with only minor changes. I have a friend whose firm invests in dermatology offices and has created a network of small offices nation w…

> Or the timeless play of load it with debt, payout themselves and declare bankruptcy. Well, as long as they sell the bonds only to consenting adults, what's wrong with that?

This model is not good for society as a whole.

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

#370
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expert Excel proficiency is mostly useful in data heavy roles such as finance, which is just one subset of MBAs. For other roles, it's useful to be able to calculate simple sums/averages/vlookups but going beyond that is outside of their required skillset

I've done big spreadsheets over the years in product management and other roles. But they've never been especially complicated--certainly not in the stereotypical complex models sense. Honestly, anyone who goes into the corporate world and, outside of pure creative roles, thinks they never will have to deal with big spreadsheets associated with budgets, sales forecasts, and the like is going to be very disappointed.…

No but they do need to be able to be comfortable with mathematics and need to be able to make sure their models are correct. Which I would argue is not always the case.
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