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BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

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Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#131

Post by sriram_sun »

austenallred wrote: post #72
sandofsky wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "attacked by all sides" comment is quite bizarre. Every pain the company experienced was self-inflicted. They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is a source of active lawsuits. They dodged California regulators and then lied to students about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020. They launched an unpaid intern program, which created a backlash in the tech…

* They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is the source of active lawsuits No we did not. We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), which we share with investors because that indicates how much we get pai…

tl;dr: The word "placement" was sometimes used to refer to students who graduated without a job offer.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#132

Post by CSMastermind »

jurassic wrote: post #55
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Filling out staff roles at FANG? Not at the FANG company I work at. I’ve never met a single boot camp person, and absolutely zero staff engineers are boot camp grads that I know of, unless they scrubbed it from their LinkedIn and never talk about it.

> I’ve never met a single boot camp person, and absolutely zero staff engineers are boot camp grads that I know of, unless they scrubbed it from their LinkedIn and never talk about it. This comment has the same energy as the person I once worked with who told me (a lesbian) with total confidence that they'd never met a gay person before. Just because you aren't aware doesn't mean it's not happening all around you. It…

I'm skeptical of that claim as well. I happen to have a roster of product and engineering employees at a FAANG company.

It doesn't include any information about their education but what I can do is pick a selection of the staff level engineers at random and look them up on LinkedIn.

Here's the highest level of education attained by the first 50 I looked at:

7 had a PhD in Computer Science

1 had a PhD in Physics

1 PhD in Electrical Engineering

12 had a master's degree in Computer Science

1 had a master's degree in Computer Engineering

1 had a master's degree in Information Management

13 had a bachelor's degree in Computer Science

1 had a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering

1 had a bachelor's degree in Information Technology

6 did not list any educational experience

6 I could not find on LinkedIn

I did not see any that mentioned a coding bootcamp explicitly.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#133

Post by MivLives »

Manuel_D wrote: post #127
MivLives wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes. They were taking what they learned and applying it. Others organized groups of people, and essentially formed a small support network of people in a similar position. I completely understand that not everyone has the time for that. I think two things happened over Lambda's life span that effected the qual…

Did lambda school have any sort of assessment before accepting students? This really resonates with my observations. The people who got the most out of software bootcamps were those that had tinkered with video game modding, WordPress, etc. and had done some self-learning of coding before going to a bootcamp. In other words, people who knew they liked hacking on tech and had a basic ability to code. They approached t…

They had a prebootcamp with a free course that taught the basics. Some people cheat through that though and didn't quite process that... you can't really pull that off through the whole program?

I totally saw people who had never coded before succeed, I'm not sure I could pick out in an interview who would do well and who wouldn't. It's a marathon not a sprint.

For the selectivity thing... I'm really not sure. The selling ISAs thing was a bit weird when I learned about. I honestly kinda wonder about the actuarial calcs of it all.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#134

Post by ZephyrBlu »

decohen wrote: post #102
user3939382 wrote: post #93

If I may comment on the abstract: I don’t get these bootcamps. I’ve been programming for 30 years and I still feel like there’s another 60% of the craft to learn. More data structures, algorithms, functional strategies, large system architecture, read/write fanning, I’m just getting into websockets now. The list goes on. These people are getting hired as programmers? To do what?

Several of my relatives are Mechanical Engineers. In that field, it seems typical to have both engineers and technicians working on projects. Engineers are responsible for design, and have degrees; Technicians do assembly and maintenance, and only need on-the-job training. I’ve often wondered what our industry would look like if we adopted a similar distinction. In which case, bootcamp graduates would be a natural fi…

That's just gatekeeping based on having a degree.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#135

Post by morgante »

MivLives wrote: post #106
onetimeusename wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why weren't lambda grads able to get good jobs? I think that was the main controversy. Was it the instruction or what went wrong there?

Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes. They were taking what they learned and applying it. Others organized groups of people, and essentially formed a small support network of people in a similar position. I completely understand that not everyone has the time for that. I think two things happened over Lambda's life span that effected the qual…

> Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes. They were taking what they learned and applying it.

Is this a knock on Lambda School, though?

You can go to MIT but if you never apply your learnings you won't be a good engineer.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#136

Post by runako »

austenallred wrote: post #80
throwaway2729 wrote: post #15

The CEO was cheering on when Musk laid off half the company. Not surprised.

I wouldn't say I was cheering; I was simply acknowledging that, though difficult, Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of revenue they're bringing in, and I am skeptical of claims that Twitter will cease to function as they go from 8,000 employees to whatever the new number is (2,500 seems to be the latest)? There's certainly internal knowledge that is lost in a transition of that kind, but the amo…

[I am explicitly not weighing in on whether this gambit will work or not. Could go either way, there is a lot of luck involved in business.]

> Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of revenue they're bringing in

This doesn't make any sense given that Twitter's revenue per employee (RPE) was roughly double that of well-run companies like Oracle or SAP and in the ballpark of EA and Adobe. This metric is a red herring currently being used to trim workforces. Which, that's the game and this is where we are in the cycle. But the ratio of revenue:employee doesn't tell the story here.

Granted cost structures and business models are different across these firms, and Twitter likely could have cut some staff (they all likely will in coming months now that it is timely to do so). But that's exactly the point here: the Twitter ratio between employees and revenue works fine at other companies, and has done so for a long time. Expedia has built a sustainable business with a lower RPE than Twitter, and it is similarly a pure-play Internet company. From a strictly financial perspective, it's equally likely that there were other levers that could have equally been tuned to fix Twitter's persistent problems.

IMHO the bigger problem was they are tooled as a high-growth company, but they were not growing fast. Even a modest bit of consistent growth, say 15% y/o/y, sustained for years, would likely have ameliorated their problems. Perhaps they have a large fixed cost to running Twitter, and they simply have not scaled the business enough to make it worthwhile yet -- could they double their business from the pre-acquisition base while only increasing staff 25%? That would be a good business! But I would guess the fundamental issue was that they are tooled for hypergrowth that is likely not on the radar.

Big staff cuts, modest (but smaller) revenue drops, then aiming to grow at a slower, sustainable pace is pretty stock PE stuff (although they typically try to pay at or below market instead of much higher than market). Can only assume people who see this as genius have never observed PE work.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#137

Post by austenallred »

Manuel_D wrote: post #127
MivLives wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes. They were taking what they learned and applying it. Others organized groups of people, and essentially formed a small support network of people in a similar position. I completely understand that not everyone has the time for that. I think two things happened over Lambda's life span that effected the qual…

Did lambda school have any sort of assessment before accepting students? This really resonates with my observations. The people who got the most out of software bootcamps were those that had tinkered with video game modding, WordPress, etc. and had done some self-learning of coding before going to a bootcamp. In other words, people who knew they liked hacking on tech and had a basic ability to code. They approached t…

This is generally true but not always. As you can imagine we have loads of data on this.

If you only selected students who had been tinkering with writing code for 10 years certainly you'd be successful in doing so, but you'd also eliminate ~90% of those who we have seen become software engineers.

The only way we've found that does it well is to have people actually start writing code and see if they enjoy it. That's why we now have multiple free classes, have a free dropout period once you're in the school, and even have a three-week free trial of the school itself.

The notion that financing ISAs removed the incentives isn't really accurate.

First, most of the time ISAs are financed it's in the form of a loan you have to pay back with interest with an ISA and its repayments as collateral, or it's a sale to a neutral SPV with recourse in the case repayments don't hit a certain threshold.

In the rare instance (we've never done that) schools have been able to sell ISAs full stop, it's been at extreme discounts or based on discounted predicted likelihoods of future revenue, and if those ISAs don't repay the buyers bail and the school trying to sell them is out of business.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#138

Post by austenallred »

MivLives wrote: post #133
Manuel_D wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did lambda school have any sort of assessment before accepting students? This really resonates with my observations. The people who got the most out of software bootcamps were those that had tinkered with video game modding, WordPress, etc. and had done some self-learning of coding before going to a bootcamp. In other words, people who knew they liked hacking on tech and had a basic ability to code. They approached t…

They had a prebootcamp with a free course that taught the basics. Some people cheat through that though and didn't quite process that... you can't really pull that off through the whole program? I totally saw people who had never coded before succeed, I'm not sure I could pick out in an interview who would do well and who wouldn't. It's a marathon not a sprint. For the selectivity thing... I'm really not sure. The se…

Honestly I was a little surprised at the cheating too. I think I was a little naive in the beginning that if you actually wanted a job you would understand that you would have to be able to write code. But some folks are in a school mentality that if you get a grade/diploma you're good, regardless of whether you understand the things required to go into that.

Having tried a number of different ways to do admissions, I can assure you doing interviews is possibly the worst.

As far as ISAs go, it all comes out in the wash. If you create a pool of ISAs and students don't get hired you may have more ISAs but the average ISA is worth less, so the only thing that matters is whether each individual student gets hired. There's no financial wizardry that can let you sell $1 for $2 in the long-run.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#139

Post by sandofsky »

austenallred wrote: post #72
sandofsky wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "attacked by all sides" comment is quite bizarre. Every pain the company experienced was self-inflicted. They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is a source of active lawsuits. They dodged California regulators and then lied to students about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020. They launched an unpaid intern program, which created a backlash in the tech…

* They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is the source of active lawsuits No we did not. We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), which we share with investors because that indicates how much we get pai…

> We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true, but don't care. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), the other (hired students/graduated students)

Your website, September 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190930144525/https://lambdasch...

"86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year."

Let's run the math on current outcomes, which I believe you've called, "the best they've ever been." 994 students graduated and 453 got a job making $50k or more. We're already at 45%, and that's before narrowing it down to, "within six months."

You may try to argue, "Not all of those 994 students count as 'job seeking,'" as if it's totally normal that 32% of graduates give up looking for jobs. That's moot. There was no fine print.

Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs?

> There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the experience any student had in any way.

They told you to cease operation. You didn't. After the BPPE news came to light, you told students that no school has ever been shut down for continuing to operate.

One point of the lawsuits are the students who felt they should have been told about the whole BPPE situation before signing up. I get why you didn't want them to know, because according to the law, the ISAs issued before you were in compliance are invalid. Yet you're still trying to collect, which I'd say very much impacts students.

> Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us back. It was successful and operates to this day.

When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid." https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1329116385629245440

Within hours of the tech community calling you out on this, you apologized. Then you deleted the apology. I find it amazing that your strategy is to just pretend none of that happened.

> We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove that clause.

Your contract said: "this extension of credit is a qualified educational loan and is subject to the limitations on dischargeability in bankruptcy contained in Section 523(a)(8) of the United States Bankruptcy Code."

It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.

https://dfpi.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/337/2021/04/CFP...

After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called out your blog post as deceptive.

https://dfpi.ca.gov/2021/04/26/lambda-school-reaches-settlem...

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#140

Post by austenallred »

sriram_sun wrote: post #131
austenallred wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is the source of active lawsuits No we did not. We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), which we share with investors because that indicates how much we get pai…

tl;dr: The word "placement" was sometimes used to refer to students who graduated without a job offer.

No, perhaps I can be clearer.

There are different ways to measure placement percentages.

* You can measure percentage of enrolled students who get hired.

* You can measure percentage of graduates who get hired.

* You can measure percentage of students who get hired making more than $50k/yr.

* You can measure percentage of students who get hired making more than $50k/yr within six months of graduation.

Those are all different placement rates.

Say 100 students enroll, 80 graduate, 60 get hired.

Investors would want to know what percent of students get hired (because you outlay costs for 100 students and get repaid for 60). The answer is 60/100 = 60%.

Student outcomes reports say what percentage of graduates get hired. So you say 60/80 = 75%.

Those numbers are different. They are also both completely correct.

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