Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 333 posts

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

#141

Post by Karrot_Kream »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #109
wittycardio wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can also confirm worked at multiple faang never seen anyone with a bootcamp. Sorry to break it to you but It's pretty rare.

I personally know people from my one bootcamp that have worked at Google and Apple. That’s without having looked to see if there are others I don’t know. People tend to play down their bootcamp experiences because of stigma associated with it. It’s possible that there are bootcamp grads that don’t mention it because a lot of people think lesser of them.

I think the point of contention is with "Staff+" roles. I'm at a Big Tech company and we've seen lots of success with bootcampers, but I've noticed many of them hit a wall around Senior or Staff. Though I worked with an engineer who was super intelligent and a blast to work with and she is now a Staff engineer and was from a bootcamp. (At the time we were smaller and didn't really have any Staff level roles.) We've also had several bootcamp engineers move onto other Big Tech/FAANG companies so I have no idea what they're up to there.

I can see why folks might want to hide their bootcamp path if they already have past non-bootcamp experience they can point to. In all fairness, most engineers, whether top-10 CS school or bootcamper, tend to hit a wall around Senior or Staff. Without knowing the true denominator of bootcampers we've hired, I can't properly answer the question of whether bootcampers tend to do better, the same, or worse at these levels than average.

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

#142

Post by austenallred »

runako wrote: post #136
austenallred wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Twitter was continually on the cusp of breakeven and would have lost money the quarter ahead of Musk's takeover had they not sold MoPub. Even before Musk took over they had planned on a 25% headcount reduction.

Their revenue per employee pales in comparison to other companies of its ilk, and I think we would disagree whether SAP and Oracle are well-run companies :)

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

#143

Post by MivLives »

austenallred wrote: post #138
MivLives wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Yeah that's fair enough. I don't think the people cheating ever got far enough to actually effect job stats. It was pretty easy to sus out who actually knew enough to keep going. I don't fault Lambda for that, it's just the reality of any educational goal line.

For the interview thing, that's just what you were doing at the time. At the rate you were iterating, I'm sure that there's a better process now.

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

#144

Post by 7sidedmarble »

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…

It was the way the layoffs were conducted which was the objectionable part. Not even taking a week to assess means it was just haphazard.

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

#145

Post by jurassic »

CSMastermind wrote: post #132
jurassic wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My claim was not that all or even most Staff engineers at prominent companies come from bootcamp backgrounds but that bootcampers can and have achieved this level of success. My bootcamp cohort was over 9 years ago... anybody who didn't wash out in the very early days has had plenty of time to grow and make significant contributions. Not sure why people find this surprising.

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

#146

Post by sandofsky »

austenallred wrote: post #95
gamblor956 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were your lawyer I would advise you to delete this comment as it would likely be used against you in court as proof of your pattern of misrepresentations. But you do you, I guess. At any rate enough people have been made aware of your lies that the harm you can continue doing is limited.

I will happily defend everything I’ve said in a courtroom if necessary.

I will bet $1,000 to the charity of your choice that you will settle your personal lawsuit— the one on this very matter— before your day in court.

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

#147

Post by [deleted] »

kirillbobyrev wrote: post #113
MivLives wrote: post #52

I graduated Lambda School and currently have been hired and work in a software position. I don't encourage people to go to... Bloomtech they're calling it now. AMA. I was earlier in the life of Lambda. I got what I needed out of it but I watched a lot who didn't.

Where _would_ you encourage people to go for similar purpose with higher quality? Are there any particular bootcamps/online schools you think are good? Some of my friends and family are eager (and IMO perfectly capable) to learn CS and enter the Software Engineering field, so I'm curious what would be a good way for them to do so (without spending 4 years on college again).

[deleted]

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

#148

Post by runako »

austenallred wrote: post #142
runako wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

Twitter was continually on the cusp of breakeven and would have lost money the quarter ahead of Musk's takeover had they not sold MoPub. Even before Musk took over they had planned on a 25% headcount reduction. Their revenue per employee pales in comparison to other companies of its ilk, and I think we would disagree whether SAP and Oracle are well-run companies :)

> Twitter was continually on the cusp of breakeven

This also fits the model where they have a large relatively fixed cost base to operate, but could reap profits if they reached a larger elusive size. Again -- my hypothesis is they are tooled for hyper growth and the business has not been able to deliver that. Giving up on high growth and cutting to profitability is part of the stock PE playbook and definitely makes sense in the absence of strategies for generating massive growth.

> we would disagree whether SAP and Oracle are well-run companies

Interesting perspective, I meant it in the sense that they have operated for decades in competitive industries while making oceans of real profit for shareholders over that period. Most of us would be fortunate to run companies as poorly. :-)

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

#149

Post by hysan »

awb wrote: post #6

Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads? I’ve interviewed dozens and their resume will say something like “Fellow at [bootcamp]” or “Instructor at [bootcamp]”, and it turns out they made a simple programming 101 app and taught a 1hr intro to JavaScript class. None have ever passed an initial screening by me for mid level dev jobs, but I’m curious if anyone else has hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had…

> Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads?

Yes and no, because it depends on your expectations. At the last company I worked at, I made sure to have a chat with management to understand what they were looking for before I did my round in the interview loop. I also advised on what potential questions to probe with since I had some insight having worked as a lead instructor at a bootcamp. Sometimes that meant I would thumbs down an otherwise promising bootcamp candidate because they were weaker on say, the frontend when we needed a frontend junior dev. Our VP of Eng had already understood that and we batted way above average… at first.

Then C-level management took that as a sign that all we needed was juniors and cut the budget for hiring mid+ roles in the then hot hiring market. After a long dry spell (rejected offers), we relented and hired more bootcamp grads into junior roles. That eventually flipped the ratio of juniors to non-juniors which will never go well because you end up with an environment that can’t support their growth. On top of that, C-level management expected that more staff == immediate improvements on velocity and were vocally disappointed when we slowed down. We expected it and tried communicating it - ramping juniors sucks up time, they won’t be a net positive until waaaay later, but of course, they knew better.

Looking back on that experience, I learned a lot about the importance of managing upwards and setting very very clear expectations. Because that’s where I see a lot of these hiring situations go wrong. You need to make an honest assessment of both what qualities you need in a junior and of your own environment to know if they work for your company, bootcamp or otherwise.

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

#150

Post by [deleted] »

sbisker wrote: post #45
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently advertised a role and had over 2000 applicants (yes, really). The vast majority of applicants went through bootcamps. Personally, I'm fine with that, heck, I'm Head of Engineering and I'm a university drop-out i.e. didn't even complete a course! One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at the bootcamp. When I'm getting 50+ app…

I’ve noticed that a lot of bootcamp grads are, in fact, legitimately hired by their bootcamps - just not to write code. They are often brought on term by term as TAs until they find work. I suspect this practice is a bit disingenuous of the bootcamps, a way to pad their “successfully employed” rates while keeping labor costs low. But it is hard for me to fault the candidates for putting those experiences in their res…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN