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Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

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Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#111
>Lambda School is free, but with an asterisk: To attend, you sign a contract that says that if you get a tech job paying $50K or more, you have to pay 17 percent of your pre-tax income to Lambda School for two years, or until you pay back $30K, whichever comes first.

30k? Seriously? my trade tech certification was only $2900 for two years. Is Lambda School a 4 year program or a college of some sort? Is room and board of some kind included? I mean I get that STEM pays a lot...but the cost here seems a little steep.

There are only 4 STEM related courses on the site. my trade-tech school had nearly 20 by the time I graduated.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#112
It’s interesting how learning to code is so challenging. Especially because it’s something humans make. Over the past few years, coders have been abstracting the complexity away, but man there’s a lot of it.

On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best. That’s always struck me as odd.

Like nobody has quite cracked the nut for how to do it. Not with programming, not with language, not with cooking. It’s always so much effort. As if the lessons people have learned are forgotten as soon as a few years pass.

We know a little bit. Spaced repetition helps. Not doing anything after studying intensely helps (as in literally just doing nothing after studying improves retention).

Going for long walks helps. So does transforming concepts into something you can see (I suspect because we have a lot of “machinery” for visual computations).

Engaging more of your muscles during an activity (writing as opposed to typing) helps too.

Engaging extra senses (like smell) seems to help.

But that’s about it. There’s no common modality, no library of how humans learn, retain, and transfer knowledge.

It’s been like what? 200,000 years since we’ve been on this planet.

We’ve barely touched the surface of what we’re capable of doing because we keep forgetting.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#113

It’s interesting how learning to code is so challenging. Especially because it’s something humans make. Over the past few years, coders have been abstracting the complexity away, but man there’s a lot of it. On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best. That’s always struck me as odd. Like nobody has quite cracked the nut for how to do it. Not with programming, not wit…

> On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best.

I think it’s naive to think there one way that will work for everyone. Attempts to find such a solution inevitably fail because it’s not something that can be generalized and then scaled. The more mechanized and focused the process, the more outliers get left behind.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, all start-ups are "run like a circus." That's the point of a start-up--to figure out new/better ways of doing things. Most of the time it doesn't work, and then you try something else. If you want the stability and reliability of Harvard, don't get your education from a scrappy upstart.

That's great, except they're charging students $30k for the privilege of beta testing their "circus".

I thought they only had to pay if the students actually landed a decent paying job.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#115
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for publishing it! It takes a lot of courage to go against the "who's hot in the valley" zeitgeist. Also, CoderPad was life changing when we started using it at Airbnb. It made phone interviews so much more effective, thanks for creating it.

Not having VCs of my own helped a lot!

Why is that? Can you elaborate?

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great, except they're charging students $30k for the privilege of beta testing their "circus".

I thought they only had to pay if the students actually landed a decent paying job.

This is true. I suppose I was being a bit hyperbolic.

Having said that, it still seems like a bad deal even for students who get jobs. If the curriculum is not up to par, it's likely that successful students would have also been successful with self-teaching or less-expensive online courses. There's also the opportunity cost of being out of work for 9 months.

It seems unfair to treat your students as guinea pigs for iterating a startup - especially when you're already often targeting desperate people.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#117
I found his constant Twitter boasting distasteful and cringeworthy. It always came off like an infomercial.

Coding bootcamps are not all bad, though, it's just that I think if you are going to do one then 1) you really need a solid financial cushion (either parental or own savings) and 2) you should really do a top rated in person one. I can't imagine doing this through a Zoom for 9 months in my apartment alone. The value of having social support you get from instructors and being around other students in the same boat as you can't be understated.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#118
I don't have an informed opinion on Lambda School, but it seems as though most of the concerns raised in this article are true of universities as well, and in some cases, worse in universities:

Lambda makes money through some financial engineering : Ivy league schools are essentially hedge funds with their multibillion-dollar endowments

Lambda's curriculum is lacking : Most CS students are taught theory, but learn very few of the skills they'll actually need on the job ( e.g. application deployment, source code management, etc.)

Lambda inflates its job placement stats : This is never defensible, but also highly prevalent in both non-profit and for-profit higher education institutions.

I commend Austen for at least attempting to better align students' and educators' financial incentives.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#119

I don't have an informed opinion on Lambda School, but it seems as though most of the concerns raised in this article are true of universities as well, and in some cases, worse in universities: Lambda makes money through some financial engineering : Ivy league schools are essentially hedge funds with their multibillion-dollar endowments Lambda's curriculum is lacking : Most CS students are taught theory, but learn ve…

Lambda School didn't invent the ISA.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#120
post #68
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying $30k for a 9 month coding bootcamp is not a good deal. A lot of colleges in the US are not good deals. But this doesn't make Lambda School a good deal.

If you go from minimum wage to a job making $50k+, the lifetime earnings from that makes $30k an outrageously good ROI. Especially since the $30k is not up front and only contingent on success.

No it doesn't. You can get the same education for much less (in other countries, other bootcamps, on your own etc.). Additionally, you take a big risk by foregoing income for 9 months. How do you think a person who had minimum wage before would pay for their life during those 9 months?
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