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Lambda School lays off 65 employees

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Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#141

Post by baron_harkonnen »

whymauri wrote: post #87
sandofsky wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assign precourse work that rejects 98% of applicants. That helps select students with existing experience, sometimes even STEM degrees. According to the example contract on their site, their income share agreements last up to seven years. Even if they fail to teach a student anything, the student can spend years studying on their own (or even get a degree), and still owe money.

>You assign precourse work that rejects 98% of applicants. I think a good model for this is the Insight Fellowship. By selecting mostly STEM Ph.D. graduates, the pool of students already has some relevant background/foundation. The focus can then be on the tools and methods for applying DS in a corporate/business setting, which is actually relevant for jobs.

Insight grads, in my experience, have been a notorious joke. Nothing has diminished my respect for a PhD from a top-tier institution more than the people I have worked with coming out of that program.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#142

Post by ska »

elevenoh wrote: post #116
void_mint wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26946972 Not all degrees are 100k. Lots of STEM degrees pay themselves off. The real issue is the time commitment. Most code school students (IME) are career changers that can't afford to spend 2-4 years changing skillsets. Also, Lambda School caps ISA at 30k, which I would argue is insane for a 6 month fulltime program. To your 100k example, college is actually cheaper.

Waterloo CS/Eng coop for instance, often pays itself off.

I hear Yale law grads tend to do ok too.

You can cherry pick, but with most random programs the value prop is much less obvious. And there are hundreds of them for every stand out program. In CS particularly you are probably ok right now, but it doesn’t generalize well, like your example.

[edit] if not clear, I’m not arguing post-secondary isn’t worthwhile, just picking a program like Waterloo isn’t good evidence.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#143

Post by rednerrus »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #34
teruakohatu wrote: post #28

Can someone explain how you can train Data Scientists in 6 months? What jobs do these grads walk into? The tech prerequisite is: "You should feel extremely comfortable with how a computer works including: touch-typing, web browsers, search engines, and basic computer programs." The Curriculum: Stats, Linear Algebra AND Data Wrangling: 4 Weeks Modeling: 3 Weeks Data Engineering, Databases, SQL, Productionisation: 3 We…

> Stats, Linear Algebra AND Data Wrangling: 4 Weeks Ridiculous. Introductory statistics and linear algebra are two separate undergraduate level courses. And if you want a real grasp of statistics, you need to learn probability theory first, which is another semester long course. To say nothing of "data wrangling", whatever the fuck it means.

Your intro stats and Linear Algebra classes are 4 hours a week. These classes are 40 hours a week. Every week is essentially a quarters worth of work. You can take undergrad courses like that in the summer.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#144

Post by gumby »

mxschumacher wrote: post #86
jurassic wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the value is similar to the value of a personal trainer. There's no rocket science involved in maintaining fitness, but many people find value in the added accountability and planning support.

I really like the idea of a talented tutor helping with subjects I struggle with. Even if it costs thousands of dollars this can be a great investment. The offer would have to be focused, customized and beyond the basics. Given the materials that are out there (MIT open courseware comes to mind) it is really beyond me why people spend so much.

You can hire a grad student to do this with you.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#145

Post by 908B64B197 »

rednerrus wrote: post #140
908B64B197 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cramming. Simple as that. Enough buzzword to pass an interview. Unless someone already has a pretty solid degree, it's impossible to learn the fundamentals that quickly. And if they do, they should take grad classes on data science, not go into a bootcamp...

You could learn to be a developer/QA/OPs in 6 months on the job. I don't know enough about data science to make that call.

Has anyone ever tried hiring someone with no experience and turning him into a productive developer/QA/OPs in 6 months on the job?

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#146

Post by flowerbeater »

calderarrow wrote: post #95
teruakohatu wrote: post #28

Can someone explain how you can train Data Scientists in 6 months? What jobs do these grads walk into? The tech prerequisite is: "You should feel extremely comfortable with how a computer works including: touch-typing, web browsers, search engines, and basic computer programs." The Curriculum: Stats, Linear Algebra AND Data Wrangling: 4 Weeks Modeling: 3 Weeks Data Engineering, Databases, SQL, Productionisation: 3 We…

I think most people who would be considering bootcamps are comparing it to a traditional 4-year college curriculum -- at least I did. I enrolled in the full-time web program a few years back and this was the back-of-the-napkin math I used to make my decision: Total Hours of College: 4 years, of which 2 years are "core" coursework and 2 years are general education. 2 Years * 2 semesters per year * 15 weeks per semeste…

Looks like you made a calculation error or misunderstood your units. A credit hour is 3 hours of work, as a credit hour is "(1) One hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out of class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit, or ten to twelve weeks for one quarter hour of credit, or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time"

So it's 2,700 hours for a 4-year degree, versus 960 hours in Lambda School, just using your method of calculation. It's also not counting the internships or summer programs that students in 4-year schools usually partake in. And it does not count extracurriculars during the schoolyear, like hackathons, interview preparation, programming competitions, student group projects, etc. Finally, you're assuming that an entire half of a college degree is geneds, which is really not the case. It's more like 1/4 geneds, 1/2 required major/concentration courses, 1/4 electives which many students opt to take technical courses in. So probably more like 3,200 (minimum) to 5,000 hours in a 4-year college.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#147

Post by wyclif »

908B64B197 wrote: post #145
rednerrus wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could learn to be a developer/QA/OPs in 6 months on the job. I don't know enough about data science to make that call.

Has anyone ever tried hiring someone with no experience and turning him into a productive developer/QA/OPs in 6 months on the job?

They have. There are companies in the UK that hire Oxbridge grads from the humanities with no tech experience whatsoever and train them. In the States, IBM has a similar apprenticeship programme that lasts for 1 year.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#148

Post by baron_harkonnen »

teruakohatu wrote: post #28

Can someone explain how you can train Data Scientists in 6 months? What jobs do these grads walk into? The tech prerequisite is: "You should feel extremely comfortable with how a computer works including: touch-typing, web browsers, search engines, and basic computer programs." The Curriculum: Stats, Linear Algebra AND Data Wrangling: 4 Weeks Modeling: 3 Weeks Data Engineering, Databases, SQL, Productionisation: 3 We…

> Data Scientists in 6 months

In my experience, anything more is dangerous.

The signal to noise ratio is so awful these days that it is a serious liability to understand what you're talking about in data science interviews.

I have seen been on hiring side of multiple larger organizational interviews where the "answers" to the questions asked during interviews were not even correct. Candidates that knew what they were talking about would be rejected because clueless interviewer didn't know what they were talking about.

Whenever I have to interview I have to play guessing games with interviewers trying to understand what they think is the correct answer. I've had to explain that, yes you can do statistical inference with a linear model, that Poisson regression and Logistic regression are in fact only different in terms of a link function, and of course also had to explain why a Poisson random variable might help in modeling number of purchases. In all these cases the correct answer was "use XGBoost".

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#149

Post by tetrahedr0n »

paxys wrote: post #85
temp8964 wrote: post #65

I hope they success. The traditional higher education is becoming more and more a scam. Federal government is backing almost all the student loans, but universities automatically increase their tuitions. The student loan crisis is a clear indication that this model is not working. For the past 20 years, in-state public university tuitions have increased more than 200% [1]. Now the total student loans count to approxi…

If you look at how much these bootcamps charge (both in terms of tuition and income sharing), college is by far the cheaper option.

My ISA with lambda is for $30k USD that I started paying after I landed a job. There is no additional tuition. Program is less than a year. That's significantly cheaper than any of the universities I could have gone to.

The trade off, in my mind, is that I didn't become a SWE in lambda. Engineering is far more broad than learning how to build a CRUD app. Since Lambda, my self appointed curriculum has been engineering fundamentals, design patters/language/etc. Knowing how to write a BST is a lot different than understanding the core concepts behind everyday algos.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#150

Post by rel2thr »

teruakohatu wrote: post #28

Can someone explain how you can train Data Scientists in 6 months? What jobs do these grads walk into? The tech prerequisite is: "You should feel extremely comfortable with how a computer works including: touch-typing, web browsers, search engines, and basic computer programs." The Curriculum: Stats, Linear Algebra AND Data Wrangling: 4 Weeks Modeling: 3 Weeks Data Engineering, Databases, SQL, Productionisation: 3 We…

There a wide range of data scientist roles. I’m a senior data scientist and couldn’t tell you how to do a dot product or a t test

A lot of my role is just analyzing data for patterns , implementing rules into our product, building models using very basic libraries and putting them into production, monitoring models in production.

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