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

Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

nymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 251 posts

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#151

Post by tmpz22 »

songzme wrote: post #17

I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently…

FAANGM has left us with an impression that if you build a decent product you will magically make so much money that you can divert portions of it to a fancy office, great salaries, open source and other philanthropic causes, with no consequences. The truth is few industries carry that much of a margin especially when VC, founders, and seniors, take so much off the top.

It's my opinion that some companies should never be done for profit, particularly Political Tech but also other social tech including portions of ed tech.

These industries should be left for FI/RE folks who are rewarded with various social credits, like awards, tax credits, and peer validation.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#152

Post by effingwewt »

AlexandrB wrote: post #113
DantesKite wrote: post #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 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.

I read parent's post as more of a generalization. As in 'what are the best ways humans best learn', not a single best way.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#153

Post by lambda-fsw-pt »

caust1c wrote: post #37

Having friends in the program, I can tell you it's run like a circus. Expecting 10 people who don't have any experience programming to cooperate on a project without any support or oversight is just asking for student failures. Of course they'll say that the students have supports through their PMs, EMs or TLs (depending on the mood, they change the role title), but they're never available and miss meetings constantl…

I've been enrolled at Lambda for just about a year now, so I feel qualified to comment here.

> Of course they'll say that the students have supports through their PMs, EMs or TLs (depending on the mood, they change the role title), but they're never available and miss meetings constantly.

This statement is full of hyperbole, however it gets at what I feel is Lambda's biggest problem: Team Lead quality and consistency.

The problem is a misalignment of incentives (sound familiar?). TLs are current students who are further ahead in the curriculum. The schedule makes it effectively impossible to have a job and TL, in addition to being a student, so I'm guessing most of those who apply for a TL position do so largely for the paycheck.

I don't mean to say that all TLs are bad or don't care about the success of their teams. In fact my experience has been mostly positive. But ultimately students are not at Lambda to be TLs. They are at Lambda to get high-paying tech jobs.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#154

Post by neilk »

I had a sinking feeling when the inventor of the CDO appeared in this article.

The housing bubble occurred, in part, because there was optimism that acquiring a certain tangible asset - a house - was a sure path to prosperity for the buyer. And the buyers of mortgage-backed securities had decades of data showing that these were solid investments.

What about intangible assets like knowing how to code? Is this what Lambda School is really doing?

And like the housing bubble, once the originator can sell the debt, they have some incentives to inflate expectations on both sides.

Perhaps Lambda School’s ISA-selling isn’t vulnerable to this flaw. Maybe the ISA-buyers are doing due diligence. But you would have thought the same was true in 2008 too.

Like everyone with a Twitter account I’ve interacted with Austen. And I had a mildly positive impression, or at least I thought he deserved more credit. Not sure about that any more. I would like to see his response.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#155

Post by simplify »

songzme wrote: post #107
hundt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very cool! How did you choose the curriculum that you are following?

I made it over time based on observations with my coworkers and my personal work experience (I'm currently a tech lead at PayPal, formerly L4 at Google). What I want to do is to teach people to become good engineers, getting a job should be a side effect of that. I think mainstream bootcamps value getting a job more than actually becoming a good engineer, which is something I disagree with. This also motivates me to…

If neither you nor universities think that getting a job is more important than becoming a "good engineer" (whatever that means), then who is left to fill this void but the bootcamps you disagree with?

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#156

Post by abbadadda »

This anecdote is particularly damning for Lambda School, like a hedge fund choosing not to update their investment return numbers year after year because they were so great in year 1:

> So where does that 86 percent figure come from? Lambda has reported graduate-outcome statistics at the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR), a voluntary trade organization of coding boot camps whose purpose is to ensure that participating schools publish truthful information about student outcomes. Allred has often used this report to defend his company online. But where other boot camps have multiple reports spanning many student cohorts, Lambda has only reported statistics for its first 71 graduates — 86 percent of who, the school claims, found jobs. Sheree Speakman, the CEO of CIRR, told me that Lambda has not undergone the standard independent auditing for the sole report it has submitted, and that her communications to Lambda School regarding further reporting and auditing have gone unanswered.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#157

Post by simplify »

raiyu wrote: post #73

I've had a fair amount of experience with coding boot camps having have helped several friends and coworkers apply, get accepted, attend, and complete bootcamps across various cities and institutions. The idea of bootcamps is fantastic, they allow people that may have not been exposed to computer science to get up to speed on technology and transition careers. However, there are several problems. First and foremost,…

Some bootcamps may allow "from zero knowledge", but quality ones always have an assessment required to pass before admission.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#158

Post by jacques_chester »

DantesKite wrote: post #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 wit…

> 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.

It's very well studied. I'd start by reading a cognitive science textbook and go from there. I have Cognition by Reisberg[0], it was well-written and well-structured.

Alternatively, an entertaining and informative popular account is Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger and McDaniel[1].

I do agree that the research findings are greatly underapplied, though.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Exploring-Science-Mind-Seve...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learnin...

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#159

Post by _ah »

kostyal wrote: post #144

I'm a current student at Lambda School. It's a pretty stressful time at the moment - I don't have any loyalty to Lambda, but the recent string of damaging stories about the quality of teaching and average graduates is concerning. It's true that Lambda is incredibly disorganised and the build weeks etc are chaotic. Equally true that they don't do a good enough job of ensuring we have something to show for ourselves on…

> What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional.

Don't let this stop you. The world needs more good engineers, and if you practice your craft you will always find a home. There are plenty of industry professionals who now look a bit silly for their choice of company (Uber, WeWork) but ultimately it's all just a job and if you have the raw skills you can find a new gig.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#160

Post by jacques_chester »

pembrook wrote: post #40

While I find Lambda’s incessant twitter evangelizing as annoying as the next guy, I’m not sure any article I’ve seen is painting a realistic picture about Lambda. Media outlets have incentives to either paint you as the second coming of Christ or as Satan. It appears Lambda, for a while, actually succeeded at convincing journalists they were the former. After a while, people get bored with that though. The incentives…

> After a while, people get bored with that though. The incentives that drive clicks flip. Suddenly Lambda is now Satan. Burn it down! Downvote all sympathizers!

What this means is that bullshitting works until it doesn't.

Post reply on HN