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Fast Crimes at Lambda School

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Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#151

Post by jimbokun »

busterarm wrote: post #12

AppAcademy started with and still does ISAs and has been fairly successful. There have been situations where they've deemed certain participants greater risk and NOT offered them ISAs and asked for upfront payment, but I believe their success has largely been a result of aggressive candidate filtering all the way up to 1/3 of the way through the program after its started. I have first hand experience with their progr…

> and its benefits are largely a forcing function to get you to build a portfolio in a short amount of time and have a peer group to rely on.

That is an incredibly valuable service to provide.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#152

Post by vundercind »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #68
Bjorkbat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yeah, I almost forgot about that. I remember students who were frustrated because of some mystery error that plagued them for hours, only for me to take a closer look and figure it out in 5 minutes. It forced me to rethink how we taught students how to read error messages, figure out line numbers and stack traces, and how to ask Google for help.

Well it doesn't help that the stack trace often doesn't follow anything but its own convention, much less the conventions of a basic English sentence. The fact you have to learn to read an error message is damning for whoever thought this would be a good error message, honestly.

It occurred to me a few years ago that the vast majority of my value as a programmer is the huge amount of trivia and giant set of heuristics I’ve picked up in years, and years, and years of work. Almost none of which came from formal education, training, anything like that.

That’s the stuff that gets me unblocked much faster than a newbie, and lets me spot shortcuts and connections and opportunities that save sometimes months of work. That stuff’s what lets me scan an exception message and stack trace fairly quickly for the one or two pieces that matter, even in some unfamiliar environment.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#153

Post by nradov »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #139
dustincoates wrote: post #14

I'm convinced that Lambda School was shady, and I'm not debating that, but some of this seems over the top. ISAs as indentured servitude? The shadowy negotiating a company's validation "behind closed doors?" (Where else are you supposed to do it.) The criticism of Lambda School can stand on its own without wading into the extreme hyperbole.

I think it is more of indentured servitude than an uncollateralized loan, but not by much. Since getting rid of chattel slavery our society has generally found ways to eke our that unearned productivity from people via fractional servitude schemes. The (thin) line between an ISA and a loan is that the can discharge the loan through bankruptcy, im not certain you can do so as easily for an ISA.

Bankruptcy courts have pretty wide latitude to modify or terminate most types of agreements that create a financial obligation or liability. Certain types of student loans are excepted but not much else.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#154

Post by busterarm »

jimbokun wrote: post #151
busterarm wrote: post #12

AppAcademy started with and still does ISAs and has been fairly successful. There have been situations where they've deemed certain participants greater risk and NOT offered them ISAs and asked for upfront payment, but I believe their success has largely been a result of aggressive candidate filtering all the way up to 1/3 of the way through the program after its started. I have first hand experience with their progr…

> and its benefits are largely a forcing function to get you to build a portfolio in a short amount of time and have a peer group to rely on. That is an incredibly valuable service to provide.

Yeah, but 27 percent of your first year's salary in value? I'm not sure. Again, I don't regret it, I just think everyone that went through it could have succeeded without it.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#155

Post by jimbokun »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #27
gatinsama wrote: post #9

The model is broken. Too many people want to learn to code, not everyone can do it well. The only way would be to filter many candidates going in, but the negative press would be huge. So you end up with huge cohorts of people who can't code, and you have to make the money back somehow. Good teachers need to know how to code well, and those are expensive too. And, let's face it, the internet is full of great material…

As a former instructor (not at Lambda), I'm kind of inclined to believe it has more to do with the fact that it takes a certain kind of person to put up with the demands of corporate software engineering. Getting both kids and adults (especially kids) to figure out how to program is easy if you understand that most of the concepts are better taught visually through p5js or what have you. Once they leave that sandbox,…

Addressing security vulnerabilities, deployment practices, monitoring, operations, architecture, gathering requirements, support questions, documentation, continuous integration and deployment, data migrations, migrating tech stacks or cloud providers for business reasons...

Very little of a software developers day is spent writing application code.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#156

Post by wrs »

vundercind wrote: post #148
spamizbad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You underscore the same thing I noticed as well: To have a decent career as a software engineer you need to be a tenacious problem solver. Even the not-so-great devs are tenacious. There are tons of smart, hard-working people who have a mentality of "You should be able to do everything correctly and have it work correctly the first time, or maybe on the second try with some minor adjustments". And I think these peopl…

I think you’ve also gotta be comfortable being in a pretty dark place a lot of the time. It’s like being a plumber if your tools did surprising things or simply broke and required repair regularly , you had to learn totally new (and usually not any better) tools every year or two, and you did the actual work with a crappy remote-control robot, mostly crammed into dark spaces, with no schematics or plan or even abilit…

“I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I'VE. DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS.”

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#157

Post by eloisant »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #88

I don't understand the controversy. Sure, you might not like ISAs, but that's not the point. You signed an agreement. The agreement itself is not illegal. If you don't like it, why did you sign it? Like, what's the expectation here? That you should be able to get a coding education for free? Even if you got a job unrelated to programming, how does that excuse you from needing to pay for tuition for courses you alread…

The problem is not the ISA itself.

1. They lied about the student success rates

2. They went after graduates for the ISA when they shouldn't (e.g. graduates not working in tech, or continuing the job they had before lambda school)

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#158

Post by nradov »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #50
duxup wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustration factor is a big deal. I took a bootcamp. One day and another student and I were working on something and a third member of our group (who had other issues) was really frustrated and took it out on us and then went to the teacher. She told the teacher "they just get it and I don't". But in truth the other student and I were not "just getting it", we were failing frequently, we had made no more progress…

I was just talking about this idea with my wife. We're both now senior enough in our jobs that we're team/project leads (not managers, just technical leaders of stuff). One of the projects I'm leading is a small R&D effort to see if a new technique will improve one of our core algorithms. And I have a very bright new junior programmer who has been with the company about 2 years and has a little post-college experienc…

Making people feel worthless isn't necessarily a bad approach. Break them down and then built them back up again into something better. But it can also fail catastrophically.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#159

Post by ilamont »

elawler24 wrote: post #121

VC incentives are the real problem here. I was a mentor at another bootcamp and also the founder of a high-skill developer marketplace in 2017. A valuation of $1B for this business is crazy. Investors were simply underwriting students paying for trade school, there's no tangible tech innovation. Like Theranos, WeWork, and FTX - it's the story of a darling founder who has to justify an unrealistic valuation in a froth…

Like Theranos, WeWork, and FTX - it's the story of a darling founder who has to justify an unrealistic valuation in a frothy market.

The other issue for all of the examples you cited (and Lambda) is an-almost complete failure for the VCs and accelerators and other gatekeepers to effectively carry out due diligence.

I say "almost" because in the case of Theranos, some investors did pass, according to the documentary and WSJ reporting. And there may be others that passed on Lambda and WeWork that will never come to light.

But FTX - the transcript of the Sequoia internal chat supposedly vetting SBF is laughably amateur and shows the mindset that allows VCs to be duped by pattern matching and specific personality types (Ivy dropout, MIT mad scientist, charismatic new age genius, etc.):

> That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”

> Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.

> “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.

> “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.

> “YES!!!” exclaimed a third

(see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128504)

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#160

Post by jdminhbg »

goat_whisperer wrote: post #119
swyx wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just to level set, i myself went thru a normal (non lambda school, but still highly rated) bootcamp in 2017 (some of which were ISAs, the rest regular tuition), and about 30% of my classmates went back to their past jobs and careers. i'm sure about 20-30% of the rest are in tech but in unhappy situations. but for the remaining 30-50% of us it was a lifechanger. i wish that people would not throw out the baby with the…

"TAs are TAs, all colleges have them; they do not replace full instructors, but some of them are worth their weight in gold due to their student empathy." Lol. TAs in colleges are graduate students. They aren't undergraduates who can't find a job.

> TAs in colleges are graduate students. They aren't undergraduates who can't find a job.

So they're... graduates who can't find a job? I'm not sure you're making the point you're trying to make here.

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