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Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

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Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#161

Post by simplify »

akanet wrote: post #58
intherdfield wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you mentioned that the student doesn't have to pay back Lambda after 60 months of deferred payments. That seems important. From the Lambda site: "The income share agreement has no interest. It's a flat percentage that goes away once you've reached the $30k payment cap, you've made 24 payments, or after 60 months of deferred payments (even if you haven't paid us anything)." But you wrote in the article:…

Yeah, got cut for brevity, but students definitely experience serious anxiety about even the five year horizon.

Got cut? Meaning you knew about this crucial detail and consciously decided to not include it?

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#162

Post by icedchai »

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…

"Crappy group projects" are actually great training for life in the real world.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#163

Post by mattmcknight »

akanet wrote: post #72
mattmcknight wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you choose to write about this program as opposed to other programs that teach people coding skills, but have vastly worse payment plans, including some which can't even be dispensed in bankruptcy? The criticism seems unmoored from its placement in the set of alternatives for people who want to try to see if they can get a job coding. The undergraduate degree is notoriously bad for this purpose, from time, pr…

Why? Its prominence.

"How do you propose that people learn these skills- or learn if they are capable of achieving these skills?"

Is that too difficult to answer for you?

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#164

Post by DantesKite »

jacques_chester wrote: post #158
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 agr…

I enjoyed the second book recommendation. Looks promising.

Thank you.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#165

Post by andy9775 »

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'll counter this by saying that in my experience school projects are no better. TA's and prof's don't have enough time to give to groups. Students are left to figure things out on their own. Some classes assume (wrongly) that concepts were taught in prior classes so you have to figure it out on your own.

Not sure when you graduated - I'm sure it was better when there were more resources and less students - but today that's not the case.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#166

Post by _hardwaregeek »

The more I think about bootcamps, the more they appear to be a rather insulting business proposition. Did they genuinely believe that one can take someone off the street, albeit someone relatively intelligent and motivated, and teach them enough to be a professional programmer in 9 months? Imagine that we replaced programmer with mechanical engineer. Or with marketing executive. Would that sound believable?

What is it about programming that makes people believe that they can learn it in a hilariously short amount of time? Sure, we programmers may be harboring some imposter syndrome and secretly believe that programming is super easy. Sure, programming doesn't require lots of math. But it's still hard! It's still a craft that requires problem solving ability, lots of semi-arcane knowledge and a detail oriented mind.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#168

Post by imtringued »

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…

There are two ways to learn. Copy knowledge from someone else or trial and error. Copying has the advantage that it's much faster but it doesn't necessarily result in comprehension.

When someone shows how to install i.e. kubernetes they show you the happy path. Once something goes wrong you can't debug the problem. The alternative is to simply try installing kubernetes yourself. You will probably make some major mistakes but you will also gain enough experience to deal with all the edge cases when they do occur.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#169

Post by conanbatt »

lambda-fsw-pt wrote: post #153
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…

From the point of the student, the TL quality being low is a huge minus, plus the fact that they are also busy means that you don't get that much help.

From the point of the business, I can see the trade off. Running a cheap shop is essential for the kind of deal they offer: A time-capped value-capped full-risk sharing agreement.

Lambda's model could have much, much higher quality if there were a less restraining cap on the ISA, but that will affect sign-ups and might increase the trouble of the people that fall-off the track.

I dont know what is the best positioning of price-quality, but I'm sure many people would prefer to pay more through ISA to have a higher success rate and stronger guidance.

That said, Lambda is really just 3 years old, they need to figure out a million things.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#170

Post by akanet »

intherdfield wrote: post #100
akanet wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, got cut for brevity, but students definitely experience serious anxiety about even the five year horizon.

That seems really disingenuous. Can't you update the article with this important detail?

It's not disingenuous; I think an earlier draft had it. This came down from 4000 words. I'll try to ask my editor to add this as a correction but things are pretty hectic. It's a fairly minor omission in my opinion, but I understand disagreeing.
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