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Lambda School lays off 65 employees

lambdaschool.com

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Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#161

You know I like how it's a fast paced learning track that's better than 4 year degrees - no argument on that if. But this Austin Allred guy is one sketchy motherfucker. And seeing PG not reacting about the shitty reviews LambdaSchool is getting is the most hypocrytic thing I've seen at all. Aged like fucking milk.

Lol, absolutely.

Austin may have been the right guy to start the company, but IMHO, he should've handed it off to someone with a background in education a long time ago.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#162
I am about to start with a company through the Fellowship program on Monday. There is a staffing agency that we are paid through. The pay isn't phenomenal, but it is a buck or two above a living wage for the state you reside in. If the company decides they like us and want to keep us on, then they reimburse Lambda for what they paid us during the Fellowship. We aren't locked into the Lambda pay rate if we are hired, and are encouraged to negotiate our offers. There is supposed to be an actual position open for hire in order for organizations to take advantage of the program, but obviously that could be exploited. I am cautiously optimistic, though.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#163

My last memory of Lambda School was Austin blocking me on Twitter after asking him why every dev bootcamp grad I’ve ever hired is now on my product team.

The implication being bootcamp grads can't into software engineering?

The implication is that good developers don’t need bootcamps as much as potential product managers need them for crash courses on development fundamentals. I’ve lived this personally as an actual founder of a non profit dev bootcamp.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#164

I am about to start with a company through the Fellowship program on Monday. There is a staffing agency that we are paid through. The pay isn't phenomenal, but it is a buck or two above a living wage for the state you reside in. If the company decides they like us and want to keep us on, then they reimburse Lambda for what they paid us during the Fellowship. We aren't locked into the Lambda pay rate if we are hired,…

First reply and managed to screw it up!

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#165

My last memory of Lambda School was Austin blocking me on Twitter after asking him why every dev bootcamp grad I’ve ever hired is now on my product team.

You must have a big product team, or hire barely any bootcamp grads.

at the time I had 15 product managers, five of which had come to me as entry level developers out of Flat Iron and some course in Boston I can’t remember the name of. I had a Ruby dev bootcamp grad switch to my finance team as controller (he was also a CPA). He manages timber leases now.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#166

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…

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.

Exactly this. The only Bootcamp grass I know that were successful in their post grad jobs were already developers but with a different skill set. The entire concept of turning non technical people into developers is a farce.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you quite appreciate the volume of utterly incompetent candidates (with plausible resumes) companies get for every software dev opening. It's a deluge, and no company on earth can deal with interviewing them all. The only realistic alternative to hackerrank is to do strict university filtering, only interviewing candidates who come from ranked universities. This is obviously terrible. Hackerrank, even t…

I'm not sure you appreciate the volume of utterly incompetent interviewers and processes now out there. I have 20 years of experience, a sizable catalog of open source work available for browsing, and yet even at this level I'm subjected to the nonsense that is leetcode. Another beef - I have yet to see an exercise which is remotely relevant to the work being done. Shuffling arrays, regurgitating interview preparatio…

Your interview process is not far from the ones I've been involved in and I think you make a number of compelling points. The onus remains on the hiring folks to actually put in the work required to follow a sane process. I don't understand why you're blaming these platforms for teams having bad interviewing practices.

There's nothing wrong with hackerrank-esque platforms themselves. They're actually pretty sweet if you want to work through a couple narrowly scoped problems and get instant feedback while picking up a new language. There are even some diamonds in the rough that are actually decent multi-stage problems you can work through with a candidate during an interview. They make data structures and general code literacy more accessible to aspiring programmers, which is not a Bad Thing.

If hiring teams are attempting (and failing miserably) to use these platforms as a shortcut, that's on them. Their system may be busted, but coding sandboxes aren't forcing teams to not put effort into their hiring processes; that's entirely up to the folks making decisions.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the signal to noise ratio for bootcamp is very low. You might get a diamond in the rough sometimes but it's so inefficient compared to a hiring pipeline from real schools. Lambda now has a program where you can "try" one of their graduates for a few weeks free of charge. Contrast that with the signing bonuses you see negotiated at serious career fairs... That should give you an idea how much people…

> Lambda now has a program where you can "try" one of their graduates for a few weeks free of charge. Any idea how this works? It seems like it would be difficult to have such a program without running afoul of labor laws. Does Lambda have the equivalent of a temp staffing agency subsidiary to facilitate this program?

I am about to start with a company through the Fellowship program on Monday. There is a staffing agency that we are paid through. The pay isn't phenomenal, but it is a buck or two above a living wage for the state you reside in. If the company decides they like us and want to keep us on, then they reimburse Lambda for what they paid us during the Fellowship. We aren't locked into the Lambda pay rate if we are hired, and are encouraged to negotiate our offers. There is supposed to be an actual position open for hire in order for organizations to take advantage of the program, but obviously that could be exploited. I am cautiously optimistic, though.

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't they lie by wrongly saying the loan can't be discharged through bankruptcy? Surely that would make candidates less likely to join Lambda? Why is it even in their interest to say that? It's not like them saying it makes it true. And if it were true, it would mean that Lambda is a bigger risk for the student who therefore may be less likely to apply.

The worth of the ISA's you sell depend on how easy it is to discharge the loan...

Wait, people can sell the contracts for their future salary? I had no idea how wild that industry had gotten.

Or do you mean Lambda was selling them to banks?

Re: Lambda School lays off 65 employees

#170
“ We're trying to do something that hasn't been done before – prove that an accessible, incentive-aligned education model can work sustainably for all students willing to put in the work. ”

“Willing to put in the work” shows me that Austen is already rationalizing his failure in terms of his indentured servants —- I mean students — not working hard enough.

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