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Fast Crimes at Lambda School

sandofsky.com

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Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#181

Post by Suppafly »

pxeger1 wrote: post #147

The government student loan system in England effectively uses an income sharing agreement: with the most recent version, you pay 9% of your income over £25,000/year and if you haven’t finished paying it back within 40 years, it gets forgiven. This scheme doesn’t pay for itself though. (it costs the government money).

>This scheme doesn’t pay for itself though. (it costs the government money).

That's ok though. Any civilized country is generally OK with spending taxes to educate people.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#183

Post by duxup »

Suppafly wrote: post #174
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…

>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 University courses for programming generally get around this issue by having a CS110 type course that functions as a weed out class where people can find out if they have the ability to do the basic problem solving and logical thinking to succeed in that path or not. I imagine it's hard to impl…

I've got mixed feelings about "weed out" classes.

Their utility is apparent if you want to just cut numbers down, but I'm not sure they automatically produce the best results if we're hoping to get all the people who could "get it".

My college weed out course experience (20+ years ago) was the first programming class I ever took. It was a C class where a dude read from the book. There was limited to no other resources outside books / internet was limited then. It did it's thing, there were fewer students by the end. I only rediscovered that I actually did like coding decades later.

The varying quality of college courses I think also kinda prove that point. It's awfully easy to say "well it's a weed out course" and just make a crappy course.

But I'm 100% with you on some way of filtering and maybe giving them most of their money back. Granted that last part ... that's going to run into the business folks call and they won't want to do that.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#184

Post by DANmode »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #43

Back in the late 80s / early 90s, I taught non-traditional students coming in through state-funded retraining programs at UT Arlington Continuing Education and Texas State Technical Institute (now TSTC) in Waco. The idea was "here are a bunch of laid-off manufacturing workers who want to retrain as SOMETHING with high-tech." The most popular courses were of the very short "here's how to do some things with Unix" vari…

Could you say more, or even link, to proper methodologies for measuring iterations of your curriculum?

I'm a very amateur teacher, but have received great feedback on my "teaching style",

which I've refined based on two things: how often I get puzzled looks during a technique, how often I get thanked for using a specific technique.

I'm curious what this looks like in the big leagues - how this "scales".

Thanks for your time.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#185

Post by DangFksAusten »

networked wrote: post #168

The HN comment originally made by 'austenallred in https://www.sandofsky.com/content/images/2024/05/image-13.pn... is still available at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774 but is now by user '_pecl. The ownership of the comment changed between July 3, 2019 and January 31, 2020 according to https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/i... . I guess the author realized it reflected badly on hi…

Dang has to protect their investment. Which is why this whole site is a fucking scam. Can't possible let someone know they invested in a scammer piece of shit

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#186

Post by [deleted] »

networked wrote: post #168

The HN comment originally made by 'austenallred in https://www.sandofsky.com/content/images/2024/05/image-13.pn... is still available at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774 but is now by user '_pecl. The ownership of the comment changed between July 3, 2019 and January 31, 2020 according to https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/i... . I guess the author realized it reflected badly on hi…

[deleted]

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#187

Post by bitwize »

networked wrote: post #168

The HN comment originally made by 'austenallred in https://www.sandofsky.com/content/images/2024/05/image-13.pn... is still available at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774 but is now by user '_pecl. The ownership of the comment changed between July 3, 2019 and January 31, 2020 according to https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/i... . I guess the author realized it reflected badly on hi…

Hackernews has "protected people", typically high-ranking Silicon Valley types, for whom, if it is revealed they are scumbags, they will run interference, changing account names and replacing their powerwords with [redacted]. An example is the high-ranking GitHub engineer who has an Indian first name but goes by "Alex", who was accused of mistreating women, and actually pled guilty to at least one incidence of such.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#188

Post by parpfish »

jjmarr wrote: post #170
AJC-Official wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISAs are equity in the student's future performance, up to a cap. This can result in paying a huge premium for relatively small amount of effort (a $30k cap for 6 months of online class is comparable to a semester at uni), but with 2 key advantages: a money-back-guarantee and accessibility. With a fixed-cost tuition program, students who can't afford to pay don't go. This prices out students who would benefit from th…

Buying equity in a person is literally what indentured servitude is. Someone making a deal to give up their future earnings for several years in exchange for a trip to the American colonies and a better life isn't fundamentally different than giving up your future earnings to a coding bootcamp in exchange for a trip to FAANG. The difference is in the degree of future earnings ceded.

Isn’t there a big difference in the amount of freedo between an indentured servant and somebody with an ISA?

An indentured servant was generally forced to work a specific job until things were paid back (and often at below market wages). Somebody with an ISA is free to do whatever they wish, they just have to pay

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#189

Post by csa »

breadsniffer wrote: post #180
csa wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many more people know how to invert a binary tree than know how to go from an empty text file to a non-trivial mobile app distributed in an App Store. As someone who can do both but values the latter skills much more, I wonder about what these “low level questions” actually optimize for selection at some companies. Part of me says that many companies want to select for willingness to “play the game” / conform rathe…

Interesting. How many companies need people to build things from the ground up vs maintainers/janitors of complex systems? I think the type of interview (leetcode vs system design) might depend on what category the job fits into.

> How many companies need people to build things from the ground up vs maintainers/janitors of complex systems?

In my experience, a good growth company will have at least the three following stages that can yield a healthy ROI with good builders:

1. Initial product (start up stage).

2. Secondary products and upsells.

3. Internal tools, iterative, and often in perpetuity for the life of the company.

I am not sure the “builders” should ever be more than about 5-10% of the programmers except in early stage 1.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#190

Post by hintymad »

In a way software engineers should feel relieved a bit that we can not mass produce well trained software engineers yet, even for entry-level roles. Of course, there are many exceptional individuals who benefited from code camps, but I'm talking about statistical results. For good for worse, one's ability to make it in software industry still has some correlation with how successful they are in "hardcore" trainings, like college-level maths and computer science.
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