191–200 of 251 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well they must at least be aware of the tech scene and how it works, since they're working closely with it.
But they’re not. They’re salesmen selling a product to uneducated people. There’s no requirement they be part of the “tech scene” ... whatever that is.
The lambda school struck me as odd due to its very long 18 month duration. Most successful bootcamps I've seen have been focused on 2-4 month programs. They also try to get students that have already taught themselves some coding (at least be able to code up a hang-man game in a terminal), and focus on teaching effective abstraction and how to use git. Basically, they don't seek to take people who don't know how to c…
From seeing this guy's (Allred's) tweets pop up on twitter a few time, I always got the feeling that he was a scammer or con artist. This article provides a lot of evidence that seems to confirm my hunch. I've seen people have success in startups using similar tactics throughout my career, and one realization I've had about this is that sometimes perception matters more than the actual numbers. It's especially true w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well they must at least be aware of the tech scene and how it works, since they're working closely with it.
But they’re not. They’re salesmen selling a product to uneducated people. There’s no requirement they be part of the “tech scene” ... whatever that is.
The companies they're trying to get people hired into.
Overall I think they're trying.
The problem with the PM/TL program is the people who are normally the best at it tend to be the best at finding jobs. The TLs that stick around forever tend to be ones that aren't the best or the worst who are normally replaced when someone complains. Instead it's the okay people who are just cruising.
One thing that seems to be overlooked about Lambda is the fact that they are remote. An applicant from the middle of nowhere who lives hours from the nearest city has as much chance of getting in as anyone. It can be harder to find a job there and they won't relocate. Remote work is much harder to get in as a junior dev.
Overall though, I wouldn't be in the position I'm currently in without them though. Maybe I just made it in before the line, maybe they're just undergoing growing pains as expand to a profitable size.
I mean, it's still a vastly, vastly better deal than college or other boot camps. It has no up front monetary investment, and you only pay for it if i works for you.
There are plenty of self-studied developers who have full-time jobs on HN. I've met a vast number of devs in real life who didn't go to college. It's not incredibly rare. It costs almost nothing but time to self-study and build a portfolio.
The other option would be go thru university. And there are many universities that offer a BS in CS for a reasonable price such as University of Florida. You can apply for a FAFSA, and depending on your financial needs, you could get it all paid for in grants. It will likely take 3 years but you get a legit degree by an accredited University, not some University of Phoenix equivalent scam. Some of these online BSCS students even get accepted to reputable PhD programs, good luck doing that from Lambda School because it's not happening.
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 mist…
In my 30+ year carreer in IT the most beneficial insights came from brilliant people I had the pleasure to work with and who were willing to share.
In a way that's self-evident. Really smart people with a true clue about what they are doing are not wallowing in angst that their trainees (for lack of a better word) would ever endanger their position and they're often happy to share.
That does not discount the trial and error approach, which could work quite brilliantly when the documentation was good. (being something of a dinosaur I'd happily refer to anything DEC in its heyday).
But there is that list of people, which I can't really thank enough for instilling some of the invaluable knowledge, which defined my career.
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…
Been there. I think this feeling comes mostly from the fact that this initiative has had a lot of attention, and of course, a lot of public criticism from people that weren't really able to give qualified opinion.
If you are having a good time there, if you are perceiving value, learning new things that makes sense and seem useful, just ignore those bad opinions and try not to think how others are looking at you.
I myself had a course on investing given by a moderately famous youtuber, and the environment around it was full of sarcasm and debauchery. I somehow managed to ignore it, took the course to the bone and now, less than 12 months after finishing, had a more than 3-fold return on the money I spent on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things,…
Why don't you think schools can scale? You need instructional material and the equivalent of professors/lecturers and TAs. Instructional material scales really well; that's what textbooks and MOOCs are. Professors scale well; otherwise 100 plus lectures wouldn't work at all. They obviously do. Intro classes in the huge majority of US universities are in the 100-600 range. I wouldn't be surprised if there are bigger.…