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Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

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Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#191

Post by st1x7 »

codingdave wrote: post #106
cjrp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using both the degree and the bootcamp to achieve the same goal (e.g. a paying job), then surely being ready for employment sooner is preferable?

No. I can get a paying job right out of high school, while someone going to medical school will be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for over a decade. If you are just looking at wealth at age 25, people working in fast food made better choices than doctors. Yet somehow, 10 years later, the doctors are ahead. Clearly that is an extreme example, but it illustrates the point - getting a paying job quickly does n…

The analogy doesn't scale because additional years of fast-food work don't add anything to your prospects. On the other hand, additional years of software development add a lot to your employability so the value of getting your first job is much higher. Once you have several years of experience, the lack of a 4-year degree is far less harmful to your employability.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#192

Post by 3np »

jacobion wrote: post #78

The thing about efficient markets is that lucrative activities which don't produce much value—borderline scams—can block activity which would be highly wealth creating. For example, there could be a huge untapped retail market for financial derivatives such as interest rate and fx hedges. However, it's very hard to access this market because historically anyone who has started selling such products has pivoted toward…

> For example, there could be a huge untapped retail market for financial derivatives such as interest rate and fx hedges. However, it's very hard to access this market because historically anyone who has started selling such products has pivoted towards targeting degenerate gamblers in order to fleece them.

Tangential, but this is pretty much emerging in the cryptocurrency/digital assets/decentralized finance (defi) space. To your point, out-right or borderline scams are a-dime-a-dozen there right now and there are plenty of incentives to cut corners in order to get growth, but there are a lot of ethical and promising projects as well.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#193

Post by [deleted] »

dougSF70 wrote: post #156

I suspect they set out with noble intentions and then realised it is a conversion-funnel game where they absorb the cost up front with the hope of recouping cost and profit later on. If 100% students passing through landed a job then the unit economics would work provided hard costs are low enough. Business might even be successful at 30% post Lambda School employment. However, as they scale that number will fall bec…

[deleted]

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#194

Post by michaelcampbell »

soneca wrote: post #62

What is sad to me looking from the outside it is that it didn’t have to be that way. Most of negative reviews seem to boil down to too many students, not enough support, not professional enough course management. Symptoms of growing pains. But why Lambda School had to grow that much that fast? It didn’t. It shouldn’t. It was at the expense of their students. Lambda School seemed a great idea from the start, revolutio…

> praise how insanely ambitious the founder was

If this isn't a warning sign of a spectacular failure, I don't know what is.

Not to mention praising it, after all the ink spilled on "rockstar" "ninja" types and how bad they are, yet they still get kudos and praise.

If you ever have a manager that espouses the "we don't want the heroic cowboy type here", run, because that's EXACTLY what they want.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#195

Post by jonsen »

jacobion wrote: post #149
rswail wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning to program is more like an old fashioned trade than a profession. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I mean that what should be happening is apprenticeships. If "industry is crying out for more people", then it should be investing in that in the same way it does in every other part of the supply chain. They should be hiring and training programmers, not externalizing their costs.

The way apprenticeships traditionally worked is that the apprentice was bound to the master for a certain number of years, and his parents also often had to pay to have him taken on. The tension between needing trained labour, but not wanting your trained labour to walk out the door and seek employment elsewhere (literal meaning of 'journeyman') was resolved firstly by extremely severe constraints on the apprentice a…

> literal meaning of 'journeyman'

The title "journeyman" refers to the right to charge a fee for each day's work. :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeyman#Origin

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#196

Post by Mikho »

Happens when a business model is to sign up as many people as possible for the ISA (Income Sharing Agreement) and then immediately monetize that ISAs by selling them with a discount to a 3rd party.

That's basically Lambda business model. The main part is to sign up as many people as possible since in mean hard cash right away for every account that became locked in the debt.

Education is just an irrelevant theme-trick to make people owe money. That's classic sting of when a mob seduces a target person to play in a rigged gamble game just to make the target owe this mob some money.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#197

Post by WJW »

marcinzm wrote: post #144
jgalt212 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> praise how insanely ambitious the founder was It seems to me that VC's often link ambition with intelligence and other assorted skills needed to get the job done.

I'd argue that you can hire employees for intelligence and other assorted skills but without an ambitious founder few startups would succeed.

It's more that the less ambitious founders would be willing to "settle" for decent-but-not-unicorn outcomes for their companies, which are not the outcomes that VCs are looking for.

The VC-funded startup model will gladly have 99 out of 100 founders go bankrupt as long as the 100th starts a unicorn. Investors will push companies to take existential risks to achieve growth at all costs. Obviously, most founders are not OK with these odds and only the most delusional (if you want to spin it negatively) or ambitious (if you want to spin it positively) will go for it.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#198

Post by barry-cotter »

meheleventyone wrote: post #176
jacobion wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way apprenticeships traditionally worked is that the apprentice was bound to the master for a certain number of years, and his parents also often had to pay to have him taken on. The tension between needing trained labour, but not wanting your trained labour to walk out the door and seek employment elsewhere (literal meaning of 'journeyman') was resolved firstly by extremely severe constraints on the apprentice a…

I don't think we need to look at apprenticeships through a lens that is quite out of date. For example you can look at the apprenticeship schemes in the UK: https://www.apprenticeships.gov.uk/

This only works with a lot of government support. If you don’t have the government’s ok to take more of the trainee’s surplus in year three than you could if they could just leave why bother training them in year one or two when they’re bloody useless or of marginal value? Unpaid internships exist for the same economic reason; for a long time in many fields the training being provided is worth more than the labour of the trainee. If you can’t get a return from the training why bother? That’s where the government comes in, either by allowing those kinds of contracts or by mandating apprenticeships or levying industry wide “taxes” so everyone pays for trainees’ development and gets the return from it more or less equally. Otherwise the logical thing to do is let someone else pay for the training and then immediately hire away the trainees without paying the costs of the training.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#200

Post by AzzieElbab »

Seems like weird time for moocs and boot camps overall. On one hand they are ideally positioned to teach “real world” it engineering. On the other, by the time teaching materials are polished and presentable the landscape had already moved making your freshly acquired skills outdated. And there is no way to differentiate your offerings if you stick to fundamentals.
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