Fast Crimes at Lambda School

Is this just easier to SEE in a bootcamp type scenario?

How many people got the traditional education route, rack up even MORE debt, still don't end up doing the thing / end up where they want to be?

Is this maybe an easy to see problem that is part of a larger education problem none the less?

Full disclosure: I'm the product of a boot camp. Changed careers and learned to code after age 40. It worked out great for me, but yeah I was in camp with a lot of people who shouldn't have been / it was a waste of time / money for them.

I have to wonder as jobs and careers change, having faster ways to retool seems all but required. At the same time I think those efforts will be hit and miss, and I'm not sure there's a solution to that.

(That doesn't excuse any of the scummy nature of some of the storytelling around bootcamps, but honestly I've worked with university interns and they seem to tell each other their own stories about how much they'll be making and it's interesting how that hype sort of builds.)

I've posted about my Lambda experience in another thread. I started Lambda School in 2019. I was in one of their first part-time evening cohorts. The original program length was 9 months. I went into the program with a lot of prior programming experience as a hobbyist and MUD programmer, but no professional experience. I had been trying to get a programming job for over a decade without success. I hoped it would help me build a portfolio and network of peers.

At that time, I was working in a helpdesk role that I had had for about 5 years. It was a call center job, so I didn't have a lot of control over my schedule, but was able to arrange to keep my schedule for the nine months of the program. About 3 months into the program, they completely changed the structure of the program, which doubled the length to 18 months.

I completed the core curriculum and the capstone project. Throughout the program they kept promising to connect us with career counselors, but kept pushing it back. First it would be after we were halfway through the core curriculum, then when we finished the core curriculum, then when we started the capstone project, then when we finished it. I never once got to speak with any kind of career professional. The closest we got was a peer reviewed resume.

After the capstone project, we started a "computer science" module, which was supposed to be the end of the course. I did a few weeks of the computer science module, but couldn't continue when my shift changed, since this was outside of the original nine months. I tried to make arrangements to finish the module on my own time, but they wouldn't allow this. The only option I was given was to withdraw from the program.

By the time I had finished, the reputation for Lambda was already tanking. I tried sending out resumes, but I couldn't get any traction at all. I did Triplebyte and passed, but only got one interview from that process and it didn't lead to a job.

Meanwhile, I got a pay bump that put me over the 50k. Lambda came after me for the ISA, since I had a job in tech. It didn't matter that it was the same job I had had for 5 years before starting their program.

I went to a lawyer and was told that the contract required arbitration in New York City, which would be too expensive to bother with, so I just paid the ISA.

I later went through a different bootcamp on scholarship and did end up getting a SWE job after that, but was laid off in 2022 when our project was discontinued and am back on the helpdesk. Guess I was never meant to be a programmer lol.

Austen seems to finally have given up on trying spin every story about him that reaches HN, no posts in the last 9 months.[0] A sure sign of the dismal state of things at Lambda/Bloom.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=austenallred

As a former instructor (not at Lambda), I'm kind of inclined to believe it has more to do with the fact that it takes a certain kind of person to put up with the demands of corporate software engineering.

Getting both kids and adults (especially kids) to figure out how to program is easy if you understand that most of the concepts are better taught visually through p5js or what have you. Once they leave that sandbox, however, and have to contend with what has to go into developing a production React app, it's a different animal.

Programming is easy. Putting a bunch of black-boxes together in order to build some app or whatever is much, much harder and more complex (and, arguably, I think that calling it programming is kind of deceptive. You're technically doing programming, but you really feel like you are? I can't say I do.)

Incidentally this is perhaps why I'm calmer than others when it comes to AI getting better and better at programming. All these researchers and companies have done is given me another black box to manage. They mean to assault my castle by first repairing its walls.

> Is this just easier to SEE in a bootcamp type scenario?

You can certainly find universities that charge high prices, deliver a poor education, don’t have their act together, and leave students with a lot of debt and little to show for it.

The difference in this case was that Lambda School was pushed on everyone as the superior bootcamp. It was supposed to be a top-tier bootcamp. One of the best. Famous people like Paul Graham touted it constantly on Twitter and even wrote an essay defending the Lambda School founder when the first criticisms started gaining momentum.

> Is this maybe an easy to see problem that is part of a larger education problem none the less?

Trying to reduce all education options to the same level removes the nuance that makes this story what it is. Of course you can find bad education experiences in many forms, but it’s also easy to discover that Stanford has an excellent CS program while some private no-name for-profit university has no reputation. In this case, the most reputable bootcamp that was being touted by industry titans as the superior education option turned out to be one of the worst. That’s the story.