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Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

businessinsider.com

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Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#211

Post by wly_cdgr »

gameswithgo wrote: post #86
bwing wrote: post #70

I was at Lambda when they announced the switch from 9 to 6 months and the elimination of paid team leaders. The feedback was universally negative. In a channel for open student discussion, Austen Allred deleted a poll from Slack because of how lopsided the reaction was. He explained the deletion by saying the poll was "misleading." Students then got a survey "explaining" why the change was actually a good thing by as…

Why don't companies just speak plainly about these kinds of changes? "We are doing this to cut costs, which we need to do to [Survive/Buy a Yacht/Whatever]" People tend to be really understanding when you are brutally honest, and brutally cynical when you bullshit them even a little.

Because Allred is a little bitch coward

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#212

Post by codr7 »

sam0x17 wrote: post #51
sam0x17 wrote: post #24

It isn't just Lambda School. I mentor for [insert large coding bootcamp here] and I will say things have been going badly across the board for more than 50% of students. They recently had to cut a lot of staff, and completion rates seem to hover around only 50-60% when you take into account all the students they remove from this calculation when they withdraw for "personal reasons". The employment numbers I don't hav…

This one particular student sticks with me. He was in his 60s-70s, and had a burgeoning career in IT/Security in the late 90s, but quit his job to take care of his ailing mother around 2001 or so. He took care of her, living off of her reverse mortgage for 20 years, but now she has passed away, and the term of the reverse mortgage ends soon (or I believe by now has ended) so the bank will be re-posessing his house, h…

Same story in most western countries by now, stumble once and you're fucked for life.

And to add insult to injury, people will rather think you deserve it than face the fact that we're all in the same stinking boat.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#213

Post by rossdavidh »

tschwimmer wrote: post #210
rossdavidh wrote: post #110

So, I learned to code at an odd program at Univ. of Texas - Austin, essentially a bootcamp for coders that began in the 1970's and still runs today. They take about 9 months to get you to a beginning programmer level, then you program (for UT administration) up through a kind of apprenticeship. It worked very well, and the washout rate has historically been about 10%; that is, 90% of those initially admitted go on to…

This sounds like a decent way to run an educational program but a very poor way to run a business (at least a VC backed one). You probably won't get enough volume by doing a hard screen. You need to ensure that your program is good enough that even moderate or marginal candidates come out able to find a job. Otherwise, your business is quite small.

I think you would probably need to sell a "first look" privilege to prospective employers. The program at UT required volunteers from various administrative departments to spend time supporting it, and the primary reason they did so was to get a peek at who they wanted to hire, ahead of competition (from other departments). Of course, this would only work in times of labor shortage for good programmers, but that is most of the time.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#214

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

sunny--tech wrote: post #166
Gunax wrote: post #23

I think there is a double standard applied to educational reformers like MOOCs, bootcamps, and video courses. Education largely does not work for most people who enrol. Most college students do not finish, and something like a third of university students do not either. And even among those students who receive the credential, many are probably able to slide through without actually learning much. Anecdotally I think…

You can’t compare uni and bootcamps because they’re a false equivalency as someone else pointed out. The sole purpose of a bootcamp is to get a job afterwards. That’s why they market their job placement rates so much. Uni, video courses, and MOOCs are for education. Not everyone uses them to get a job, so job placement for a video course or uni compared to bootcamp doesn’t give you much info. Anecdote: I did a self-p…

Wish someone told me before I got $300,000 into debt that my liberal arts degree wasn't going to help me get employment. My university was certainly not up front about that. And if they had been honest about the fact that the degree was worth fuckall in the job market I would have not wasted my money there.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#215

Post by ResearchCode »

syndacks wrote: post #207
ResearchCode wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not having majored in medicine myself, I see no reason why CS couldn't have a 99% placement rate too.

This is a troll comment.

The 99% placement of medical schools is not a "troll", no. There is no reason it could not apply to CS.

Also note that most of the points made in contention would apply just as well to medical schools and medical school graduates. For instance, there are plenty of unsocialized medical school graduates - they are still called doctors. But if they studied STEM, they're supposedly "too bad to deserve a job". Weird.

I'm leaning more towards there being an oversupply of STEM graduates.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#216

Post by bwing »

gkop wrote: post #115
jesuis_14 wrote: post #9

I'm curious about the future of Lambda School. Apparently, the co-founders have been lying about the numbers for years like there's no tomorrow, but the money still came in. It's pretty clear that the business is not sustainable nor does it have much hope of becoming profitable even in the short term.In addition, the school's reputation is tarnishing, and there have also been a few clashes with the institutions that…

Austen will get a soft landing. Look at the circle jerk of YC and YC-adjacent cheerleaders that have gone to bat for Lambda School.

Yeah, this has been one of the most disappointing things for me. No way his shtick has fooled all of them.

Pg in particular I would've expected more rigor from, but maybe that's naivete, or the inevitable awkwardness that comes from him living both in the world of high epistemic standards (his essays) and zero epistemic standards with rampant dishonesty (startup/VC culture). To me, the latter undermines the former, but I also am not a rich thought leader.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#217

Post by [deleted] »

shakezula wrote: post #109
bwing wrote: post #70

I was at Lambda when they announced the switch from 9 to 6 months and the elimination of paid team leaders. The feedback was universally negative. In a channel for open student discussion, Austen Allred deleted a poll from Slack because of how lopsided the reaction was. He explained the deletion by saying the poll was "misleading." Students then got a survey "explaining" why the change was actually a good thing by as…

Interestingly enough, all of these comments could have been said about my experience at $BOOTCAMP that I attended and then was later hired at as a mentor. The degradation of quality from the removal of human presence is a common narrative, and the students react to it so much more than management ever realizes. > at no point did I feel like Lambda at its top level prioritized student wellbeing over PR, costs, or metr…

[deleted]

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#218

Post by legerdemain »

ghaff wrote: post #154
notJim wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Java has a lot of silly boilerplate, but I don't see that as a huge hurdle. Most people will use an IDE that populates it for you. Keep in mind this is for a complete beginner. Dependency management with either Java or Python is PITA IMO, but my idea would be to avoid dependencies during this initial phase of learning the basics.

Python seems to be the goto for intro programming courses at a lot of universities today. I assume that bootcamps are more focused on Javascript because front-end wbdev is probably more marketable than Python in isolation.

A number of bootcamps, at least in the Bay Area, teach full-stack web dev as JS + Django (General Assembly) or JS + Rails (Coding Dojo).

On one hand, it seems like an antiquated curriculum. On the other hand, a surprising number of mid-sized companies still run on Rails or Django.

(I don't comment on the usefulness of Rails and Django to small companies and individuals, because they're not the ones hiring bootcamp grads.)

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#219

Post by gonehome »

gameswithgo wrote: post #86
bwing wrote: post #70

I was at Lambda when they announced the switch from 9 to 6 months and the elimination of paid team leaders. The feedback was universally negative. In a channel for open student discussion, Austen Allred deleted a poll from Slack because of how lopsided the reaction was. He explained the deletion by saying the poll was "misleading." Students then got a survey "explaining" why the change was actually a good thing by as…

Why don't companies just speak plainly about these kinds of changes? "We are doing this to cut costs, which we need to do to [Survive/Buy a Yacht/Whatever]" People tend to be really understanding when you are brutally honest, and brutally cynical when you bullshit them even a little.

Good executives do do this, Ben Horowitz addresses it explicitly in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, but I've also seen it personally from good executives I've worked for.

It's bad ones that think they can spin something negative into something positive. All it does is break trust and employees just think they're full of shit.

The urge to spin things positively is the common default though for new execs for some reason, telling the truth about bad news when it's hard to do so is part of what makes someone good.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#220

Post by abeyer »

MivLives wrote: post #198
908B64B197 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The TA thing, a TA doesn't teach, a TA pretty much grades/code reviews. They answered questions. That sounds like... teaching doesn't it?

I guess I should have used the word lecture. Maybe they do lecture now, it's been awhile since I was involved.

Many would argue that lecturing is (/should be) the least important or impactful part of teaching.
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