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Fast Crimes at Lambda School

sandofsky.com

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Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#221

Post by gorbachev »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #27
gatinsama wrote: post #9

The model is broken. Too many people want to learn to code, not everyone can do it well. The only way would be to filter many candidates going in, but the negative press would be huge. So you end up with huge cohorts of people who can't code, and you have to make the money back somehow. Good teachers need to know how to code well, and those are expensive too. And, let's face it, the internet is full of great material…

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,…

> 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

I would argue that putting a bunch of black boxes together is relatively easy compared all the other stuff you have to do the more senior you become.

Like resolving inter-personal / inter-team problems interfering with "coding". Or convincing your manager, a skip level manager, a skip-skip level manager and a skip-skip-skip level manager that we should do something new and they need to hand the team some money and people to get it done.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#222

Post by jimberlage »

busterarm wrote: post #12

AppAcademy started with and still does ISAs and has been fairly successful. There have been situations where they've deemed certain participants greater risk and NOT offered them ISAs and asked for upfront payment, but I believe their success has largely been a result of aggressive candidate filtering all the way up to 1/3 of the way through the program after its started. I have first hand experience with their progr…

This was my experience of them as well.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#223

Post by jdminhbg »

goat_whisperer wrote: post #191
jdminhbg wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TAs in colleges are graduate students. They aren't undergraduates who can't find a job. So they're... graduates who can't find a job? I'm not sure you're making the point you're trying to make here.

Perhaps you aren't familiar with the term. Graduate Student = someone enrolled in a Masters Program, Post doc, PHD program, etc. This is quite different from a using a recent Bootcamp grad, likely without any industry experience, as a TA in a Software Dev Bootcamp. Especially because the main purpose of this is just to inflate job placement statistics.

> Perhaps you aren't familiar with the term. Graduate Student = someone enrolled in a Masters Program, Post doc, PHD program, etc.

I'm familiar, thanks.

Why is someone who graduated last year and went into a Master's program different from someone who graduated last year and became a bootcamp TA?

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#224

Post by gnabgib »

monero-xmr wrote: post #214
dang wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renaming accounts, redacting posts, etc. are all things that we do for users in general. We make no distinction between "high-ranking" users and others. We take care of these requests every day and have bent over backwards (e.g. spending hours writing code) to help people individually in cases where their needs were unusually complex. I can tell you for sure that whether the person is high- or low-status in $whoever'…

I was totally unaware that HN mods would treat certain accounts better than others, and give special anonymous edits, totally news to me. I have seen a lot of selective application of HN rules over the (many) years. My 2 cents.

All these features are covered in the FAQ What does [deleted] mean?, Can I change my username?, Can I delete my account? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#225

Post by doubloon »

philwelch wrote: post #212
TrackerFF wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher education works fine in other countries, where it is heavily subsidized by the government. But, I guess, for many people in the US - they want any solution other than that.

Higher education in the US is heavily subsidized by the government, but the administration just grows to consume all of those subsidies. Almost none of the US’s problems are the result of not throwing enough taxpayer money at the problem. We throw as much taxpayer money at problems as any other country in the world.

The US version of "subsidized by the government" is that the government guarantees gigantic piles of money to be loaned to 18 year olds and then says they have to pay it back.

This tends to attract an enormous amount of non-education related work like loan servicing companies, bloated school administration, etc. Now schools mission is not just to educate it is to get a piece of that huge loan pie. It creates perverse incentives like universities competing on how fancy their dorms are or whatever meanwhile they are trying to drive down all costs like turning full time professors into part time employees who have to get second jobs to make ends meet. Kids become just loan delivery mechanisms to administration.

What a subsidy would be is just... giving the money directly to the schools. Like is done with high school.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#226

Post by philwelch »

doubloon wrote: post #225
philwelch wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher education in the US is heavily subsidized by the government, but the administration just grows to consume all of those subsidies. Almost none of the US’s problems are the result of not throwing enough taxpayer money at the problem. We throw as much taxpayer money at problems as any other country in the world.

The US version of "subsidized by the government" is that the government guarantees gigantic piles of money to be loaned to 18 year olds and then says they have to pay it back. This tends to attract an enormous amount of non-education related work like loan servicing companies, bloated school administration, etc. Now schools mission is not just to educate it is to get a piece of that huge loan pie. It creates perverse…

> What a subsidy would be is just... giving the money directly to the schools. Like is done with high school.

How’s that working out for K-12? Baltimore spends over $20,000 per student on their schools—more than the US average, and significantly more than most developed countries—but their schools are awful. As I said, none of this is an issue of not throwing enough money at the problem.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#227

Post by rahimnathwani »

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).

Imagine you go and work for a hedge fund straight out of university, have a great year, and earn £1m.

Does the government get 9% of that? Or is it capped at the outstanding loan amount?

If the latter, and someone earning $1m pays the same as someone evening $500k, it doesn't seem like an income share agreement.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#228

Post by monero-xmr »

gnabgib wrote: post #224
monero-xmr wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was totally unaware that HN mods would treat certain accounts better than others, and give special anonymous edits, totally news to me. I have seen a lot of selective application of HN rules over the (many) years. My 2 cents.

All these features are covered in the FAQ What does [deleted] mean? , Can I change my username? , Can I delete my account? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Strange you can change the username for a specific comment vs. all comments. It makes it so that a comment is attributed to someone else. Very odd.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#230

Post by refulgentis »

dustincoates wrote: post #14

I'm convinced that Lambda School was shady, and I'm not debating that, but some of this seems over the top. ISAs as indentured servitude? The shadowy negotiating a company's validation "behind closed doors?" (Where else are you supposed to do it.) The criticism of Lambda School can stand on its own without wading into the extreme hyperbole.

I've followed Sandofsky for years, brilliant mind, and shaves ever more of the aggro edge off it, but it's still there. This is brilliant writing. Absolutely top-notch. This is the most minor of nits: The moment for me was the abrupt shift to a paragraph about "Utah MLM"...then you remember the un-needed reference to Mormon missionary...and you wince, then smile, "Ben...you still got it, baby"

Of course it's all fine and it's all understandable because he's from Utah and Mormon and Utah has a lot of MLMs. And it's relevant later anyway, it illustrates that it's a Potemkin village company / depths of humiliation that Austin moved back to Utah. Blah blah blah.

But a really good example younger me, and even today me, would learn from. Stay focused. Delete the punches that feel good, and you excuse by saying they drive the point home / are explicit. People understood what you're saying without it, so it reads as gratituous.

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