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BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

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Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#271

Post by ChicagoDave »

edgyquant wrote: post #268
ChicagoDave wrote: post #267

The entire anti-college movement needs to die. This is a good step in that direction. LambdaSchool was an exploitative bad idea from the start.

I agree that the percentage they take is predatory. However I have a junior we hired right out of lambda school who was not in a position to go back to college even if they could have gotten loans. He now makes six figures and has a career he doesn’t hate. The elitism of keeping knowledge in overpriced institutions is what needs to die. I know dudes who work construction that have deep math skills, but believe themse…

The overpriced part is the problem, not college itself.

40 years ago anyone could complete a 4-year degree at nearly any college with grants and a part-time minimum wage job working 10/hrs a week.

Today you could only do the same if that job paid $70/hr.

The reason? Reagan and his racist republicans hated that college was a leveling playing field. They wanted to put a financial gate in front of college that only white upper middle class/rich students could navigate.

Unfortunately, it went too far and it’s now even too expensive for anyone but the most wealthy people.

We need to go back to subsidizing public college so anyone can work a part-time job with federal grants to complete a 4-year degree while affirming minimal grades along the way.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#272

Post by [deleted] »

austenallred wrote: post #206
sandofsky wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense. You keep running in circles around a very simple statement that was on the front page of your website: "86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year." Just tell…

Our iOS curriculum covered memory management extensively.

[deleted]

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#273

Post by Stranger43 »

miketery wrote: post #251
Stranger43 wrote: post #174

Where you get the statistics that shows real value to coding camp, despite a lack of tech passion is when you teach modern data science tools to "domain users" currently stuck within the limitations of excel(The only successful low code platform in the market), or web skills to existing content managers, but that is a much smaller market then trying to push the vision of easy money to youngsters still trying to break…

This is excellent insight. In a previous role, on the side I ran an SQL training for the customer success team, and that was fun and beneficial. What kind of curriculum do you think is best for these folks coming from excel or the other BI tools? Is python jupyter too advanced? It feels like we’re still early in the tooling for “no code”.

SQL is definitely where the curriculum should start. and Jupyter(or in reality pandas and matplotlib) is definitely not too advanced unless you make it so by talking machine learning and complex statistical modelling.

What gets used in the organizations that do try and exit excel is typically batch jobs written in either python(pandas) or powershell taking data from one or more databases for display in a reporting framework like tableau.

no code is im my view basically a myth when we start dealing with systems more complex then what the average high school student can create as a spreadsheet, as the effort in learning the low code platforms idiosyncrasies are similar to those needed to use an modern scripting language.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#274

Post by user3939382 »

austenallred wrote: post #123
user3939382 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point isn’t to learn 100% but how about 5 or 10? The complexity of the work just doesn’t seem to match the duration of these programs.

I can't speak for other code bootcamps, but BloomTech is at 960+ hours for our shortest program, and considerably longer for our longer ones. And it's really hard, intentionally. That's an absolute minimum six months full-time (and a lot of students spen dmore than 40 hours/week) with no breaks; longer hour for hour than the time in a CS degree spent on software-related topics (though those vary far more widely than…

> BloomTech is at 960+ hours for our shortest program

I helped run a large school for 6 years with 4,000 students/year who took an 850 hour program. Sad to say that amount of training isn't necessarily as much as it sounds.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#275

Post by Benlights »

phillipcarter wrote: post #263
blululu wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Community colleges deliver a reasonably good quality of education at a very modest price point. They do accept basically anyone who shows up and unfortunately a lot of people are just not that motivated or are not adequately prepared for college level work. That said, if you show up and do the work you can easily get an associates degree and spin that into a career or transfer into a 4 year university. In California…

Former CC student, yep. The folks who do the transfer program are extremely motivated. A lot of them had shitty jobs beforehand. Far better students than the average 4-year university student I'd work with when I transferred. The quality of education was great and the teachers were wonderful people. Class sizes were usually small and it was easy to get a lot of 1:1 time with the profs. Cost is more expensive than a c…

Idk about cost, DevBootCamp was about 11k in 2014.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#276

Post by user3939382 »

gobias1234 wrote: post #97
user3939382 wrote: post #93

If I may comment on the abstract: I don’t get these bootcamps. I’ve been programming for 30 years and I still feel like there’s another 60% of the craft to learn. More data structures, algorithms, functional strategies, large system architecture, read/write fanning, I’m just getting into websockets now. The list goes on. These people are getting hired as programmers? To do what?

To do the frontend work with more recent tech like websockets that you're just now learning about. In all seriousness, considering the amount of bootcamp grads now at all (yes all) levels of the industry, this is an out of touch take. They're getting hired to work hard at entry level software engineering jobs, and most of them quickly move beyond that.

> this is an out of touch take

I'll grant that possibility. Also, my anecdata isn't an objective truth right? But I can only judge by what I know and have seen. I wouldn't hire myself at my 2 year mark, all I could produce then by my standards now is a bunch of code I'd have to fix. I've had the same experience with junior developers I've hired.

Maybe these bootcamp grads are great, I haven't hired them because of the issue I raised so I don't actually know.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#277

Post by ak_111 »

austenallred wrote: post #249
laserlight wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment got me interested, so I dived deeper into the report [0]. Learners are divided into three groups: graduated (59%), still enrolled (5%), and withdrawn (36%). Graduated learners are further divided into two groups: job seeking (63%: ~37% of all learners) and non-job seeking (37%: ~22% of all learners). Here's the definition of “non-job seeking”: “A BloomTech graduate who has been unresponsive to outreach,…

We should do a better job of getting more granular on that piece, because it really does matter, but the above isn't the right way to do that math to answer the question prospective students have, and is misleading in the opposite direction. The outcomes report is directed at prospective students who want to understand what will happen to them if they attend the school and look for a job. You have to remember that (f…

I think presenting this data using the "funnel visualisation" is the most informative way of doing it.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#278

Post by edgyquant »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #271
edgyquant wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the percentage they take is predatory. However I have a junior we hired right out of lambda school who was not in a position to go back to college even if they could have gotten loans. He now makes six figures and has a career he doesn’t hate. The elitism of keeping knowledge in overpriced institutions is what needs to die. I know dudes who work construction that have deep math skills, but believe themse…

The overpriced part is the problem, not college itself. 40 years ago anyone could complete a 4-year degree at nearly any college with grants and a part-time minimum wage job working 10/hrs a week. Today you could only do the same if that job paid $70/hr. The reason? Reagan and his racist republicans hated that college was a leveling playing field. They wanted to put a financial gate in front of college that only whit…

I disagree here. Unified courses work for only a percentage of people, a lot of (most?) people find it boring. These are the people we are failing. We teach math, history you name it in such a mundane way that even I (who is obsessed with math and history) did poorly in the day to day (but passed because I’m a good test taker.)

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#279

Post by shytey »

dzader wrote: post #230
rguzman wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i was going to sit this one out, but i want to +1 the above with more than just an upvote. Austen seems to be arguing and explaining all the happenings in good faith with someone who appears to be hell-bent on "catching" him with something by misconstruing things. i have never understood why Lambda/Bloomtech has so many haters but the other commenter here appears to me to be in that camp.

Austen is a terrible person and has been caught lying dozens of times and always hides behind the "we're just good people trying to help others" line to distract from the fact he and the rest of the lambda school staff (which is just all of the un-hired grads so they can boost their already pathetic placement rates) are scammers and frauds.

Calling someone a terrible person, liar, scammer and fraud with little evidence is not a good look. Even if all your points are true (Austen has refuted at least a few), "terrible person" is a huge stretch.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#280

Post by dehrmann »

kirillbobyrev wrote: post #113
MivLives wrote: post #52

I graduated Lambda School and currently have been hired and work in a software position. I don't encourage people to go to... Bloomtech they're calling it now. AMA. I was earlier in the life of Lambda. I got what I needed out of it but I watched a lot who didn't.

Where _would_ you encourage people to go for similar purpose with higher quality? Are there any particular bootcamps/online schools you think are good? Some of my friends and family are eager (and IMO perfectly capable) to learn CS and enter the Software Engineering field, so I'm curious what would be a good way for them to do so (without spending 4 years on college again).

With all the recent layoffs, this might not be the best time to do a coding bootcamp. Not as many companies are hiring, and you'll be competing with people with better credentials and more experience.

A lot can also change in a year, so take this with a grain of salt.

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