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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

#291

Post by austenallred »

austenallred wrote: post #137
Manuel_D wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did lambda school have any sort of assessment before accepting students? This really resonates with my observations. The people who got the most out of software bootcamps were those that had tinkered with video game modding, WordPress, etc. and had done some self-learning of coding before going to a bootcamp. In other words, people who knew they liked hacking on tech and had a basic ability to code. They approached t…

This is generally true but not always. As you can imagine we have loads of data on this. If you only selected students who had been tinkering with writing code for 10 years certainly you'd be successful in doing so, but you'd also eliminate ~90% of those who we have seen become software engineers. The only way we've found that does it well is to have people actually start writing code and see if they enjoy it. That's…

Edit: It's too late to edit my comment, but I noticed an error we have sold ISAs with minimal recourse not at enrollment, but at the point of _graduation_; we would sell half at an extreme discount at graduation (based on likelihood of being hired) and keep half on our books.

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

#292

Post by austenallred »

MivLives wrote: post #143
austenallred wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I was a little surprised at the cheating too. I think I was a little naive in the beginning that if you actually wanted a job you would understand that you would have to be able to write code. But some folks are in a school mentality that if you get a grade/diploma you're good, regardless of whether you understand the things required to go into that. Having tried a number of different ways to do admissions,…

Yeah that's fair enough. I don't think the people cheating ever got far enough to actually effect job stats. It was pretty easy to sus out who actually knew enough to keep going. I don't fault Lambda for that, it's just the reality of any educational goal line. For the interview thing, that's just what you were doing at the time. At the rate you were iterating, I'm sure that there's a better process now.

> I don't think the people cheating ever got far enough to actually effect job stats.

Yeah, some do a remarkably good job of cheating and would get into hiring stats for sure, but I think we've almost entirely cut that out now.

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

#293

Post by babelfish »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #14
babelfish wrote: post #7

Perhaps irrelevant to the thread at hand, but as I see other commenters mentioning programming fellowships I'll ask here: I recently saw a mention of a programming fellowship program on HN that I thought sounded really interesting. It was for experienced programmers, I believe mostly virtual, and was free-or-cheap. The idea behind it was to give programmers excited about programming a space to explore new ideas. I've…

https://www.recurse.com/ ?

Definitely it, thank you!

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

#294

Post by sandofsky »

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.

I said, "After looking through Lambda School’s curriculum, I’d say students are going to struggle with very basic questions you’ll get on first phone screens," and "Out of ten student projects available, five should have failed."

Yes, you had a page in the curriculum on memory management. You also rubber-stamped through people who didn't understand it, and even contracted one of those people to not-help other students on the topic.

Anyone can link someone to a page about a topic and say it's covered, but the difference between a Udemy course and $30k worth of training is the expectation that someone will actually look at homework.

Anyway, the reason you won't explain the 86% placement number claim is that it was true for one cohort in 2018. That's why you only submitted a single report to CIRR. At scale, the number has always been somewhere between 30% and 50%, but that's easier to obfuscate by coming up with your own methodology.

There's a strong parallel with the time you claimed 100% of your UX cohort was hired, without disclosing that only one student graduated. You said it's ok because you tweeted, "VERY SMALL SAMPLE SIZE."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26813371

And I'm sure you'll argue you didn't lie moments ago about the Fellows program due to what the word "launched" should mean. You have shown a pattern of deflecting the substance of criticism by focusing on technicalities.

Maybe this worked out for you in a different life. I suspect you've gathered so many critics, you're "attacked at all sides," because you're now among engineers. They just take your data, plug it into a spreadsheet, and let the facts speak for themselves.

https://applieddivinitystudies.com/lambda-lies/

But I don't think this had to be. There's an alternate timeline where you did a mea culpa, cut out the shenanigans, and the tech community washed the bad taste out of its mouth. This could have been an incredible reception arc. Instead, Paul Graham enabled you with that whole "haters" pep talk, and things went downhill from there. So it goes.

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

#295

Post by gamblor956 »

austenallred wrote: post #159
gamblor956 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he's going to lie, yes.

Feel free to point out where I lie

- Employment stats. The fact that you use the same term to mean different things to different people is prima facie evidence of an intent to misrepresent.

- Requirement to register with the BPPE. A physical classroom has not been a threshold requirement for registration with the BPPE since at least 2009. The relevant statutes are available online. Also note that online classrooms were not "novel" in 2017 as you claim, so that's an additional misrepresentation. If you claim that your lawyer advised you contrary to the explicit written language of the relevant statutes, you would have clear grounds to sue them for malpractice, and even if you chose not to sue them, the Bar would be interested in disciplining them.

- Claim of unique regulation burden. No, you're dealing with the same regulations that apply to all private schools in the jurisdictions in which they operate.

- ISA. It was found to be illegal. By itself it could be innocuous, but combined with the other deliberate misrepresentations there is evidence of exploitative intent.

And that's just your statements on HN. Don't get people started on the misrepresentations you've made elsewhere.

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

#296

Post by phillipcarter »

Benlights wrote: post #275
phillipcarter wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only the CC credits are cheaper, yeah. But factoring in the other 2 years of undergrad and it's much more expensive than a bootcamp. Still far, far cheaper than 4+ full years of undergrad, though!

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

#297

Post by a_lieb »

austenallred wrote: post #252
a_lieb wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There used to be a site that categorized boot camps by results. Maybe try that? I think you're talking about either the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) [1], or Course Report [2] (both still up). CIRR is a body run by the code school industry itself to monitor its own results; Course Report has over 50k reviews by students as well as articles with tips about how to pick a code school, "top x code sc…

I love the idea of CIRR but it is largely a failed institution. Their measures have changed dramatically over the years (the last CIRR event anyone at BloomTech attended resulted in the notion that anyone who adds anything new on LinkedIn could be considered "hired," even if it was a portfolio project or self-employment), and are used very differently from school to school, resulting in every major school I know of s…

Ah, OK. Now I wish it wasn't too late to edit my original post :)

The stats on the CIRR site across schools did always seem a little... odd to me, with differences in outcomes too big to believe at times. Sounds like I would have found the same thing if I looked at any individual school over time, as the rules and practices changed.

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

#298

Post by elsif-maj »

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).

Launch School is an incredible option: https://launchschool.com/

It's a self-paced online curriculum that generally takes 1.5 - 2 years to get through, with an optional 4-month "Capstone" intensive after graduating the core curriculum. Progressing out of each course in the curriculum involves having to pass rigorous, easily failable, assessments; you just can't progress until you've cleared a pretty high bar of knowledge in each domain. There is a good mix of live interview assessments, written assessments, and coding projects.

The job placement statistics are staggering in comparison to the 'quicker' options -- as they should be given the time investment involved. I'm unaware of any institution that has had more success in placing students in high-quality software development positions.

Disclosure: I've been studying for about 14 months now using the Launch School curriculum.

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

#299

Post by MikePlacid »

SystemOut wrote: post #158
awb wrote: post #6

Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads? I’ve interviewed dozens and their resume will say something like “Fellow at [bootcamp]” or “Instructor at [bootcamp]”, and it turns out they made a simple programming 101 app and taught a 1hr intro to JavaScript class. None have ever passed an initial screening by me for mid level dev jobs, but I’m curious if anyone else has hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had…

Yeah, we found an amazing engineer through one of the bootcamp programs. It might have helped that she had a math degree and so she probably started with an analytical approach but either way, she did really well. This was in a rapidly growing enterprise software company with rigorous reviews. There was definitely some bias against it in a few corners of our group but by and large, most didn't care. Ironically, the g…

> It might have helped that she had a math degree

May be that’s my own biases speaking (and my degree), but I’ve spent all my professional life in a firm belief that a math degree is way more preferential than a CS degree for an SWE job. Like you should hire a CS graduate only when there is no math graduates willing to take the job (but we never had a shortage of those feeding on the Moscow State).

If forced to rationalize this belief, I would say that CS is just a subset of math, and not that intellectually challenging actually, so a person that has chosen a CS course over a math one has voluntarily agreed to narrow his intellectual perspective in order to possibly get a better pay in the future.

(Hides quickly).

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

#300

Post by dzader »

shytey wrote: post #279
dzader wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

no, it isn't. defrauding and taking advantage of vulnerable people looking to better their lives is the definition of a terrible person.
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