BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by achileas » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 12:11 PM UTC

ibarearer wrote: post #214

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 Learners are divided into three groups: graduated (59%), still enrolled (5%), and withdrawn (36%).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,…

I see, that’s … extremely unimpressive especially if you take the median salary increase from above. And I think maybe we should take everything else this guy is saying as potentially dishonest. Not including people who stopped trying to get a job is just an absurd way to do this calculation. Imagine a clinical trial that just ignores everyone who disconues due to adverse events. These stats seem borderline predatory

That controversy has been rightly following Lambda around for a few years now.

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

#332

Post by MivLives » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

OrwellianChild wrote: post #165

MivLives wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, not much. I'm one of the success stories. I think I was just early enough to have small classes and knew enough basic html and programming concepts from doing IT work to have the bootcamp work for me. I was also incredibly lucky the company that hired me had a program where they took on essentially fresh college grads and boot camp grads, and funneled them into Junior positions with a project before you wer…

What do you think you learned at the company thru the early project and junior work that you didn't get from Lambda?

This is a really good question.

1. Scale. When you're self taught you can make decisions that only really impact yourself. Or maybe 3-4 other people for some of the projects. The company that I walked into has two monoliths (front end, and backend), and working in a code base that's 5 gigs files is a lot different. There's so many files. My editor is now slow. There's no way for me to understand the details of the entire codebase. Badly documented internal libraries are all over the place. This isn't what a bootcamp or self made codebase looks like for a beginner normally.

2. Specific practical stuff. I had been coding JS mostly on Linux. I had to learn PHP on Mac OS. I had never used either. And a number of other tools connected to the build process that are internal to this company.

By not dropping you straight into a team you can also control where you landed a bit. People who didn't like UI stuff ended up a deeper backend team, people who prefer ui ended up more towards the front end. Almost everyone in the group I cam with (17 people) had to learn PHP. When you have 16 other people learning the same stuff at the same time, you start to work together and organize into groups. We begin producing our own docs for the project and other helpful things.

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

#333

Post by kodah » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 7:22 AM UTC

tjvc wrote: post #324

kodah wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've met some people with physics and accounting degrees who took boot camps and had success, but the people I've seen succeed were already problem solvers and math-aware. They just needed to know the language and routines. On the other hand, I dropped out of school and have been programming for a majority of my life. I was never accused of being incompetent or underperforming, but there was a point in my career wher…

I'd be interested to hear more about this, as someone potentially in a similar position. What kinds of problems did you come up against where you felt your math skills were a limiting factor? What branches of math did you focus on learning?

Well, I've worked in cryptography orchestration (not actual cryptography, but I needed to understand how it worked from a basic POV) and in reliability engineering which is very stats heavy. Both of those became limited as I got more senior. For instance, a lot of problems can be identified by bucketing them in distributions - I didn't even really know or understand the math for representing a distribution. The long tail of where I actually used that was in a program that I used to create mock data for a set of devices my company was working on that simulated real household resource usage. These same math skills also became problematic as I started to need to learn/understand better applications of algorithms and data structures. There's a lot of assumptions baked in to things like asymptotics that you won't get without a background in math as well. You can certainly memorize certain things, but that has diminishing returns imo. I think I answered the last part above, but I refresh algebra and calculus. I read a stats book, took a Discreet course on Udemy, and read a lot on DS&A. I think that covers it. Took me about 3-4 years to chew through most of what I learned in my spare time.