Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year • Hacker News Board

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#391

Post by learc83 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 10:06 PM UTC

skylanh wrote: post #225

gnicholas wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's even better for the student because the tuition is paid via an income-sharing agreement. That means you don't have to try to "get your money back" — you just have to defend yourself if they actually sue you for a share of your earnings. This means that Lambda would have to deal with the bad optics of "suing their students" (which sounds worse than simply refusing to give refunds). If Lambda did actually su…

I imagine they have the elusive and ever present "arbitration clause" where they don't actually have to actually sue their students.

But good luck getting money out of a student without actually getting a judgement. They'd basically be limited to reporting it to credit agencies and just asking them to pay.

A arbitration agreement isn't enough to get a bank or an employer to hand over any money from the student.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#392

Post by Frondo » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

tharne wrote: post #358

a123b456c wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The frequent use of the term "disrupt", just shows how much the culture has descended into degeneracy. This is an extraordinary claim.

> This is an extraordinary claim. How so? I would argue that folks using millions of dollars in investment capital with no real goal other than to cause disruption, regardless of whether it helps anyone or even creates a viable business, is what's extraordinary. Think for a second what a dumb goal 'disruption' is on it's own. That's what bored 15 year old's do to amuse themselves, they disrupt and break things simply…

"Move fast and break things" has a human cost, always, and at times the human cost can be tremendous. Ignoring that human cost is always a little sinister.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#393

Post by learc83 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 10:11 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #248

michaelt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lambda School pushes "income sharing agreements" where once you're paid over $50k you pay back 17% of your income until you've paid back $30k. Depending on your opinion, it's either a brilliant investment in students, aligning the interests of the school and the students - or it's a loan by a slightly different name, fooling the naive into overpaying for instruction from teachers who barely make minimum wage.

This is roughly how UK student loans work too. You typically borrow £55k for a three-year degree, but then repay at 9% of your annual earnings above £26,575. There's also a rule that the remaining debt is cancelled 30 years after you graduate. Most people (perhaps not most programmers) won't repay the whole debt within 30 years. So for them, this is essentially a kind of tax, rather than a debt. https://www.moneysavi…

That's exactly how public student loans work in the US too (public loans account for 90%+ of student loan disbursements).

For some reason this isn't widely known on HN.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#394

Post by estaseuropano » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 10:14 PM UTC

austenallred wrote: post #210

soneca wrote: post #62

What is sad to me looking from the outside it is that it didn’t have to be that way. Most of negative reviews seem to boil down to too many students, not enough support, not professional enough course management. Symptoms of growing pains. But why Lambda School had to grow that much that fast? It didn’t. It shouldn’t. It was at the expense of their students. Lambda School seemed a great idea from the start, revolutio…

CEO of Lambda School here. This is disappointing, of course. We have 180+ people working really, really hard to make Lambda School the best experience it can be. At times we’ll fall short, and, as another poster pointed out, the margin for error is just razor thin; thousands of happy and successful students can be out there, but it’s the ones who don’t make it or have a good experience that cause us to lose sleep (an…

I have zero skin in the game either way, but this is such a sad and dismissive response. At the surface polite and accepting critique, but underneath that putting all the blame on the student that paid a ridiculous 30k for this. Generalised 'most did like/benefit from this' to discredit the specific critique while not engaging with the issue of why the issues weren't fixed. Supposedly a 1:10 teacher:student ratio but no one fixed the problems mentioned by op or in the Reddit thread. Do they all only work 1h a month?

This post tells me all I ever needed to know about lambda. Clearly an irresponsible organisation more focused on image than value and with no respect for their supposed students.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#395

Post by learc83 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 10:14 PM UTC

mhaymo wrote: post #133

bambax wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not wanting to go into debt either But doing lambda school is going into debt, isn't it? A different kind of debt but a debt nonetheless.

Different in important ways. There is no risk of ruin from an ISA: if you aren't earning you don't have to pay. The idea is also that this aligns the school's incentives with the student's: if the student doesn't prosper, the school doesn't get paid.

Public student loans (90%+ of loan disbursements) work like this as well.

The max you will have to pay is 10% of your discretionary income (10% of income above 1.5x the poverty level).

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#396

Post by anchpop » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 10:23 PM UTC

ptero wrote: post #261

austenallred wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEO of Lambda School here. This is disappointing, of course. We have 180+ people working really, really hard to make Lambda School the best experience it can be. At times we’ll fall short, and, as another poster pointed out, the margin for error is just razor thin; thousands of happy and successful students can be out there, but it’s the ones who don’t make it or have a good experience that cause us to lose sleep (an…

First, kudos for answering and not avoiding a group that you expect to hold (based on the linked post) adverse feelings. Good information, too. Education greatly benefits from more options; best of luck! Now for things that I think need work (I know little about Lambda school, so this is definitely an armchair strategist opinion): First and foremost, as others pointed, is the growth plans. Education is hard to scale…

I disagree with your last point. In many cases in teaching, the teacher knows the correct path better than the student. One example I've found is that when an experienced teacher says "Practice this. It's boring and you won't enjoy it and you'll wish you were doing something more exciting, but investing skill into it now will pay off later" I very rarely regret listening to them even if it seems totally useless at the time.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#397

Post by AntiImperialist » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 10:30 PM UTC

whatyesaid wrote: post #51

AntiImperialist wrote: post #22

Isn't their selling point that you don't have to pay unless you get hired? I haven't read the fine print though.

The people doing such bootcamps are either going to try it, hate it and say bye; or they're going to be the type of people who are determined. To quote the guy: "People in my cohort don't even understand basic Javascript and I'm not faring much better. I'm nowhere ready for a job. Now I have to find an education elsewhere and probably teach myself because now I don't trust bootcamps. Also, I will have to pay it back.…

I hope he learns his lesson cheaply and does not end up going to normal school with student debt.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#398

Post by asdffdsa » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 10:31 PM UTC

austenallred wrote: post #210

soneca wrote: post #62

What is sad to me looking from the outside it is that it didn’t have to be that way. Most of negative reviews seem to boil down to too many students, not enough support, not professional enough course management. Symptoms of growing pains. But why Lambda School had to grow that much that fast? It didn’t. It shouldn’t. It was at the expense of their students. Lambda School seemed a great idea from the start, revolutio…

CEO of Lambda School here. This is disappointing, of course. We have 180+ people working really, really hard to make Lambda School the best experience it can be. At times we’ll fall short, and, as another poster pointed out, the margin for error is just razor thin; thousands of happy and successful students can be out there, but it’s the ones who don’t make it or have a good experience that cause us to lose sleep (an…

I'd suggest you not minimize, disregard, and reinterpret criticism, especially if it's repeated and widespread. It's better to learn from criticism than to try to twist it into something else (into something you think you already know and can control). The latter comes across as disingenuous and only makes the (already obvious to everyone else) problem worse.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#399

Post by simonebrunozzi » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 11:00 PM UTC

austenallred wrote: post #210

soneca wrote: post #62

What is sad to me looking from the outside it is that it didn’t have to be that way. Most of negative reviews seem to boil down to too many students, not enough support, not professional enough course management. Symptoms of growing pains. But why Lambda School had to grow that much that fast? It didn’t. It shouldn’t. It was at the expense of their students. Lambda School seemed a great idea from the start, revolutio…

CEO of Lambda School here. This is disappointing, of course. We have 180+ people working really, really hard to make Lambda School the best experience it can be. At times we’ll fall short, and, as another poster pointed out, the margin for error is just razor thin; thousands of happy and successful students can be out there, but it’s the ones who don’t make it or have a good experience that cause us to lose sleep (an…

I don't know the specifics, but your answer as CEO of Lambda School is a great answer. Most CEOs in your position would have not provided this level of details. Or answered at all.

Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year

#400

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 11:05 PM UTC

fakedang wrote: post #366

pc86 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> indirectly by preventing competitors who aren't looking for an exit from existing. This is huge, and definitely hurts in the short term, but could it actually be good in the long term? Let's say the break-even price for Service A is $x/mo/user. Nobody really knows the technical problems underlying A, but startups #1-3 get venture funding and start offering Service A for .75x, for a couple years each, burning a few…

Imo, bootstrapped startups can only exist feasibly in the B2B space. And definitely not in the B2C space. Would Uber have succeeded if it were bootstrapped (with higher pricing), or would it have spawned enough copycats during its slow growth phase who would soon make it infeasible to scale up and hire the kind of engineers that a venture like ridesharing would need?

> or would it have spawned enough copycats during its slow growth phase who would soon make it infeasible to scale up and hire the kind of engineers that a venture like ridesharing would need?

Would that be a problem? At least from the point of view of a customer, I don't want a single megacorp owning the market (and let's cut the marketing BS: Uber is not a startup, and hasn't been for a while; it's a multinational corporation). More "copycats" is usually better, as they compete (until they start racing to the bottom, but that's another issue entirely).