Is lambda school a yc company?
Yes
Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year
421–430 of 444 posts
Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I was talking about Uber circa 2009. Were it bootstrapped, we would have seen 5-6 loss making entities competing against each other by 2014 - and Uber wouldn't have likely expanded outside the US.
Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year
#423The solution to student debt it Georgia Tech's OMSCS. It is super cheap ($8k whole MS degree), amazing, very hard, and takes a long time. UTexas and ASU's programs are also excellent and not much more expensive.
I think OMSCS isn't more popular because it is so damn hard. People always want the quick and easy road.
Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I was talking about Uber circa 2009. Were it bootstrapped, we would have seen 5-6 loss making entities competing against each other by 2014 - and Uber wouldn't have likely expanded outside the US.
I understand. But I don't consider Uber's success a good thing - it was a ruthless company that cornered the market through illegal and antisocial behavior, and unfortunately set a path for other startups to follow. I believe we'd be better off if Uber died very early, and allowed one of their above-board competitors to disrupt the taxi space.
Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ideals of socialism are that the means of production are owned by the community. So it owns all industry as well. Communism says that there isn't any individual property. Scandinavian countries have never been socialist.
The rate of state ownership of capital is fairly high in the Nordics, though. In that sense, they're relatively socialist countries. Maybe they're not "really socialist", but then by that standard, is there a "really capitalist " country? Even the US, which is probably the most capitalist "developed" country, has some state ownership of production.
state ownership and community ownership aren't the same thing either, to be fair.
But given existing systems it's probably the closest one can get.
Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now it's technically structured as a sale to an SPV that is owned by Lambda, Lambda gets a small advance ( It's still completely aligned, we just fast-forward some of the cash so we don't have to raise endless amounts of VC.
" Lastly, this arrangement will not affect the student experience during or after Lambda School." As a student, I can confirm this is a lie. And you know it is because we have told you in Slack, we've told you on Twitter, we've told you on Reddit, and now you have to read about it on Hacker News.
It’s interesting that he never responds to current or former students publicly.
Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not particularly familiar with arbitration and the resulting paperwork, nor with financial claims against another party.
However, I do know that minutes of mutual settlement can be filled with a court, and the court will, based on the affidavit of filing, enforce it as if that court had ruled.
And for instance, this is in a Arbitration submission agreement I found: "The parties agree to abide by and perform any award(s) rendered pursuant to this Submission Agreement. The parties further agree that a judgment and any interest due thereon, may be entered upon such award(s) and, for these purposes, the parties hereby voluntarily consent to submit to the jurisdiction of any court of competent jurisdiction which may properly enter such judgment."
i.e. "act as if a court ordered it, 'cause they have in effect"
So you are right that a binding arbitration agreement probably isn't enough, but filed with a court, and filed with either bank or employer, it should be enough.
Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year
#428Earlier 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…
Some students see it as one more thing distracting them from writing more code, and believe the only thing that will determine their career success is ability to write code (as you all know, ability to write code is necessary but not sufficient to success as an engineer). As an interviewer, engineer and lead myself, I'd say your students that think this are pretty darn close. If I get a junior candidate that can't co…
> What I can't do is teach them to be able to reason and write code and do the engineering work I hired them for.
Excuse me if I'm missing the obvious, but why can't you teach them that? Seems like it'd be right up your alley.
Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I was surprised to learn the guy I was pair programming with had a CS degree from MIT lol. That surprises me. Someone who could drink from the firehose should not need some bootcamp to learn web dev.
I think some CS grads come out of school with a lack of practical framework knowledge, i mean like React or Ruby on Rails, rather than spend 5 months learning/building on their own, these top tier students choose to learn/build in a managed environment so it takes them 3 rather than 5 months. They are promised assistance with applying to jobs as well which can be a nerve wrecking process for a university grad. If you…
3 months to learn a framework?
I've seen web dev classes in colleges that are spread out on a semester where they basically learn whichever framework the university decided to teach. Doesn't take 3 months of full time work, more like 6 hours per week including labs.
I highly doubt someone from MIT CS would go that route and pay for a bootcamp, considering how easy it's for them to get internships at companies where they are going to learn it on the job anyways.
Re: Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I was surprised to learn the guy I was pair programming with had a CS degree from MIT lol. That surprises me. Someone who could drink from the firehose should not need some bootcamp to learn web dev.
I think some CS grads come out of school with a lack of practical framework knowledge, i mean like React or Ruby on Rails, rather than spend 5 months learning/building on their own, these top tier students choose to learn/build in a managed environment so it takes them 3 rather than 5 months. They are promised assistance with applying to jobs as well which can be a nerve wrecking process for a university grad. If you…
> They are promised assistance with applying to jobs as well which can be a nerve wrecking process for a university grad.
Universities tend to have career services offices that specialize in that and which are free for current students and at least recent alumni.
> If you have the money and want to jump into the work force ASAP it makes sense to me.
It's literally delaying entering the workforce, so it really doesn't make sense if you want to enter the workforce ASAP.