Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wizard: Why, anybody can have a brain. Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me, I hereby confer upon you the Honorary Degree of T.H.D. Scarecrow: “Th.D.”? Wizard: Yeah, that’s “Doctor of Thinkology.” The authority vested in Allred was that he'd been a manager at a payday lending company.
Allred?
Fast Crimes at Lambda School
51–60 of 354 posts
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#52Austen seems to finally have given up on trying spin every story about him that reaches HN, no posts in the last 9 months.[0] A sure sign of the dismal state of things at Lambda/Bloom. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=austenallred
or months and months of defending your reputation can wear you down. have a little empathy for the flawed human on the other side of the screen.
no, he should have empathy for everyone he screwed over and doesnt, so i wont have a single ounce of empathy for him
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#53I have been through lambda. It was the force of nature that turned my life on the right path. It was the best decision I ever made This wouldn’t have been possible without Austen.
I'm glad to hear that it was a positive experience for you! Do you think you know what % of your peers ended up working in tech off the top of your head?
just to level set, i myself went thru a normal (non lambda school, but still highly rated) bootcamp in 2017 (some of which were ISAs, the rest regular tuition), and about 30% of my classmates went back to their past jobs and careers. i'm sure about 20-30% of the rest are in tech but in unhappy situations. but for the remaining 30-50% of us it was a lifechanger.
i wish that people would not throw out the baby with the bathwater when changing careers and reskilling people is an inherently messy process that obviously the bootcamp cannot totally control even if were run perfectly, which lambda definitely was not. it just turns off a lot of people like me who actually could potentially change their lives for the better if they were presented simple facts without the extremes of hype or hyperbole.
p.s. for sibling comment - yes it is -normal- for good students to be offered another term as TAs for the next class. this was considered an honor and actually was fairly competitive and i think helped them be really good by the time they got into the job search. TAs are TAs, all colleges have them; they do not replace full instructors, but some of them are worth their weight in gold due to their student empathy.
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#54I have been through lambda. It was the force of nature that turned my life on the right path. It was the best decision I ever made This wouldn’t have been possible without Austen.
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Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#55Is this just easier to SEE in a bootcamp type scenario? How many people got the traditional education route, rack up even MORE debt, still don't end up doing the thing / end up where they want to be? Is this maybe an easy to see problem that is part of a larger education problem none the less? Full disclosure: I'm the product of a boot camp. Changed careers and learned to code after age 40. It worked out great for me…
You can argue about the value of traditional education. But I think you would be hard pressed to find a university, even a crappy one, where it's up to the students to TA themselves, there are 100 students to one professor, and the curriculum constantly changes in the middle of a semester. So it's not quite accurate to try and compare Lambda to a traditional univeristy. But congrats on your success in career changing…
I don't think I could have done it without a camp. I think that initial push to get "over the hump", at least the first hump for me really required someone I could immediately bounce questions off of, the structure of a classroom environment, and push to keep going because, class goes on.
Granted after that... I was fine learning on my own / that's half the job of programming. But initially I don't think I would have made it over that first hill.
I do think that is a personal learning style thing. When I was younger I was a TERRIBLE formal schooling type learner. When I went back I was appreciative / loved that environment.
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#56The model is broken. Too many people want to learn to code, not everyone can do it well. The only way would be to filter many candidates going in, but the negative press would be huge. So you end up with huge cohorts of people who can't code, and you have to make the money back somehow. Good teachers need to know how to code well, and those are expensive too. And, let's face it, the internet is full of great material…
I think it's worse than not doing it well. It's more like struggling at the basics. The incentives of these camps favor quantity over quality.
Programming is really not as hard as you're making it out to be. I've taught it to beginners both children and adults and they struggle but they all learn it. Professional software development is quite difficult, but programming is only a portion of why. And even then, software dev is only like the second or third most technically difficult job I've had. Any welder or marine upholsterer or nurse or whatever has about as intellectually demanding a job as we do.
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
or months and months of defending your reputation can wear you down. have a little empathy for the flawed human on the other side of the screen.
no, he should have empathy for everyone he screwed over and doesnt, so i wont have a single ounce of empathy for him
Both can be true.
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#58The comparison of Lambda and YC is appealing on its surface, but then you realize that YC has uncapped upside on its winners, and this is why it works. Lambda has a capped upside on each participant, so it's important that its median graduate be successful. No number of insanely successful graduates can make up for the median being unsuccessful.
Kind of surprised that PG made the comment he did, which seems naive in this regard.
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#59The model is broken. Too many people want to learn to code, not everyone can do it well. The only way would be to filter many candidates going in, but the negative press would be huge. So you end up with huge cohorts of people who can't code, and you have to make the money back somehow. Good teachers need to know how to code well, and those are expensive too. And, let's face it, the internet is full of great material…
Why don't you just fire them like any other job where people can't perform the work? This isn't a unique issue with programming but the hiring managers that exist in programming act like it is and have come up with crap like leetcode and passive aggressive games like soft firing people by paying them salary and not giving them work. Imagine a landscaper thats been soft fired, it would be unthinkable.
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#60I have this sense that the world of tech needs the pendulum to swing back a bit towards geeky hacker types who are in it for the love of building cool things, tinkering, exploring and all that. There is a bit too much of the "bro" side of things - hustlebros and techbros and VC bros and that culture. Where are my people at these days?
Building things. Those geeks don’t market well. Never did. There’s a reason Woz needed Jobs.
There is just a lot more noise than signal now.