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Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

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Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#61

Post by sriram_sun »

caust1c wrote: post #37

Having friends in the program, I can tell you it's run like a circus. Expecting 10 people who don't have any experience programming to cooperate on a project without any support or oversight is just asking for student failures. Of course they'll say that the students have supports through their PMs, EMs or TLs (depending on the mood, they change the role title), but they're never available and miss meetings constantl…

I agree with almost everything you say. However all the college projects I was part of, there was no supervision whatsoever. We were all children learning to be adults. Some of us were already there before others. I'm guessing lambda students are more adults than kids. Bottom line, TA support is golden. Supervision, not so much.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#62

Post by wbharding »

Mildly interesting how this story has gotten 130 points in two hours but is still placed beneath numerous other HN front page stories with less points in more time. Not least since the incentives of YC would be to want this story dead. In the 5 mins it took me to login on mobile it dropped from 15 to 25.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#63

Post by raiyu »

hundt wrote: post #19

> Whether or not this counts as “selling” strikes me as a meaningless semantic distinction: Either way, the school receives some money up front and an investor shoulders some of the risk of the ISA not paying out. And either way, Lambda School students don’t know that the school isn’t as incentive-aligned with them as the school’s marketing indicates. It is certainly not meaningless! Selling an ISA means that Lambda…

It is selling, because the loan is backed by the ISA. Which means if Lambda can not repay the loan, the loaning company now owns the ISA and can use any sort of aggressive tactics to get the student to repay their ISA.

Just like if you take out a mortgage on a house and fail to pay the loan back, then the bank owns the house.

In this case since the ISA is used as collateral, the company that originated the loan now owns a lien on the ISA, effectively giving it ownership.

Similar to when you lease a car, there is a company that provides the finances for the lease, and has a lien on the car, which means you do not own it. Otherwise you could lease a car for $250/mo, then sell it the next day for $30k, but you can't because there is a lien on the title.

So in this case, while the loan is outstanding, the originating loan company effectively owns the asset used for collateral. Ownership means you have 100% control over the asset, and in this case, Lambda has given away 100% control over the ISA.

It also means that they are not aligned anymore, since they have received financial compensation for the ISA up front, they can default on their repayment of the loan as it doesn't matter because the collateral aren't shares in their company, but just the ISA itself.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#64

Post by gazelle21 »

Kind of torn here, I went to a bootcamp and it completely changed my life. One of the best decisions ive ever made. At the same time some of them are straight up predatory, at our cohort there was a few people who "graduated" who couldn't print a console.log

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#65

Post by Vinnl »

songzme wrote: post #17

I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently…

In the Netherlands (and by now a couple of other countries, I believe), there's a similar initiative called HackYourFuture [1], in which professional developers volunteer to teach refugees to code. This contributes to solving both to the lack of developers, and the challenges refugees face in contributing to the country they migrated to. It's really gratifying, and with volunteer sessions being limited to three Sundays in a row every now and then, less taxing than going there before work every day.

[1] https://www.hackyourfuture.net/program/

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#66

Post by snisarenko »

songzme wrote: post #17

I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently…

This is very generous, to donate your time like this. Just wanted to say you are doing a very good thing.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#68

Post by cm2012 »

shafyy wrote: post #56
cm2012 wrote: post #4

I mean, it's still a vastly, vastly better deal than college or other boot camps. It has no up front monetary investment, and you only pay for it if i works for you.

Paying $30k for a 9 month coding bootcamp is not a good deal. A lot of colleges in the US are not good deals. But this doesn't make Lambda School a good deal.

If you go from minimum wage to a job making $50k+, the lifetime earnings from that makes $30k an outrageously good ROI. Especially since the $30k is not up front and only contingent on success.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#69

Post by hundt »

nkrisc wrote: post #42
hundt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Lambda school is very focused on teaching you what you need to get a job, so if you were just "interested in tech" you would probably be better served by Udacity, other free or nearly-free online courses, or just reading books.

Right, there are certainly better options. I'm not necessarily interested from a practical standpoint, more of a theoretical one, being relatively unfamiliar with how these agreements work beyond a one-sentence description.

You can read what Lambda School describes as the "template" for their ISA contracts:

https://leif.org/api/products/5b5b8bd0e59b743f9a086ed9/pdf

It says that you agree that you "are entering into this Agreement in good faith and with the intention to pay us" and will "make reasonable and good faith efforts to seek employment" as long as you are not paying them.

I don't see any specific provisions describing how that would be enforced and I bet in practice it is not a major issue for the reason I mentioned above: there isn't much reason to go through with Lambda School if you don't actually want a job in tech, so it probably doesn't happen much.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#70

Post by snisarenko »

akanet wrote: post #6

Hi, I'm the author of the piece, perhaps better known here as founder of CoderPad. Feel free to ask me anything but things are a bit crazy right now!

Hey man. Thank you for publishing this article, and doing actual journalism (researching the actual data, and giving people opportunity to respond). I've been recommending lambda school to my friends, only based on their marketing. I may stop doing that now.
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