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Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

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Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#91

Post by raiyu »

hintymad wrote: post #86
raiyu wrote: post #73

I've had a fair amount of experience with coding boot camps having have helped several friends and coworkers apply, get accepted, attend, and complete bootcamps across various cities and institutions. The idea of bootcamps is fantastic, they allow people that may have not been exposed to computer science to get up to speed on technology and transition careers. However, there are several problems. First and foremost,…

Just curious, what's wrong with a community college? It's cheap. It's flexible. Its admission rate is practically 100%. Its courses are not worse than a code camp's. My relative went to a CC, and I reviewed his course work. CCs does not spend much time teaching all the fundamentals, but they do teach some. In their data structure course, they don't teach student why two pivots are not better than a single pivot in qu…

I think community colleges are great, and if you can get one on one instruction anywhere it is fantastic. The challenge is that bootcamps are really designed for people who are changing careers. Which means they have already gone through college or actively working. So it becomes an issue because they are reliant on income to survive and they aren't living with their parents.

Basically it's unplanned and so much harder to able to commit two years.

Certainly do-able, but challenging when you are thinking of it from a consumer perspective. Spend two years working towards a career shift or get it done in 6 months.

Maybe community colleges can do a better job of marketing themselves.

But ultimately I think the fact that computer science isn't a requirement in all education is criminal. We study "Math" and "English" in school. "Computer Science" is the equivalent of math 100 years ago, it needs to be a mandated requirement.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#92

Post by AlexandrB »

irrationalactor wrote: post #71
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…

In fairness, all start-ups are "run like a circus." That's the point of a start-up--to figure out new/better ways of doing things. Most of the time it doesn't work, and then you try something else. If you want the stability and reliability of Harvard, don't get your education from a scrappy upstart.

That's great, except they're charging students $30k for the privilege of beta testing their "circus".

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#93

Post by IOT_Apprentice »

ucha wrote: post #2

I'm wondering why it is that two hit pieces came out at the same time [1]? Is it just a coincidence? https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/11/21131848/lambda-school-co...

It must be a conspiracy? I mean come on. The issues with ISAs and the fact that they can be sold, means the student has no protections, as they would with regular student debt.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#94

Post by hundt »

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 cool! How did you choose the curriculum that you are following?

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#95

Post by 737min »

pembrook wrote: post #40

While I find Lambda’s incessant twitter evangelizing as annoying as the next guy, I’m not sure any article I’ve seen is painting a realistic picture about Lambda. Media outlets have incentives to either paint you as the second coming of Christ or as Satan. It appears Lambda, for a while, actually succeeded at convincing journalists they were the former. After a while, people get bored with that though. The incentives…

Maybe that’s true im general, but the facts are very consistent - Lambda repeatedly misrepresented them while attracting lots of positive attention. This is what a free press helps correct.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#96

Post by chasing »

James_Henry wrote: post #54
chasing wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all comparable to a four-year college experience. And it's a terrible solution to the problems we are having with the cost of secondary education.

Secondary education is high school. I think you mean post-secondary education, right?

Undergraduate, yes.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#99

Post by taytus »

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…

Thank you for the inspiration. I'm tempted now to start doing the same myself.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#100

Post by intherdfield »

akanet wrote: post #58
intherdfield wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you mentioned that the student doesn't have to pay back Lambda after 60 months of deferred payments. That seems important. From the Lambda site: "The income share agreement has no interest. It's a flat percentage that goes away once you've reached the $30k payment cap, you've made 24 payments, or after 60 months of deferred payments (even if you haven't paid us anything)." But you wrote in the article:…

Yeah, got cut for brevity, but students definitely experience serious anxiety about even the five year horizon.

That seems really disingenuous. Can't you update the article with this important detail?
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