[HN Gopher] Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance...
___________________________________________________________________
Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last
two years
Author : akanet
Score : 261 points
Date : 2021-10-25 15:42 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| whoisjuan wrote:
| In their eagerness to disrupt traditional education, all these
| programs forgot that the one single thing that makes traditional
| university education succesful is teaching people with aptitude
| and drive.
|
| To get accepted and graduate from a reputable university you have
| to get good results in standardized tests and work your self
| through multiple courses for at least 3 years. That by itself
| doesn't mean anything but there's a level of rigor and self-drive
| required to succesfully traverse this experience.
|
| I mentored in one of these bootcamp programs and you would be
| surprised how little people give a shit, even though they are
| paying. Most of them know that the job placement guarantee is a
| safeguard for their own laziness.
|
| These programs accept people who think pursing a career in tech
| would be cool and easy until they realize is a tough learning
| experience and a tough job. Perhaps tougher than anything else
| they have done in their lives.
|
| The problem with these companies is that they have to balance the
| quality of students with the quantity required to meet scale.
| This is probably the worst type of VC backed business because the
| investor expectations on scale are in direct conflict with the
| quality of potential students pre-bootcamp and the demanded
| quality by employers post-bootcamp.
| virtuous_signal wrote:
| > To get accepted and graduate from a reputable university you
| have to get good results in standardized tests and work your
| self through multiple courses for at least 3 years. That by
| itself doesn't mean anything but there's a level of rigor and
| self-drive required to succesfully traverse this experience.
|
| It's worth noting that Lamda school actually does use an
| industry-standard "IQ test" [0], although it seems the cutoff
| is quite low (23 out of 50 whereas the median score according
| to Criteria Corp is 24).
|
| [0] https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/how-to-ace-the-
| criteria...
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| I can't speak to the quality of the people who are attending
| these bootcamp programs (I wouldn't at all be surprised that
| most of them aren't "successful" for a variety of reasons) but
| as far as traditional university education being "successful",
| there are tons of university graduates who have little to show
| for it except a piece of paper and a load of student debt. A
| lot of kids today go to university because they're told it's
| what they're supposed to do, and coming out of it with a degree
| doesn't require nearly as much as it used to.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| I agree with what you're saying. Traditional education is
| ripe for disruption, but this is clearly not the model that
| will do that. I imagine that there are high quality students
| that come out of this bootcamps but how consistently can they
| produce a good outcome for both the students and the
| prospective employers?
|
| I think the tech industry needs to realize that their talent
| needs can't be solved this way. We need a more proactive and
| consistent system to identify potential and educate students.
| I think VC money creates incentives that impact quality, so
| for starters we should be thinking of these businesses as
| real non-profit organizations. Not wannabe mega tech corps.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > one single thing that makes traditional university education
| succesful is aptitude and drive.
|
| I think it's more accurate to say that high ranked universities
| try to pick people who will succeed. That can be through
| intelligence and drive but it can also be through the backing
| of an ultra-rich relative (if someone will buy the school a
| building to get you into your college of choice you're probably
| going to do fine professionally).
|
| That aside, I think your point is largely correct. I know
| someone founded one of the older bootcamps and in the early
| days it was fairly easy to choose only smart people, often with
| degrees from top schools ironically. Paired with the dearth of
| junior candidates job placement was 99% and pretty easy.
|
| Acceptance standards have had to drop dramatically as the
| number of bootcamps has increased and the backlog of smart
| people who'd always wanted to get into tech has been wiped out.
| doitLP wrote:
| Bootcamp grads (every one I've ever met) are often highly
| motivated and good autodidacts. Perhaps the incentive structure
| of something like Galvanize (nee Hack Reactor) are better for
| weeding out the low performers -- you don't make it through
| those programs by not working 12h days/6.5 days/week.
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| > (if someone will buy the school a building to get you into
| your college of choice).
|
| If this was really widespread surely the campuses would have
| (literally) thousands of donated buildings?
| dnautics wrote:
| > one single thing that makes traditional university education
| succesful is aptitude and drive.
|
| Networking, connections, and (external) credentialism?
| notJim wrote:
| I honestly think these things are somewhat overrated. If you
| want to work at Google right out of school, maybe they matter
| more (particularly credentialism.) But I got my first three
| tech jobs simply by applying on the website, including one at
| a well-regarded startup. I don't have a CS degree, didn't
| have connections, and have never networked in my life.
|
| I think what actually mattered was laddering up from a sorta-
| crappy place to a less-crappy place to an actually-good
| place, and consciously filling in gaps in my skills,
| especially those relevant for interviewing. When I
| interviewed at the well-regarded startup, for some reason
| someone asked me to implement merge sort (lol!) Well,
| fortunately I had skimmed the algorithm on the plane over, on
| the off chance someone asked me.
|
| I could definitely get an interview at a FAANG at this point,
| because their recruiters reach out to me. As to whether I
| could get the job, I think it would mostly depend on my luck,
| skills, and preparation.
| dnautics wrote:
| yeah but you found your way out via tech, which is a very
| exceptional case (I did the same thing, after spending
| almost two decades not-in-tech). And anyways GP said:
|
| > one single thing that makes traditional university
| education successful
|
| Probably is "external credentialism", if there were a
| single thing. Think of the largest employer in the US
| (federal government). Credentials are CRAZY important for
| positions in that org.
| bocklund wrote:
| Networking and connections get university students good jobs.
| Aptitude and drive are what makes them good at those jobs.
|
| I think the post you responded to was talking about the
| latter type of "success" at universities, but both are valid
| metrics of success.
| dnautics wrote:
| I believe you are talking about _excellence_ which is
| correlated to, but not necessarily concommitant with
| _success_.
| zenithd wrote:
| Attending courses for four years, including many outside of
| your major, and doing enough work to not fail.
|
| It's a low bar. Very low. But still much higher than the bar
| at bootcamps.
|
| Anecdotally, the only positive interactions I've had with
| bootcamp cert holders were cases where the cert holder
| already had significant work experience that required non-
| trivial training (e.g., in healthcare, a trade, or logistics
| as opposed to retail/warehouse) or a 4 year degree. So I
| believe the earlier anecdote/observation that bootcamp grads
| -- especially "blank slates" -- often lack the grit that's
| required for successful employment in an IC eng role.
|
| I'm a self-taught programmer and had my first programming
| gigs prior to starting college. So I've been an advocate for
| non-traditional hires in most roles I've helped hire for.
| Even roles where we'd traditionally require a PhD and where
| the level of expertise required really is 3+ years post-
| graduate-coursework immersion in the research field, I've
| advocated for "phd in <subfield 1> and <subfield 2> _or
| similar background_ " and helped source non-traditional
| candidates where possible. But the "lack of grit" problem wrt
| bootcamp grads is definitely a thing.
|
| _> Networking and connections?_
|
| You say this like it should be dismissed out-of-hand, but
| actually, having a reputation among your peers for not being
| a lazy idiot does not come free and is actually a useful
| signal in hiring.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I've had to hire for a few developer positions over the past ~6
| months, and I was honestly shocked by how many cases of, "Have
| never coded in my life, but I am enrolled in Bootcamp X, and look
| to complete the coursework soon!" there were.
|
| Often, you find cases of people who claim to be "software
| engineers" and list working _at_ the Bootcamp company on their
| resume. You also get a number of "instructors" who apply for
| senior roles, which I find interesting.
|
| I guess, overall, I'm not _opposed_ to hiring someone who
| attended a school like this, I am just not in any way _impressed_
| by seeing it on someone 's resume. For a junior role, I think it
| can make sense, but for anything more senior, it's become a bit
| frustrating to deal with these (and the contractors who pretend
| like they're interested in full time work until the last second).
| twofornone wrote:
| It's high time we as a society rejected this nonsensical idea
| that you can teach anyone anything. Not everyone is suited to
| learn programming at a professional level; certainly not by
| cramming in x weeks at some bootcamp. For most students I suspect
| these are effectively scams. Not unlike college these days...
| danso wrote:
| The author's tweet thread has the key points and documents:
| https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1452658640809197569
|
| edit: on top of the problems with Lambda's offerings, losing 7
| out of 9 executives since 2020 is rough:
| https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1452658652448362497
| digianarchist wrote:
| Vincent's interview with This Week in Startups on Lambda School
| is also very interesting despite the weird McCarthyist line of
| questioning the host goes down.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5hUT8VZNvm8
| ctvo wrote:
| My partner went through a bootcamp, and there was an interview
| process after the application process. In my partner's case, they
| hold an advance degree in a STEM field from an Ivy League. A few
| of their peers had similar backgrounds, and that group didn't
| have trouble finishing.
|
| I wonder if the push to scale out these programs meant lowering
| standards, since folks with the ability / discipline to finish
| are few.
|
| If so, the unintended consequences are interesting:
|
| Letting in more folks -> more folks with issues finishing -> more
| customer support -> more issues -> more doubts about the
| worthiness of the credentials from employers -> more folks having
| trouble finding placement -> lowering standards to let in more
| folks.
| tjpnz wrote:
| I've interviewed a few candidates in a similar situation to
| your partner. My impression is that the bootcamps had very
| little to do with their success. I would put it more down to
| personal drive and possibly the programming STEM grads tend to
| get exposed to.
| ctvo wrote:
| Right, I agree. I think that's the problem. Misattributing
| initial successes to the program, and not the people you
| filtered in, meant it became progressively harder to achieve
| the same placement rates year over year.
|
| I imagine the above coupled with investor pressure and your
| own hype / marketing makes for a situation like Lambda
| School.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| It's interesting that you call this having "very little to do
| with" the success. It's a philosophical argument, I guess. If
| there's boulder at the top of a hill and I give it a little
| nudge so it rolls all the way to the bottom - did I have very
| little to do with the boulder rolling down, since gravity did
| most of the work? Or did I play the most important role?
|
| Even if it's true that selection bias is huge and the best
| qualified people going into a bootcamp are the best
| performers coming out, that doesn't necessarily mean the
| bootcamp wasn't useful. These people could have otherwise
| gone their whole lives always being one small nudge away from
| becoming a great programmer, but would have never realized it
| without the right conditions. If a bootcamp simply creates
| those conditions for them to make it happen for themselves,
| that still seems important.
| ummonk wrote:
| Would they have been given an interview without going through
| the bootcamp?
| kregasaurusrex wrote:
| I'm a Lambda School data science graduate that's currently
| looking for a job, have been doing plenty of leetcode problems
| and DS&A studying recently. Resume & contact info is available on
| my profile if your company has any openings or if you just want
| to chat.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| It's been my experience that there is knowledge that can only be
| taught in high school for some subjects. Not because the
| information is inherently specific to high schoolers but because
| high school is the only place that allows for the leisurely-
| enough pace to teach the knowledge.
|
| For example, I learned Pascal as a first language. Outside of
| high school, no one has the time to learn a dead language for the
| few cool ideas it has but _in_ high school, it provides
| indispensable background for a lot of concepts that come later
| (e.g. BEGIN /END being written out to teach you how much that
| sucks so that you understand why we use {} in every other
| language, the := operator making far more sense than the =
| operator, and other little tidbits).
|
| The same logic applies (for me) to Latin, cooking classes, and
| Calculus. Ironically, I find that music classes have become so
| subsumed by the struggle to justify their funding that HS music
| brushes off non-essential skills just as shamelessly as
| university music does.
| paulpauper wrote:
| just change your bank account, withdraw your money. worse case,
| get new ID , or try to get a judge to suspend it. tons of ways to
| evade a civil garnishment. never keep much $ in your bank
| account. If lambda ripped you off, no need for you to keep having
| to pay for your mistake.
| poundofshrimp wrote:
| My anecdotal experience as a part-time web dev instructor was not
| great - I recently quit after just 6 months. A small handful of
| students were curious and driven, but I have the impression that
| most students were not very driven. Could be an artefact of my
| program being part-time, not sure if it's different in the full-
| time one (the part-time program enrolment was paused shortly
| after I joined btw). The main reason I quit was because school
| provided very little support for instructors in the sense of
| growth of our skills. I still think the idea is great, but I'm
| less confident in Lambda School as a company now.
| 1-6 wrote:
| The best way to get your foot in the door is by actually getting
| your foot in the door. I had great success working with a
| staffing company and others who have followed my advice also
| became full-time employees. You'll be a contractor or vendor for
| a bit but you'll meet the right teams and even get a chance to
| sample the culture before you make the move in.
| Gunax wrote:
| I think there is a double standard applied to educational
| reformers like MOOCs, bootcamps, and video courses.
|
| Education largely does not work for most people who enrol. Most
| college students do not finish, and something like a third of
| university students do not either. And even among those students
| who receive the credential, many are probably able to slide
| through without actually learning much.
|
| Anecdotally I think you'll find education has a pareto
| distribution: the top few percent of students learn enormously,
| the top 20% learn a decent amount, the next 20% or so squeek
| through with marginal benefit, and the bottom half does not even
| finish.
|
| The reason I get annoyed is that I think these new, data-driven
| forms of education shoot themselves in the foot by gathering
| data. If they just shut their ears and pretended that everyone
| was learning _based on the grades /assessments_ like universities
| and colleges do, they might be just as successful.
|
| In other words, the proper comparison is not whether the
| education is most likely to succeed, but how likely it is to
| succeed _in comparison to other forms_. Sort of like those quit
| smoking aids which reportedly double your success rate of
| quitting--in a notoriously difficult task like quitting smoking,
| going from a 3% success to 6% is profound.
| bwing wrote:
| It's only a double standard if you're assuming the people
| critical of Lambda aren't also critical of selling valueless
| $200k college educations to checked-out students.
| sunny--tech wrote:
| You can't compare uni and bootcamps because they're a false
| equivalency as someone else pointed out.
|
| The sole purpose of a bootcamp is to get a job afterwards.
| That's why they market their job placement rates so much.
|
| Uni, video courses, and MOOCs are for education. Not everyone
| uses them to get a job, so job placement for a video course or
| uni compared to bootcamp doesn't give you much info.
|
| Anecdote: I did a self-paced online school to get my first
| software job. I did research on it in regards to job placement.
|
| After getting my first software job, I have since taking many
| video courses and even went back to uni to get a degree in
| Computer Science. All of that was purely for further education,
| not getting a job.
|
| I wouldn't go to a bootcamp in my position because I don't need
| it. They aren't focused on education or academics but job
| training.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| Wish someone told me before I got $300,000 into debt that my
| liberal arts degree wasn't going to help me get employment.
| My university was certainly not up front about that. And if
| they had been honest about the fact that the degree was worth
| fuckall in the job market I would have not wasted my money
| there.
| akanet wrote:
| I agree but would suggest you apply further rigor. There _are_
| bootcamps that are performing well. Bootcamps should be
| compared to other bootcamps.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Do you have any recommendations or a shortlist?
| sanxiyn wrote:
| cirr.org has data you can compare.
| verogianno wrote:
| I was a 2015 UX Bootcamp grad (Chicago local, later acquired and
| run into the ground.) I think I paid $8k and have had a pretty
| great career, though it took a couple months to find that first
| job. The last 2 years, I've had a side gig where I do practice UX
| interview - usually to bootcamp grads.
|
| Y'all I felt bad for most of these folks. The majority were not
| taught how to solve problems, but rather how to take generic
| steps in design thinking in order to create a cookie cutter
| portfolio. There was rarely any consideration for anything on the
| either side of UX, be it business or development, so they were
| learning in a vacuum. A couple of the schools had former grads
| teaching in order to boost placement %. How are you supposed to
| learn from someone who's never executed in the real world is
| beyond me. The most successful folks almost always had tangental
| previous work experience to draw from. And in the rare instances
| someone had learned some UI skills? Yikes. All that in a market
| that has been oversaturated with junior UX/UI candidates the last
| couple year, it's no wonder places are starting to ditch the UX
| programs. Plus now, you always have college students with UX
| degrees to compete with.
|
| I think a lot of people believed it would be easier to break into
| UX because there was no code/is less technical which led to this
| burst bubble. Not to say that's not true, but designing software
| for humans is more complicated than a persona and some low-fi
| wireframes!
| sam0x17 wrote:
| It isn't just Lambda School. I mentor for [insert large coding
| bootcamp here] and I will say things have been going badly across
| the board for more than 50% of students. They recently had to cut
| a lot of staff, and completion rates seem to hover around only
| 50-60% when you take into account all the students they remove
| from this calculation when they withdraw for "personal reasons".
| The employment numbers I don't have as much insight into but I
| have definitely had students who I don't think will get hired
| easily, and students reach out via LinkedIn 6th months later
| still looking for a job and wondering if they can work for me.
|
| That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are
| Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of
| them had any background in programming and went right from
| bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for
| some people.
|
| One thing I've tried to emphasize with my mentees is the need to
| go beyond the curriculum (because it simply doesn't cover enough)
| and do personal projects. I always tell them the narrative about
| how back in the early 00s, the only resources available were
| things like w3schools.com, documentation, and the occasional
| dubiously accurate blog entry. I was able to learn almost
| everything I learned not for the sake of learning it but because
| I wanted to build X or Y. Bootcamps will teach you a vertical
| slice of some skills that are relevant in [current year], but
| they do not do a very good job of getting you started on a
| lifelong process of self-learning and side projects, which is the
| only way you get anywhere in this industry. Plus the only way to
| stand out when you went to a bootcamp anyway is having a very
| exceptional github profile with open source contributions that
| demonstrates you actually have an interest and do things beyond
| what is required by the bootcamp.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| One huge mistake I think a lot (but not all of) the bootcamps
| are making is taking the easy route of simply using JavaScript
| to teach both frontend and backend. JavaScript is a TERRIBLE
| first programming language. I usually have to spend 2-3
| sessions per mentee explaining the idiosyncrasies of
| JavaScript, where some of the OOP concepts actually come from,
| and how things work in other languages to put into context the
| really terrible implementation of these features in js. Main
| reason being, I tell them, things that run in the browser are
| different from almost every other runtime environment because
| on the web it is extraordinarily difficult to deprecate/change
| things, because if you do then X% of the web breaks. This is
| why we still to this day have things like "quirks mode" etc.
| Once a behavior is out there in the wild, you basically have to
| support it as a browser, and you can drop support for it
| virtually never. This process has led to the JavaScript we have
| today -- mountains of functionality dumped on top of a
| backwards compatible core riddled with idiosyncrasies and poor
| design decisions that didn't become poor until they were left
| unchanged for ~20 years.
|
| Anyway, my point is, it's very important to make sure students
| understand that their confusion surrounding how things are
| structured in JavaScript is natural, and that they can (and
| should, on their own preferably) look forward to learning more
| stable/sensical languages in the near future. It's a shame I
| have to do this for my students instead of the course just
| doing it for me, however.
| kace91 wrote:
| Why not teach them functional concepts (map, filter, reduce,
| etc are well supported and comfortable) and leave the horrors
| of Js classes alone?
| sam0x17 wrote:
| They run into enough problems with objectness just learning
| map / filter / reduce. I've seen so many angry / frustrated
| students trying to use a for each loop to iterate over an
| Array only to find that although this works in most
| languages, in js these just loop over the fucking KEYS of
| the object (which now opens up the discussion about how
| `obj[1]` is not a key but `obj['hey']` is a key and the
| differences therein.
| woah wrote:
| Kind of crazy that nobody taught them to use "for of"
| instead of "for in". Maybe make a linter that marks "for
| in" as a syntax error
| skrebbel wrote:
| I wonder if there would be a market for a "stricter mode"
| version of JavaScript that simply does not allow you to
| use the legacy features that are so quirky.
|
| Eg just disallow for...in to be used at all (but allow
| for...of)
|
| No iterating over objects except via eg Object.entries
|
| No inheriting objects from other objects (ie no
| prototypal inheritance)
|
| No var
|
| No anonymous functions (ie only named function
| declarations or lambda/fat-arrow expressions, to avoid
| `this` binding gotchas)
|
| Etc
|
| I think the only real big blocker to a thing like this is
| that it'd need tooling (eg a transpiler that injects
| error throws at appropriate places), and tooling is
| another big hairy thing that makes JS less approachable
| for beginners.
| threatofrain wrote:
| That's something which can be done at build time, such as
| through a linter.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Some of it would need to be runtime checks to be fully
| consistent and unsurprising, I think.
| abecedarius wrote:
| I haven't tried it, but somewhere in that neighborhood:
| https://github.com/endojs/Jessie
| whakim wrote:
| Yes, javascript has some quirks. But most bootcamps are
| trying to get their students from "zero to employable
| developer" in a very short amount of time, and "employable
| entry-level developer" is almost always synonymous with
| "employable entry-level _web_ developer ". Given that
| mandate, you basically have to teach people the basics of web
| applications, which means talking about what happens on the
| client, which means javascript. And at that point, it's
| pretty reasonable to not spend your limited time teaching
| them a whole other language, especially because Node is
| extremely popular at the kinds of places your students are
| likely to work.
|
| Also, most languages have quirks. What are you going to teach
| them? Python, which also has almost 30 years of baggage?
| Java, which requires you to spend significantly more time to
| produce basic functionality? Haskell, so they can gloat about
| the power of purity and monads on Hacker News?
|
| I understand that javascript might not be the ideal intro
| language in theory. But I think it probably is the best one
| in the bootcamp specific use case.
| notJim wrote:
| I agree with this. It seems like they should start with
| python or even java to learn the basics in a relatively
| straightforward environment, but one that also implements a
| lot of constructs in a fairly standard way. They also both
| have well-documented and large standard libraries. I feel
| like they should spend a bit of time on that, and then switch
| to JS, which is relevant for so many jobs these days.
| pharmakom wrote:
| It's niche, but I really think F# is the best language to
| learn first. Not all of F#, but the basics of let, records,
| tuples, recursion... All that's required is FSI (the
| interactive interpreter). You can even fetch dependencies
| from Nuget inside a script, so there's less setup than Node
| or Python.
|
| Elm would probably work too.
| notJim wrote:
| Learning these esoteric languages seems like the opposite
| of what you want to do if your goal is to create
| employable engineers in as little time as possible.
| woah wrote:
| Python and Java are probably just as bad as Javascript. I
| started with Javascript (and self taught) and never had
| many issues. Javascript is very easy to get running and
| play around.
|
| With Java you will spend a huge amount of time on pointless
| ceremony that can seem important to a beginner but is
| really pedantic enforcement of programming preferences from
| the Java designers (everything is a class for example).
|
| With Python you have a pretty easy language but the
| dependency management situation is a disaster. Python in a
| Google Colab notebook where everything is pre-installed
| could be good.
| notJim wrote:
| I agree that Java has a lot of silly boilerplate, but I
| don't see that as a huge hurdle. Most people will use an
| IDE that populates it for you. Keep in mind this is for a
| complete beginner.
|
| Dependency management with either Java or Python is PITA
| IMO, but my idea would be to avoid dependencies during
| this initial phase of learning the basics.
| ghaff wrote:
| Python seems to be the goto for intro programming courses
| at a lot of universities today. I assume that bootcamps
| are more focused on Javascript because front-end wbdev is
| probably more marketable than Python in isolation.
| legerdemain wrote:
| A number of bootcamps, at least in the Bay Area, teach
| full-stack web dev as JS + Django (General Assembly) or
| JS + Rails (Coding Dojo).
|
| On one hand, it seems like an antiquated curriculum. On
| the other hand, a surprising number of mid-sized
| companies still run on Rails or Django.
|
| (I don't comment on the usefulness of Rails and Django to
| small companies and individuals, because they're not the
| ones hiring bootcamp grads.)
| threatofrain wrote:
| JS is a small language when you consider the core of
| constructs which are in use today. I'd ballpark JS to be
| around 80-120 "constructs", which will differ based on how
| you divide semantic and conceptual units of learning. I'd
| ballpark Go to be around 80-120 as well.
|
| A junior developer who is just learning how to code will not
| deal with all of JS historical baggage; they will deal with
| historical JS when joining a large historical codebase. A
| junior developer will also not be dealing with the different
| quirks arising from different browser runtimes. These are
| concerns for businesses who already have products.
|
| But a Student does not encounter these things while learning
| and writing greenfield apps. Otherwise we are advocating for
| a student to learn an additional "learning" language. That
| sounds ideal for a 4 year university program.
| Fellshard wrote:
| You have to deal with every idiosyncrasy as soon as you
| begin using external dependencies (and even many standard
| browser features), because there is no standard convention
| at any one time, much less over time. There is no fixed
| paradigm, no common way of doing things, and so the student
| must first understand how each library frames the world
| differently, and then work out how to composite those
| worlds into anything approaching coherence.
| yholio wrote:
| Learning an additional, "learning language", be it a real
| language like Pascal or an entirely conceptual/theoretical
| language like pseudocode or flowchart is the only way to
| become a programmer.
|
| Programming is a very particular and abstract way to look
| at performing a task and most people need to be eased into
| it, trained to think like a computer.
|
| This ideea that you can take a shoe salesman, make them
| "proficient" at JavaScript, and let them loose in the job
| market is a bit strange. It might work for a very limited
| number of people with an knack for it, but most people I've
| seen will approach the task as some sort of incantation of
| magic formulas that make the computer work. When the
| complexity of the task exceeds what can be achieved with
| magic formulas, they give up in frustration.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Except they will actually deal with all of it. First
| question I get is usually "what is var" followed by "when
| do I use arrow functions and when do I use normal
| functions" shortly followed by "why does this code work
| with a normal function but not with an arrow function" or
| "why does my code using classes and arrow functions not
| work on [ancient browser some family member has for some
| reason]?". I'll also get numerous questions about whether
| it is a good practice to do things like `x++` where `x` is
| a string because they noticed that it happens to work and
| legitimately want to know if this is good practice / by
| design (oof). Don't even get me started on the "equality in
| js" discussion.
|
| The key problem with js is the relationship between objects
| and functions is extremely confusing. You end up having to
| explain associative arrays, and spend 30+ minutes doing
| some hand-waving to even begin to describe what an object
| actually is in JavaScript. Then they get it. Contrast that
| with something like Java or even Rust where, despite the
| other complexities, it's pretty clear what the data is and
| how it is stored.
| ksml wrote:
| That sounds like a pedagogy problem, not a language
| problem. From my experience [1], students learn JS just
| fine as a first language, as long as the learning process
| is structured well. Every practical language has its
| quirks, and no one learns a programming language by
| learning all the quirks at one time. You can be
| productive in JS without understanding all of the quirks,
| and then build up to that later.
|
| When you're teaching, you should be enabling the student
| to do one more thing that they couldn't do before. If
| you're spending 30+ minutes trying to explain what an
| object is, you're trying to do way too much. You don't
| need to have a 100% complete and correct understanding of
| Javascript's object model to use objects.
|
| > Contrast that with something like Java or even Rust
| where, despite the other complexities, it's pretty clear
| what the data is and how it is stored.
|
| That's nonsense. Particularly with Rust, now you're deep
| in the weeds of pointers, stack vs heap vs other
| segments, and borrow checking rules.
|
| [1] helped design a JS class at Stanford for first-time
| programmers. Also designed an intro Rust class.
| ciberado wrote:
| My experience is quite different: I used to love to teach
| introductory courses using JS. Using an omnipresent and
| familiar tool like the browser as the IDE and the super-
| powerful debug system integrated on it is a big plus for
| newbies.
|
| Also, the language has clear defects, but they irritate much
| more the experienced folks than the rookies (that are not so
| surprised when encountering inconsistencies).
|
| Oh, and I have also trained many people using Java, and I
| initiated my dev career with Java 0.99 (or 0.98?). Most of my
| courses started with the sentence "let me tell you a joke:
| public static void main(String[] args)" :)
| temp8964 wrote:
| Is 50% really bad? How much did they pay?
|
| Compare to graduation rate of traditional colleges:
| https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40
|
| "The overall 6-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time
| undergraduate students who began seeking a bachelor's degree at
| 4-year degree-granting institutions in fall 2012 was 62
| percent. That is, by 2018 some 62 percent of students had
| completed a bachelor's degree at the same institution where
| they started in 2012. The 6-year graduation rate was 61 percent
| at public institutions, 67 percent at private nonprofit
| institutions, and 25 percent at private for-profit
| institutions. The overall 6-year graduation rate was 65 percent
| for females and 59 percent for males; it was higher for females
| than for males at both public (64 vs. 58 percent) and private
| nonprofit (70 vs. 64 percent) institutions. However, at private
| for-profit institutions, males had a higher 6-year graduation
| rate than females (26 vs. 25 percent)."
| ksml wrote:
| I think the bigger issue is with dishonesty in numbers.
| They're advertising a different set of numbers to students,
| and it does not seem like they're being very transparent with
| the process
| herbturbo wrote:
| That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are
| Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of
| them had any background in programming and went right from
| bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works
| for some people.
|
| Isn't that just a case of some students having natural ability
| where a large percentage do not? If being a good developer was
| only about knowing syntax and writing efficient algorithms boot
| camps would work fine.
| ghaff wrote:
| I very much doubt it's exclusively "natural ability"
| (whatever that means exactly. I suspect that most people who
| are really motivated to finish and can set aside the time to
| do so can get the certificate even if they don't have the
| whatever to become really good developers.
| herbturbo wrote:
| The whatever you refer to is natural ability. Two people
| from a bootcamp turning out to be immediately useful
| developers says more about the people than the bootcamp
| which is what the original point was about.
| ghaff wrote:
| Maybe it doesn't apply at the bootcamp level. But there
| are certainly things I could be very motivated to learn
| but I'm pretty sure I'd really struggle with serious
| math/physics even if I put a lot effort in.
| notJim wrote:
| > two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda
| School and Ironclad grads
|
| I just want to echo this, I have also worked with some really
| really sharp engineers coming out of these bootcamps. They were
| also people changing careers. I would really hate for the
| questionable aspects of these bootcamps to reflect on all of
| their grads, because some of the grads are fantastic.
| clpm4j wrote:
| From what I've seen, I agree about some of the grads being
| fantastic - the types who could have been extremely
| successful in a traditional college CS path if they had
| chosen. However, these are few and far between, the exception
| to the rule. Most (again, from what I can tell) really
| struggle, and don't have what it takes to succeed in this
| field (be it lack of genuine interest, focus, curiosity in
| technology - whatever). Add to this the fact that every
| company has had the "only hire the best; hiring is the most
| important thing in the world" mantra beat into their heads,
| and suddenly all of these would-be developers are far from
| employable. I routinely see and hear of entry level dev jobs
| (at small mediocre tech startups) getting over a thousand
| applications per role, and they reject all of them.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Some of the grads are fantastic, but not because of
| bootcamps. They would probably succeed only through self-
| teaching if they wanted. The school isn't doing them any
| favors besides adding a little standardized badge on their
| resume.
|
| I guess traditional colleges are the same way, right? A
| degree is like an informal union card that says "Hey this
| person can sit for 4 years and take tests."
| ummonk wrote:
| I mean there is a lot of value in getting a standardized
| badge for far less expense and time than a traditional
| degree.
| ghaff wrote:
| One nice thing about software is that you can self-teach to a
| significant degree. But you probably need some basic aptitude
| _and_ you need a huge amount of self-motivation. And, as you
| say, you probably want to structure your learning in a way that
| works for you.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Or you can just keep making small projects. I got to 100k
| without a degree this way. I made these projects because I
| enjoy programming. I can't say any of my learning has been
| structured.
|
| Even now I'll show off my projects during interviews. The
| rare times this backfires I know that company would have
| sucked anyway.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I will say, the formalism mainly helps to fight off imposter
| syndrome. I was the same programmer I was before and after my
| CS degree, the difference being with the degree I had a chip
| on my shoulder, and that helped significantly.
| tayo42 wrote:
| > But you probably need some basic aptitude and you need a
| huge amount of self-motivation.
|
| You need this to be successful at anything. My cynical take
| is most people aren't, and see programing as some get rich
| quick scheme. If they did have these qualities they for the
| most part would already be successful
| 300bps wrote:
| _But you probably need some basic aptitude and you need a
| huge amount of self-motivation_
|
| Could not agree more. When I was 14 years old my friends
| would go out to the mall to hang out. I would sit at home
| working on the modem routines for my BBS program.
|
| If I didn't get paid to work in IT, I would be doing it for
| free.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| This one particular student sticks with me. He was in his
| 60s-70s, and had a burgeoning career in IT/Security in the late
| 90s, but quit his job to take care of his ailing mother around
| 2001 or so. He took care of her, living off of her reverse
| mortgage for 20 years, but now she has passed away, and the
| term of the reverse mortgage ends soon (or I believe by now has
| ended) so the bank will be re-posessing his house, his only
| remaining asset. The guy was not doing well. Even though he was
| quite smart and had C++ in his distant background, he was
| making almost zero progress in the course. It soon became clear
| that he was so drained from working 12-hour days at a Costco
| warehouse (and doing other similar menial jobs) 6 days a week
| (and still not making enough to even pay his medical bills)
| that he wasn't going to be able to make any progress. I
| repeatedly recommended him for a scholarship (because of his
| intelligence and skill) but I never heard back, and eventually
| he dropped off my schedule. I did everything I could to give
| him what he needed to succeed, but ultimately there was nothing
| I could do. It haunts me. This country is so fucked.
| akanet wrote:
| Thanks for the story. The most brutal thing for me about
| reporting this story was each individual human horror-show.
| It's such a serious thing to be responsible for attempting to
| transform the lives of people who need it so desperately. It
| is what's most noble about Lambda's mission, to me.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| What's even more sad is even if he did well in the courses; I
| doubt he would be hired because of his age.
|
| I can't think of another industry that discriminates on age
| more than tech.
| codr7 wrote:
| Same story in most western countries by now, stumble once and
| you're fucked for life.
|
| And to add insult to injury, people will rather think you
| deserve it than face the fact that we're all in the same
| stinking boat.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Does any country do a decent job of retraining 70 year old
| men for developer positions? This does not need to be a high
| priority for a society if the 70 year old can afford a roof
| of their head and a meal.
| xtracto wrote:
| My thought was around those lines: 60/70 year olds
| shouldn't be struggling to get retrained. They should be
| able to live the rest of their lives in retirement. Society
| should take care of their elders. That's where I would
| start a UBI program if I could.
|
| Sure, if anyone wants to use their time to learn something
| new that would be a plus for them.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, we sort of do. It's called social security. Now,
| you could argue that social security by itself only
| supports a pretty spartan lifestyle. But any UBI proposal
| is probably even less money.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I'm for not giving SS to those that don't need it.
|
| Your 65 and wealthy. Why do you need a that piddley SS
| check? The USA has reniged on promises before. Oh yea,
| everyone would still have to contribute to SS.
|
| I imagine the money saved might go to a Basic Income? A
| Basic Income that would help out the poorest of
| Americans.
| ericb wrote:
| I don't think that's the issue. The issue is that the
| United States provides such a poor safety net for those
| with health issues that one person's failing health
| destroys the economic potential of one or more people
| around them.
|
| From a sheer utilitarian perspective, healthcare and safety
| nets are positive ROI. Imagine the job-producing startups
| that don't exist because "how do you pay for insurance?"
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| Can't people choose to refuse medical help?
|
| The only reason I see expenses really causing massive
| debt is if you choose to accept/request medical
| procedures you can't pay for.
|
| While it's morbid to consider the idea of just letting
| yourself die because you don't want to go into debt, it
| still is a choice... isn't it?
| dnautics wrote:
| In a whole lot of cases dying is, whether we like it or
| not "I/we/We[0] don't want to pay for it anymore". I have
| the experience of pulling the plug on my dad, not for
| financial reasons, but because it was very clear that he
| was going to die anyways and it wasn't worth the
| emotional energy to keep him around (luckily for us,
| everyone important had time to say their goodbyes and
| several annoying people had said their goodbyes too [1]).
| But it also brought into focus to me that we COULD have
| spent/forced the system to spend millions of dollars in
| extraordinary resources to keep him alive.
|
| Medical technology is quite advanced these days. Advanced
| != free. And there's a thing where the longer you try to
| prolong someone's life the more progressively expensive
| it becomes, not just from a "price of care" perspective
| but an "[externalized] cost of care" perspective. Is it
| worth X carbon dioxide emissions to keep a person on a
| "level-III dialysis machine"? Is it worth X acres of
| rainforest to extract an anticancer drug to keep
| someone's cancer at bay?
|
| Anyways the political divide, in the US, between the
| left's clueless utopianism and the right's underhanded
| support of market-distorting profitmongers, has become so
| farcical that it's impossible to question if humans
| should have "a general right to have their life extended"
| even if there are actual, difficult questions to go
| around.
|
| [0] capital We, as in "the state"
|
| [1] if you ever have the experience of being by the
| bedside of someone who is dying (n=2 for me), you will
| see people who come to visit, and have so much pathos, I
| suspect largely due to their own hangups about death. To
| be at your best in your role, you will want to shoo them
| away as quickly as possible.
| homo_ergaster wrote:
| > The only reason I see expenses really causing massive
| debt is if you choose to accept/request medical
| procedures you can't pay for
|
| Have you ever been to a US hospital? They don't have a
| menu where you browse treatments and prices. You get your
| treatment and then later on you get a massive bill
|
| That's all putting aside the fact that a society allowing
| people to suffer from treatable illnesses is completely
| unnecessary and cruel considering that providing free
| care to everyone is something many countries do
| successfully
| horsawlarway wrote:
| It's worse than just lost startup opportunities.
|
| I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to
| "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your
| wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next
| generation.
|
| Long term care is needed by a lot of folks over the age
| of 65 (~70% of adults age 65 will require at least
| partial long term care).
|
| Even "reasonably cheap" care (in my experience, roughly
| the same quality as living in a college dorm, with a
| roommate and a meal plan) can easily run 10k/month - or
| 120k a year.
|
| Of those needing long term care (roughly half of all
| folks): Men will need that care for an average of ~2
| years, women nearly 4 years. 20% will need that care for
| 5 years or longer.
|
| I watched my parents spend all of their inheritance
| covering long term care costs for their parents
| (Alzheimers is a bitch). Once the inheritance was gone,
| they worked longer than they would have preferred to
| continue covering those costs (my mother only retired
| this year when my grandmother died of covid - as
| horrendous as it sounds, it was almost a blessing).
|
| My personal take is that "single family homes" and
| "private healthcare" are a literal fucking disaster for
| long term wealth inequality. That policy combination
| takes a lot of middle class families and leaves them
| poor.
|
| * - I personally don't think it's an accident at all, I
| think it's very, _very_ intentional.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| To be fair, long-term care is not just an opportunity to
| _accidentally_ (from the perspective of the holder, not
| the system) get rid of one's accumulated wealth, it is
| often the motivation for _intentionally_ doing so
| prematurely, in order to qualify for Medicaid (which pays
| for the _majority_ of long-term care in the US.) OTOH,
| for people who don't have the knowledge or professional
| advice to do this (which, of course, correlates strongly
| with having more wealth to start with), it is a trap for
| accidental wealth drain rather than intentional
| redistribution, so the poor get generationally poorer,
| while the better off are also better able to protect
| generational wealth, both benefiting from programs for
| the medically indigent.
| makomk wrote:
| This isn't just a US thing. For example, even though
| healthcare is nominally free at the point of use here in
| the UK, that doesn't cover long-term care for the elderly
| - you will have to pay privately for that out of your
| wealth to companies of varying degress of sleaziness
| until you have no more left, at which point the
| government will hopefully consider picking up the bill.
| Our current conservative goverment is planning on capping
| this and it seems fairly controversial.
| sophacles wrote:
| > I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to
| "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your
| wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next
| generation.
|
| ...
|
| > * - I personally don't think it's an accident at all, I
| think it's very, very intentional.
|
| Its extremely intentional wealth stealing, and it's even
| worse than just lost generational wealth transfer. Filial
| responsibility laws mean that your illness and long-term
| care are your children's financial burden:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws
| .
|
| In the worst cases, people estranged from their parents
| for decades end up bankrupted. Depending on what state
| your grandmother lived in - your mother may have been on
| the hook even if she hadn't chosen to keep working to
| care for her mom.[1]
|
| The idea that paying for elderly parents' expensive
| (intentionally or accidentally) care is a choice only
| applies to people in less than half of the states. These
| laws make the only choice "pay the provider directly now"
| or "pay the provider costs and late fees, etc via the
| courts". So anyone who wants to claim that the people who
| care for their parents are chosing to do so is claiming
| wrong - if your parent spends their last days in one of
| 26 states, the parent is chosing what your wealth is used
| for.
|
| [1] I hope that didn't come across as suggesting your mom
| was only making a financial choice, or that she didn't
| make her choice out of love. I'm sorry you lost your
| grandmother and I hope your mom enjoys her retirement.
| 0des wrote:
| > my mother only retired this year when my grandmother
| died of covid - as horrendous as it sounds, it was almost
| a blessing
|
| I can only imagine the hardships your family endured for
| this sentence to come out. I'm glad things are working
| out for you guys and I'm sorry for your loss.
| ancode wrote:
| > I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to
| "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your
| wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next
| generation.
|
| That's not true, the money isn't just lost. The money is
| passed to the children of the person who extracts the
| money from the sick people. It's by design.
| gigatexal wrote:
| I think this sums up the issue with bootcamps:
|
| "That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are
| Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of
| them had any background in programming and went right from
| bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works
| for some people."
|
| Some folks thrive in this environment either by natural ability
| or their learning style and others do not. For whatever the
| reason the coding bootcamp gets the flack for underperforming
| folks and it seems to me unfair: Why are they held to this
| super high standard to teach a difficult subject (computer
| programming at a high level) to all kinds of learners at all
| levels?
| bwing wrote:
| Because they have minimal admissions filter and constantly
| tell students not to give up, to fight imposter syndrome,
| student testimonials, "this is the toughest thing you'll ever
| do but it's so worth it."
|
| College is gated by GPA and standardized test scores. You can
| quibble over the effectiveness and wisdom of this specific
| gate, but the upside is that mediocre students aren't going
| to spend a year and $30,000 convincing themselves they're
| going to major in CS at MIT. At Lambda, students quit their
| jobs, and take months out of their lives, only to find out 4
| months later that programming isn't for them.
| ghaff wrote:
| It almost seems as if there should be a book or a website
| the gist of which is: "If you can't and don't want to plug
| through the concepts and problems here, you're wasting your
| money to go to a bootcamp."
|
| Heck, there are "intro" (OK, some of them aren't really)
| MOOC classes that, while more theoretical in some cases,
| should give you a pretty good idea if this is something
| you're really willing to devote a lot of time and money to.
| rrix2 wrote:
| > Why are they held to this super high standard to teach a
| difficult subject (computer programming at a high level) to
| all kinds of learners at all levels?
|
| because this is the standard they advertise to and represent
| as the capability of their learning platform and their
| teachers?
| missinfo wrote:
| > things have been going badly across the board for more than
| 50% of students
|
| How does this compare to traditional colleges? We hear a lot
| about students saddled with massive debt and useless degrees,
| but I don't have a good sense of what percentage that is.
|
| And my understanding of Lambda is that you don't end up with
| debt if the school fails you?
| ptudan wrote:
| Anyone else think using the placement rate from the first half of
| 2020 is a bit cherry picked? That's right when covid hit and
| hiring froze eveywhere. Yes it picked back up by the end of the
| year, but in April 2020 I can only assume that the demand for
| bootcamp graduates was at its lowest. Bluechip companies like
| Airbnb were reneging on offers to ivy league candidates. It was a
| unique period in time.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| Every time I read about a coding bootcamp, it comes off as, if
| not outright fraud, then at the very least sleazy and deceptive.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I've been coding since I was a wee bairn (well, 21, really). I
| was introduced to programming, in 1982-3, during a tech school
| course. I don't really consider the Heathkit calculator I built
| and programmed in the 1970s to be "real" programming.
|
| Mostly self-taught. I'm smarter than the average bear, and pick
| things up, fairly well, but I've also taken somewhere in the
| neighborhood of 30 bootcamps, seminars, and college classes.
|
| Not one single one of them (after my tech school, which was
| actually quite vocationally-based) was particularly useful for
| immediate use in the real world. I think one or two of the
| project management ones were in the same zip code, and the Apple
| DU (dating myself) courses were relatively practical, but they
| were _all_ "training wheels" classes.
|
| What has been my real education, has been writing code to ship.
| _Everything_ I write, I write as "ship" code. Even my
| "throwaway" projects and experiments.
|
| Having a clear end goal, and becoming habituated to finishing all
| my work, has been _incredibly_ valuable. Solving my own problems,
| doing my own research, not "kicking the can down the road," and
| releasing with full tests, documentation, and support, have been
| great teachers.
|
| People seem to like the work I do.
|
| Bootcamps are nice, but they only light the fuse.
|
| I don't think I was ever qualified to write ship code after any
| one of my classes. In many cases, I already knew how to ship, and
| just wanted to learn about different directions. In the last year
| or so, I've taken a whole bunch of short courses on new Apple
| tech. I probably won't use what I learned for months, but I like
| to keep the axle greased.
| zbtaylor1 wrote:
| I completed Lambda's part-time web program about a year ago and
| while I did come out with more knowledge than when I entered, I
| do not think it was worth the time or the money I have invested.
|
| I was not the target Lambda student in that I already had web dev
| knowledge but wanted to delve deeper and felt like I was spinning
| my wheels on my own. The accountability created by the program is
| what I was after.
|
| The curriculum was adequate and, with one exception, the
| instructors were engaging and knowledgeable. While we did have
| some limited interaction with the instructors themselves, digging
| in to individual problems was the job of the team lead (a student
| further ahead in the program who went through an application
| process) and this is where things got grim.
|
| TLs changed frequently and their quality was all over the place.
| Some followed the meeting protocol, some let their group run the
| meetings, others missed meetings regularly. Multiple times my TLs
| were unable to help much because the curriculum had changed and
| we were learning something they hadn't been taught. At best, they
| made sure we all understood the lecture by being thorough during
| our 1 on 1 meetings. At worst, they were a hindrance.
|
| The final for the web dev curriculum is what they call "labs" and
| the TL for your labs group has expanded responsibilities. In
| theory, having gone through labs already, they are supposed to be
| kind of like lead devs - offering architecture suggestions,
| helping with deployment snags, shepherding us through merge
| conflicts, etc.
|
| My labs TL was, more than anything, an obstacle. Mostly they
| forwarded our questions to the section lead and they weren't a
| particularly efficient go-between, so after a few weeks of
| deflecting our follow-ups we started messaging with the SL
| directly and were receiving timely responses. Our TLs only
| contributions to our project were the initial heroku projects and
| an unfinished code climate integration.
|
| In the end, having projects and due dates was helpful for me but
| in no way do I feel it was worth the cost of tuition.
|
| Another Lambda alum here mentioned feeling like student wellbeing
| took a back seat to marketing and PR and nothing encapsulates
| this more perfectly than the photo at the top of their homepage
| of a student who dropped out after repeating one of the early
| sections once or twice. Who cares what became of them as long as
| it looks good on the website!
| katmannthree wrote:
| It's not just lambda. There's another bootcamp, lets call it crap
| college, which effectively asks their ~~customers~~, sorry,
| _students_ to work 10+ hours a day 6-7 days a week for months.
|
| If you fail or withdraw, you have to pay back prorated tuition at
| the rate of several hundred dollars per day you were there. There
| is no grace period, if you get three days in and decide it's not
| for you then you owe them almost a thousand dollars.
|
| Ever worse: their instructional material is very much lacking
| rigor, the degree of guidance they provide is far lower than
| you'd get at a community college (which would also be a lot
| cheaper), and the whole vibe of the community borders on cult-
| like toxic positivity (any criticism of the company will get you
| kicked out).
|
| It's very close to predatory. They lure in disadvantaged people
| with promises of vastly improving their lives, but I'm betting a
| substantial percentage of them leave with thousands in debt and
| virtually nothing to show for it. And the best part? If you're
| dismissed or withdraw that nice easy-to-pay income share
| agreement goes away and you just owe them thousands effective
| immediately regardless of your financial situation.
| akanet wrote:
| Can you email me about this? me@vincentwoo.com
| lostinquebec wrote:
| I think it's a veiled reference to traditional college?
| ummonk wrote:
| Not unless they're counting student loan deferral / income
| driven repayments as an income share agreement.
| katmannthree wrote:
| It's not, I just don't want to name them for reasons that
| should be obvious. There may or may not be enough info in
| my post to figure out what I'm talking about, you'll have
| to use your best judgement.
| lordnacho wrote:
| The problem with any education is how do you figure out the
| actual value added?
|
| We all know that kid who would learn stuff regardless of what
| environment he was put in, and his opposite. And then probably a
| fair few in the middle where the environment actually matters.
|
| When you're looking at outcomes, how do you know which school is
| worth paying for? I'm facing this issue myself right now for my
| primary school kids.
|
| The big issue statistically is selection. For an analogy, think
| of cars. Are Volvos safe, or do they just attract safer drivers?
| It's not impossible to tease out from stats in principle, but has
| anyone done it? With schools it's even worse. Is one school in a
| richer area? What about the cost, that will skew selection too?
| Does one school use an entrance exam? And the really big one,
| does a school kick out underperformers?
|
| With respect to coding schools you have to wonder whether the
| "best" students are already creamed off by universities, such
| that Lambda School and their like are really just salvaging a few
| people who fell into unfortunate circumstances and are trying to
| help themselves out. Along with some unfortunates who are never
| going to be coders but buy the premise that you can be taught
| these things in a short period of time, you just have to pay.
|
| In any case it seems like they are forced to produce numbers
| quite fast for business reasons, and this has caused them to
| present the stats in the most positive light possible. The virus
| situation is not an entirely crazy excuse, but it will be
| interesting to see what happens.
| bingohbangoh wrote:
| Wonder if Austen is gonna make an appearance and say hes happy to
| answer any questions
| minimaxir wrote:
| Here's the last time Austen answered questions about Lambda
| School, which did not go well:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26948258
| bingohbangoh wrote:
| FWIW, I greatly appreciate when founders go to these lengths
| but this happens over and over again. It does not feel
| significant anymore and rings hollow.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Having majored in English Literature at an Ivy, let me just say,
| 30% is a pretty damn good industry placement rate. That said, I'm
| sure the large majority of those people could have done just as
| well through self-study and $1-2k worth of MOOCs
| ResearchCode wrote:
| While not having majored in medicine myself, I see no reason
| why CS couldn't have a 99% placement rate too.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| I think placements rates are just a way to game data. I'm
| imagining two schools, one that accepts everyone that
| applies, and one that filters the bottom half out before
| acceptance. After graduation, the first school has a 50%
| placement rate, and the second has a 100%. Which one is
| better?
|
| Sure we can all pretend that "everyone can do it" but...
| everyone can't. Placement rates as a metric are just deciding
| when to filter the low performers out.
| syndacks wrote:
| This is a troll comment.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| The 99% placement of medical schools is not a "troll", no.
| There is no reason it could not apply to CS.
|
| Also note that most of the points made in contention would
| apply just as well to medical schools and medical school
| graduates. For instance, there are plenty of unsocialized
| medical school graduates - they are still called doctors.
| But if they studied STEM, they're supposedly "too bad to
| deserve a job". Weird.
|
| I'm leaning more towards there being an oversupply of STEM
| graduates.
| ska wrote:
| It's an interesting point, not just the placement rate but
| the graduation rate for medical schools is very high (barring
| a few last-chance, offshore type places if I understand
| correctly).
|
| I never did it but have watched the process from a few
| different viewpoints. My impression is that the gatekeeping
| on the entry side is pretty strong (not just exam results,
| good schools may have multiple interviews before letting you
| in) but they also have ton of resources available to help you
| if you are bogged down. This latter part is helped by high
| tuition.
|
| As for the vetting, as far as I can see they are fine with a
| bunch of false negatives, which results in more homogeneity
| than may be desired. It doesn't seem to be particularly
| empirical.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| Most CS programs do not have 99% placement. There are a few
| reasons
|
| 1. Some people who graduate with CS degrees can't write good
| code. It is shocking how little you can learn while still
| graduating.
|
| 2. Some college graduates are lack the social/organizational
| skills for office work
|
| 3. Industry has a limited appetite for junior engineers
| because they're often a net drain on the company for the
| first 6-12 months and once they become productive can usually
| get a pay bump by switching jobs.
| shagie wrote:
| Additional items:
|
| Many new grads have exaggerated expectations and refuse to
| consider or accept "lower" than working in big tech.
|
| Related to this, there are also the new grads that have
| some extremely niche role that they want to fill. I recall
| from a bit ago a new grad on reddit that wanted to do
| machine learning to save the whales while traveling on a
| research ship. Coming to the realization that most jobs
| aren't in the "safe the world" category was something of a
| shock / disillusionment for them.
|
| At least traditionally, many new grads have refused to
| consider other geographic areas. The "I want to do software
| development, but I am not willing to move out of {local
| area}." Some of this may be changing with remote jobs being
| more feasible - though there may still be restrictions on
| "you must reside within {some state} to qualify for WFH".
| This may be changing a bit, for some companies... but I
| still suspect that some companies are still going to
| require a "you may need to come into the office
| occasionally with a 24h notice."
|
| To point 3, even with the "they are a net drain and they
| job hop soon" there's also the "we need to add more
| capacity in the mid and senior levels before we add
| additional juniors to these teams." There are a lot of
| places where it's "here's a new junior, there's the code -
| go for it" because the mid and senior devs don't have the
| capacity to mentor them.
|
| I also suspect there is a common thought process of new
| grads that the quantity of applications is more important
| than the quality of the application -- sending out hundreds
| of applications even if there significant mismatches
| between the resume and the job posting that could be
| trivially corrected.
| [deleted]
| rossdavidh wrote:
| So, I learned to code at an odd program at Univ. of Texas -
| Austin, essentially a bootcamp for coders that began in the
| 1970's and still runs today. They take about 9 months to get you
| to a beginning programmer level, then you program (for UT
| administration) up through a kind of apprenticeship. It worked
| very well, and the washout rate has historically been about 10%;
| that is, 90% of those initially admitted go on to become
| professional programmers. That 10% includes people who quit,
| move, are expelled, etc. Truly 90% of those admitted get
| programmer jobs.
|
| They have an admissions test, which is essentially an IQ test.
|
| They would never admit to that, and their admitted population is
| very diverse (gender, race, age, etc.). But, they don't just
| admit anybody; in times of high unemployment the vast majority of
| people who take the test are not admitted. They also interview
| prospective candidates to weed out anyone with obvious, serious
| people skills issues. I wonder if this is what's missing from
| most bootcamps?
| [deleted]
| weezin wrote:
| Its funny because Lambda School sent me (alumni) a test
| recently which was basically a wonderlic test.
| tschwimmer wrote:
| This sounds like a decent way to run an educational program but
| a very poor way to run a business (at least a VC backed one).
| You probably won't get enough volume by doing a hard screen.
| You need to ensure that your program is good enough that even
| moderate or marginal candidates come out able to find a job.
| Otherwise, your business is quite small.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I think you would probably need to sell a "first look"
| privilege to prospective employers. The program at UT
| required volunteers from various administrative departments
| to spend time supporting it, and the primary reason they did
| so was to get a peek at who they wanted to hire, ahead of
| competition (from other departments). Of course, this would
| only work in times of labor shortage for good programmers,
| but that is most of the time.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I've been calling this a scam since day one. And the founder has
| been trying to promote anti-college sentiment. It just needs to
| die.
| akanet wrote:
| Hi I wrote this piece and am perhaps still better known here as
| the founder of CoderPad, etc. I'm happy to answer any questions
| throughout the day, so long as they are on-topic and civil.
| mcyc wrote:
| Hi, thanks for this piece.
|
| I've been following these stories for a while and it seems like
| a lot of the big players are ridiculously predatory and are
| providing a catastrophically bad service. I'd like to ask if
| there are any that you think are actually doing a good job?
|
| One in particular I'm curious about is Hackbright.
| akanet wrote:
| I think Hackbright is doing well, enough so that I
| recommended that a friend attend recently (and she did). I
| would look closely at the reporting from each, and interview
| former students. I think prospective students go along too
| easily with marketing. A friend and former bootcamp operator
| told me that students ought to think of picking a school much
| more like buying a house than picking the best air purifier
| off of Wirecutter or whatever. I think this is true.
| vorador wrote:
| Would love to hear a bit about what got you interested in
| journalism and in lambda school - thank you!
| akanet wrote:
| I saw a really silly tweet one of their former execs made and
| then just started gathering information about them for fun. I
| tried to get a friend who was a writer to do the story, but
| she eventually told me to fuck off and do it myself. It took
| a little bit of convincing myself that such a thing it was
| possible, but it was a very enjoyable journey.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Just wanted to say I'm a big fan of your journalism and
| CoderPad.
|
| One question I have about this: Do you think Lambda is uniquely
| problematic in this space or are they perhaps a more typical
| case? Are others worse?
|
| Anecdotally, back in 2019 I asked our internal recruiter to
| reach out to Lambda school to see about graduate resumes sent
| our way for jr software development positions. He emailed them
| but claims they weren't terribly responsive and never sent him
| any candidates. At the time, we just assumed fancy startups
| were getting first pick. Now I think the well was dry.
| akanet wrote:
| I think Lambda is an unusually bad bootcamp owing to their
| financialization strategy and also lack of prior educational
| experience in their leadership. I think there are good
| bootcamps, but the well is being poisoned a bit here.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Wouldn't Caleb Hicks, one of their founders, qualify as
| having education experience?
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebhicks/ -- I mean, it looks
| mostly like biz/corporate education stuff, and dev training
| experience seems to be narrowly focused but I guess it's
| not nothing.
| e_commerce wrote:
| I've loved the interviews you've done. You're one of the sane
| people in this industry. Do you have a podcast or are you
| considering starting one?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| >The school recently sent him a letter demanding his banking
| information so that it could track direct deposits from a job. If
| he doesn't comply, it threatened to charge him his full tuition
| of $30,000 regardless of whether he gets a job.
|
| How disgusting. He should probably tell them no. Even if they
| wrote some non sense allowing this in the income share agreement,
| let them go to court.
|
| I've never met a successful boot camp grad who didn't already
| have a four-year degree.
|
| This is a very complicated problem, because you really do have
| tons of desperate people who are willing to sign their lives away
| for a shot at getting ahead.
|
| $50,000 is an extremely low threshold, so if someone adds a few
| extra shifts working at Best Buy lambda school can then leech
| their meager income?
|
| I'd argue the social experience of traditional college is easily
| a part of its cost. If you're coming from a bad background you'll
| surround yourself better people than you met back home.
|
| It's also much easier to get a generic office job with a
| bachelor's in art history than it is with a ux certificate.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Can you explain why is this disgusting? Why the income share
| agreement is non sense?
| eli wrote:
| Was mandatory monitoring of your bank accounts spelled out in
| the agreement?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| They cancelled his program before he finished it.
|
| Income share agreements are just disingenuous loans,
| eventually most people are going to get to $50,000 a year
| even if it has nothing to do with their education. At least a
| loan is upfront about what you're going to pay, I sure
| wouldn't give my bank account information to some sketchy
| company.
| zenithd wrote:
| It's not the income share agreement per se. It's the request
| for his banking info. They weren't asking for a routing and
| account number, they were asking for enough access to _track
| direct deposits_.
|
| There's no way in hell I'm ever giving that sort of banking
| access to an employer, let alone an educational institution.
| For starters, I share a bank account with my wife and her
| earnings are none of their god damn business.
| mplewis wrote:
| Send me your bank's routing number and your checking account
| number and I'll be happy to explain.
| temp8964 wrote:
| What? Do I have any signed agreement with you?
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Lambda School has no business knowing about:
|
| * their students' alimony payments
|
| * their students' other court awards
|
| * their students' pensions
|
| * their students' disability payments
|
| * their students' spouse's income
|
| * their student's spouse's alimony, other court awards,
| pensions, disability payments, etc.
|
| Agreeing to payment is not the same as agreeing to
| financial surveillance.
|
| If Lambda School believes one of their students is not
| living up to their income sharing agreement, then they
| should simply ask the student. If they have a reason to
| disbelieve a specific student, then they can go to court.
|
| "Let me see all info on regular deposits into your bank
| account because I'm too lazy and unprofitable to do this
| in a way that's not creepy and abusive" is NOT
| reasonable.
| paulpauper wrote:
| After factoring in all these huge fees and other hidden costs,
| traditional college is a better deal, and the degree is
| actuality valid credential, instead of a certificate, which is
| useless in the eyes of most employers. Plus, colleges have tons
| of financial aid with far less punitive repayment conditions or
| upfront costs.
| honkycat wrote:
| Anecdotal: I went to an "expensive fancy" private college and
| I was lucky enough to have parents who knew how to advocate
| for financial aid.
|
| In the end I ended up with +40k in scholarships as a mediocre
| high school student, plus a bunch of state grants.
|
| I graduated with <30k of debt, which I paid off aggressively
| with my programmer job.
|
| I like college. There is a right way to do it as an average
| student:
|
| - Two years of cheap community college to get the chaff out
| of the way - Two years in a better school for the higher
| level classes.
|
| You can't think of it is a party or 'summer camp' which is an
| image which is sold to a lot of young people. You are there
| to learn a skill, improve yourself, and graduate into a
| career.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Large discussions from this year.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26946972
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26802601
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26987632
|
| Interview with Lambda School CEO Austen Allred and Vincent Woo.
|
| https://soundcloud.com/vwoo/interview-with-austen-allred
| MivLives wrote:
| I was at Lambda, graduated, got a job, and have been working
| since. Interesting to see I'm in the minority. I watched a lot of
| change happen. The classes ballooned in size, they kept
| rearranging the curriculum. At one point the curriculum (broken
| into thirds) had the 2nd and 3rd bits flipped. Then a forth bit
| was added on. I actually agreed with that change, as it the extra
| 3 months that were added on were just about finding a job, a task
| students were silently doing anyway.
|
| Did the TL/PM/TA thing for a bit too. There were clearly people
| in it that were struggling. They started to have the ability to
| drop backwards a single week of course. That decision was
| reversed as it was kind of crazy to have people in between
| cohorts.
|
| By the time I was done I don't think the UI program had anyone
| graduate from it. I was interviewed by lawyer at one point who
| was working on behalf of someone in that program. I am unsure of
| the quality of the program but it doesn't seem good.
|
| Most of the people I saw who were doing well were going faster
| then the curriculum. The alumni program was sorta hard to keep
| track of after the slacks split, a lot of people never made the
| transition.
|
| I know a lot of people who were successful after bootcamps,
| Lambda and otherwise. That may just be survivorship bias. I think
| one of the things that may also influence is when you went into
| the program. If you were going because you heard about it on
| hackernews when it was brand new, it was a different experience
| then when you had people coming in from everywhere.
| samsolomon wrote:
| An anecdote from an early bootcamp grad--I graduated from what
| was then known as The Starter League in 2012. Those I have kept
| in touch with have all done pretty well. My guess is:
|
| --1/4 are doing what they did before or something similar.
|
| --1/4 became engineers. Some have moved more into management
| roles.
|
| --2/4 have ended up as PMs, founded a startup or in product
| design, like myself.
|
| Those were successful gave it 100% of their time and focus. Those
| who stuck with their day job and tried to do it in the evenings
| struggled. Also, nobody got a job straight out of bootcamp. Many
| did after 3 to 6 months of additional work post graduation.
|
| Also, It's interesting to see how things have changed. I paid
| like $6,000 and we met for class 3 days a week and had hours of
| pairing work and mentoring outside of class each week for 12
| weeks. Now it seems like many of these schools cost at least
| $20,000 and are much more hands off.
|
| It is amazing that was almost 10 years ago. Time flies.
| bwing wrote:
| I was at Lambda when they announced the switch from 9 to 6 months
| and the elimination of paid team leaders. The feedback was
| universally negative. In a channel for open student discussion,
| Austen Allred deleted a poll from Slack because of how lopsided
| the reaction was. He explained the deletion by saying the poll
| was "misleading."
|
| Students then got a survey "explaining" why the change was
| actually a good thing by asking questions such as "Do you
| understand why companies value mentoring experience?" Not just
| failing to reveal the truth (these were cost-cutting measures),
| but not even taking the effort to come up with a convincing lie.
|
| It was destabilizing: Austen's twitter account would read
| ambitious, hyperoptimistic; meanwhile, drastic changes would be
| made within the program with vague rationales ("after speaking
| with hiring managers, we've made these changes..."), and probing
| further simply got deflections or gaslighting surveys.
|
| There were a ton of good people in the program, and I learned a
| lot there. But fundamentally there needs to be trust between
| institution and student when you're asking people to make this
| level of time and financial commitment. And at no point did I
| feel like Lambda at its top level prioritized student wellbeing
| over PR, costs, or metrics to be sold to investors.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning
| that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching
| as little as two months into the program as students[0]. I
| guess that counts toward their "placement" stats!
|
| Not only that, but Lambda seems so desperate that they will
| offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial
| period. [1]
|
| I don't think I've seen a single hire out of a bootcamp work
| out in the end. Except a few cases where the person actually
| came from a STEM degree from a good school (and more crucially,
| already had some exposure to programming during the degree) but
| it's unclear to me that they actually needed the bootcamp and
| not just a good primer on modern software development and
| something like the Missing Semester [2] or a few classes at
| their school covering software engineering.
|
| [0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-
| job-p...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610
|
| [2] https://missing.csail.mit.edu/
| MivLives wrote:
| I'm a currently working software engineer from Lambda, who
| knows other people who succeeded at Lambda and other
| bootcamps.
|
| The TA thing, a TA doesn't teach, a TA pretty much
| grades/code reviews. They answered questions. (I did this
| while I was hunting for a job).
|
| They also don't count that towards placement.
|
| I have an IS degree, but some other people I know succeed
| with pretty much anything you can think of. I don't have
| enough of a sample size to know if we're all just exceptions
| or not.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > The TA thing, a TA doesn't teach, a TA pretty much
| grades/code reviews. They answered questions.
|
| That sounds like... teaching doesn't it?
| MivLives wrote:
| I guess I should have used the word lecture. Maybe they
| do lecture now, it's been awhile since I was involved.
| shakezula wrote:
| Interestingly enough, all of these comments could have been
| said about my experience at $BOOTCAMP that I attended and then
| was later hired at as a mentor.
|
| The degradation of quality from the removal of human presence
| is a common narrative, and the students react to it so much
| more than management ever realizes.
|
| > at no point did I feel like Lambda at its top level
| prioritized student wellbeing over PR, costs, or metrics to be
| sold to investors.
|
| This is exactly how I would describe it. $BOOTCAMP was around
| for a few years, was purchased by private equity, immediately
| doubled it's prices, gutted the mentoring team, and "revamped"
| the curriculum, which really meant they were just pushing
| everything to video learning.
|
| They have made some minor curriculum improvements as of late,
| but they have a long way to go to get back to what the program
| was when it was just starting out - which was ironically much
| higher quality in my opinion.
| akanet wrote:
| I have a guess at which bootcamp you mean, but I'd love to
| talk to you more - me@vincentwoo.com
| afsafsaf wrote:
| Many bootcamps have a strong incentive to "scale" which
| basically means removing the human element and using video or
| written content. I haven't seen any case where the quality
| didn't degrade once they scale it this way.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Why don't companies just speak plainly about these kinds of
| changes? "We are doing this to cut costs, which we need to do
| to [Survive/Buy a Yacht/Whatever]"
|
| People tend to be really understanding when you are brutally
| honest, and brutally cynical when you bullshit them even a
| little.
| bwing wrote:
| To be frank: I think the main reason is because explicit talk
| of cost-cutting was at odds with leadership's self-
| aggrandizing Twitter talk. (Disrupting the education
| industry, putting four-year colleges out of business, etc.)
| tziki wrote:
| Maybe in some engineering/phd bubbles that's true, but that
| most definitely doesn't work the majority of the time.
| munificent wrote:
| Probably because a startup's primary audience for information
| is investors, not customers.
| lazide wrote:
| For engineering or other pragmatic types? Definitely. For
| those who are used to hard reality and know how to make it
| fit in a nice way or move on like field sales? Often.
|
| For most everyone else? There is often a need to provide at
| least some surface 'here is why everything is not actually
| super terrible so you should stay' sugar coating or it is not
| going to go down well.
|
| The larger the group, the more apparent the effect and I
| suspect it's due to lack of trust and/or familiarity with the
| speaker. If you've had your sleeves rolled up and been in the
| trenches with someone, you either know you can't trust them
| already (and in which case, why are you still here?!?), or
| can trust them well and can see a positive outcome if it
| works.
|
| If you can't trust them, it's just a signal that things are
| terrible and don't know how terrible they really are - and
| what choice does someone have to anchor and assume it's worse
| (or maybe a little better).
| bingohbangoh wrote:
| That might work if its a few decisions here and there that
| look like they're being taken with much gravitas.
|
| But I'm not sure that would work if you're pivoting
| constantly and in a downward spiral. There are simply too
| many decisions happening for "we need to cut costs" to feel
| valid all the time. Lambda school appears to be in that
| category so far as I can see.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Because Allred is a little bitch coward
| lozenge wrote:
| Because legal.
|
| The students would understand, yes, but not accept getting
| something other than what they signed up for.
| t-louie wrote:
| Lambda framed these changes as beneficial to students, for
| reason XYZ. I remember seeing a lot of student comments
| saying things like "Is lambda ok??" or "We're adults here, if
| lambda needs to cut costs they can tell us."
| weezin wrote:
| Lambda School was great for me. You get out of it what you put
| into it. Why are there never stories like these about specific
| university programs with higher opportunity cost and financial
| cost?
| jesuis_14 wrote:
| I'm curious about the future of Lambda School. Apparently, the
| co-founders have been lying about the numbers for years like
| there's no tomorrow, but the money still came in.
|
| It's pretty clear that the business is not sustainable nor does
| it have much hope of becoming profitable even in the short
| term.In addition, the school's reputation is tarnishing, and
| there have also been a few clashes with the institutions that
| must provide the certifications necessary for the school to
| operate.
|
| The co-founders, particularly Allred, between the constant lies,
| problems with reporters, and personalities that many
| psychiatrists would call delusional do not bode well.Even the
| casual observer would easily notice his bizarre statements, the
| furious backpedaling observed over and over, the constant
| distractions that can be inferred from his almost pathological
| tweeting about anything but what concerns his position as CEO of
| a company that is making promises to people who are often in
| need.
|
| You could say that these visionary leaders are what is needed to
| disrupt entrenched industries, and that the fight with the
| authorities are the result of the status quo trying to hold the
| line, and that some lies are nothing more than making the future,
| present. I just don't see it for Lambda School.
| gkop wrote:
| Austen will get a soft landing. Look at the circle jerk of YC
| and YC-adjacent cheerleaders that have gone to bat for Lambda
| School.
| bwing wrote:
| Yeah, this has been one of the most disappointing things for
| me. No way his shtick has fooled all of them.
|
| Pg in particular I would've expected more rigor from, but
| maybe that's naivete, or the inevitable awkwardness that
| comes from him living both in the world of high epistemic
| standards (his essays) and zero epistemic standards with
| rampant dishonesty (startup/VC culture). To me, the latter
| undermines the former, but I also am not a rich thought
| leader.
| jesuis_14 wrote:
| Funny how the pg was rooting for him by calling Allred
| "relentlessly resourceful" while it was clear even to naive
| ears and eyes that it was the lies that were relentless and
| the resources were mostly talking a great game, but with no
| results to back it up.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| "Lambda School placed only 30% of its 2020 graduates in
| qualifying jobs during the first half of 2020. This figure is in
| stark contrast to the 74% placement rate it advertised for its
| 2019 graduates"
|
| It's almost as if something happened in 2020 that reduced the
| number of open positions available...
| autarch wrote:
| > It's almost as if something happened in 2020 that reduced the
| number of open positions available...
|
| Did it? My impression has been that software dev jobs have
| exploded (or maybe continued to explode) during COVID. Maybe
| there was a bit of a slowdown in the first half of 2020?
| alasdair_ wrote:
| There were a LOT of hiring freezes and substantial layoffs in
| the first half of 2020.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| There are so many of these and they are so flawed, yet again and
| again its been clear to me that I would have maybe gotten a job
| at this point if I had just signed up for one and stomached the
| debt. These days I just wonder how feasible it would be to
| just... make one up and say that I am a graduate.
|
| I'd just need to mock up a relatively fancy website, some copy,
| and a good name, and then put on my resume that I am a graduate.
| Gortal278 wrote:
| I have always been surprised by how many students of lambda and
| equivalent graduate to immediately teach at these bootcamps. It
| just seems gross.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I wonder why? I learned most of what I learned in university
| from student group, and sophomores teach freshmen there. I
| learned as a freshman and taught as a sophomore. It is normal.
| brian_spiering wrote:
| I have worked at many bootcamp-style educational programs.
|
| Teaching in a bootcamp-style environment is a team endeavor.
| Recent graduates can be a part of that mix.
|
| Generally, it makes sense to hire some of the instructor pool
| out of recent graduates. It is often difficult to find
| instructors at all. The recent graduates know the curriculum.
| It also helps those recent graduates develop a deeper
| understanding of the material and extend their job searching
| window. It can be a form of peer learning that some students
| respond well to.
|
| There are also definite limitations. Primarily, the recent
| graduates might not have great teaching skills, knowledge
| outside of the curriculum, and knowledge of real-world
| applications.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I get the impression that the business model for these
| bootcamps is largely the modeled after the one used in startup
| funding, where the bulk of the money will be made on the top
| 5-10% of the class.
|
| There's also likely some element of grabbing mind-share while
| they work to automate the process (plus, gathering data on who
| make profitable students). Eliminating the instructor will
| allow N to grow much higher than 150 per course and reduce
| costs dramatically.
| darepublic wrote:
| Similar experience with college degree program. Was being taught
| table layout in web course up to and beyond 2012. The key
| learnings needed to be employable were really discovered in work
| internship and through trial and error.
| foxbee wrote:
| As the landscape gets more competitive, the promises will only
| get larger leading to lots of disappointed students sadly
| mym1990 wrote:
| Anecdotal, but here is my experience: I graduated from General
| Assembly back in 2015, and bootcamps were just starting to crop
| up back then. I really liked the experience but it was definitely
| very clunky, I don't think I learned much about code. My first
| job afterwards ended up being a support engineer role for a year
| where I touched code maybe a handful of times, I started out at
| 55k which I was ELATED with. I then got an opportunity to learn
| development on the Salesforce platform and took a paycut to 35k
| just so I can learn the ropes and be 'coding'. This proved to be
| invaluable experience. 1 year later I moved to SF and I haven't
| looked back since.
|
| It wasn't really the trajectory I saw back in 2015, but it felt
| that the bootcamps focused so much on teaching popular JavaScript
| tools and not really how to problem solve or even the language
| basics or even what the technology space can offer. I think it is
| a very tough thing to get right in 3 months(my class length) or
| even less...
| devteambravo wrote:
| I come from the failed Lambda School UX program. It wasted more
| than a year of my life. And to add insult to injury, after having
| succeeded in learning UX on my own + finding employment, I now
| send them a mortgage payment's worth of $$$ every month, until I
| reach that $30k limit. What a damn scam.
| arthurwu wrote:
| How did it suck?
| devteambravo wrote:
| Students graded students papers. Racism. Unending trolling on
| Slack. Peers panicking as they realize the program was not
| "finished". (ie: We were paying beta testers) Being roped in
| to the web dev program when I didn't want to be a dev (This
| happened after the UX program was shut down).
|
| I could write a book
| Daishiman wrote:
| Move fast and break people.
| devteambravo wrote:
| People who aren't equipped to deal with it, mainly.
| People who won't fight back. It's disgusting
| 0des wrote:
| Your testimony sounds a lot like those of the peers I
| have who were from ITT Tech.
| effingwewt wrote:
| And Hallmark, and every single other for-profit school
| ever.
|
| And Lambda is worse as they take off the top from future
| earnings.
|
| Glad this dumpster fire is big enough to garner serious
| attention finally.
|
| Can't wait till austen et al come into the thread with
| their PR bullshit and lies as per usual.
|
| edit- tale->take
| robocat wrote:
| I wonder how many university students are jealous of you? I
| spent three years doing a Bachelor of Engineering, which I
| consider three years lost. The piece of paper got me a job, but
| I certainly felt I was _less_ valuable after finishing the
| degree than I was before it (negative learning is a thing).
| literallyaduck wrote:
| Start talking with your state's attorney general's office about
| your experiences and how you were sold something that was not
| as advertised.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Go figure. how is this a surprise to anyone . Not just lambda but
| any of these coding academies, boot camps, etc. It's an open
| secret that these companies vastly inflate their success rates.
| pillowkusis wrote:
| This article takes the angle that Lambda's profitability efforts
| may hurt its students:
|
| > the school can still reach profitability by enrolling 2,000
| students a month while only placing less than half of its
| graduates in qualifying jobs.
|
| >Class sizes are like 150 students to one instructor -- I've only
| heard that number going up
|
| I don't see what the problem is here. For students, the only cost
| associated with Lambda is the opportunity cost. The incentives
| are still aligned here -- the school wants people to get placed.
| It can't "scam" students with higher teacher:student ratios or
| bad curriculums without hurting its bottom line. If it's failing
| at teaching students, that's incompetence, not a drive for
| profitability. If only 40% of students get placed -- that's still
| 40% more than would have been placed without Lambda, right?
|
| >"Those students that are in the bottom 10%, why would they
| invest resources into helping those students succeed? Just let
| them fail out after six months"
|
| ...exactly? You are going to school for free. The school is not
| obligated to waste resources on students falling behind, because
| those students aren't paying anything.
|
| If you think 6 months of wasted time is a bad deal, just wait
| until I tell you about this other educational program that lasts
| 4 years, costs over $100,000, and has a much lower placement
| rate: Your local university's liberal arts degrees.
|
| Still, it's unfortunate to hear that Lambda is playing the same
| placement-rate games as bootcamps. I'm surprised they have to do
| this at all; if I was running admissions, I would be extremely
| selective, only accepting extremely bright students that I feel
| the university system had "missed," to get placement rates as
| high as possible. Maybe they try to do this, and this is just a
| sad sign of the state of non-college education opportunities?
| shkkmo wrote:
| > If only 40% of students get placed -- that's still 40% more
| than would have been placed without Lambda, right?
|
| You can't draw that conclusion without a control group. It is
| entirely possible that a control group that spent that boot
| camp time doing independent study and job hunting would have
| higher placement rates and that Lamda school would thus have a
| negative effect.
|
| I would guess that Lamda school does have a positive effect but
| that effect is smaller than 40%.
| sandofsky wrote:
| I don't see what the problem is here. For students, the only
| cost associated with Lambda is the opportunity cost.
|
| The terms of the ISA are five years, and they don't just apply
| to coding jobs. You could conceivably go back to school for a
| degree after the program fails, get a job without any of their
| help, and still get your wages garnished. They just have to say
| you learned something in the program that helped you get your
| job.
|
| Another scenario: you're making slightly below $50k, you get a
| promotion to $50k in the middle of the program. The promotion
| had nothing to do with what you learned in the program, but
| it's up to you to argue otherwise.
|
| Students have brought up both of these things in the official
| subreddit, but I can't link to them since they set it to
| private after last year's major backlash.
|
| I'll also add that while most students opt for the ISA, some
| students pay the up-front price. That's because the ISA
| historically attached a premium e.g. $20k pay up front or go
| with an ISA with a $30k cap. If you were sold on their claimed
| 86% placement rate, who needs that insurance?
| akanet wrote:
| It depends on what you conceive of the school as - is it an
| educational institution that has an incentive to improve the
| lives of each one of its students, incurring variable cost for
| each? Or is it a fishing expedition to land as many students as
| possible for as cheaply as possible, and letting the ones who
| were going to get jobs on their own anyway pay for the rest?
| ggreer wrote:
| If we judged colleges by the same standards, I doubt they'd
| come off better. Normal colleges are fishing expeditions to
| land as many students as possible for as cheaply as possible
| and burden students with inescapable debt. Students have to
| pay even if they don't graduate or get a good job. 4-year
| graduation rates are below 50%. After 6 years, only 62% of
| college students have gotten a 4-year degree. The rest are
| stuck with debt that not even bankruptcy can forgive.
|
| I don't know much about Lambda School, but my guess is that
| it does what colleges do, but faster and with incentives
| better aligned. College is more about distinguishing people
| than training them. (If education is actually about training,
| then why is >60% of the wage benefit of education from the
| credential rather than the years or credits earned?[1])
| Someone with a college degree has shown they are reasonably
| intelligent and can obey instructions to complete boring
| tasks over long periods of time. This means they're probably
| a useful employee. I think Lambda School (and similar
| outfits) distinguish people more quickly than college and try
| to train them better.
|
| To give people some idea of how bad education is: I learned
| computer science at an ABET-accredited college. The vast
| majority of the career skills I developed were from learning
| on my own, not from my coursework. Nowhere in my classes was
| there any discussion of source control. I had to teach my
| classmates how to use Subversion.
|
| So often we forget that almost all education is terrible.
| We're only jarred out of status quo bias when a new type of
| school comes along.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepskin_effect
| emaginniss wrote:
| Source control is not in the domain of computer science.
| You're thinking of software engineering. Many CS grads
| become software engineers (myself included) and we apply
| the concepts that we learn from CS in our jobs.
|
| CS teaches us:
|
| - How computers work (assembly, compilers)
|
| - Logic and math (automata theory, set theory, numerical
| analysis)
|
| - How to make computers do what we want (algorithms, data
| structures, performance)
|
| If they taught you how to use subversion, that data might
| be useless by the time you graduate. Hopefully, the other
| stuff they taught you will make you able to better
| understand source control.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I actually learned how to use Subversion in university
| and it has been useful. Concept of version control
| transfers between systems.
| akanet wrote:
| I agree that colleges suffer from the same perverse
| incentives. That is why transparency in outcomes reporting
| is so important, and why fraudulent reporting is so
| dangerous.
|
| edit: oh, you're geoff greer. I emailed you a couple times
| about floobits when I was still running coderpad
| sunny--tech wrote:
| > "Danner, who invested $1 million shortly after Lambda School's
| Series A, compared the complaints to his own experience launching
| the charter school Rocketship Education, which received public
| backlash for teaching elementary-school students on laptops
| without instructors for part of their day.
|
| "They said we were experimenting on the backs of children,"
| Danner said.
|
| "But when SpaceX launched their first five rockets and they blew
| up, was that OK?" he continued. "We're in a more high-stakes
| world of human development. Still, you can't say that you don't
| like the way things are but don't want people to try new things."
|
| This is one of the problems of mixing VCs in the education space.
| "Move fast and break things" doesn't work when the "things" are
| humans, not code and technology.
|
| Also, last time I checked, SpaceX wasn't promising 80% of its
| rockets would work back in its early days.
|
| Good ol' fashion false equivalency.
| lostinquebec wrote:
| > last time I checked, SpaceX wasn't promising 80% of its
| rockets would work back in its early days.
|
| Is your criticism that these places are making false promises,
| or:
|
| > "Move fast and break things" doesn't work when the "things"
| are humans, not code and technology.
|
| RCTs and placebos work exactly this way. People literally die
| to help us learn what does and does not work. We lost 8-9
| months of COVID-19 deaths because of a system that needs to go
| slow, and yet had experimentation regimes that still put
| participants at risk.
|
| I don't know of any verification method that doesn't require
| some degree of risk for the participants, but I'd love to hear
| one.
| sunny--tech wrote:
| Why are you bringing up vaccines and medicine in a discussion
| about bootcamps?
|
| I'm criticizing both the false claims and the VC model of
| hyper scaling and hyper growth being applied to education.
|
| "Move fast and break things" isn't the motto of the medical
| industry, but it is for tech. So how is this even related?
|
| If you want to talk about medicine, that's a completely
| different discussion.
| lozenge wrote:
| People joining trials aren't given fake information about how
| 70% of participants are given immunity from COVID...
| tYPSyClA wrote:
| Link without paywall: https://archive.md/Gkzcz
| throwaway789257 wrote:
| I used to work as a technical recruiter and made several hires
| out of coding bootcamps (though never from Lambda, which didn't
| exist at the time).
|
| One rule of thumb that we drew after many trials was that, if a
| candidate coming out of a coding bootcamp did not have a math or
| science background prior to that bootcamp, they probably would
| not pass our interview process.
|
| That is, people with a certain intellectual foundation and
| aptitude can acquire useful skills from coding bootcamps. But
| people without that aptitude will not obtain it simply because
| they attended a coding bootcamp.
|
| Separately, while I appreciate that Vincent got answers to
| questions that many people are asking, the fact that he had to
| hide his intentions to get an interview with Austen is exhibit
| number 1 why people have grown to mistrust reporters.
|
| And that's interesting, because often you can't have both. That
| is, either you accept that corporations lie while the press plays
| by certain rules of honesty, which prevent them from getting past
| the smokescreen of lies. Or you support the press in its schemes
| to penetrate the smokescreen by using deception themselves. But
| if you support them against Lambda, then you should support them,
| too, in lying to the institutions you may support, which are also
| hiding something. Muckrakers need to disguise themselves.
|
| DELETED: A sentence claiming that Vincent runs Coder Pad and has
| a conflict of interest. I apologize for the error. See his
| comment below.
| boringg wrote:
| I think this is a far assessment. There is a certain level of
| mathematical aptitude that is essential for being able to be
| successful at programming. Maybe no in the strict sense of math
| but in understanding how different structures and concepts are
| able to relate to each other. However in the strict sense of
| math, there is a requirement there.
|
| I also posit that as bootcamps grew - the quality control and
| quality of hires(students) decreased with the continued
| pressure of growing for their investors. Leads to bad outcomes.
|
| It is not dissimilar to when a company blitzscales and the
| quality of incoming hires diminishes the further down the graph
| you go. I realize its a bit harsh of a comparison but I do tend
| to find the earlier hires at solid companies typically have
| something the later hires don't (though many of the later hires
| are quite good at their specific roles).
| ghaff wrote:
| >However in the strict sense of math, there is a requirement
| there.
|
| As someone who tutored first year MBAs at one point...
|
| My observation in general was that most people could at least
| muddle through most classes, even if they were at best
| mediocre students. But some subset of students pretty much
| froze at anything beyond the most basic arithmetic--and then
| probably only because they had calculators.
|
| Whether you call it aptitude or just a phobia about math,
| it's there.
|
| I even had project groups of generally strong students. But,
| still, as soon as things got into more complicated
| spreadsheets, operations research sort of topics, etc., I
| usually ended up doing more than my share.
|
| Over the years there have been a number of "My first year at
| business school" sort of books and the common theme in all of
| them I think is "It was the math that got me."
| boringg wrote:
| I always find it funny that MBAs struggle with math and
| that so many MBAs aren't actually that good at excel. It
| seems like it is a core tenant of success of the program. I
| fully understand that business isn't strictly math and
| there are so many other dimensions of importance. However
| in its purest form, it is mathematical.
|
| Then again I guess you could always buy talent to shore up
| your insecurities.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Expert Excel proficiency is mostly useful in data heavy
| roles such as finance, which is just one subset of MBAs.
| For other roles, it's useful to be able to calculate
| simple sums/averages/vlookups but going beyond that is
| outside of their required skillset
| ghaff wrote:
| I've done _big_ spreadsheets over the years in product
| management and other roles. But they 've never been
| especially complicated--certainly not in the
| stereotypical complex models sense.
|
| Honestly, anyone who goes into the corporate world and,
| outside of pure creative roles, thinks they never will
| have to deal with big spreadsheets associated with
| budgets, sales forecasts, and the like is going to be
| very disappointed. But that doesn't mean most people need
| to deal with anything that's complex mathematically.
| akanet wrote:
| We didn't have to trick anyone for this piece - all dialogue
| with the school was conducted through a fact checker hired by
| the publication. I didn't talk to Austen at all.
|
| That said, I definitely did trick him a little bit last year
| for that first interview. I'll own that. It was worth it.
|
| I'm unsure what the conflict of interest would be - but I no
| longer run CoderPad nor own any equity in it.
| throwaway789257 wrote:
| It is often worth it in the short term to trick sources. But
| it has consequences for the individual doing the tricking,
| over the long term. And it has negative externalities for
| reporters as a whole. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done,
| but it's a decision that comes with a tradeoff.
| felistoria wrote:
| Are there any reputable bootcamps? Serious question as someone
| who wants to transition from IT Management to programming.
| akanet wrote:
| I would suggest checking out cirr.org, as well as interviewing
| former students.
| tayo42 wrote:
| why do you feel you need a bootcamp? open a text editor and
| start programing
| felistoria wrote:
| I've actually been off and on programming for a few years and
| have done my tour in tutorial hell on Udemy. Just thought
| maybe a bootcamp would give me experience programming with a
| team like you would at a job. I also have a unique
| opportunity next year where I will have 6 months off paid,
| which I plan to spend programming full time. Thought a
| bootcamp may be a good way to spend that time.
| ummonk wrote:
| The methodology they use to calculate the placement rate is
| clearly misleading, and given that methodology, the 2019
| placement numbers are rather mediocre. They shouldn't be tricking
| students into making major life decisions based on misleading
| statistics.
|
| On the other hand, some of the arguments in the article are
| silly. Tech companies drastically cut back on entry level hiring
| in 2020, and when this happens the non conventional pipelines
| tend to be the first to go. I wouldn't extrapolate out this
| decline as a permanent issue beyond the pandemic. Additionally,
| the article expresses skepticism that expanding student
| enrollment at the expense of placement would hamper profitability
| - common sense is that there will be some variable costs that
| scale proportionally with student enrollment, and as such the
| path to profitability would be to improve placement rates.
| Perhaps most egregiously, the article talks about the high
| opportunity cost for students investing 9-12 months in lambda
| school and the immediately after that switches to attacking
| lambda school for shortening its class lengths. A curious
| juxtaposition. Frankly, this is a good example of incentive
| alignment.
|
| Finally, there is the ridiculousness of the graduate at the end
| who doesn't want to find a designer job because that would entail
| making income share payments. Not only is that cutting off your
| nose to spite your face, but it's rather odd to feel you didn't
| get your money's worth from a service operating at a significant
| loss. I guess taxpayer funded K-12 and community college
| education has made a lot of people accustomed to being insulated
| from the true cost of education.
| jjar wrote:
| ``` #piano-inline-content-wrapper { display: block !important; }
| ```
|
| :)
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| The profitability slide with the cute animal pictures is a pretty
| good summary of everything that's disgusting about startup
| culture. Allred is clearly a huge piece of shit & YC should be
| ashamed of having funded this scam that preys on some of the most
| desperate, credulous, and vulnerable populations. Not that other
| bootcamps are better - and definitely not that most universities
| are better, either. Most are as bad or worse
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-25 23:01 UTC)