[HN Gopher] Fast Crimes at Lambda School
___________________________________________________________________
Fast Crimes at Lambda School
Author : plinkplonk
Score : 344 points
Date : 2024-06-19 15:57 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sandofsky.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sandofsky.com)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Discussion (762 points, 62 days ago, 366 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067939
| breadsniffer01 wrote:
| Stop the SV gifting. Fast, Rabbit, Lambda School, etc. These
| fraudsters should get punished for false advertising.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Not surprising at all.. as it's said "if something is too good to
| be true it probably is"
|
| Coding is hard, and there is no evidence to suggest it's getting
| easier , such as dealing with the integration of the front-end
| with the back-end, or having to deal with libraries and cloud
| environments and everything else that goes into it. The belief
| that average people can be turned into proficient coders in
| months is ludicrous.
| jarsin wrote:
| Haven't you heard the latest craze? Executives that wonder how
| the cloud works when there are no clouds in the sky don't need
| us anymore.
|
| They will fire up good old chatGPT and put together million
| line code systems easy.
| gatinsama wrote:
| The model is broken. Too many people want to learn to code, not
| everyone can do it well.
|
| The only way would be to filter many candidates going in, but the
| negative press would be huge. So you end up with huge cohorts of
| people who can't code, and you have to make the money back
| somehow. Good teachers need to know how to code well, and those
| are expensive too. And, let's face it, the internet is full of
| great material to learn to code for free. If you are not
| motivated enough to learn by your own, all the time, I don't see
| how a bootcamp will give you anything.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I think it's worse than not doing it well. It's more like
| struggling at the basics. The incentives of these camps favor
| quantity over quality.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Programming is really not as hard as you're making it out to
| be. I've taught it to beginners both children and adults and
| they struggle but they all learn it. _Professional software
| development_ is quite difficult, but programming is only a
| portion of why. And even then, software dev is only like the
| second or third most technically difficult job I 've had. Any
| welder or marine upholsterer or nurse or whatever has about
| as intellectually demanding a job as we do.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Are you doing it one on one or in a classroom setting? In
| former, I imagine the success rates would be higher.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| It was a code school. Not lambda but a comparable
| curriculum & setting.
| goat_whisperer wrote:
| That might be true if the company was honest. But this was
| clearly fraud. So go ahead and blame the victim.
| gatinsama wrote:
| In fact, I am blaming the company from the very start, since
| they are the ones who promised something they could never
| deliver.
| CalChris wrote:
| Wizard: Why, anybody can have a brain. Therefore, by virtue of
| the authority vested in me, I hereby confer upon you the
| Honorary Degree of T.H.D. Scarecrow: "Th.D."?
| Wizard: Yeah, that's "Doctor of Thinkology."
|
| The authority vested in Allred was that he'd been a manager at
| a payday lending company.
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Allred?
| CalChris wrote:
| Lendup.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Institute_of_Technology
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think there's probably room for something like: programming
| with less CS. But I mean, we already have trade schools and
| community colleges for that sort of thing.
|
| I also think there's a ton of value in everybody learning a
| little bit of programming to help them automate things like
| office jobs. But that's have to be carefully handled with nice
| intuitive libraries and thoughtfully restricted network stuff.
|
| Getting teachers for this sort of stuff is hard, but maybe the
| tech bubble will pop soon.
| itronitron wrote:
| I'm curious how much Calculus as a prerequisite is a barrier
| to entry for students. CS as a topic is not hard, but a lot
| of students are blocked from entry with fairly rigorous
| Calculus requirements.
| SuurRae wrote:
| I'm sorry, but if you are unable to understand the basics
| of calculus and discrete math, then you should not be in a
| Computer Science program (with emphasis on the "science"
| part). CS isn't just programming - it's the theory of how
| computers work and math is an integral part of that. Just
| because you don't use it every day in the job itself
| doesn't mean that the information is useless.
| itronitron wrote:
| >> understand the basics of calculus
|
| I think the issue is that many programs expect students
| to understand 'the basics' of calculus as an academic
| mathematician understands them, which I would consider to
| be more suitable as an upper level elective for a CS
| program.
|
| A fun exercise would be to have graduating CS students
| take the same calculus exams that were required for
| admission to the program. I would expect that 10% would
| score much higher and the other 90% would score much
| lower.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I worked with students in a "intro calculus for
| humanities" type class for many years (as a sort of
| undergrad tutoring role, so, it was a while ago, I'm old
| now). Despite this experience it is pretty shocking to me
| that there are, like, actually adult people walking
| around who can't at least do a derivative.
|
| Spending too long in STEM academics absolutely warps your
| view of the mathematical skill floor I think.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| At one point, I was able to do 3-dimensional vector
| calculus on electromagnetic fields. Now, I'm not sure I
| could do even a basic derivative.
|
| Use it or lose it.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I mean, even when I was tutoring it I'd double check most
| of the equations just to be sure.
|
| I'm sure chain rule, product rule, and polynomials would
| come right back to you, and everyone has to look up the
| trig functions anyway.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| While I've certainly found calculus useful on many
| occasions, I don't think calculus is a particularly
| important requirement for understanding how computers
| work.
|
| On the other hand, calculus prerequisites are a filter
| that filters out anyone who might be inclined to say
| "math is hard" and give up, which _might_ correlate with
| people who say "computers are hard" and give up. Or in
| other words, it's easier to say "Prerequisite: Calculus
| 2" than it is to say "Prerequisite: be sufficiently
| determined to complete something many people find hard
| and give up on, or be one of the people who found it easy
| to begin with". And lo and behold, rather than getting
| people taking an advanced CS class and giving up, you
| instead get people not taking the class in the first
| place because they don't meet the prerequisites, which
| makes numbers look a lot better.
|
| This is not the best solution for the problem. It's the
| solution most CS programs take, though.
|
| (Necessary disclaimer because internet discourse: this is
| a comment on CS education in general, not a comment on
| Lambda School in any aspect.)
| lispisok wrote:
| I dont get why so many people want to drop calculus from
| computer science curriculum. Calculus is necessary for
| basic science and math literacy. People act like it's
| graduate level math and not something easily learned by any
| somewhat studious high schooler. 4 year CS programs are
| supposed to give you an education which is a foundation for
| wherever your career takes you not teach you to be a
| create-react-app code monkey for life. What if you come
| across the need or desire to do anything related to science
| or engineering?
| kagakuninja wrote:
| I'm 60, and have never used any calculus on the job. I
| did need to relearn some linear algebra when doing game
| programming, but these days most of the heavy lifting is
| done in the game engine for us.
|
| Nothing I've done on the job involves deep computer
| science. There are people who need to know that stuff,
| but they are specialists. Building CRUD servers or web
| frontends uses very little of what I studied in college,
| beyond basic understanding of data structures and
| algorithmic complexity.
|
| I'm glad I learned CS, and wish I had learned more of it,
| but it should not be a requirement for getting a code-
| monkey job.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| As a former instructor (not at Lambda), I'm kind of inclined to
| believe it has more to do with the fact that it takes a certain
| kind of person to put up with the demands of corporate software
| engineering.
|
| Getting both kids and adults (especially kids) to figure out
| how to program is easy if you understand that most of the
| concepts are better taught visually through p5js or what have
| you. Once they leave that sandbox, however, and have to contend
| with what has to go into developing a production React app,
| it's a different animal.
|
| Programming is easy. Putting a bunch of black-boxes together in
| order to build some app or whatever is much, much harder and
| more complex (and, arguably, I think that calling it
| programming is kind of deceptive. You're technically doing
| programming, but you really _feel_ like you are? I can 't say I
| do.)
|
| Incidentally this is perhaps why I'm calmer than others when it
| comes to AI getting better and better at programming. All these
| researchers and companies have done is given me another black
| box to manage. They mean to assault my castle by first
| repairing its walls.
| gatinsama wrote:
| Good point. What is hard is not programming, but taming
| complexity and scale.
| duxup wrote:
| The frustration factor is a big deal.
|
| I took a bootcamp. One day and another student and I were
| working on something and a third member of our group (who had
| other issues) was really frustrated and took it out on us and
| then went to the teacher.
|
| She told the teacher "they just get it and I don't".
|
| But in truth the other student and I were not "just getting
| it", we were failing frequently, we had made no more progress
| on what was a fairly elementary task than she did. We just
| kept trying ... kept our hands on the keyboard and came up
| with new things to try. We were no less frustrated too.
|
| Now there's more to it than just typing like coming up with
| those ideas / thinking it through, but the grit to do that is
| not something many people have just to start.
|
| Amusingly that seems to be a problem with seasoned
| programmers too. I work with some good guys who do their job
| well enough, but man they hit a little cognitive dissonance
| and they just fall apart. I'm not better and very much not
| smarter, I just keep thinking about the problem and keep
| trying. A troubleshooting mindset, curiosity, and will to
| keep going is hard to really test for and give to someone.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| Ah, yeah, I almost forgot about that. I remember students
| who were frustrated because of some mystery error that
| plagued them for hours, only for me to take a closer look
| and figure it out in 5 minutes. It forced me to rethink how
| we taught students how to read error messages, figure out
| line numbers and stack traces, and how to ask Google for
| help.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Well it doesn't help that the stack trace often doesn't
| follow anything but its own convention, much less the
| conventions of a basic English sentence. The fact you
| have to learn to read an error message is damning for
| whoever thought this would be a good error message,
| honestly.
| vundercind wrote:
| It occurred to me a few years ago that the vast majority
| of my value as a programmer is the huge amount of trivia
| and giant set of heuristics I've picked up in years, and
| years, and years of work. Almost none of which came from
| formal education, training, anything like that.
|
| That's the stuff that gets me unblocked much faster than
| a newbie, and lets me spot shortcuts and connections and
| opportunities that save sometimes _months_ of work. That
| stuff's what lets me scan an exception message and stack
| trace fairly quickly for the one or two pieces that
| matter, even in some unfamiliar environment.
| darkerside wrote:
| I think you just need to rethink your feedback cadence
| spamizbad wrote:
| You underscore the same thing I noticed as well: To have a
| decent career as a software engineer you need to be a
| tenacious problem solver. Even the not-so-great devs are
| tenacious.
|
| There are tons of smart, hard-working people who have a
| mentality of "You should be able to do everything correctly
| and have it work correctly the first time, or maybe on the
| second try with some minor adjustments". And I think these
| people will find no joy in being a software developer and
| typically don't survive bootcamps.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Software engineering is like digging a hole, where every
| time you strike your shovel down you either hit a huge
| boulder or a giant lead lined pipe no one told you was
| down there. It would take some kind of a mental
| disability or achieving a state of enlightenment to not
| be frustrated by being constantly blocked and held down
| when you want to run, which is the real definition of
| this job.
| shagie wrote:
| I keep pulling up one of my favorite bits on this
| attitude http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/
| monthly/2018... -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541
|
| > ...
|
| > But I had enjoyed working on the hard projects I'd
| encountered in my programing class back in high school.
| They were challenges I wanted to overcome. I changed my
| major and dove into college CS courses, which were full
| of hard problems -- but hard problems that I wanted to
| solve. I didn't mind being frustrated for an entire
| semester one year, working in assembly language and JCL,
| because I wanted to solve the puzzles.
|
| > Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to
| "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract
| to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find
| the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do
| you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to
| be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration
| do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you
| figure things out? Answers to these very practical
| questions might help you find a place where you can build
| an interesting and rewarding life.
|
| > ...
|
| ... And there's also Programming Sucks (
| https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks ) which
| takes a rather hyperbolic style of writing on the
| subject.
|
| The penultimate part of it is:
|
| > Eventually every programmer wakes up and before they're
| fully conscious they see their whole world and every
| relationship in it as chunks of code, and they trade
| stories about it as if sleepiness triggering acid trips
| is a normal thing that happens to people. This is a world
| where people eschew sex to write a programming language
| for orangutans. All programmers are forcing their brains
| to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation
| they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day,
| five to seven days a week, and every one of them is
| slowly going mad.
| vundercind wrote:
| I think you've also gotta be comfortable being in a
| pretty dark place a lot of the time.
|
| It's like being a plumber if your tools did surprising
| things or simply broke and required repair _regularly_ ,
| you had to learn totally new (and usually not any better)
| tools every year or two, and you did the actual work with
| a crappy remote-control robot, mostly crammed into dark
| spaces, with no schematics or plan or even ability to
| personally see the outline of the general _area_ you're
| working in and lights that only illuminate about 2 feet
| ahead.
|
| Lots of the time all your shit you need to do the other
| shit is broken or is lying to you, and you're also in
| some awful little mess that you can't be _sure_ there's
| any real way out of because you can't goddamn see
| anything.
|
| "Ok time for standup!" now try not to slip and say "fuck
| everything, I hate life, all of this is bullshit and I'm
| pretty sure we don't even need to be doing it. No
| blockers." Keep on your mask that presents you as
| employably-stable.
|
| It kinda fucking sucks. I get why people don't want to do
| it.
|
| [edit] oh and it's that _plus_ all the usual offices-suck
| dehumanizing , quietly degrading, pointless-feeling,
| politically- and ethically-nasty (cf _Moral Mazes_ ),
| boring shit that people've complained about in much the
| same way since the 50s or so (e.g. Yates' _Revolutionary
| Road_ )
| wrs wrote:
| "I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I'VE. DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY
| TOOLS."
|
| https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pd
| f
| vasco wrote:
| I know of a couple of people I really trust that tried to
| explain to me how they feel when they try math or
| programming and it's more like a physical pain almost than
| frustration. I always also got frustrated and always
| thought everyone just has to push through it but I wonder
| if there's something deeper. Those two people really led me
| to believe some of us have some harder "blockage" than
| others to get through, and it's not related purely to being
| generally smart.
| darkerside wrote:
| I think you're partially right. But the "smartest" of us
| probably have a combination of high pain sensitivity
| (motivated to solve the problem) and high pain tolerance
| (won't give up until they do).
| jseliger wrote:
| _I know of a couple of people I really trust that tried
| to explain to me how they feel when they try math or
| programming and it 's more like a physical pain almost
| than frustration._
|
| For a lot of people writing prose is like this too
| (https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/on-writing-or-not).
| Back when I taught English to college students, it felt
| like getting students used to creating the smallest
| fraction of writing possible--getting them started--was a
| key skill, as was trying to teach the kind of free
| association that leads to deeper insights. Learning to
| manage frustration is of vital import to many people who
| want or need to learn to write better.
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| I was just talking about this idea with my wife. We're both
| now senior enough in our jobs that we're team/project leads
| (not managers, just technical leaders of stuff).
|
| One of the projects I'm leading is a small R&D effort to
| see if a new technique will improve one of our core
| algorithms. And I have a very bright new junior programmer
| who has been with the company about 2 years and has a
| little post-college experience at another company, so he's
| not totally new.
|
| When I give him work, he gets stuck (it's R&D after all),
| and blames the library or the API or things like that. It's
| like the "no there's not a bug in the compiler meme".
|
| I'll take a good chunk of my day and pair with him to show
| him how to get around the problems, and it seems like he
| gets it, and then the next week when we sync up, he's back
| to blaming the tools.
|
| My wife's opinion is that it just take a LONG time to learn
| that you're usually the one who's wrong, not the tools. And
| she pointed out that we both spent about 5 years in grad
| school. The biggest lesson of grad school is that you never
| know what's going on and that you need to figure out your
| tools, and that you're always the dumb one.
|
| I've always been a little disappointed that I wasted so
| many prime earning years in grad school, but I think I
| agree with her here. Grad school is as close to the old
| "apprentice" model where you don't earn much (if any) money
| because you're primary goal is to learn the field and you
| really spend most of your time being in the way or annoying
| to your grad advisor. You don't bring much value in the
| time you're there. Much of that is learning how to deal
| with failure and working around that. (Edited to add: last
| week I found my archive of code that I wrote in grad
| school. I was surprised how little code I produced in those
| years and how I could now have solved the problem in about
| a week or so since I understand what tooling I now have at
| my disposal. But I did learn a ton in those years.)
|
| I'm trying to figure out a way to get those lessons to my
| junior teammates (without making them feel as worthless as
| I did in grad school).
|
| To bring this back to the topic, maybe Lamba school like
| boot camps are a problem just because the time is so
| compressed. You need time to keep learning the lesson that
| it's not the compiler, it's you. And then you can learn the
| problem solving of how do _I_ make this work.
|
| Lots of self-taught from a young age people learn this, so
| it's not the grad school that's as important as the freedom
| to have time to learn (while not being on the hook to be
| providing value to someone who's paying you).
|
| Not saying it's fair and I understand people need to
| support themselves, but I do think that the best problem
| solvers have put in the time and there's not real
| substitute for time.
| auggierose wrote:
| Let's face it, most of the time the tools _are_ the
| problem. That is why, whenever possible, I write my own
| tools.
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| Yeah, for learning that's good. But for novel research,
| not so much. I do a lot of what I always call "fast math
| on a computer" because that was a by product of me
| writing my own tools to solve problems in grad school. I
| didn't have numpy and only very limited BLAS
| optimizations existed at the time, so I had to write lots
| of low level stuff. But the actual novel work was pretty
| small on top of that.
|
| In my grandparent post I mentioned that I could redo my
| PhD thesis in about a week of work. Much of that is that
| I know where the dead ends lie now. But a lot is also
| that I could just take advantage of numpy and I could
| just write everything in vector math now and not need to
| code up my own linear algebra stuff.
| auggierose wrote:
| Well, try running numpy on apple metal.
| darkerside wrote:
| He's not going to recognize the pattern on his own, no
| matter how obvious it is to you. You will do him a
| disservice if you don't pull him aside one day and say,
| hey I noticed you have a blind spot, and I need to point
| it out to you because it's going to be a limiter for your
| career unless you learn to deal with it.
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| Yeah, you're right. This is the non-technical part of
| being a leader that I really struggle with. I'm much more
| comfortable "leading by example" and modelling behaviors
| and much less comfortable with how to frame a discussion
| like this.
|
| Much of my company and field is full of nerds that are a
| bit outcast (including me). I hate the overuse of the
| term "bullying", but I'd say that most of the people I
| work with daily weren't the most loved kids in school.
|
| So I don't want to add "boss thinks I'm doing a bad job"
| anxiety on someone by telling them that they're not
| matching my expectations. And If I put myself back to
| being 3 years or so out of college, I was probably
| behaving the same way, and maybe time to figure it out is
| what he needs.
|
| My grad advisor was a real not nice guy, and even after
| all these years I still don't really like him. But he was
| what _I_ needed and my reaction to his pressure was to
| become a much better problem solver. I know I shouldn't
| act like him, but I haven't had many great role models in
| how to talk to someone about their performance.
|
| I want to him to get the message that "he's smart and I
| know he'll figure it out" and not the message that "he's
| a bad employee and that he needs to start worrying about
| being let go in this bad job market"
| darkerside wrote:
| You're not alone. Hard conversations are a difficult
| skill, and not one most people learn or even think about
| as a skill. Check out radical candor.
| https://www.radicalcandor.com/blog/what-is-radical-
| candor/
|
| It gets a bad rap, but for me, it was a really useful way
| to think about giving people the messages they need to
| hear.
|
| Good luck! It's not easy, but it's key to leveling up as
| a professional, and I would argue, as a human being.
| zenlikethat wrote:
| Depends, I've come across plenty of people who act like
| what you say there, probably because it's a variant on
| the natural human tendency to cast blame on something
| besides ourselves, but... these days, things move so fast
| and we lean on so many amateur part-time projects, that
| bugs or shortcomings in the libraries etc. we use are not
| uncommon. The fine art is partially in knowing when it's
| extremely unlikely you hit a bug (gcc), vs. very likely
| (JS library with five stars on Github).
|
| But more importantly, in digging in -- to me, that's a
| big part that's missing in leveling up the next
| generation -- like hey, there's a stack trace, let's go
| look at the lines of code in our source libraries and
| think about them instead of flailing around randomly like
| most people seem to.
| nradov wrote:
| Making people feel worthless isn't necessarily a bad
| approach. Break them down and then built them back up
| again into something better. But it can also fail
| catastrophically.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >a third member of our group (who had other issues) was
| really frustrated and took it out on us and then went to
| the teacher
|
| University courses for programming generally get around
| this issue by having a CS110 type course that functions as
| a weed out class where people can find out if they have the
| ability to do the basic problem solving and logical
| thinking to succeed in that path or not. I imagine it's
| hard to implement something like that as part of a bootcamp
| though. The bootcamp really should be pre-screening people
| using some basic testing or such, but often they are more
| commercially minded and willing to accept students that
| will obviously fail because it keeps a steady supply of
| cash coming in.
| duxup wrote:
| I've got mixed feelings about "weed out" classes.
|
| Their utility is apparent if you want to just cut numbers
| down, but I'm not sure they automatically produce the
| best results if we're hoping to get all the people who
| could "get it".
|
| My college weed out course experience (20+ years ago) was
| the first programming class I ever took. It was a C class
| where a dude read from the book. There was limited to no
| other resources outside books / internet was limited
| then. It did it's thing, there were fewer students by the
| end. I only rediscovered that I actually did like coding
| decades later.
|
| The varying quality of college courses I think also kinda
| prove that point. It's awfully easy to say "well it's a
| weed out course" and just make a crappy course.
|
| But I'm 100% with you on some way of filtering and maybe
| giving them most of their money back. Granted that last
| part ... that's going to run into the business folks call
| and they won't want to do that.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Programming is easy. Putting a bunch of black-boxes
| together in order to build some app or whatever is much, much
| harder and more complex
|
| This is why I think those low-level "invert a binary tree"
| and "find a substring in a string" questions are not really
| that great if you're trying to find someone to actually build
| an application. Many more people know how to invert a binary
| tree than know how to go from an empty text file to a non-
| trivial mobile app distributed in an App Store.
|
| This is why I like high level design questions like: "Design
| an application that takes a user's GPS location, draws it on
| a map, and shows the 10 nearest restaurants." I'm not
| expecting them to open up their IDE and start coding. I want
| to see someone who can draw boxes and lines connecting them,
| and write the right words in those boxes. I want them to show
| which of those lines are network calls, which of them are
| IPC, and which of them are API calls within the actual app.
| Which of them are provided by the operating system and which
| of them will they need to write themselves? Then show what
| one of those lines might look like as an API. I don't care if
| they know the exact code that should be in those boxes. I
| want to know they are thinking sensibly about how everything
| fits together.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Isn't the binary tree question more of a "low-pass filter"?
| As in, if someone can't even do that, they don't get as far
| as the interview where you talk about architecture and
| other cool things?
| kagakuninja wrote:
| I've been programming professionally for 35 years. I've
| never needed to invert or balance a tree. When I need a
| tree, there is usually a library that does what I need,
| and if not, I can google the algorithm that I need.
|
| I could figure it out, but the issue is that it will take
| time, and it is stressful. A new college grad by contrast
| still remembers Data Structures 101, and how to
| manipulate trees. This kind of "bozo filter" favors both
| new grads, and people who spend a lot of time memorizing
| trivia in order to solve these problems quickly.
| csa wrote:
| > Many more people know how to invert a binary tree than
| know how to go from an empty text file to a non-trivial
| mobile app distributed in an App Store.
|
| As someone who can do both but values the latter skills
| much more, I wonder about what these "low level questions"
| actually optimize for selection at some companies.
|
| Part of me says that many companies want to select for
| willingness to "play the game" / conform rather than
| actually code deliverable product. In fact, being able to
| go from blank page to decent app in an app store might be
| considered a contra-indicator of a good applicant -- easier
| for them to bail and do their own thing or be a hired gun.
|
| Most orgs I've seen need a relatively small percentage of
| their devs to be creators and builders, but a large
| percentage need to be good maintainers and tweakers of
| existing code. These are vastly different skill sets and
| personalities, imho.
|
| Thoughts on this?
|
| And what sort of company / department do you work at that
| needs/wants a lot kf true builders?
| breadsniffer wrote:
| Interesting. How many companies need people to build
| things from the ground up vs maintainers/janitors of
| complex systems? I think the type of interview (leetcode
| vs system design) might depend on what category the job
| fits into.
| csa wrote:
| > How many companies need people to build things from the
| ground up vs maintainers/janitors of complex systems?
|
| In my experience, a good growth company will have at
| least the three following stages that can yield a healthy
| ROI with good builders:
|
| 1. Initial product (start up stage).
|
| 2. Secondary products and upsells.
|
| 3. Internal tools, iterative, and often in perpetuity for
| the life of the company.
|
| I am not sure the "builders" should ever be more than
| about 5-10% of the programmers except in early stage 1.
| zenlikethat wrote:
| I've been musing lately as well that a challenging part of
| the job is not just "coding", it's working with other
| software engineers. Each cat to herd has their own quirks,
| differences, stylistic choices etc. that sometimes make other
| cats cringe. I also think there's a big mental shift from
| "working harder == more output" that's very difficult for a
| lot of people to adapt to.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Addressing security vulnerabilities, deployment practices,
| monitoring, operations, architecture, gathering requirements,
| support questions, documentation, continuous integration and
| deployment, data migrations, migrating tech stacks or cloud
| providers for business reasons...
|
| Very little of a software developers day is spent writing
| application code.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Why don't you just fire them like any other job where people
| can't perform the work? This isn't a unique issue with
| programming but the hiring managers that exist in programming
| act like it is and have come up with crap like leetcode and
| passive aggressive games like soft firing people by paying them
| salary and not giving them work. Imagine a landscaper thats
| been soft fired, it would be unthinkable.
| codeforafrica wrote:
| last week two students started learning on freecodecamp using a
| laptop i provide for them in my home. they work on their own,
| but they can ask me when they get stuck. so far it was mostly
| telling them to closely reread the instructions to see if that
| provides a clue. when they finish the html course, i'll pay
| them to update my website (it's all static html) then i'll see
| if i can get them started on javascript.
|
| not sure yet where this will go. the first student that tried
| that gave up after a few days. don't know why. maybe he felt it
| wasn't for him. fine.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Too many people want to learn to code, not everyone can do it
| well.
|
| People don't want to code. People want to make a living, and
| the people who exported their jobs overseas and gig-ized what
| was left told them to "learn to code."
| paulpauper wrote:
| _On the surface, this is another window into the 2010 's tech
| bubble, a period where mediocre people could raise ludicrous
| money amid a venture capitalist echo chamber fueled by low-
| interest rates. But what makes this any worse than Juicero,
| Clinkle, or Humane? Why does this rise to the level of Theranos?_
|
| It has been a bubble now for 13 years. I disagree here. Maybe
| it's just the new normal? Comparisons between now the the '90s do
| not hold up. Tech companies today are much bigger, but also
| generating huge profits, unlike the 90s bubble, in which tech
| companies were much less profitable or unprofitable relative to
| valuations.
|
| lol _" people could raise ludicrous money"_ What? Where? Funding
| rounds are much smaller, more competitive, and more selective
| today compared to in the 90s. Hardly anyone except for a few
| lucky people (like the founders of Coinbase or Dropbox) are
| getting rich overnight anymore, unlike in the 90s. Founders are
| being offered table scraps worth of funding compared to the
| generous, multi-million-dollar funding rounds that were common in
| the 90s.
|
| This is made worse by the fact that running a tech company is
| more expensive than ever in terms of the complexity of the
| product (interactive apps are waaaayyy harder to develop than a
| static html store) and marketing (everything is so expensive and
| saturated compared to the 90s. Ads are obscenely expensive today
| and full of click/viewer fraud and worthless, inflated metrics.)
| and labor costs (coders are much better paid today compared to
| the 90s relative to inflation).
| gatinsama wrote:
| In general, running a tech company is harder (more complex)
| than running other kinds of companies but offers significant
| rewards if you can do it well.
|
| The new normal (from the invention of the internet on) would be
| that tech companies are more competitive, pay better, and have
| higher risk.
| busterarm wrote:
| People really forget what it was truly like in the 90s. If you
| could breathe and knew how to turn a computer on, you could get
| a job in tech. The hiring was that desperate and that easy. The
| fundraising was that easy too. Everyone just assumed that you
| even knew what a computer was that you could figure the rest
| out.
|
| That all changed with the Russian ruble crisis, which hit
| finance first late in '98 and then took another year for its
| effects to start hitting the tech industry hard. By 2001 the
| game was up and it really took until the 2010s to turn around.
|
| Actually in the late 00s and early 2010s it was actually really
| gross and sort of like crypto. I remember a lot of smooth
| talking dudes around NY who were raising all kinds of VC money
| and doing _nothing_ with it but finding shady ways to spend it
| on themselves/drugs. The money was free and the accountability
| was absent. That era really didn't last more than about 3-5
| years.
| localfirst wrote:
| You know something about this? It's just money being moved
| around between the rich, middle class and poor. Each cycle
| ends when that resource extraction is complete (or rinsing).
| lispisok wrote:
| Just because the dotcom bubble was more ludicrous doesnt mean
| there wasnt another bubble
| busterarm wrote:
| AppAcademy started with and still does ISAs and has been fairly
| successful. There have been situations where they've deemed
| certain participants greater risk and NOT offered them ISAs and
| asked for upfront payment, but I believe their success has
| largely been a result of aggressive candidate filtering all the
| way up to 1/3 of the way through the program after its started.
|
| I have first hand experience with their program, albeit 10 years
| ago, but I would largely say that almost no one who completed the
| program with me actually needed it and its benefits are largely a
| forcing function to get you to build a portfolio in a short
| amount of time and have a peer group to rely on. Everyone from my
| cohort is still working in industry today if they want to and all
| seem to be doing well.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| It's awesome to hear that there are more scrupulous
| alternatives. You say everyone is working in industry - if in a
| %, you mean to say like 100% of those who graduated with you
| work(ed) in tech afterwards, right?
| busterarm wrote:
| Our cohort was 23. 2 people basically scammed AppAcademy by
| not finding a job for two years but did find jobs after that
| and didn't have to pay their ISA. Everyone else did find jobs
| within about 3 months. All but three have moved into senior
| roles. Of those three, one prefers just being an IC and two
| moved into product management.
|
| I don't know how things are lately but given sentiment I hear
| about hiring from bootcamps, I imagine they haven't been able
| to hold up the high numbers that they had in their first few
| years. Would love to hear otherwise though. I still think the
| program is expensive for what it is, but I don't regret it at
| all.
|
| My only regret was that I chose between changing careers and
| putting all my money in crypto at the time...back when
| Bitcoin was still in double digits. If I'd chosen differently
| I would be rich beyond my wildest dreams.
| tyre wrote:
| Feels like not finding a job for two years isn't really
| winning, unless the terms of the ISA were insane. Lost
| income for two years as a software developer, experience
| towards higher seniority and income, building a resume and
| portfolio...I don't know, that seems like a losing scam for
| the scammers.
| busterarm wrote:
| They did it intentionally because they didn't want to
| pay. They had plenty of backing from their families to do
| so. I agree with you but people who grift aren't usually
| making the most rational choices anyway.
|
| The bootcamp's selection process is basically picking
| winners. I was nearly unique among my cohort for my
| background. It was overwhelmingly ivy grads and silver
| spoon kids.
|
| They're selecting for people that can afford to move to
| one of the most expensive cities in the world without
| working for 6 months. I managed it only by saving enough
| to pay my rent ahead of time and living off of credit
| cards for the rest of my spending. I ate a lot of dollar
| pizza and 6/$1 dumplings that year.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Took a risk hiring out of App academy once. Guy had gone
| through hundreds of interviews and just bombed on all of
| them. I know why, he just sucked at interviews and exudes a
| Morty's dad kind of vibe. Perfectly fine programmer, it
| turned out.
| busterarm wrote:
| Is his name Tom? :D
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Jerry, get a job!
| x0x0 wrote:
| I hired out of app academy. It was fine -- they were super
| junior, but that was expected. All of them were successful in
| other industries and used app academy to retrain into software.
|
| I suspect one of the problems with these programs is they're
| supply constrained; if you want to scale them, you're betting
| there's a lot of people with the requisite IQ, self control,
| motivation, ability to set and carry out long term goals, etc,
| that fell through the cracks both for college and an industry
| desperate for engineers. There definitely are some, but it sure
| doesn't seem like there's a VC-industry or public companies
| amount of these people.
| abirch wrote:
| The University of Phoenix started out the same: using high
| standards. It'd be great if you could carve those standards
| into stone to prevent some future person flooding the market
| with less qualified candidates.
| tuft_1 wrote:
| > ...a result of aggressive candidate filtering all the way up
| to 1/3 of the way through the program after its started.
|
| I can attest to this. AppAcademy essentially gave me free
| interview prep with many rounds of technical interviews
| resulting in me landing a role before the admissions process
| even concluded.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > and its benefits are largely a forcing function to get you to
| build a portfolio in a short amount of time and have a peer
| group to rely on.
|
| That is an incredibly valuable service to provide.
| busterarm wrote:
| Yeah, but 27 percent of your first year's salary in value?
| I'm not sure. Again, I don't regret it, I just think everyone
| that went through it could have succeeded without it.
| forgot_user1234 wrote:
| I have been through lambda.
|
| It was the force of nature that turned my life on the right path.
|
| It was the best decision I ever made
|
| This wouldn't have been possible without Austen.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| I'm glad to hear that it was a positive experience for you! Do
| you think you know what % of your peers ended up working in
| tech off the top of your head?
| swyx wrote:
| just to level set, i myself went thru a normal (non lambda
| school, but still highly rated) bootcamp in 2017 (some of
| which were ISAs, the rest regular tuition), and about 30% of
| my classmates went back to their past jobs and careers. i'm
| sure about 20-30% of the rest are in tech but in unhappy
| situations. but for the remaining 30-50% of us it was a
| lifechanger.
|
| i wish that people would not throw out the baby with the
| bathwater when changing careers and reskilling people is an
| inherently messy process that obviously the bootcamp cannot
| totally control even if were run perfectly, which lambda
| definitely was not. it just turns off a lot of people like me
| who actually could potentially change their lives for the
| better if they were presented simple facts without the
| extremes of hype or hyperbole.
|
| p.s. for sibling comment - yes it is -normal- for good
| students to be offered another term as TAs for the next
| class. this was considered an honor and actually was fairly
| competitive and i think helped them be really good by the
| time they got into the job search. TAs are TAs, all colleges
| have them; they do not replace full instructors, but some of
| them are worth their weight in gold due to their student
| empathy.
| rideontime wrote:
| Lambda/Austen certainly were capable of controlling whether
| or not they lied to prospective students about their job
| placement statistics.
| goat_whisperer wrote:
| "TAs are TAs, all colleges have them; they do not replace
| full instructors, but some of them are worth their weight
| in gold due to their student empathy."
|
| Lol. TAs in colleges are graduate students. They aren't
| undergraduates who can't find a job.
| swyx wrote:
| like i said i cant speak for lambda school, but at my
| bootcamp the TAs were the best of us, not the "ones who
| can't find a job". and at my (fairly prestigious,
| hopefully not non-legit) university, TAs were very often
| upperclassmen and sometimes sophomores that -just-
| completed the previous class.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > TAs in colleges are graduate students. They aren't
| undergraduates who can't find a job.
|
| So they're... graduates who can't find a job? I'm not
| sure you're making the point you're trying to make here.
| goat_whisperer wrote:
| Perhaps you aren't familiar with the term. Graduate
| Student = someone enrolled in a Masters Program, Post
| doc, PHD program, etc.
|
| This is quite different from a using a recent Bootcamp
| grad, likely without any industry experience, as a TA in
| a Software Dev Bootcamp. Especially because the main
| purpose of this is just to inflate job placement
| statistics.
| mettamage wrote:
| I was a bootcamp instructor at a place. This had been my
| experience too with classes and how I selected TAs.
|
| I had no control over student selection. The bootcamp
| school accepted everyone. I told them not to, they didn't
| care.
| rideontime wrote:
| What year did you attend? Did you have actual teachers, or just
| other classmates conscripted into teaching you things they
| themselves didn't understand yet?
| balls187 wrote:
| > It was the force of nature that turned my life on the right
| path.
|
| In what way was it a force of nature, vs just a bootcamp where
| you applied yourself?
|
| Is there something in the instruction Lambda offered vs other
| bootcamps?
| dustincoates wrote:
| I'm convinced that Lambda School was shady, and I'm not debating
| that, but some of this seems over the top.
|
| ISAs as indentured servitude? The shadowy negotiating a company's
| validation "behind closed doors?" (Where else are you supposed to
| do it.)
|
| The criticism of Lambda School can stand on its own without
| wading into the extreme hyperbole.
| virissimo wrote:
| I did a year of computer science, but ended up going to App
| Academy with an ISA, because I couldn't really afford another
| couple of years. If ISAs are indentured servitude, but are
| still better than going to university, then what does that say
| about universities?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Perhaps your second premise isn't true...?
| mapmeld wrote:
| Agreed, I gave real $ to the "Lambda Perpetual Access Fund" and
| now feel negative about the whole thing, but the sections where
| the author is talking about Austen's golf swing, bots, having
| written a paragraph conscious of clickbait? Not really
| necessary.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Did the article talk about his golf swing, or did the article
| mention that a sockpuppet account that he used to spy on his
| disgruntled students linked to a video of his golf swing that
| he also linked to on his twitter account, proving it was him?
|
| > Not really necessary.
|
| Define "necessary." Is it necessary to write articles at all?
| jonathankoren wrote:
| ISAs were indentured servitude. That's literally what they
| were. It was the single most scummy concept that Austin came up
| with and PaulG endorsed.
| wmf wrote:
| What does that make student loans? Slavery?
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Loans are a payment. These were a percentage of earnings.
| They are very different.
| AJC-Official wrote:
| Percentage of earnings is just equity. They're different,
| but not ethically. Slavery would be forcibly taking 100%
| of an individual's equity, but given that ISAs are both
| optional and a minor percentage (Lambda's was 18% when I
| went thru), the comparison is unreasonable.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Equity in what property?
|
| Equity in what property?
|
| _honk_ _honk_ _honk_
| mlyle wrote:
| If the percentage of earnings is capped (as it was in
| most agreements), it's far better than a loan--
| worst/best case you pay the capped amount (like the loan
| amount); if you do worse than that best case, you pay
| proportionally less.
|
| But trying to claw earnings from jobs that didn't relate
| to the school violates the letter and spirit of the
| agreement and shows the disproportionate power of the
| parties.
| huffmsa wrote:
| Okay, so what's an income based repayment plan for a
| loan?
| eloisant wrote:
| I believe they're capped to a maximum time and fixed
| amount, so it's like a loan where the payments depend on
| your revenue no? And if you don't reach the max amount
| during the max time you end up paying less.
| AJC-Official wrote:
| ISAs are equity in the student's future performance, up to a
| cap. This can result in paying a huge premium for relatively
| small amount of effort (a $30k cap for 6 months of online
| class is comparable to a semester at uni), but with 2 key
| advantages: a money-back-guarantee and accessibility.
|
| With a fixed-cost tuition program, students who can't afford
| to pay don't go. This prices out students who would benefit
| from the program. There is also no recourse if you can't get
| a job from uni. How do u know if the teachers instructed you
| properly? Imagine paying $20k for the wrong instruction.
| Yikes.
|
| The only time an ISA works against the student's favor is
| when the schools go after students who got a job working in
| something unrelated (which Lambda appears to have done a lot
| of) or students who were super successful, because they
| overpay for the instruction. The latter isn't that bad given
| the risk-free nature of the ISA, and the former can be
| resolved with legal action and regulation (which is what's
| happening).
|
| That's just my $0.02, although I was a Lambda Grad who did
| the ISA and didn't have any issues.
|
| Another piece of anec-data: I had a non-CS degree coming into
| Lambda, which definitely helped me during recruitment time. I
| think that had I gone into a CS program, I would have done
| fine and possibly even landed a better gig than I got after
| Lambda, but I didn't want to shell out $50k over 2 years on
| the chance of that happening, so I was happy to take the ISA.
| 5 years post-grad, I'm making 4x what I was making pre-
| Lambda, and my ISA was paid off after 2 years, but as is true
| with most things: your mileage may vary.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Buying equity in a person is literally what indentured
| servitude is.
|
| Someone making a deal to give up their future earnings for
| several years in exchange for a trip to the American
| colonies and a better life isn't fundamentally different
| than giving up your future earnings to a coding bootcamp in
| exchange for a trip to FAANG.
|
| The difference is in the degree of future earnings ceded.
| parpfish wrote:
| Isn't there a big difference in the amount of freedo
| between an indentured servant and somebody with an ISA?
|
| An indentured servant was generally forced to work a
| specific job until things were paid back (and often at
| below market wages). Somebody with an ISA is free to do
| whatever they wish, they just have to pay
| karaterobot wrote:
| Yeah. This article is a combination of an interesting story
| with a really unfortunate insertion of POV that sends up red
| flags for trustworthiness.
|
| My favorite example is when he's talking about Lambda not
| registering with the state:
|
| > Austen claimed the school had made an honest mistake, and the
| company lawyer, who he claimed told them that since all the
| classes were online, it didn't need approval. Sure.
|
| And that's it. "Sure". He just smugly dismisses the claim
| without presenting any actual evidence to establish that that's
| what happened. This approach only works as journalism if the
| reader doesn't need to be convinced, but if they don't need to
| be convinced, why read the story in the first place?
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Thats just the typical Mastodon commie. Resentful of the man
| in the arena and always looking to make themselves feel
| better by endlessly moralizing about others.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I think it is more of indentured servitude than an
| uncollateralized loan, but not by much. Since getting rid of
| chattel slavery our society has generally found ways to eke our
| that unearned productivity from people via fractional servitude
| schemes. The (thin) line between an ISA and a loan is that the
| can discharge the loan through bankruptcy, im not certain you
| can do so as easily for an ISA.
| nradov wrote:
| Bankruptcy courts have pretty wide latitude to modify or
| terminate most types of agreements that create a financial
| obligation or liability. Certain types of student loans are
| excepted but not much else.
| duxup wrote:
| Is this just easier to SEE in a bootcamp type scenario?
|
| How many people got the traditional education route, rack up even
| MORE debt, still don't end up doing the thing / end up where they
| want to be?
|
| Is this maybe an easy to see problem that is part of a larger
| education problem none the less?
|
| Full disclosure: I'm the product of a boot camp. Changed careers
| and learned to code after age 40. It worked out great for me, but
| yeah I was in camp with a lot of people who shouldn't have been /
| it was a waste of time / money for them.
|
| I have to wonder as jobs and careers change, having faster ways
| to retool seems all but required. At the same time I think those
| efforts will be hit and miss, and I'm not sure there's a solution
| to that.
|
| (That doesn't excuse any of the scummy nature of some of the
| storytelling around bootcamps, but honestly I've worked with
| university interns and they seem to tell each other their own
| stories about how much they'll be making and it's interesting how
| that hype sort of builds.)
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Is this just easier to SEE in a bootcamp type scenario?
|
| You can certainly find universities that charge high prices,
| deliver a poor education, don't have their act together, and
| leave students with a lot of debt and little to show for it.
|
| The difference in this case was that Lambda School was pushed
| on everyone as the superior bootcamp. It was supposed to be a
| top-tier bootcamp. One of the best. Famous people like Paul
| Graham touted it constantly on Twitter and even wrote an essay
| defending the Lambda School founder when the first criticisms
| started gaining momentum.
|
| > Is this maybe an easy to see problem that is part of a larger
| education problem none the less?
|
| Trying to reduce all education options to the same level
| removes the nuance that makes this story what it is. Of course
| you can find bad education experiences in many forms, but it's
| also easy to discover that Stanford has an excellent CS program
| while some private no-name for-profit university has no
| reputation. In this case, the _most_ reputable bootcamp that
| was being touted by industry titans as the superior education
| option turned out to be one of the worst. That's the story.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The article claims that their true placement rate was below
| 30%. Even for a graduate program in an oversaturated field -
| and I'm very comfortable describing such programs as scams
| themselves - that would be kinda low.
| goat_whisperer wrote:
| You can argue about the value of traditional education.
|
| But I think you would be hard pressed to find a university,
| even a crappy one, where it's up to the students to TA
| themselves, there are 100 students to one professor, and the
| curriculum constantly changes in the middle of a semester. So
| it's not quite accurate to try and compare Lambda to a
| traditional univeristy.
|
| But congrats on your success in career changing. It begs the
| question of whether you could've done that on your own without
| attending a boot camp.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't think I could have done it without a camp. I think
| that initial push to get "over the hump", at least the first
| hump for me really required someone I could immediately
| bounce questions off of, the structure of a classroom
| environment, and push to keep going because, class goes on.
|
| Granted after that... I was fine learning on my own / that's
| half the job of programming. But initially I don't think I
| would have made it over that first hill.
|
| I do think that is a personal learning style thing. When I
| was younger I was a TERRIBLE formal schooling type learner.
| When I went back I was appreciative / loved that environment.
| least wrote:
| I don't really think the primary value of a bootcamp is
| teaching you anything you couldn't learn on your own, but
| that it pushes you into a structured environment with other
| like-minded people to interact with and mentorship from
| experienced developers.
| imzadi wrote:
| I've posted about my Lambda experience in another thread. I
| started Lambda School in 2019. I was in one of their first part-
| time evening cohorts. The original program length was 9 months. I
| went into the program with a lot of prior programming experience
| as a hobbyist and MUD programmer, but no professional experience.
| I had been trying to get a programming job for over a decade
| without success. I hoped it would help me build a portfolio and
| network of peers.
|
| At that time, I was working in a helpdesk role that I had had for
| about 5 years. It was a call center job, so I didn't have a lot
| of control over my schedule, but was able to arrange to keep my
| schedule for the nine months of the program. About 3 months into
| the program, they completely changed the structure of the
| program, which doubled the length to 18 months.
|
| I completed the core curriculum and the capstone project.
| Throughout the program they kept promising to connect us with
| career counselors, but kept pushing it back. First it would be
| after we were halfway through the core curriculum, then when we
| finished the core curriculum, then when we started the capstone
| project, then when we finished it. I never once got to speak with
| any kind of career professional. The closest we got was a peer
| reviewed resume.
|
| After the capstone project, we started a "computer science"
| module, which was supposed to be the end of the course. I did a
| few weeks of the computer science module, but couldn't continue
| when my shift changed, since this was outside of the original
| nine months. I tried to make arrangements to finish the module on
| my own time, but they wouldn't allow this. The only option I was
| given was to withdraw from the program.
|
| By the time I had finished, the reputation for Lambda was already
| tanking. I tried sending out resumes, but I couldn't get any
| traction at all. I did Triplebyte and passed, but only got one
| interview from that process and it didn't lead to a job.
|
| Meanwhile, I got a pay bump that put me over the 50k. Lambda came
| after me for the ISA, since I had a job in tech. It didn't matter
| that it was the same job I had had for 5 years before starting
| their program.
|
| I went to a lawyer and was told that the contract required
| arbitration in New York City, which would be too expensive to
| bother with, so I just paid the ISA.
|
| I later went through a different bootcamp on scholarship and did
| end up getting a SWE job after that, but was laid off in 2022
| when our project was discontinued and am back on the helpdesk.
| Guess I was never meant to be a programmer lol.
| rideontime wrote:
| Austen seems to finally have given up on trying spin every story
| about him that reaches HN, no posts in the last 9 months.[0] A
| sure sign of the dismal state of things at Lambda/Bloom.
|
| [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=austenallred
| swyx wrote:
| or months and months of defending your reputation can wear you
| down. have a little empathy for the flawed human on the other
| side of the screen.
| rideontime wrote:
| Did you read the linked article? I'm struggling to empathize
| with this fraud, especially after listening to the interview
| mentioned.
| swyx wrote:
| skimmed it. was a fan of @fulligin since before he became a
| citizen journalist and have followed it closely, i didnt
| really see much new info here in my browse thru. i'm not
| saying to empathize WITH THE FRAUD lol, just responding to
| GP about why austen stopped answering qtns. yes he fucked
| up, now give the guy a chance to build Bloom into something
| legit instead of constantly reading the most negative take
| into simple things like stopping his hn activity as "A sure
| sign of the dismal state of things at Lambda/Bloom."
| wk_end wrote:
| > now give the guy a chance to build Bloom into something
| legit
|
| That'd be the (perhaps too) generous thing to do, but
| there's no evidence at this point that he has any
| interest in doing that. You said that he "fucked up", but
| there's zero reason to believe that the past tense and
| not the continuous present is appropriate here. To my
| knowledge, he's never offered an apology, an
| acknowledgement of wrongdoing - either in his predatory
| business model or his mendacious self-promotion - or a
| promise to do better. The last word we have from Mr.
| Allred is that he believes that everyone who criticizes
| him is a "hater" who's just too stupid to appreciate his
| genius.
|
| The message of turning the other cheek is beautiful, but
| perhaps a little impractical to those of us who aren't
| totally Christ-like all the time, and - in the context of
| a conversation discussing clear wrongdoing - a little
| banal. We're not single-handedly going to stop him from
| doing whatever he wants with Bloom but we should say,
| very loudly, that until further evidence arises his
| history implies that he's not to be trusted and advise
| everyone within a hundred yards of him to be wary.
| throwaw2y342345 wrote:
| no, he should have empathy for everyone he screwed over and
| doesnt, so i wont have a single ounce of empathy for him
| borski wrote:
| Both can be true.
| danso wrote:
| He had the habit of running from legitimate criticism years
| ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26813088
| simplify wrote:
| Someone being exposed for leading a fraud organization for
| several years is not the time to call for "empathy". This
| reads as a astroturf manipulation tactic to make the guilty
| seem not as bad as they are.
| swyx wrote:
| thankfully this account has plenty of credibility and i
| have no ties to lambda whatsoever. tinfoil hat off. i can
| want more empathy while not absolving the guy of guilt.
| simplify wrote:
| If he was just a subordinate, sure. But leaders are and
| must be held to higher standards.
| throwanem wrote:
| Whatever reputational damage he's suffered, he seems to have
| come by it honestly. What's to defend?
|
| We are all flawed humans. I can empathize so far - but no
| further, because the thing that comes after "we are all
| flawed humans" needs to be learning how to manage one's own
| flawed nature such that its blast radius encompasses
| blameless others as closely to never as possible. It is not
| evident Allred has meaningfully done anything remotely
| resembling that kind of work.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Back in the late 80s / early 90s, I taught non-traditional
| students coming in through state-funded retraining programs at UT
| Arlington Continuing Education and Texas State Technical
| Institute (now TSTC) in Waco. The idea was "here are a bunch of
| laid-off manufacturing workers who want to retrain as _SOMETHING_
| with high-tech. " The most popular courses were of the very short
| "here's how to do some things with Unix" variety: how to log-in,
| how to do simple admin, how to exit vi, how to edit a file with
| emacs, Make for the perplexed, etc.
|
| I did teach a 6 week C++ course. Mostly attended by CS students
| at the local college. Back in the day we didn't teach kids how to
| code in a CS cirriculum. They were expected to just pick it up
| themselves. Six weeks really isn't enough to teach how to be good
| at C++.
|
| I spent a fair amount of time reading Papert and Piaget, trying
| to develop a theory on how people learn and how to best teach
| "programming" concepts. I've yet to see ANYONE (myself included)
| do an excellent job teaching the kind of programming employers
| want. I saw another comment here about how "programming" is
| simple, but teaching architecture and putting things together is
| hard. I would mostly agree with that.
|
| But... there are some techniques that are better than others.
|
| My experience w/ Lambda School was they tried to hire me as an
| instructor way back when. I talked to them briefly about pedagogy
| and their approach to modeling learning and how they were going
| to measure improvements in their cirriculum. I got blank looks.
| They kept harping about how they were going to iterate, but
| without the slightest idea how they were going to improve between
| iterations.
|
| I quietly walked out the door never to return (moving to Seattle
| to work for Amazon instead.) It looks like I made the right call.
| DANmode wrote:
| Could you say more, or even link, to proper methodologies for
| measuring iterations of your curriculum?
|
| I'm a very amateur teacher, but have received great feedback on
| my "teaching style",
|
| which I've refined based on two things: how often I get puzzled
| looks during a technique, how often I get thanked for using a
| specific technique.
|
| I'm curious what this looks like in the big leagues - how this
| "scales".
|
| Thanks for your time.
| heymijo wrote:
| Hi DANmode, I'm obviously not OP, but I am a teacher who has
| gained a broad understanding of the field from practice and
| research.
|
| One thing about feedback this is counterintuitive is that,
| students are generally very bad at understanding what
| actually helps them learn. When I say learn I mean gain a
| conceptual understanding and procedural fluency in whatever
| they are learning that sticks with an ability to
| appropriately transfer that knowledge beyond the context
| they've seen it in.
|
| So unfortunately when a student says "that was great!"
| research has found that to be negatively correlated with
| learning.
|
| If you want to delve into a study that talks about this and
| what effective teaching looks like in the long-term I really
| recommend this study done at the US Air Force Academy [0].
|
| It is the closest thing I have seen to a gold standard study
| in education where a lot of research is dubious at best:
|
| Look at what Carrell and West handed us with this study:
|
| - 7 year study at the US Air Force Academy - 10,534 students
| - 421 faculty members - 30 core courses, all standardized
| (math, science, social science, humanities, and engineering)
| - Random assignment of students to professors in initial
| course and follow-on courses
|
| [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/653808
|
| I've got an email in my profile if you want to discuss!
| davidw wrote:
| I have this sense that the world of tech needs the pendulum to
| swing back a bit towards geeky hacker types who are in it for the
| love of building cool things, tinkering, exploring and all that.
| There is a bit too much of the "bro" side of things - hustlebros
| and techbros and VC bros and that culture.
|
| Where are my people at these days?
| borski wrote:
| Building things. Those geeks don't market well. Never did.
| There's a reason Woz needed Jobs.
|
| There is just a lot more noise than signal now.
| davidw wrote:
| To build a successful company, you need both, clearly, but
| it's a balance. And not everything needs to be a successful
| company. Some things are just for the fun of it. And
| sometimes those things turn into companies in unexpected
| ways.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| That sort of environment is an artifact of a new technical
| domain, not unique to programming or because of any
| characteristics unique to it.
|
| At different times for example it was typical for a doctor,
| architect, or pilot to be an informally educated enthusiast. As
| programming has matured into a broadly relevant and
| economically important domain, the dynamics of who does it and
| how they learn it change, as it also did in those other fields.
|
| You can lament the change but it's never coming back.
| davidw wrote:
| You can be a professional software developer without all the
| 'bro' stuff.
|
| And there's certainly still space for people who are curious
| and intrinsically motivated if you think about the whole pie
| growing rather than just being cut up differently.
| zenlikethat wrote:
| Give it another two years of high interest rates washing people
| out into non-tech sales, finance, trades, whatever... but there
| are plenty out there, the bros are just far louder.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I think tech workers, whether it's the passionate geeks or
| materialistic frat bros, need to understand that a decent chunk
| of people just want a regular/safe office job that's more
| exciting and stimulating than spreadsheets and powerpoint
| slides.
|
| They don't want to engage in intellectual/nerdy pissing
| contests, nor do they want to jump through a million burning
| hoops to increase their total compensation. They want to show
| up 9 o'clock, do their work, and leave around 5 - and that's
| that.
|
| No hacky side projects. No late evenings reading up on shiny
| new tools, no grinding leetcode and prepping for interviews, no
| hustles.
|
| (You'll find the geeky hackers at startups, open-source
| projects, etc.)
| kevbin wrote:
| This article needs an editor the way that Austen Allred needs a
| conscience.
| gnicholas wrote:
| The comparison of Lambda and YC is appealing on its surface, but
| then you realize that YC has uncapped upside on its winners, and
| this is why it works. Lambda has a capped upside on each
| participant, so it's important that its median graduate be
| successful. No number of insanely successful graduates can make
| up for the median being unsuccessful.
|
| Kind of surprised that PG made the comment he did, which seems
| naive in this regard.
| salamo wrote:
| It's really too bad. Higher ed needs disruption. The problem is,
| a responsibly-run university is a slow/medium growth enterprise,
| not an overnight unicorn.
|
| The Vanderbilts and Carnegies of today could do a major public
| service if they wanted to. Use their names and hire the best
| researchers in their respective fields and pay them well.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| this is happening in great numbers .. behind closed doors,
| private benefit, legal NDAs, in the case of AI also closely
| tied to nationalist entities in uniforms. What could go wrong?
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Higher education works fine in other countries, where it is
| heavily subsidized by the government.
|
| But, I guess, for many people in the US - they want any
| solution other than that.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Why do you think higher education is not subsidized by the
| government? You can look at how much money universities
| receive. Do you think Universities are incapable of education
| people for less money?
| philwelch wrote:
| Higher education in the US is heavily subsidized by the
| government, but the administration just grows to consume all
| of those subsidies.
|
| Almost none of the US's problems are the result of not
| throwing enough taxpayer money at the problem. We throw as
| much taxpayer money at problems as any other country in the
| world.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| I don't understand the controversy.
|
| Sure, you might not like ISAs, but that's not the point. You
| signed an agreement. The agreement itself is not illegal. If you
| don't like it, why did you sign it?
|
| Like, what's the expectation here? That you should be able to get
| a coding education for free? Even if you got a job unrelated to
| programming, how does that excuse you from needing to pay for
| tuition for courses you already completed?
| jph00 wrote:
| In the article it's shown that the CEO stated that you only
| have to pay if you make $50k+ as a software engineer.
|
| According to the article, they have not had court victories to
| support their claims.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| When I was doing my undergrad, the university published
| statistics saying something to the tune of "the average
| engineering graduate goes on to earn a $60k salary at their
| first job."
|
| If only I knew at the time I could have simply taken the
| university to court because my starting salary out of school
| was $55k.
| Spivak wrote:
| If paying your student loans was contingent on you making
| $60k, you made $55k, and they came knocking at your door
| demanding money yes I do think you have grounds to sue and
| not pay them.
|
| I don't care one iota about the legal minutiae that says
| they're technically allowed to collect, it is blatantly
| obvious what the students thought they were signing and so
| it's really hard to argue "no actually they agreed to <this
| other thing>." If you present paperwork that you say is the
| legalese version of the agreement you discussed, have the
| other party sign it on that basis, and then it isn't that
| is the lowest hanging fruit of contracts that should be
| thrown out.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| I think you can also make an argument that data provided to
| entice you into the loan turned out to be misrepresented at
| best, or a full out lie at worst.
|
| I do agree with accountability on debts you sign up for,
| including student loans.
| afavour wrote:
| Weren't they vastly misselling their success rate? They said
| sign this agreement, we offer 9X% rate of success! Then it
| turned out to not be the case. TFA:
|
| > Most students weren't hired. What little money the school
| made came from quietly reselling student debt to hedge funds.
|
| Legally sound, probably? Morally unsound, definitely.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| Isn't every VC-funded startup overly optimistic? I've seen
| pitch decks before where founders promise 10x growth over the
| next 2 years to an impossible projected revenue. It is
| obviously not going to happen, and indeed did not. Should
| those founders be criminally charged as well?
| afavour wrote:
| IMO there's a meaningful difference between pitching to VC
| investors and selling a product to individual customers.
| mcguire wrote:
| There is a meaningful legal difference between lying to
| VC investors and lying to people taking out loans from
| you.
| drewda wrote:
| The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said that specific
| practice was _not_ legally sound.
|
| See the subsections titled "Misrepresented their financial
| interests by selling loans to investors" and "Engaged in
| illegal contract practices" at
| https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-
| takes...
| sangnoir wrote:
| Implicit in your first 2 sentences is the assumption that
| anything legal can't or shouldn't be controversial. I
| vehemently disagree with that idea.
| Spivak wrote:
| Because the agreement way pay if-and-only-if you get a job as a
| software developer making >$50k annual salary.
|
| They went after people not meeting the conditions. Simple as
| that.
| eloisant wrote:
| The problem is not the ISA itself.
|
| 1. They lied about the student success rates
|
| 2. They went after graduates for the ISA when they shouldn't
| (e.g. graduates not working in tech, or continuing the job they
| had before lambda school)
| golergka wrote:
| My girlfriend leads a placement department at AI bootcamp, helps
| graduates find jobs. Some of them are over 50, they're often from
| completely unrelated industries with zero coding experience. It
| takes a lot of effort, interviews, and unpaid internships as well
| -- so I really fail to understand why Lambda School's internship
| program got this enormous amount of backlash. But in the end
| people who persevere and go through the grind usually land the
| jobs, and I think that on average the bootcamp pays off.
| mrroryflint wrote:
| I find it interesting there is no major mention of the failed
| Europe/Africa expansion. It was a great program that launched my
| career as well as many others - but God behind the scenes was
| insanity.
| kbigdelysh wrote:
| I was one of the coding instructors at Make School which was
| similar to Lambda School and was bankrupt couple years ago. Our
| major issue? It was damn hard to find enough students for our
| school who were talented enough to understand computer science
| and had enough grit to finish the program and get a job. Why?
| Because those students were already absorbed by the established
| traditional universities.
| parpfish wrote:
| I have a similar view and am skeptical of bootcamp claims that
| they can get anybody a job with X weeks of training. I'm
| reminded of the ending of Ratatouille when the critic figures
| out that the motto "Anyone can cook" means "Not everyone can
| become a great artist; but a great artist can come from
| anywhere".
|
| I'm personally biased, but I feel like one bootcamp program
| that got this right (for a while) was Insight Data Science. For
| a few years at the start of the 'data boom' there was a market
| inefficiency where tech needed more people that understood
| stats and ML and there were a ton of STEM postdocs that wanted
| to leave academia. The program worked because it wasn't really
| about teaching any new skills, it was mostly about being able
| to market the skills you have in a different sector. But after
| a few years, the market corrected itself and there was no
| shortage of data/stats people in tech anymore and there were
| enough resources for those academics to manage the transition
| on their own. I don't know if the program still exists, but if
| they do I'm not sure what they could do now to make themselves
| relevant.
| btown wrote:
| Apparently when the pandemic hit Insight pivoted into a
| remote model with ISAs, then stopped accepting new cohorts.
|
| https://www.teamblind.com/post/Insight-data-science-scam-
| dur...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/s/sdKVWBP2GJ
| parpfish wrote:
| Not surprised that they didn't make it, but it's too bad
| that had to do that bit of a heel turn right at the end
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I feel like Big Nerd Ranch[0] did well. They had more of a
| seminar model, although they called their classes
| "bootcamps."
|
| Unfortunately, they couldn't make enough at it, and have had
| to pivot away from it. There was a post, hereabouts,
| recently, that spoke to that.
|
| [0] https://bignerdranch.com
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah my impression is that there are a decent number of people
| who are probably smart enough to learn to program, at least in
| an "easy" language like Python, but it's just too boring for
| the average person.
|
| I think law is similar. Do you really need to be super smart to
| be a lawyer? Probably not. But you _do_ have to be vaguely
| interested in reading legal texts and... Jesus no thanks.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Most people are smart enough to program, I think. The biggest
| hurdle is being able to sit down and work on a program for 8
| hours a day. All the other skills can be learned.
| strken wrote:
| "Most people" as in "most people jayd16 interacts with",
| "most people who hold a white-collar job", "most people who
| hold any job at all", "most working-age adults", or "if you
| randomly selected a big enough group of people, more than
| half of them could become professional programmers"?
|
| I suspect we're in a bubble. Consider the charts at the end
| of https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~hauser/merit_01_081502_compl
| ete...., specifically the "Computer occs." results. I don't
| think most people are smart enough to become professional
| programmers if they have to compete with existing
| professional programmers for jobs. I _do_ think that if you
| look around the average office which employs programmers,
| most of the people in non-technical roles could have become
| a professional programmer, but that 's a biased sample.
| 7thpower wrote:
| Counter point, I have worked with a company we'll call "C" and
| they have been able to build a pipeline of folks who have been
| incredibly effective (>50).
|
| That being said the program is a bit more than ~3 months and
| the students go all in, they're not doing it part time.
|
| The students come from different backgrounds, some have not
| graduated highschool, and they come hungry for better
| opportunities. We've tried this with a few companies and that
| was the only one that has been successful.
|
| That being said, I think it has been difficult for them to
| scale profitably as it is just a lot of work to find the
| candidates and provide effective instruction.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Teaching is a really time-consuming task, if you want to do
| it right.
|
| I'm in the middle of creating a series on implementing
| Universal Links and URL Schemes, for iOS. May be a while,
| before it's ready. I spend a _lot_ of time, testing the
| supporting materials, and making sure that I 'm giving good
| info.
| obvustroweh wrote:
| I used to mentor for a south-eastern group, Iron Yard.
|
| All the good candidates had proven themselves in other
| disciplines. Our top candidates my first year mentoring were a
| master carpenter and a PhD in Jazz.
|
| The typical Bachelor's in Communications-to-Coder just never
| panned out at a real-world level.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Not sure about other states, but California has super low cost
| junior colleges with CS classes. It seems like the Austen's of
| the world would advise people to start there and see how they do
| rather than jump into a $50k commitment.
|
| The other baffling thing about Lambda was that companies had to
| pay Lambda to recruit their students.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Yep. Here's how it breaks down for the CC I attended.
|
| https://www.cuesta.edu/student/resources/cashier/cost_of_att...
|
| Additionally, at Cuesta the first month of bus rides is free,
| and the bus tickets themselves can be purchased at ~50 bucks a
| month. It's not too hard to find some roommates in town and get
| some cheap rent, too.
|
| In return, you can get a curriculum that closely follows that
| of Cal Poly (often with teachers who teach at both
| institutions!), and a fairly successful transfer program.
|
| Of course once you get into the university the costs are much
| higher, but you don't have mandatory dorms anymore, but you did
| two years on the cheap, and when you combine financial aid,
| scholarships, and federal student loans it's not ridiculous to
| have $20k or less in debt by the time you graduate. With a
| decent job in tech, that can be paid off in under a year.
|
| Unfortunately, the job market is really tough right now for
| fresh grads, so that last part is where this falls apart, but
| I'd wager it's relatively easier for someone with a proper
| four-year degree than someone with a bootcamp credential.
| localfirst wrote:
| > Lambda School targeted single mothers, the disabled, reformed
| convicts, and people struggling with serious medical problems.
| They lost tens of thousands of dollars, some lost years of their
| lives, on a broken, predatory program.
|
| Seeing a huge wave of ponzified educational courses being pushed
| by influencers and famous people that results in financial ruin.
|
| 1%ers, 10x engineers, these are ALL caricatures that is created
| by course sellers to instill the belief that the participant
| NEEDS to purchase it.
|
| If I was to create a society based on principles, the founders of
| Lambda School, should be behind bars.
| elawler24 wrote:
| VC incentives are the real problem here. I was a mentor at
| another bootcamp and also the founder of a high-skill developer
| marketplace in 2017.
|
| A valuation of $1B for this business is crazy. Investors were
| simply underwriting students paying for trade school, there's no
| tangible tech innovation. Like Theranos, WeWork, and FTX - it's
| the story of a darling founder who has to justify an unrealistic
| valuation in a frothy market. They're living in an echo chamber
| where fraudulent behavior goes unquestioned because everyone
| wants the upside.
|
| Salaries are based on scarcity. High-skill software engineers
| were rare at one point, because there weren't many of them with
| experience or training. Programs like Lambda School increased the
| number of people who know how to code while decreasing quality,
| resulting in fewer unfilled jobs and lower compensation. And
| again, where is the innovation? In the sketchy ISA?
|
| There's a fine line between the "fake it till you make it" ethos
| in Silicon Valley and fraudulent behavior that materially hurts
| investors and consumers. He clearly crossed the line by publicly
| and repeatedly lying, but he was also incentivized and encouraged
| to build a hyper-scale business on the backs of people lacking
| expertise in the job marketplace.
|
| I believe teaching people how to code is a good thing. But it's
| not a venture-scale business, and never should have been valued
| as such. A sketchy financial instrument doesn't equal innovation.
| ilamont wrote:
| _Like Theranos, WeWork, and FTX - it 's the story of a darling
| founder who has to justify an unrealistic valuation in a frothy
| market._
|
| The other issue for all of the examples you cited (and Lambda)
| is an-almost complete failure for the VCs and accelerators and
| other gatekeepers to effectively carry out due diligence.
|
| I say "almost" because in the case of Theranos, some investors
| _did_ pass, according to the documentary and WSJ reporting. And
| there may be others that passed on Lambda and WeWork that will
| never come to light.
|
| But FTX - the transcript of the Sequoia internal chat
| supposedly vetting SBF is laughably amateur and shows the
| mindset that allows VCs to be duped by pattern matching and
| specific personality types (Ivy dropout, MIT mad scientist,
| charismatic new age genius, etc.):
|
| > That's when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app:
| "I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want
| with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money
| in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You
| can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money
| from inside FTX."
|
| > Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia's side of the Zoom
| lights up with partners freaking out.
|
| > "I LOVE THIS FOUNDER," typed one partner.
|
| > "I am a 10 out of 10," pinged another.
|
| > "YES!!!" exclaimed a third
|
| (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128504)
| swedonym wrote:
| I'm not sure we can solely blame VC incentives here. There are
| many edtech companies that are doing well with VC funding /
| incentives (Coursera, Duolingo, Goalsetter to name a few). As
| far as I know, the majority of these companies have not
| resorted to predatory practices or actively misleading
| potential students.
|
| I agree that VCs have an incentive to inject high-octane fuel
| into the growth engine of a company, but the decision to use
| that fuel for an ICBM or a Spaceship is ultimately that of the
| founders.
| tptacek wrote:
| I share the same feelings, directionally, as the author ---
| though I don't believe DoorDash was somehow bad for the world,
| but:
|
| _Lambda School was on-par with an average code bootcamp.
| Students got a taste of programming, but when it came to getting
| hired, neither the training nor credentials held a candle to a
| college degree_
|
| Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break.
|
| Lambda seems to have been real bad in the aggregate, but I'm wary
| of people leveraging that scary story as a vector for restoring
| college credentialism. Plenty of esteemed colleges have
| comparable track records, and deserve comparable stories.
|
| _Let 's skip the math, physics, and other code-free classes give
| you a foundational understanding of computers [...]_
|
| Yes, let's, please. Programmers in the main connect form fields
| to SQL columns. Calc II is a hazing ritual that supports an elite
| credential structure, not foundational knowledge for the
| practice.
|
| _In reality, one iOS instructor had just graduated from a
| competing boot camp before getting hired, having never spent a
| day in the industry. The head of the data science program was
| Austen 's brother, Ryan, whose only experience was another
| bootcamp and internship._
|
| Again: real bad. Lambda: not good. But the author knows full well
| who teaches a lot of university courses, and that's not a great
| story either.
| bitwize wrote:
| I'm reminded of a company I've crossed paths with in the past.
| It's the same people each time, but when they get found out they
| tear down the old company and erect a new one with the same
| business model under a new name. At first it was called Unbounded
| Solutions, then it was called BrighterBrain, and now it's called
| EnhanceIT.
|
| Their whole deal is, they will offer you a "free" crash course in
| mobile development (or whatever the new hotness du jour is, these
| days I'm sure they have AI offerings). I believe the course lasts
| two months, after which they will prepare a fake resume for you,
| apply for contract positions in your name, and have call-center
| people in India do the phone interviews on your behalf,
| pretending to be you. You are also coached in how to lie about
| your experience for the in-person interview. You are obligated to
| work for two years at wherever they place you (could be one place
| or many places, I guess). If you do not agree to all of this, you
| will be assessed a $20,000 charge for your "free" training and
| billed for such.
|
| The principal in all three companies is Vikram Thadani. He's been
| running this scam in some form or another since the early 2010s.
|
| Their current site: https://www.enhanceit.com
|
| Old blog post about someone who got skeeved out applying to work
| for them when they were BrighterBrain:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150308193650/http://shifttohap...
|
| More recent Reddit post about the same shit going on under the
| EnhanceIT name:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/careerguidance/comments/v63p2t/enha...
| soneca wrote:
| Hey, I mentioned you in my comment elsewhere on this post.
| Checked your recent comments and found you here.
|
| You were right in 2019, despite being downvoted. Good call.
| Congrats
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774532
| bitwize wrote:
| No worries m8, fwiw I HATE being right about this sort of
| thing. Unbounded/BrighterBrain/EnhanceIT probably sprang to
| mind when I read that comment of yours way back when, hence
| my response.
|
| For anybody out there, if you want to gain coding skills but
| cannot or do not wish to do a four-year degree program,
| community colleges in the USA can help close that skill gap
| for a price much more reasonable than a boot camp. Consider
| those, or state universities, and potentially save yourself a
| whole lot of trouble getting caught in a costly trap.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| The government student loan system in England effectively uses an
| income sharing agreement: with the most recent version, you pay
| 9% of your income over PS25,000/year and if you haven't finished
| paying it back within 40 years, it gets forgiven. This scheme
| doesn't pay for itself though. (it costs the government money).
| Suppafly wrote:
| >This scheme doesn't pay for itself though. (it costs the
| government money).
|
| That's ok though. Any civilized country is generally OK with
| spending taxes to educate people.
| soneca wrote:
| I wonder if Paul Graham regrets investing in and defending Austen
| for such a long time.
|
| I only made a comment long time ago that Lambda School sounded
| like a good idea to me and I regret how fool I was.
|
| Edit: btw, bitwise, you were right in 2019, despite your response
| to my comment being downvoted.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774532
| networked wrote:
| The HN comment originally made by 'austenallred in
| https://www.sandofsky.com/content/images/2024/05/image-13.pn...
| is still available at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774 but is now by user
| '_pecl. The ownership of the comment changed between July 3, 2019
| and January 31, 2020 according to
| https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/i....
| I guess the author realized it reflected badly on him and
| contacted HN to anonymize the comment.
|
| Edit: This is not to suggest 'austenallred received special
| treatment.
| DangLovesAusten wrote:
| Dang just banned my other account because I questioned if the
| comment was really just Austen using his network of burners.
| pretty obvious the HN people are in cohoots with their precious
| Austen and don't want to see his terrible reputation tarnished
| even more
| dang wrote:
| I have no idea which account you're referring to but I
| certainly haven't banned anyone for that reason. In fact I
| just restored your other comments in this thread.
| DangLovesAusten wrote:
| And in case its not obvious why they can't be objective and
| have to protect their saint
| https://www.ycombinator.com/library/5N-on-starting-and-scali...
| DangFksAusten wrote:
| Dang has to protect their investment. Which is why this whole
| site is a fucking scam. Can't possible let someone know they
| invested in a scammer piece of shit
| dang wrote:
| We delete and/or redact things for users who ask us to ( http
| s://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| ), we take care of such requests every day, and we treat
| every user exactly the same. More at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732867 in this thread.
|
| Edit: here's what I posted the last time this came up:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343. It's a more
| complete explanation than I have time to give right now, and
| nothing has changed since then.
| bitwize wrote:
| Hackernews has "protected people", typically high-ranking
| Silicon Valley types, for whom, if it is revealed they are
| scumbags, they will run interference, changing account names
| and replacing their powerwords with [redacted]. An example is
| the high-ranking GitHub engineer who has an Indian first name
| but goes by "Alex", who was accused of mistreating women, and
| actually pled guilty to at least one incidence of such.
| dang wrote:
| Renaming accounts, redacting posts, etc. are all things that
| we do for users in general. We make no distinction between
| "high-ranking" users and others.
|
| I personally take care of these requests every day and have
| gone out of my way (including spending hours writing code) to
| help people individually in cases where their needs were
| unusually complex. I can tell you for sure that whether the
| person is high or low status in $whoever's eyes has nothing
| to do with this. Often I don't even know who the person is.
|
| Our approach to this boils down to one principle: We don't
| want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to
| HN. It doesn't matter who "anyone" is. On countless occasions
| I've deleted posts, redacted personal details, and/or
| randomized usernames for accounts that in fact had repeatedly
| abused and trolled HN. I don't rub their nose in that either
| --I just pretend not to have noticed. You'd be surprised how
| polite and thankful people can be when they need something.
|
| I'm not surprised to see accounts like
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732721 making
| sinisterly scurrilous accusations, but you've been around
| here long enough to know better.
|
| Edit: here's what I posted the last time this came up:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343. It's a more
| complete explanation than I have time to give right now, and
| nothing has changed since then.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I was totally unaware that HN mods would treat certain
| accounts better than others, and give special anonymous
| edits, totally news to me.
|
| I have seen a lot of selective application of HN rules over
| the (many) years. My 2 cents.
| j-bos wrote:
| Thanks dang
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| Dang, by any chance are you looking for an understudy so
| you can, I dunno, go on vacation without your laptop or
| somewhere without a cell signal? Your moderation is always
| first class.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Hacker News will do this for basically anyone. Or you can run
| a script to do it. It's not particularly special.
| fudged71 wrote:
| Around the time that Lambda school was trending I joined a
| company that is providing large scale process re-engineering to
| Universities. At the time I was optimistic that Lambda would
| succeed.
|
| I'm fairly confident now that the cumulative student journey
| improvement, work allocation, cross-faculty collaboration,
| beurocracy-reduction, and general efficiencies we have delivered
| to a stable large post-secondary institution across all faculties
| is going to make a larger and longer lasting positive improvement
| to more students and people's lives than what Lambda achieved.
| (With fewer people, less funding, etc)
| light_triad wrote:
| There's clearly a need to disrupt expensive colleges and some
| type of pay later arrangement is a good idea, but there's some
| difficulties every ed startup will face:
|
| - schools need to be selective to keep the quality of the student
| body high so they persevere to finish the program and succeed
|
| - getting students hired in a competitive field is a very high
| bar that is much higher compared to most schools
|
| - software is a difficult field with high frustration and a steep
| learning curve
|
| Lambda was open to everyone, in a tough field, with a high bar
| for success. Alternatives might be possible in less competitive
| fields
| hintymad wrote:
| In a way software engineers should feel relieved a bit that we
| can not mass produce well trained software engineers yet, even
| for entry-level roles. Of course, there are many exceptional
| individuals who benefited from code camps, but I'm talking about
| statistical results. For good for worse, one's ability to make it
| in software industry still has some correlation with how
| successful they are in "hardcore" trainings, like college-level
| maths and computer science.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I'd take this more seriously if it didn't come across like there
| was a political agenda.
|
| To say something like "The defunding of public colleges" is
| egregious. It's just factually wrong. Colleges haven't been
| defunded. In fact college funding has gone _up_ in many states.
| It 's that tuition has risen _more_ than the funding has gone up.
|
| Also, no mention of thousands of people saddled with debt from
| many public colleges teaching CS or IT or whatever? That's not a
| scam either???
| seoulmetro wrote:
| Not sure why the writer attacks his "sock puppet", it's not a
| sock puppet, his wording actually obscures but does not lie. He
| is in that discord, with other students.
|
| If you think he's trying to hide on that account, and that's all
| your evidence, then you're just being emotional.
|
| Don't trust anyone you meet on the internet as they may be the
| CEO.
| enahs-sf wrote:
| Absolutely eviscerating. Also I see this guy on some investor
| updates I get so I assume if he's got enough cash to be an
| accredited investor he took a few chips off the table at some
| point.
| hintymad wrote:
| > Students got a taste of programming, but when it came to
| getting hired, neither the training nor credentials held a candle
| to a college degree. Yet Lambda School regularly compared itself
| to college in its marketing, promising, "The depth of a 4-year
| degree, the practicality of a bootcamp."
|
| I thought people in the US already knew that part of the value of
| a college is accreditation. Some people would fail in a rigorous
| 4-year program. Some courses are like grand filters: it does not
| mean much if one excels first-year calculus, but it is a strong
| signal that one's talent or discipline is in question if the
| person fails the first-year calculus. So, statistically,
| companies get a pretty good signal, at a relatively low cost, on
| how good a college graduate is.
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