22 ms·

Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

406 points by uptown 7y ago

ucha 7y ago
I'm wondering why it is that two hit pieces came out at the same time [1]? Is it just a coincidence? https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/11/21131848/lambda-school-coding-bootcamp-isa-tuition-cost-free https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/11/21131848/lambda-school-co...
- TaylorGood 7y ago
  I’m neutral on this, but if I had to guess: @DHH shed light on it via his twitter recently in a big way.
  - topherPedersen 7y ago
    I noticed that too. @DHH appears to have been one of the biggest names/voices to speak out against Lambda School recently. In their defense however, I follow a YouTuber that goes by "Dummy Codes" that landed a pretty good job doing Flutter development after attending Lambda School. So it looks like they are at least helping some people find jobs. It'll be interesting to see if Lambda School survives and thrives, or if it goes the way of Theranos. Only time will tell!
- akanet 7y ago
  It's a coincidence. I was working on the story for five months, but some recent student unrest catalyzed Kate Clark's (excellent) reporting.
- azangru 7y ago
  I've seen discontent with Lambda brewing on twitters for quite some time: https://twitter.com/KeziyahL/status/1155154616281178114 https://twitter.com/KeziyahL/status/1155154616281178114
  - SamReidHughes 7y ago
    Any program teaching CS or software with relatively open admissions will have its discontented students, because there are simply people who don't have the cognitive ability to handle it, and their inability to do the homework is always the teacher's fault.
- chasing 7y ago
  These don't seem like hit pieces. They seem like investigative journalism.
- IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
  It must be a conspiracy? I mean come on. The issues with ISAs and the fact that they can be sold, means the student has no protections, as they would with regular student debt.
  - javagram 7y ago
    Regular student debt is effectively nondischargeable in bankruptcy due to special provisions of federal law, it’s one of the hardest types of debt to escape from.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  Perhaps a number of journalists who were targeted by the 'learn to code' meme a few months ago actually made a go of it and are beginning to graduate around now.
hprotagonist 7y ago
relatedly, it's so nice to see zed shaw tilting at a windmill that deserves it for once: https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069?lang=en https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069?lang=e...
- azangru 7y ago
  "If you are contemplating joining a coding bootcamp in 2020...", his tweet starts. I wonder whether the quality of education at coding bootcamps has gone downhill. From what I know of the Web Development Immersive program at General Assembly in 2014, or the software engineer program at Hack Reactor in 2015, they both were very decent.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- xenihn 7y ago
  He's been shitting on bootcamps for a while. I want to say it's been at least three years since he first did so.
- topherPedersen 7y ago
  I learned how to code by reading his book Learn Python the Hard Way 6 years ago! It cost me $0.
cm2012 7y ago
I mean, it's still a vastly, vastly better deal than college or other boot camps. It has no up front monetary investment, and you only pay for it if i works for you.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > it's still a vastly, vastly better deal than college or other boot camps I'd like to see ten-year outcomes before claiming this. That said, it's also hard to control for different student backgrounds.
  - chasing 7y ago
    I would be more interested in the ten-year outcomes of something like the Lambda School versus self-teaching or using cheap online resources and entering the job market. Either way you're going to have to start with a very junior and entry-level position in order to crack the job market. But at least you're not on the hook for a huge chunk of your paycheck.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Sure, but controlling for different student backgrounds is a super high standard. Very few people try to control for example colleges by student background; almost nobody would say that Stanford admits having high grades is a point against Stanford.
  - dilap 7y ago
    50% placement doesn't seem bad to me at all...
- chasing 7y ago
  It's not at all comparable to a four-year college experience. And it's a terrible solution to the problems we are having with the cost of secondary education.
  - James_Henry 7y ago
    Secondary education is high school. I think you mean post-secondary education, right?
akanet 7y ago
Hi, I'm the author of the piece, perhaps better known here as founder of CoderPad. Feel free to ask me anything but things are a bit crazy right now!
- lonnyk 7y ago
  I have to be honest that I’m not really seeing any major issues here. They _used_ to do something and now they don’t, so he didn’t lie about it. They _have_ had low placement rates and informed their investors, but it’s unclear what the average or common placement rate is and if it’s significantly different from what they claim. And _some_ students didn’t like the curriculum. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You also make reference to some internal documents. Perhaps sharing them will help further the story?
  - akanet 7y ago
    I disagree that this is an accurate assessment of my claims. When you claim that you "never have" done something after you've already done it, you're making a statement about both the present and the past. Your point about averages or something is also difficult for me to parse.
- AquinasCoder 7y ago
  You mention that there's value in Lambda's mission, but I'm curious as to whether you believe that Lambda's business model is redeemable. It's hard to argue that there's clearly a major risk involved in attending a program like this, but at the same time it seems to be working for some individuals. Would these high-achieving individuals be able to teach themselves? Possibly. But I'm not sure that going back to the traditional college route is the right choice either. And how can we better help those who lack the aptitude or enjoyment of programming and find out too late into these programs?
  - akanet 7y ago
    Bootcamps probably need a longer and more rigorous trial period - one thing that students were really pissed about was that they didn't find out that Lambda was bad until after the month-long forgiveness period ended.
lquist 7y ago
Doesn't surprise me. Culture starts at the top. Austen has repeatedly proven to be a liar (this article has a few examples and you can find others in Verge's reporting) and that culture has been normalized at Lambda.
songzme 7y ago
I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently gets 4-8 students who show up promptly at 8am. I answer their questions, give them guidance, and teach them best practices I follow as a software engineer with 10 years of work experience. I ask for nothing in return except the joy of students going "ahhh" when something clicked for them. Things are still early for us, but my dream is to inspire other software engineers to help create a free and open learning center at their local libraries so people have an alternative to coding bootcamps.
- cheshireoctopus 7y ago
  This is really inspiring. Thank you for sharing. Few questions if you do not mind: 1. How did you broadcast your Meetup to your students? 2. It looks like you have students pull lessons from a repo. Do you find it challenging to manage a handful of students who are all at different places in your lessons? 3. How do you avoid burnout? 4. Do you plan on open sourcing your lessons?
  - songzme 7y ago
    Thanks for asking! 1. I simply created the meetup group. Showed up, people came. It was empty the first week couple of days, I just made it a point to show up. When there were no people, I simply just read hn or did some work. When the first student came, I made sure to be nice so he feels inspired to come back. The library took note, wanted to make it official with their library program and give us a dedicated room / parking even though we only have 4 consistent students. (Libraries love it when tech community volunteers to help teach). 2. I was honest with students that I can't help everyone and my time is limited (though I try). If they helped each other it would make my life easier. They have been good at helping each other. 3. I don't understand burnout, I'm guessing it's a symptom of ambition and expectations (I'm really not sure because I've never understood it. If I experienced it previously I never noticed). I just make sure to have no expectations. All I hold myself accountable for is to show up. If I did something wrong I apologize and move on, there's no point beating myself up over anything. I don't have big ambitions to make millions and millions, I just want physically show up for people who need help. 4. Yes. I want to open source it completely, such that if people wanted to repackage it into their own bootcamp they have the freedom to do so (not sure what license that would be, but I'm not at that point yet). Right now I just document everything in notion: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f81560429faca3821a9af8a5e2 https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f...
hundt 7y ago
> Whether or not this counts as “selling” strikes me as a meaningless semantic distinction: Either way, the school receives some money up front and an investor shoulders some of the risk of the ISA not paying out. And either way, Lambda School students don’t know that the school isn’t as incentive-aligned with them as the school’s marketing indicates. It is certainly not meaningless! Selling an ISA means that Lambda no longer has any financial interest in its outcome. Borrowing against an ISA is completely different; if the ISA doesn't pay out then Lambda goes bankrupt, which is precisely the incentive alignment they claim to have.
- akanet 7y ago
  The claim made to the student is not that they have some long minded financial alignment with the student cohort in aggregate - it's that specifically, the school does not make any money off the student (individually) until the student has an outcome.
  - hundt 7y ago
    Yes, and that is accurate; borrowing against a student's debt is not "making money" from the student. The transaction you describe does not hedge Lambda's risk; in fact it increases Lambda's risk because now if the student defaults they still need to pay interest as well.
    - akanet 7y ago
      that's a fair enough point, and I suppose I could have built the point more clearly in the article that I feel that the actual transgression is a misleading statement made to a student.
- beering 7y ago
  It's not zero financial interest, but certainly more indirect and less compelling. If investors in Lambda ISAs are not getting good returns, the value of buying a Lambda ISA will go down. If Lambda can't sell ISAs for a good price, they won't get the operating income they need or will have to shoulder the ISA themselves. Still, selling the ISA just feels shady relative to the marketing that touts ISAs as aligning incentives.
nkrisc 7y ago
About these ISAs: do they require any kind of good faith effort to find a tech job after completing the boot camp? If someone was just interested in tech, but worked in an unrelated field with no intention to switch, how would Lambda protect themselves? Obviously they could probably sue if there was bad faith on the student's part, but do these agreements address this scenario? Do they focus on screening students to avoid this?
- hundt 7y ago
  My understanding is that Lambda school is very focused on teaching you what you need to get a job, so if you were just "interested in tech" you would probably be better served by Udacity, other free or nearly-free online courses, or just reading books.
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    Right, there are certainly better options. I'm not necessarily interested from a practical standpoint, more of a theoretical one, being relatively unfamiliar with how these agreements work beyond a one-sentence description.
    - hundt 7y ago
      You can read what Lambda School describes as the "template" for their ISA contracts: https://leif.org/api/products/5b5b8bd0e59b743f9a086ed9/pdf https://leif.org/api/products/5b5b8bd0e59b743f9a086ed9/pdf It says that you agree that you "are entering into this Agreement in good faith and with the intention to pay us" and will "make reasonable and good faith efforts to seek employment" as long as you are not paying them. I don't see any specific provisions describing how that would be enforced and I bet in practice it is not a major issue for the reason I mentioned above: there isn't much reason to go through with Lambda School if you don't actually want a job in tech, so it probably doesn't happen much.
- calderarrow 7y ago
  I was one of the first 10 cohorts to go through Lambda and it wasn't a requirement for me. Actually, this was one of the primary reasons why I chose them! I was coming from public accounting, and I was concerned I may have to take a pay cut to switch into tech, but reading the contract at the time was very clear that I wasn't obligated to pursue a career in tech -- I wasn't even obligated to accept any tech offers I received! It was total financial and career freedom. If I went through and wanted to stay as an accountant, I could walk away owing nothing. The Lambda model is set up to operate at scale -- and teaching people who don't want to get a career in tech or change their mind is baked into their operational model.
codegeek 7y ago
I could be wrong but isn't Lamdba School a perfect example of destroying a noble idea due to the venture capitalish returns expected from the company ? If there wasn't so much pressure to grow that fast, perhaps they would have done a better job focussing on the quality and outcomes instead of growth at any cost ?
- caust1c 7y ago
  Reading history about the founder, I think he had his eyes set on massive growth from the outset over the actual experience. He got starry-eyed working in growth at LendUp and wanted to build his own rocket ship. I don't think he ever put the students above running a trendy fast-growing startup.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Without VC money Lambda would have had at best 10 students and you wouldn't have heard of it. There are real beefs Lambda will have to sort out on how it runs things, but running with VC money isn't one of them. Also, weird to have that opinion in HN, made by an incubator that sells startups to VCs.
- sjc33 7y ago
  Yep, exactly. This is Kaplan 2.0.
- nerfhammer 7y ago
  It would take years for the first cohort of students to be able to pay back the cost of running the business, so this is exactly the sort of thing you really do need venture financing for
caust1c 7y ago
Having friends in the program, I can tell you it's run like a circus. Expecting 10 people who don't have any experience programming to cooperate on a project without any support or oversight is just asking for student failures. Of course they'll say that the students have supports through their PMs, EMs or TLs (depending on the mood, they change the role title), but they're never available and miss meetings constantly. Also, they've reogranized the curriculum multiple times during the tenure of my friends, and don't wait till the next batch like a sane school would. I feel really bad for the excellent teachers they brought on board. They ended up with a lot more than they bargained for. Half or more of the program is composed of the crappy group projects. The people who succeed after lambda school is in spite of the program, not because of it.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Did your friends learn to code?
- sriram_sun 7y ago
  I agree with almost everything you say. However all the college projects I was part of, there was no supervision whatsoever. We were all children learning to be adults. Some of us were already there before others. I'm guessing lambda students are more adults than kids. Bottom line, TA support is golden. Supervision, not so much.
  - seem_2211 7y ago
    This is a golden example of where in person beats online. It's so much easier to weed out the people who will not show up when you do things in person (and there are plenty of those in College). But even diligent people are more likely to flake when things are online. There's simply less commitment.
- irrationalactor 7y ago
  In fairness, all start-ups are "run like a circus." That's the point of a start-up--to figure out new/better ways of doing things. Most of the time it doesn't work, and then you try something else. If you want the stability and reliability of Harvard, don't get your education from a scrappy upstart.
danso 7y ago
The author also posted a 50-minute audio clip of his interview with Austen Allred: https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230162120701964289 https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230162120701964289
- Fede_V 7y ago
  This is exceptionally good. Fantastic journalism.
pembrook 7y ago
While I find Lambda’s incessant twitter evangelizing as annoying as the next guy, I’m not sure any article I’ve seen is painting a realistic picture about Lambda. Media outlets have incentives to either paint you as the second coming of Christ or as Satan. It appears Lambda, for a while, actually succeeded at convincing journalists they were the former. After a while, people get bored with that though. The incentives that drive clicks flip. Suddenly Lambda is now Satan. Burn it down! Downvote all sympathizers! Here’s the reality: all models for education can work for certain people in certain instances. Lambda is definitely the best choice for some people. But no single company is going to solve something like “education” or “healthcare” because they are political institutions tied to the power dynamics that determine how society is arranged. You cannot brute force this without gaining influence over government itself. This is not as simple as disrupting where people buy their shampoo or where they see ads.
- raiyu 7y ago
  There are always two sides to every story, but when you have outright fraudulent claims I don't think you can say that the article is simply painting the school as "Satan" If you stated that you have an 86% placement record and in reality it is 50%, that is a pretty large discrepancy. If the original 86% placement was from the first 70-ish students and now you are over 2500 students, that seems a bit fraudulent. If placement rates aren't critical to you getting students, then you can say it is 50% publicly and see if that affects your enrollment numbers or not. Otherwise, it would stand to reason that stating a higher placement rate gets you more students. Also, this isn't run a a non-profit organization, its a for-profit enterprise. So they have a financial incentive to get more students because that equates to more value for them.
  - pembrook 7y ago
    Cherry picking a strong cohort and using it to create a narrative is the same thing as cherry picking a weak cohort and doing the opposite. This is my point. Journalists are picking a narrative first, then seeking out facts to justify that position. When they thought lambda was going to fix education they were more than happy to report the 86% number without any research. Now that lambda is “evil” they look for the lowest number they can find. I’m sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.
brenden2 7y ago
From seeing this guy's (Allred's) tweets pop up on twitter a few time, I always got the feeling that he was a scammer or con artist. This article provides a lot of evidence that seems to confirm my hunch. I've seen people have success in startups using similar tactics throughout my career, and one realization I've had about this is that sometimes perception matters more than the actual numbers. It's especially true when it comes to investing and VC fueled businesses where success tends to follow the funding (i.e., if you get enough money you can buy your way to success). Eventually, however, everything comes out in the wash. At some point lying about the numbers won't work anymore, and maybe for Allred this is an example of that. As a founder, if you don't eventually deliver on what you've promised, it will all unwind and you'll be left with nothing.
- kwisatzh 7y ago
  He’s a white guy founding a company with the biggest tech backers on the planet. He will fail upwards; he will be handsomely rewarded.
- seem_2211 7y ago
  Taking a more benign view, I don't know if Austen is a scammer, but he seems like a smart guy, who's a bit over his head, with a smart team, who are in over their heads. The kind of students they've targeted need more help, not less, which makes this a bit of a messy situation.
- seem_2211 7y ago
  Seems to have worked out pretty well with Elon... when were we supposed to get the Model Y/Roadster/Full Self Driving/Profitability (and all of the other things) again?
xwowsersx 7y ago
I co-started LS before it was in YC. Here's the original course I taught https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnUp9BNCQZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnUp9BNCQZM Weird seeing stories about it now.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  What happened afterwards?
  - xwowsersx 7y ago
    We went separate ways. I had a job offer I couldn't turn down and it was still very early days in the venture.
- mattcdrake 7y ago
  Are the other videos in this series publicly available? You are great at explaining things.
  - xwowsersx 7y ago
    Thanks! I'm not sure where the other videos are (I don't see them on my Youtube). I'll see if I can dig them up.
heedlessly3 7y ago
There's no point to doing coding bootcamps. I know plenty of individuals who were non-CS majors, not even STEM, switch to software developers after self-study and building up a portfolio. if you decide you want an accredited university degree, then you can get FAFSA to fund community college, then transfer an online university such as Florida
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Strongly disagree with this. I know 50 people that think they can learn to do Data or something with an Udemy class and end up doing nothing. I think the negative picture painted by the author masks that the company is placing 50% of graduates which mostly paid nothing for the education they received. Lambda is not high quality education, but its super cheap and higher quality than just reading a Knuth Book, or Skenna's algo book which has no completion rate.
  - heedlessly3 7y ago
    Sounds like you know unsuccessful people. I know plenty of developers who became front-end or dev ops from their own studies. It's not too hard to learn SQL or data visualization. The majority of questions can be answered via stackoverflow or slack communities. You don't need to know everything to land a entry-level job, you just need to prove you know how to problem solve. Either way, you are not becoming a true machine learning researcher via self-study nor a bootcamp. You will need at least a master's in CS/Math/Stats to land those roles. A bootcamp is neither the lowest cost to a softwaredev career nor is it the a career effective maximizing choice.
wbharding 7y ago
Mildly interesting how this story has gotten 130 points in two hours but is still placed beneath numerous other HN front page stories with less points in more time. Not least since the incentives of YC would be to want this story dead. In the 5 mins it took me to login on mobile it dropped from 15 to 25.
- 737min 7y ago
  Indeed, odd to see this story is dropping off the front page so quickly. Someone ought to do some datascience analytics on how YC-negative bs YC-positive stories do on HN.
- dang 7y ago
  The submission hit some software penalties, like HN's flamewar detector. Moderators didn't touch it or even see it until a few minutes ago (I'm getting a late start this "morning"), when I saw it and turned off that penalty. This placed the article back on the HN front page. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC-funded startups are in a story. That's literally the first principle of HN moderation, in the sense that it's the first thing PG told me when he was training me to do this in 2012. I didn't even have time to grab a chair before he blurted it out. It's natural for people to question this, so such questions will always come up. We're scrupulous about following this rule for two reasons. The first is that we need to be able to answer the questions in good conscience; the second is that moderating any other way would be dumb. The community's trust is the most valuable asset HN has. In fact, if you think about it, it's the only asset HN has. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20not%20more%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
gazelle21 7y ago
Kind of torn here, I went to a bootcamp and it completely changed my life. One of the best decisions ive ever made. At the same time some of them are straight up predatory, at our cohort there was a few people who "graduated" who couldn't print a console.log
Dansvidania 7y ago
Is this the same, or does it stem from, Lambda School that started with a kickstarter in 2016?
raiyu 7y ago
I've had a fair amount of experience with coding boot camps having have helped several friends and coworkers apply, get accepted, attend, and complete bootcamps across various cities and institutions. The idea of bootcamps is fantastic, they allow people that may have not been exposed to computer science to get up to speed on technology and transition careers. However, there are several problems. First and foremost, while 3-6-9 months are great when you are going from zero knowledge, the challenge is that isn't enough time to really be a junior developer unless you have prior experience. So you will need to continue to augment your education after graduation to ensure that you get a well paying job. Most people attending bootcamps are doing so after college and later in life, which means even though some bootcamps are cheaper than attending a semester or a full year of college they are still quite expensive because the students are not "students" in that they are usually adults and need to figure out how to pay for school, attend classes, while effectively receiving zero income. And applying for loans is much more complex because this isn't the same as taking out student debt for college. The second issue is that all of these bootcamps say that they are for beginners with zero knowledge, but looking over their curriculums that simply isn't the case. Software engineering has gotten much more complex over the past decade. When I first started fumbling around with it myself I could just write some PHP or Perl code, and get up and running quickly. Today you need to know about github, javascript libraries, frameworks, and the typical "Hello World" application isn't a direct route. Most of these schools don't realize that their first students are already exposed to these concepts, but later students aren't so they don't really adjust their curriculum. With lambda in particular it also is a bit confusing because the school is online. Which should mean that you are able to provide the service for a lower cost, but they are charging the same amount as in person physically attended schools. There are a lot of deceptive practices in the industry, lambda isn't alone, such as taking recent grads and giving them low paying jobs as TA (teacher assistants) so that they can provide help to students at a lower cost while also allowing the school to claim that they have higher placement. The curriculums are really dependent on a per school basis, but I have seen a bunch of stuff that simply doesn't make sense and makes it more challenging for students. One school had students do a group project, which wouldn't count as part of their final for the first "mod" of the school. However they continued to teach things that you need for the final which would be a personal project. If you got assigned to a bad team you would be working much slower and not able to keep up and then your final which has nothing to do with a group determines whether you proceed or repeat the course (they charge you to repeat). Also it's important to note that 50% of the students didn't pass the first mod, which means you have a 50% chance of being on a slow team that would hamper your learning. Their advice was that it is important to learn to pair, and I agree, but when you get to your first job you are pairing with people that have experience, not where your partner has a 50% chance of failing out. I firmly believe that bootcamps and providing secondary education choices are essential and if done correctly can really begin to combat the monopoly that colleges hold over education, but it's a challenging mission. With education there are student loans that you can take out and I think that is essential to get this going in the US because it is simply impossible for most people to not have any income and still pay for schooling for even 6 months, much less a longer period of time. The other challenge is that you really need to have 3 terms. Beginner, intermediate, advanced. Each student can then apply based on skill set to determine where they place and students can move from one to the next, with each section being 4-5 months. If you did 15 months of education you would be much better off than what the school provides. It's great to get from zero to one in terms of knowledge, but students are still left far from having skills that are immediately beneficial to employers. There's definitely more work that needs to be done. As for Lambda itself, when you look at how other coding bootcamps have fared financially it doesn't paint a rosy picture. It's a challenging space to operate and the VC style returns simply aren't there. If you want to offer an online only education that is fantastic but you have places like codecademy that do that and also do not charge you $30k for the privilege of basically accessing information that is online for free. The challenge with coding is that it really is much easier to get going when you have someone you can ask questions from, so helping to improve that aspect of it while providing it online at a low cost is really the challenge.
737min 7y ago
Good to see this finally get called out. Basically Lambda is using CDO’s & subprime mortgages as a revenue source.. Even if it hekps some of the students some of the time, we know how this show ends.
taytus 7y ago
Austen has totally disappeared from twitter. He used to tweet all the time about their AMAZING success rate.
- bbg215 7y ago
  This is the biggest red flag imo
- taytus 7y ago
  Now he just posted a they have received $100M Investment.
- prawn 7y ago
  He was also quick in the past to post about LS on HN but no comment in this thread at all. Might be responding in blog form and outlining a few changes they're making to address the concerns?
jariel 7y ago
These courses should be free. If government agencies really had their acts together, then these courses, as well as many others would be free, as part of 'extended learning' programs. For all the crazy amount of grant money being thrown around by so many governments, and given the need for certain disciplines, it's odd that this doesn't happen.
nimbius 7y ago
>Lambda School is free, but with an asterisk: To attend, you sign a contract that says that if you get a tech job paying $50K or more, you have to pay 17 percent of your pre-tax income to Lambda School for two years, or until you pay back $30K, whichever comes first. 30k? Seriously? my trade tech certification was only $2900 for two years. Is Lambda School a 4 year program or a college of some sort? Is room and board of some kind included? I mean I get that STEM pays a lot...but the cost here seems a little steep. There are only 4 STEM related courses on the site. my trade-tech school had nearly 20 by the time I graduated.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Was it an 8 hour a day 5 days a week program for two years?
DantesKite 7y ago
It’s interesting how learning to code is so challenging. Especially because it’s something humans make. Over the past few years, coders have been abstracting the complexity away, but man there’s a lot of it. On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best. That’s always struck me as odd. Like nobody has quite cracked the nut for how to do it. Not with programming, not with language, not with cooking. It’s always so much effort. As if the lessons people have learned are forgotten as soon as a few years pass. We know a little bit. Spaced repetition helps. Not doing anything after studying intensely helps (as in literally just doing nothing after studying improves retention). Going for long walks helps. So does transforming concepts into something you can see (I suspect because we have a lot of “machinery” for visual computations). Engaging more of your muscles during an activity (writing as opposed to typing) helps too. Engaging extra senses (like smell) seems to help. But that’s about it. There’s no common modality, no library of how humans learn, retain, and transfer knowledge. It’s been like what? 200,000 years since we’ve been on this planet. We’ve barely touched the surface of what we’re capable of doing because we keep forgetting.
- AlexandrB 7y ago
  > On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best. I think it’s naive to think there one way that will work for everyone. Attempts to find such a solution inevitably fail because it’s not something that can be generalized and then scaled. The more mechanized and focused the process, the more outliers get left behind.
  - effingwewt 7y ago
    I read parent's post as more of a generalization. As in 'what are the best ways humans best learn', not a single best way.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  > On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best. That’s always struck me as odd. It's very well studied. I'd start by reading a cognitive science textbook and go from there. I have Cognition by Reisberg[0], it was well-written and well-structured. Alternatively, an entertaining and informative popular account is Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger and McDaniel[1]. I do agree that the research findings are greatly underapplied, though. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Exploring-Science-Mind-Seventh/dp/0393624137/ https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Exploring-Science-Mind-Seve... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013 https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learnin...
sjc33 7y ago
I found his constant Twitter boasting distasteful and cringeworthy. It always came off like an infomercial. Coding bootcamps are not all bad, though, it's just that I think if you are going to do one then 1) you really need a solid financial cushion (either parental or own savings) and 2) you should really do a top rated in person one. I can't imagine doing this through a Zoom for 9 months in my apartment alone. The value of having social support you get from instructors and being around other students in the same boat as you can't be understated.
mikekij 7y ago
I don't have an informed opinion on Lambda School, but it seems as though most of the concerns raised in this article are true of universities as well, and in some cases, worse in universities: Lambda makes money through some financial engineering : Ivy league schools are essentially hedge funds with their multibillion-dollar endowments Lambda's curriculum is lacking : Most CS students are taught theory, but learn very few of the skills they'll actually need on the job ( e.g. application deployment, source code management, etc.) Lambda inflates its job placement stats : This is never defensible, but also highly prevalent in both non-profit and for-profit higher education institutions. I commend Austen for at least attempting to better align students' and educators' financial incentives.
- sjc33 7y ago
  Lambda School didn't invent the ISA.
manfredo 7y ago
The lambda school struck me as odd due to its very long 18 month duration. Most successful bootcamps I've seen have been focused on 2-4 month programs. They also try to get students that have already taught themselves some coding (at least be able to code up a hang-man game in a terminal), and focus on teaching effective abstraction and how to use git. Basically, they don't seek to take people who don't know how to code and turn out engineers more than a year later. They take people who know how to code, and refine their skills to the point that they are employable.
- MivLives 7y ago
  18 months is the part time. 9 is the full time. It used to be six, but they raised it because people would expect a job on graduation, nine is more realistic for that.
Grustaf 7y ago
As a working developer you will spend a sizeable portion of your time learning new things, so if you are not good at teaching yourself programming, maybe it's not a suitable career choice? Especially with amazing MOOCs like Stanford's Swift course? At least in the context of something like Lambda school, that does not teach computer science, as I understand it.
soneca 7y ago
I learned to code from scratch using freeCodeCamp.org, tutorials and official documentation. Got a good job after 8 months studying full-time. Almost 3 years now and everything is good (more details on my experience here: https://rodrigohgpontes.github.io https://rodrigohgpontes.github.io). As a totally outsider (not even from the US), Lambda School seemed too good to be true, in a good way, and I said so here in HN. 9 months of serious commitment, no upfront payment, ISA, all of it seemed good to me. These days, I don't think the same way. Lambda School and it's founder seem more worried about being a billion dollar company than doing the right thing for its students. Personally, that's strategically stupid and counter-productive. They won't be a billion dollar company because they don't care about their students. But it looks like the direction they took. This mistake is not inherent to VC ventured companies or Silicon Valley, so I think the ones to blame are Lambda leaders, not the system. So, I still recommend freeCodeCamp.org as the best thing that exists for people that want to learn to code and get a job. I wish some of these effective philanthropy multi millionaire would give them generous money to pursue their mission. It changed my life.
fronofro 7y ago
There are inherent limitations to edu that go unacknowledged. - There are a relatively fixed number of high skill jobs. - More people with the same skills/portfolio reduces the value of that skill/portfolio. - While people can learn new skills, people have different learning rates and integrating that knowledge deeply often takes much longer than teachers/bootcamps want to believe. - Most edu info exists for free online, what school/bootcamps uniquely provide is feedback. Quality feedback is HARD to scale. - How much does pre-application screening find people who don't really need that much help vs trying to help every applicant and getting unmotivated people in your bootcamp. I have seen very few examples of a bootcamp fundamentally changing someones motivation/work ethic. ISAs will be the big winner in the ed tech space and providers of education will likely come and go unless someone cracks all the issues above. Perhaps the current distribution of students to universities (having plurality) is actually more suited to serving this function than a typical tech world power law distribution where one or two companies would provide 80% of the edu.
ChicagoDave 7y ago
The problem with Lambda School is the model and vision that suggests a general college education isn't worthwhile. That college should focus on a marketable skill directly leading to some job. That's optimal, but that leaves out the social aspects, the critical thinking aspects, and the safe space to have an open mind and absorb and share ideas. I would argue those other aspects of higher education are far more critical than the bootcamp model and vision. And eventually, it boils down to a waste of time for some subset of students, which is not helpful to our higher education interests.
hundt 7y ago
Interestingly, Lambda School has just announced a new "ISA Financing Blueprint" [0] and "Better Data Transparency" [1] which address some of the concerns from the article. [0] https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-isa-financing-blueprint-and-100m-in-new-financing https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-isa-... [1] https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/building-better-data-transparency-at-lambda-school https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/building-better-data-tr...
kostyal 7y ago
I'm a current student at Lambda School. It's a pretty stressful time at the moment - I don't have any loyalty to Lambda, but the recent string of damaging stories about the quality of teaching and average graduates is concerning. It's true that Lambda is incredibly disorganised and the build weeks etc are chaotic. Equally true that they don't do a good enough job of ensuring we have something to show for ourselves on our portfolio. It's also true that their admission standards are seemingly incredibly lax. About 40% of my cohort struggle to code at a fundamental level - I don't mean that harshly, it's Lambda's fault With that said, I've really enjoyed my time at Lambda overall and it saddens me to see it fail like this. The atmosphere and internal culture that they cultivated is second to none and I have enjoyed my time there a lot. As with many people at Lambda, I joined them at a difficult time of my life, when I was suffering from pretty severe depression. I knew I loved coding but barely spent any time doing it and struggled with impostor syndrome, etc. While at Lambda I benefitted hugely from the daily structure and discipline, and from having a community of people in the same position as me. I've made some great friends, and met some very smart and talented people. What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional.
- _ah 7y ago
  > What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional. Don't let this stop you. The world needs more good engineers, and if you practice your craft you will always find a home. There are plenty of industry professionals who now look a bit silly for their choice of company (Uber, WeWork) but ultimately it's all just a job and if you have the raw skills you can find a new gig.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Just keep at it. The one thing that Lambda does best is the constant drilling of practicing. That method of learning is second to none.
- surferbayarea 7y ago
kregasaurusrex 7y ago
Since the original HN post[0] is about 2.5 years old now, one would expect there to be more data released by LS regarding job placement/salaries before a potential student would sign a $30,000 ISA. I've been a fan of the idea of up-skilling at a bootcamp for those who either don't want to spend 4 years getting a CS degree or being unable to finance its associated costs which can be in excess of $75,000. In an increasingly tight labor market, there's fewer jobs available in the 'middle' where companies seem to be either wanting an experienced SME in a specific domain or less-experienced programmers to do testing rather than development. I think the bundling and selling of student CDOs works for a company in its early stages, since the costs for recovering unpaid tuition can range from high to being declared a total loss. Some of the anecdotes make it seem like the company doesn't receive enough feedback from employers in order to strengthen parts of their curriculum that make interviewees fail at some stages during the interview process. Creating a complete curriculum takes more than bundling together Leetcode and Hackerrank problems, where the actual teaching reflects that bootcamps and a CS education aren't in direct parity with one another. [1] Regarding the finances, student loan debt through an established institution can't be removed through filing for bankruptcy. This allows access to federal loans and underwriters that give better rates and agreements for all the business parties invloved. I've been denied refinancing my loans from multiple companies for a combination of those effects including not graduating and having too low of an income. The business seems like a good idea but too fixated on higher short-term valuations in order to attract VC capital; rather than fixing its underlying structural problems. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011033 [1] https://hackernoon.com/bootcamps-vs-college-11dd76a4d127 https://hackernoon.com/bootcamps-vs-college-11dd76a4d127
throaway1990 7y ago
Fascinating story. I think there is value in the service provided by Lambda School but the questionable revenue tactics like selling ISAs or using ISAs to secure loans means students can't really trust them with placements.
neilk 7y ago
I had a sinking feeling when the inventor of the CDO appeared in this article. The housing bubble occurred, in part, because there was optimism that acquiring a certain tangible asset - a house - was a sure path to prosperity for the buyer. And the buyers of mortgage-backed securities had decades of data showing that these were solid investments. What about intangible assets like knowing how to code? Is this what Lambda School is really doing? And like the housing bubble, once the originator can sell the debt, they have some incentives to inflate expectations on both sides. Perhaps Lambda School’s ISA-selling isn’t vulnerable to this flaw. Maybe the ISA-buyers are doing due diligence. But you would have thought the same was true in 2008 too. Like everyone with a Twitter account I’ve interacted with Austen. And I had a mildly positive impression, or at least I thought he deserved more credit. Not sure about that any more. I would like to see his response.
abbadadda 7y ago
This anecdote is particularly damning for Lambda School, like a hedge fund choosing not to update their investment return numbers year after year because they were so great in year 1: > So where does that 86 percent figure come from? Lambda has reported graduate-outcome statistics at the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR), a voluntary trade organization of coding boot camps whose purpose is to ensure that participating schools publish truthful information about student outcomes. Allred has often used this report to defend his company online. But where other boot camps have multiple reports spanning many student cohorts, Lambda has only reported statistics for its first 71 graduates — 86 percent of who, the school claims, found jobs. Sheree Speakman, the CEO of CIRR, told me that Lambda has not undergone the standard independent auditing for the sole report it has submitted, and that her communications to Lambda School regarding further reporting and auditing have gone unanswered.
_hardwaregeek 7y ago
The more I think about bootcamps, the more they appear to be a rather insulting business proposition. Did they genuinely believe that one can take someone off the street, albeit someone relatively intelligent and motivated, and teach them enough to be a professional programmer in 9 months? Imagine that we replaced programmer with mechanical engineer. Or with marketing executive. Would that sound believable? What is it about programming that makes people believe that they can learn it in a hilariously short amount of time? Sure, we programmers may be harboring some imposter syndrome and secretly believe that programming is super easy. Sure, programming doesn't require lots of math. But it's still hard! It's still a craft that requires problem solving ability, lots of semi-arcane knowledge and a detail oriented mind.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Because you can, and because lots of people are doing it.
- sean2 7y ago
  I don't think we could pump out the well rounded developers like 4 years of undergrad can, but I don't see how we couldn't pump out SQL technicians, front-end developers, or otherwise specialized workers that could alleviate the supposed shortage of developers. I also helped a person go from zero knowledge of programming to pumping out android games in a month of self study. So I know that smart, motivated people can get pretty far pretty fast. In regards to your point, I don't think this person knows UML or ever learned big O notation, but this person was able to gain the skills required to do what they wanted, plus some pro-programmer friends and stackoverflow to fill in the "semi-arcane knowledge" when required.
  - _hardwaregeek 7y ago
    I think we can pump out good apprentices. After 9 months of study, the person could definitely have enough skills to write semi-valid code and work on some small projects with supervision from a developer. However I would not call this person after 9 months a developer. A developer should be able to look at a codebase, learn it, learn the relevant technologies and start contributing. I doubt a bootcamp graduate will be able to do that. Or worse, they'll do that and wreak havoc on the codebase. > front-end developers I suspect this is part of the issue. Plenty of people believe that front-end is easier or lesser than back-end, and therefore can be learned quickly. Lots and lots of terrible front-end code has taught me that this is not true. Good front-end developers are really hard to find and subpar ones can lead to horrible user interfaces and direct impact to the bottom line. Even if we're talking the most minimal of front-end stacks, i.e. HTML, CSS and JS, which, I'm not even sure people hire for anyways, there's a lot of subtle issues with accessibility, responsive UI, writing halfway decent JS, etc. If we add on the various libraries (a sign of a good developer is also knowing when to use these libs and when to avoid them), then the amount of knowledge required is far far more than 9 months can provide.
deleted 7y ago
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ubu7737 7y ago
There just isn't a way to speed up comprehension of computing systems and computing technology. Software development is highly conceptual and concepts don't materialize in the brain in a way that's independent from the time variable. I initially thought bootcamps would be a good idea because I thought they could use a streamlined curriculum to put difficult concepts in front of students and then winnow them quickly based on the reactions of said students. Like a phone screen that you spend 2-4 months performing. It costs you up-front to do all that education and subsequent scrutiny of the candidate, but you win by identifying people with the potential you want to migrate into the SD workforce. With public funding and a long schedule, I believed this could be a sustainable way to populate those vacancies. That's not how bootcamps work. Bootcamps are trying to launch people into careers, and I just find that absurd on its face. No level of training is going to compress years of plastic changes in the brain into a shorter amount of time.
surferbayarea 7y ago
A skill of knowing how to use React in a particular way to create simple views is something that will be redundant in a few years. These people will unfortunately be out of jobs. The mundane work of converting sketch files to react views will be automated soon
deleted 7y ago
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rajacombinator 7y ago
There are plenty of red flags in the article but the part about Lambda selling the ISAs removing their incentive is BS - their long term incentives are clearly still aligned because they won’t be able to continue selling ISAs if they don’t deliver. Selling the ISAs presumably just helps with cash flow. That said it makes one wonder why a company that’s raised 9 figures needs to worry about cash flow.
MivLives 7y ago
Lambda grad with a job, who also worked as a PM/TL. Overall I think they're trying. The problem with the PM/TL program is the people who are normally the best at it tend to be the best at finding jobs. The TLs that stick around forever tend to be ones that aren't the best or the worst who are normally replaced when someone complains. Instead it's the okay people who are just cruising. One thing that seems to be overlooked about Lambda is the fact that they are remote. An applicant from the middle of nowhere who lives hours from the nearest city has as much chance of getting in as anyone. It can be harder to find a job there and they won't relocate. Remote work is much harder to get in as a junior dev. Overall though, I wouldn't be in the position I'm currently in without them though. Maybe I just made it in before the line, maybe they're just undergoing growing pains as expand to a profitable size.
AVTizzle 7y ago
On the authors Twitter, he comes across as having an axe to grind: "lmao I woke my boy up" [1] Sounds like he's keeping score of something, which isn't a quality I necessarily want from my "journalists". [1] https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230251533951889409 https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230251533951889409
BlueTemplar 7y ago
This seems more like job training than education - something that should be directly done by the companies that end up recruiting these people instead.
MarkMc 7y ago
All the haters seem to be piling onto Lambda and its CEO, but looking at actual reviews by students it is clear that most students are very happy with Lambda: https://www.switchup.org/bootcamps/lambda-school https://www.switchup.org/bootcamps/lambda-school And the problems mentioned in the article are straightforward to fix: (a) Be honest and transparent about the job placement rate for each batch (b) Don't sell the ISA or borrow against it (c) Improve the quality of teaching and accept a lower growth rate
- Step888 7y ago
  Take a look at the other coding bootcamps on that site. They all seem to have very positive reviews. The problem is that switchup uses the affiliate links of the bootcamps, so it has a financial incentive to sell the bootcamps it features to its viewers. That's how it makes its money. Now Amazon does the same thing, you'll say. And you'd be right, but with Amazon, it has a reputation to maintain. If Amazon reviews are unreliable, people will stop shopping at Amazon. With Switchup, it's different. Most people will only buy one coding bootcamp in their lifetime. So withchup doesn't have the same incentive to make its reviews super accurate. It mostly has the incentive to sell as many coding bootcamps as it can.
737min 7y ago
Found this blog from last year comparing Lambda to AppAcademy, confirms many of the details and adds some.. no involvement with them. https://blog.appacademy.io/app-academy-versus-lambda-school-which-one-is-better/ https://blog.appacademy.io/app-academy-versus-lambda-school-...
chrisyeh 7y ago
Lambda's marketing is deceptive and should rightly be stopped. But what is so bad about a bootcamp with no up front cost that gets 50% of its graduates a job? https://chrisyeh.com/2020/02/the-cost-of-cynicism.html https://chrisyeh.com/2020/02/the-cost-of-cynicism.html

406 points by uptown 7y ago

ucha 7y ago

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

TaylorGood 7y ago
I’m neutral on this, but if I had to guess: @DHH shed light on it via his twitter recently in a big way.
- topherPedersen 7y ago
  I noticed that too. @DHH appears to have been one of the biggest names/voices to speak out against Lambda School recently. In their defense however, I follow a YouTuber that goes by "Dummy Codes" that landed a pretty good job doing Flutter development after attending Lambda School. So it looks like they are at least helping some people find jobs. It'll be interesting to see if Lambda School survives and thrives, or if it goes the way of Theranos. Only time will tell!
akanet 7y ago
It's a coincidence. I was working on the story for five months, but some recent student unrest catalyzed Kate Clark's (excellent) reporting.
azangru 7y ago
I've seen discontent with Lambda brewing on twitters for quite some time: https://twitter.com/KeziyahL/status/1155154616281178114 https://twitter.com/KeziyahL/status/1155154616281178114
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  Any program teaching CS or software with relatively open admissions will have its discontented students, because there are simply people who don't have the cognitive ability to handle it, and their inability to do the homework is always the teacher's fault.
chasing 7y ago
These don't seem like hit pieces. They seem like investigative journalism.
IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
It must be a conspiracy? I mean come on. The issues with ISAs and the fact that they can be sold, means the student has no protections, as they would with regular student debt.
- javagram 7y ago
  Regular student debt is effectively nondischargeable in bankruptcy due to special provisions of federal law, it’s one of the hardest types of debt to escape from.
SuoDuanDao 7y ago
Perhaps a number of journalists who were targeted by the 'learn to code' meme a few months ago actually made a go of it and are beginning to graduate around now.

hprotagonist 7y ago

relatedly, it's so nice to see zed shaw tilting at a windmill that deserves it for once: https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069?lang=en https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069?lang=e...

azangru 7y ago
"If you are contemplating joining a coding bootcamp in 2020...", his tweet starts. I wonder whether the quality of education at coding bootcamps has gone downhill. From what I know of the Web Development Immersive program at General Assembly in 2014, or the software engineer program at Hack Reactor in 2015, they both were very decent.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
xenihn 7y ago
He's been shitting on bootcamps for a while. I want to say it's been at least three years since he first did so.
topherPedersen 7y ago
I learned how to code by reading his book Learn Python the Hard Way 6 years ago! It cost me $0.

cm2012 7y ago

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

dehrmann 7y ago
> it's still a vastly, vastly better deal than college or other boot camps I'd like to see ten-year outcomes before claiming this. That said, it's also hard to control for different student backgrounds.
- chasing 7y ago
  I would be more interested in the ten-year outcomes of something like the Lambda School versus self-teaching or using cheap online resources and entering the job market. Either way you're going to have to start with a very junior and entry-level position in order to crack the job market. But at least you're not on the hook for a huge chunk of your paycheck.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Sure, but controlling for different student backgrounds is a super high standard. Very few people try to control for example colleges by student background; almost nobody would say that Stanford admits having high grades is a point against Stanford.
- dilap 7y ago
  50% placement doesn't seem bad to me at all...
chasing 7y ago
It's not at all comparable to a four-year college experience. And it's a terrible solution to the problems we are having with the cost of secondary education.
- James_Henry 7y ago
  Secondary education is high school. I think you mean post-secondary education, right?

akanet 7y ago

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

lonnyk 7y ago
I have to be honest that I’m not really seeing any major issues here. They _used_ to do something and now they don’t, so he didn’t lie about it. They _have_ had low placement rates and informed their investors, but it’s unclear what the average or common placement rate is and if it’s significantly different from what they claim. And _some_ students didn’t like the curriculum. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You also make reference to some internal documents. Perhaps sharing them will help further the story?
- akanet 7y ago
  I disagree that this is an accurate assessment of my claims. When you claim that you "never have" done something after you've already done it, you're making a statement about both the present and the past. Your point about averages or something is also difficult for me to parse.
AquinasCoder 7y ago
You mention that there's value in Lambda's mission, but I'm curious as to whether you believe that Lambda's business model is redeemable. It's hard to argue that there's clearly a major risk involved in attending a program like this, but at the same time it seems to be working for some individuals. Would these high-achieving individuals be able to teach themselves? Possibly. But I'm not sure that going back to the traditional college route is the right choice either. And how can we better help those who lack the aptitude or enjoyment of programming and find out too late into these programs?
- akanet 7y ago
  Bootcamps probably need a longer and more rigorous trial period - one thing that students were really pissed about was that they didn't find out that Lambda was bad until after the month-long forgiveness period ended.

lquist 7y ago

Doesn't surprise me. Culture starts at the top. Austen has repeatedly proven to be a liar (this article has a few examples and you can find others in Verge's reporting) and that culture has been normalized at Lambda.

songzme 7y ago

I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently gets 4-8 students who show up promptly at 8am. I answer their questions, give them guidance, and teach them best practices I follow as a software engineer with 10 years of work experience. I ask for nothing in return except the joy of students going "ahhh" when something clicked for them. Things are still early for us, but my dream is to inspire other software engineers to help create a free and open learning center at their local libraries so people have an alternative to coding bootcamps.

cheshireoctopus 7y ago
This is really inspiring. Thank you for sharing. Few questions if you do not mind: 1. How did you broadcast your Meetup to your students? 2. It looks like you have students pull lessons from a repo. Do you find it challenging to manage a handful of students who are all at different places in your lessons? 3. How do you avoid burnout? 4. Do you plan on open sourcing your lessons?
- songzme 7y ago
  Thanks for asking! 1. I simply created the meetup group. Showed up, people came. It was empty the first week couple of days, I just made it a point to show up. When there were no people, I simply just read hn or did some work. When the first student came, I made sure to be nice so he feels inspired to come back. The library took note, wanted to make it official with their library program and give us a dedicated room / parking even though we only have 4 consistent students. (Libraries love it when tech community volunteers to help teach). 2. I was honest with students that I can't help everyone and my time is limited (though I try). If they helped each other it would make my life easier. They have been good at helping each other. 3. I don't understand burnout, I'm guessing it's a symptom of ambition and expectations (I'm really not sure because I've never understood it. If I experienced it previously I never noticed). I just make sure to have no expectations. All I hold myself accountable for is to show up. If I did something wrong I apologize and move on, there's no point beating myself up over anything. I don't have big ambitions to make millions and millions, I just want physically show up for people who need help. 4. Yes. I want to open source it completely, such that if people wanted to repackage it into their own bootcamp they have the freedom to do so (not sure what license that would be, but I'm not at that point yet). Right now I just document everything in notion: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f81560429faca3821a9af8a5e2 https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f...

hundt 7y ago

> Whether or not this counts as “selling” strikes me as a meaningless semantic distinction: Either way, the school receives some money up front and an investor shoulders some of the risk of the ISA not paying out. And either way, Lambda School students don’t know that the school isn’t as incentive-aligned with them as the school’s marketing indicates. It is certainly not meaningless! Selling an ISA means that Lambda no longer has any financial interest in its outcome. Borrowing against an ISA is completely different; if the ISA doesn't pay out then Lambda goes bankrupt, which is precisely the incentive alignment they claim to have.

akanet 7y ago
The claim made to the student is not that they have some long minded financial alignment with the student cohort in aggregate - it's that specifically, the school does not make any money off the student (individually) until the student has an outcome.
- hundt 7y ago
  Yes, and that is accurate; borrowing against a student's debt is not "making money" from the student. The transaction you describe does not hedge Lambda's risk; in fact it increases Lambda's risk because now if the student defaults they still need to pay interest as well.
  - akanet 7y ago
    that's a fair enough point, and I suppose I could have built the point more clearly in the article that I feel that the actual transgression is a misleading statement made to a student.
beering 7y ago
It's not zero financial interest, but certainly more indirect and less compelling. If investors in Lambda ISAs are not getting good returns, the value of buying a Lambda ISA will go down. If Lambda can't sell ISAs for a good price, they won't get the operating income they need or will have to shoulder the ISA themselves. Still, selling the ISA just feels shady relative to the marketing that touts ISAs as aligning incentives.

nkrisc 7y ago

About these ISAs: do they require any kind of good faith effort to find a tech job after completing the boot camp? If someone was just interested in tech, but worked in an unrelated field with no intention to switch, how would Lambda protect themselves? Obviously they could probably sue if there was bad faith on the student's part, but do these agreements address this scenario? Do they focus on screening students to avoid this?

hundt 7y ago
My understanding is that Lambda school is very focused on teaching you what you need to get a job, so if you were just "interested in tech" you would probably be better served by Udacity, other free or nearly-free online courses, or just reading books.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  Right, there are certainly better options. I'm not necessarily interested from a practical standpoint, more of a theoretical one, being relatively unfamiliar with how these agreements work beyond a one-sentence description.
  - hundt 7y ago
    You can read what Lambda School describes as the "template" for their ISA contracts: https://leif.org/api/products/5b5b8bd0e59b743f9a086ed9/pdf https://leif.org/api/products/5b5b8bd0e59b743f9a086ed9/pdf It says that you agree that you "are entering into this Agreement in good faith and with the intention to pay us" and will "make reasonable and good faith efforts to seek employment" as long as you are not paying them. I don't see any specific provisions describing how that would be enforced and I bet in practice it is not a major issue for the reason I mentioned above: there isn't much reason to go through with Lambda School if you don't actually want a job in tech, so it probably doesn't happen much.
calderarrow 7y ago
I was one of the first 10 cohorts to go through Lambda and it wasn't a requirement for me. Actually, this was one of the primary reasons why I chose them! I was coming from public accounting, and I was concerned I may have to take a pay cut to switch into tech, but reading the contract at the time was very clear that I wasn't obligated to pursue a career in tech -- I wasn't even obligated to accept any tech offers I received! It was total financial and career freedom. If I went through and wanted to stay as an accountant, I could walk away owing nothing. The Lambda model is set up to operate at scale -- and teaching people who don't want to get a career in tech or change their mind is baked into their operational model.

codegeek 7y ago

I could be wrong but isn't Lamdba School a perfect example of destroying a noble idea due to the venture capitalish returns expected from the company ? If there wasn't so much pressure to grow that fast, perhaps they would have done a better job focussing on the quality and outcomes instead of growth at any cost ?

caust1c 7y ago
Reading history about the founder, I think he had his eyes set on massive growth from the outset over the actual experience. He got starry-eyed working in growth at LendUp and wanted to build his own rocket ship. I don't think he ever put the students above running a trendy fast-growing startup.
conanbatt 7y ago
Without VC money Lambda would have had at best 10 students and you wouldn't have heard of it. There are real beefs Lambda will have to sort out on how it runs things, but running with VC money isn't one of them. Also, weird to have that opinion in HN, made by an incubator that sells startups to VCs.
sjc33 7y ago
Yep, exactly. This is Kaplan 2.0.
nerfhammer 7y ago
It would take years for the first cohort of students to be able to pay back the cost of running the business, so this is exactly the sort of thing you really do need venture financing for

caust1c 7y ago

Having friends in the program, I can tell you it's run like a circus. Expecting 10 people who don't have any experience programming to cooperate on a project without any support or oversight is just asking for student failures. Of course they'll say that the students have supports through their PMs, EMs or TLs (depending on the mood, they change the role title), but they're never available and miss meetings constantly. Also, they've reogranized the curriculum multiple times during the tenure of my friends, and don't wait till the next batch like a sane school would. I feel really bad for the excellent teachers they brought on board. They ended up with a lot more than they bargained for. Half or more of the program is composed of the crappy group projects. The people who succeed after lambda school is in spite of the program, not because of it.

conanbatt 7y ago
Did your friends learn to code?
sriram_sun 7y ago
I agree with almost everything you say. However all the college projects I was part of, there was no supervision whatsoever. We were all children learning to be adults. Some of us were already there before others. I'm guessing lambda students are more adults than kids. Bottom line, TA support is golden. Supervision, not so much.
- seem_2211 7y ago
  This is a golden example of where in person beats online. It's so much easier to weed out the people who will not show up when you do things in person (and there are plenty of those in College). But even diligent people are more likely to flake when things are online. There's simply less commitment.
irrationalactor 7y ago
In fairness, all start-ups are "run like a circus." That's the point of a start-up--to figure out new/better ways of doing things. Most of the time it doesn't work, and then you try something else. If you want the stability and reliability of Harvard, don't get your education from a scrappy upstart.

danso 7y ago

The author also posted a 50-minute audio clip of his interview with Austen Allred: https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230162120701964289 https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230162120701964289

Fede_V 7y ago
This is exceptionally good. Fantastic journalism.

pembrook 7y ago

While I find Lambda’s incessant twitter evangelizing as annoying as the next guy, I’m not sure any article I’ve seen is painting a realistic picture about Lambda. Media outlets have incentives to either paint you as the second coming of Christ or as Satan. It appears Lambda, for a while, actually succeeded at convincing journalists they were the former. After a while, people get bored with that though. The incentives that drive clicks flip. Suddenly Lambda is now Satan. Burn it down! Downvote all sympathizers! Here’s the reality: all models for education can work for certain people in certain instances. Lambda is definitely the best choice for some people. But no single company is going to solve something like “education” or “healthcare” because they are political institutions tied to the power dynamics that determine how society is arranged. You cannot brute force this without gaining influence over government itself. This is not as simple as disrupting where people buy their shampoo or where they see ads.

raiyu 7y ago
There are always two sides to every story, but when you have outright fraudulent claims I don't think you can say that the article is simply painting the school as "Satan" If you stated that you have an 86% placement record and in reality it is 50%, that is a pretty large discrepancy. If the original 86% placement was from the first 70-ish students and now you are over 2500 students, that seems a bit fraudulent. If placement rates aren't critical to you getting students, then you can say it is 50% publicly and see if that affects your enrollment numbers or not. Otherwise, it would stand to reason that stating a higher placement rate gets you more students. Also, this isn't run a a non-profit organization, its a for-profit enterprise. So they have a financial incentive to get more students because that equates to more value for them.
- pembrook 7y ago
  Cherry picking a strong cohort and using it to create a narrative is the same thing as cherry picking a weak cohort and doing the opposite. This is my point. Journalists are picking a narrative first, then seeking out facts to justify that position. When they thought lambda was going to fix education they were more than happy to report the 86% number without any research. Now that lambda is “evil” they look for the lowest number they can find. I’m sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.

brenden2 7y ago

From seeing this guy's (Allred's) tweets pop up on twitter a few time, I always got the feeling that he was a scammer or con artist. This article provides a lot of evidence that seems to confirm my hunch. I've seen people have success in startups using similar tactics throughout my career, and one realization I've had about this is that sometimes perception matters more than the actual numbers. It's especially true when it comes to investing and VC fueled businesses where success tends to follow the funding (i.e., if you get enough money you can buy your way to success). Eventually, however, everything comes out in the wash. At some point lying about the numbers won't work anymore, and maybe for Allred this is an example of that. As a founder, if you don't eventually deliver on what you've promised, it will all unwind and you'll be left with nothing.

kwisatzh 7y ago
He’s a white guy founding a company with the biggest tech backers on the planet. He will fail upwards; he will be handsomely rewarded.
seem_2211 7y ago
Taking a more benign view, I don't know if Austen is a scammer, but he seems like a smart guy, who's a bit over his head, with a smart team, who are in over their heads. The kind of students they've targeted need more help, not less, which makes this a bit of a messy situation.
seem_2211 7y ago
Seems to have worked out pretty well with Elon... when were we supposed to get the Model Y/Roadster/Full Self Driving/Profitability (and all of the other things) again?

xwowsersx 7y ago

I co-started LS before it was in YC. Here's the original course I taught https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnUp9BNCQZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnUp9BNCQZM Weird seeing stories about it now.

conanbatt 7y ago
What happened afterwards?
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  We went separate ways. I had a job offer I couldn't turn down and it was still very early days in the venture.
mattcdrake 7y ago
Are the other videos in this series publicly available? You are great at explaining things.
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  Thanks! I'm not sure where the other videos are (I don't see them on my Youtube). I'll see if I can dig them up.

heedlessly3 7y ago

There's no point to doing coding bootcamps. I know plenty of individuals who were non-CS majors, not even STEM, switch to software developers after self-study and building up a portfolio. if you decide you want an accredited university degree, then you can get FAFSA to fund community college, then transfer an online university such as Florida

conanbatt 7y ago
Strongly disagree with this. I know 50 people that think they can learn to do Data or something with an Udemy class and end up doing nothing. I think the negative picture painted by the author masks that the company is placing 50% of graduates which mostly paid nothing for the education they received. Lambda is not high quality education, but its super cheap and higher quality than just reading a Knuth Book, or Skenna's algo book which has no completion rate.
- heedlessly3 7y ago
  Sounds like you know unsuccessful people. I know plenty of developers who became front-end or dev ops from their own studies. It's not too hard to learn SQL or data visualization. The majority of questions can be answered via stackoverflow or slack communities. You don't need to know everything to land a entry-level job, you just need to prove you know how to problem solve. Either way, you are not becoming a true machine learning researcher via self-study nor a bootcamp. You will need at least a master's in CS/Math/Stats to land those roles. A bootcamp is neither the lowest cost to a softwaredev career nor is it the a career effective maximizing choice.

wbharding 7y ago

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

737min 7y ago
Indeed, odd to see this story is dropping off the front page so quickly. Someone ought to do some datascience analytics on how YC-negative bs YC-positive stories do on HN.
dang 7y ago
The submission hit some software penalties, like HN's flamewar detector. Moderators didn't touch it or even see it until a few minutes ago (I'm getting a late start this "morning"), when I saw it and turned off that penalty. This placed the article back on the HN front page. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC-funded startups are in a story. That's literally the first principle of HN moderation, in the sense that it's the first thing PG told me when he was training me to do this in 2012. I didn't even have time to grab a chair before he blurted it out. It's natural for people to question this, so such questions will always come up. We're scrupulous about following this rule for two reasons. The first is that we need to be able to answer the questions in good conscience; the second is that moderating any other way would be dumb. The community's trust is the most valuable asset HN has. In fact, if you think about it, it's the only asset HN has. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20not%20more%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

gazelle21 7y ago

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

Dansvidania 7y ago

Is this the same, or does it stem from, Lambda School that started with a kickstarter in 2016?

raiyu 7y ago

I've had a fair amount of experience with coding boot camps having have helped several friends and coworkers apply, get accepted, attend, and complete bootcamps across various cities and institutions. The idea of bootcamps is fantastic, they allow people that may have not been exposed to computer science to get up to speed on technology and transition careers. However, there are several problems. First and foremost, while 3-6-9 months are great when you are going from zero knowledge, the challenge is that isn't enough time to really be a junior developer unless you have prior experience. So you will need to continue to augment your education after graduation to ensure that you get a well paying job. Most people attending bootcamps are doing so after college and later in life, which means even though some bootcamps are cheaper than attending a semester or a full year of college they are still quite expensive because the students are not "students" in that they are usually adults and need to figure out how to pay for school, attend classes, while effectively receiving zero income. And applying for loans is much more complex because this isn't the same as taking out student debt for college. The second issue is that all of these bootcamps say that they are for beginners with zero knowledge, but looking over their curriculums that simply isn't the case. Software engineering has gotten much more complex over the past decade. When I first started fumbling around with it myself I could just write some PHP or Perl code, and get up and running quickly. Today you need to know about github, javascript libraries, frameworks, and the typical "Hello World" application isn't a direct route. Most of these schools don't realize that their first students are already exposed to these concepts, but later students aren't so they don't really adjust their curriculum. With lambda in particular it also is a bit confusing because the school is online. Which should mean that you are able to provide the service for a lower cost, but they are charging the same amount as in person physically attended schools. There are a lot of deceptive practices in the industry, lambda isn't alone, such as taking recent grads and giving them low paying jobs as TA (teacher assistants) so that they can provide help to students at a lower cost while also allowing the school to claim that they have higher placement. The curriculums are really dependent on a per school basis, but I have seen a bunch of stuff that simply doesn't make sense and makes it more challenging for students. One school had students do a group project, which wouldn't count as part of their final for the first "mod" of the school. However they continued to teach things that you need for the final which would be a personal project. If you got assigned to a bad team you would be working much slower and not able to keep up and then your final which has nothing to do with a group determines whether you proceed or repeat the course (they charge you to repeat). Also it's important to note that 50% of the students didn't pass the first mod, which means you have a 50% chance of being on a slow team that would hamper your learning. Their advice was that it is important to learn to pair, and I agree, but when you get to your first job you are pairing with people that have experience, not where your partner has a 50% chance of failing out. I firmly believe that bootcamps and providing secondary education choices are essential and if done correctly can really begin to combat the monopoly that colleges hold over education, but it's a challenging mission. With education there are student loans that you can take out and I think that is essential to get this going in the US because it is simply impossible for most people to not have any income and still pay for schooling for even 6 months, much less a longer period of time. The other challenge is that you really need to have 3 terms. Beginner, intermediate, advanced. Each student can then apply based on skill set to determine where they place and students can move from one to the next, with each section being 4-5 months. If you did 15 months of education you would be much better off than what the school provides. It's great to get from zero to one in terms of knowledge, but students are still left far from having skills that are immediately beneficial to employers. There's definitely more work that needs to be done. As for Lambda itself, when you look at how other coding bootcamps have fared financially it doesn't paint a rosy picture. It's a challenging space to operate and the VC style returns simply aren't there. If you want to offer an online only education that is fantastic but you have places like codecademy that do that and also do not charge you $30k for the privilege of basically accessing information that is online for free. The challenge with coding is that it really is much easier to get going when you have someone you can ask questions from, so helping to improve that aspect of it while providing it online at a low cost is really the challenge.

737min 7y ago

Good to see this finally get called out. Basically Lambda is using CDO’s & subprime mortgages as a revenue source.. Even if it hekps some of the students some of the time, we know how this show ends.

taytus 7y ago

Austen has totally disappeared from twitter. He used to tweet all the time about their AMAZING success rate.

bbg215 7y ago
This is the biggest red flag imo
taytus 7y ago
Now he just posted a they have received $100M Investment.
prawn 7y ago
He was also quick in the past to post about LS on HN but no comment in this thread at all. Might be responding in blog form and outlining a few changes they're making to address the concerns?

jariel 7y ago

These courses should be free. If government agencies really had their acts together, then these courses, as well as many others would be free, as part of 'extended learning' programs. For all the crazy amount of grant money being thrown around by so many governments, and given the need for certain disciplines, it's odd that this doesn't happen.

nimbius 7y ago

>Lambda School is free, but with an asterisk: To attend, you sign a contract that says that if you get a tech job paying $50K or more, you have to pay 17 percent of your pre-tax income to Lambda School for two years, or until you pay back $30K, whichever comes first. 30k? Seriously? my trade tech certification was only $2900 for two years. Is Lambda School a 4 year program or a college of some sort? Is room and board of some kind included? I mean I get that STEM pays a lot...but the cost here seems a little steep. There are only 4 STEM related courses on the site. my trade-tech school had nearly 20 by the time I graduated.

conanbatt 7y ago
Was it an 8 hour a day 5 days a week program for two years?

DantesKite 7y ago

It’s interesting how learning to code is so challenging. Especially because it’s something humans make. Over the past few years, coders have been abstracting the complexity away, but man there’s a lot of it. On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best. That’s always struck me as odd. Like nobody has quite cracked the nut for how to do it. Not with programming, not with language, not with cooking. It’s always so much effort. As if the lessons people have learned are forgotten as soon as a few years pass. We know a little bit. Spaced repetition helps. Not doing anything after studying intensely helps (as in literally just doing nothing after studying improves retention). Going for long walks helps. So does transforming concepts into something you can see (I suspect because we have a lot of “machinery” for visual computations). Engaging more of your muscles during an activity (writing as opposed to typing) helps too. Engaging extra senses (like smell) seems to help. But that’s about it. There’s no common modality, no library of how humans learn, retain, and transfer knowledge. It’s been like what? 200,000 years since we’ve been on this planet. We’ve barely touched the surface of what we’re capable of doing because we keep forgetting.

AlexandrB 7y ago
> On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best. I think it’s naive to think there one way that will work for everyone. Attempts to find such a solution inevitably fail because it’s not something that can be generalized and then scaled. The more mechanized and focused the process, the more outliers get left behind.
- effingwewt 7y ago
  I read parent's post as more of a generalization. As in 'what are the best ways humans best learn', not a single best way.
jacques_chester 7y ago
> On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best. That’s always struck me as odd. It's very well studied. I'd start by reading a cognitive science textbook and go from there. I have Cognition by Reisberg[0], it was well-written and well-structured. Alternatively, an entertaining and informative popular account is Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger and McDaniel[1]. I do agree that the research findings are greatly underapplied, though. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Exploring-Science-Mind-Seventh/dp/0393624137/ https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Exploring-Science-Mind-Seve... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013 https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learnin...

sjc33 7y ago

I found his constant Twitter boasting distasteful and cringeworthy. It always came off like an infomercial. Coding bootcamps are not all bad, though, it's just that I think if you are going to do one then 1) you really need a solid financial cushion (either parental or own savings) and 2) you should really do a top rated in person one. I can't imagine doing this through a Zoom for 9 months in my apartment alone. The value of having social support you get from instructors and being around other students in the same boat as you can't be understated.

mikekij 7y ago

I don't have an informed opinion on Lambda School, but it seems as though most of the concerns raised in this article are true of universities as well, and in some cases, worse in universities: Lambda makes money through some financial engineering : Ivy league schools are essentially hedge funds with their multibillion-dollar endowments Lambda's curriculum is lacking : Most CS students are taught theory, but learn very few of the skills they'll actually need on the job ( e.g. application deployment, source code management, etc.) Lambda inflates its job placement stats : This is never defensible, but also highly prevalent in both non-profit and for-profit higher education institutions. I commend Austen for at least attempting to better align students' and educators' financial incentives.

sjc33 7y ago
Lambda School didn't invent the ISA.

manfredo 7y ago

The lambda school struck me as odd due to its very long 18 month duration. Most successful bootcamps I've seen have been focused on 2-4 month programs. They also try to get students that have already taught themselves some coding (at least be able to code up a hang-man game in a terminal), and focus on teaching effective abstraction and how to use git. Basically, they don't seek to take people who don't know how to code and turn out engineers more than a year later. They take people who know how to code, and refine their skills to the point that they are employable.

MivLives 7y ago
18 months is the part time. 9 is the full time. It used to be six, but they raised it because people would expect a job on graduation, nine is more realistic for that.

Grustaf 7y ago

As a working developer you will spend a sizeable portion of your time learning new things, so if you are not good at teaching yourself programming, maybe it's not a suitable career choice? Especially with amazing MOOCs like Stanford's Swift course? At least in the context of something like Lambda school, that does not teach computer science, as I understand it.

soneca 7y ago

I learned to code from scratch using freeCodeCamp.org, tutorials and official documentation. Got a good job after 8 months studying full-time. Almost 3 years now and everything is good (more details on my experience here: https://rodrigohgpontes.github.io https://rodrigohgpontes.github.io). As a totally outsider (not even from the US), Lambda School seemed too good to be true, in a good way, and I said so here in HN. 9 months of serious commitment, no upfront payment, ISA, all of it seemed good to me. These days, I don't think the same way. Lambda School and it's founder seem more worried about being a billion dollar company than doing the right thing for its students. Personally, that's strategically stupid and counter-productive. They won't be a billion dollar company because they don't care about their students. But it looks like the direction they took. This mistake is not inherent to VC ventured companies or Silicon Valley, so I think the ones to blame are Lambda leaders, not the system. So, I still recommend freeCodeCamp.org as the best thing that exists for people that want to learn to code and get a job. I wish some of these effective philanthropy multi millionaire would give them generous money to pursue their mission. It changed my life.

fronofro 7y ago

There are inherent limitations to edu that go unacknowledged. - There are a relatively fixed number of high skill jobs. - More people with the same skills/portfolio reduces the value of that skill/portfolio. - While people can learn new skills, people have different learning rates and integrating that knowledge deeply often takes much longer than teachers/bootcamps want to believe. - Most edu info exists for free online, what school/bootcamps uniquely provide is feedback. Quality feedback is HARD to scale. - How much does pre-application screening find people who don't really need that much help vs trying to help every applicant and getting unmotivated people in your bootcamp. I have seen very few examples of a bootcamp fundamentally changing someones motivation/work ethic. ISAs will be the big winner in the ed tech space and providers of education will likely come and go unless someone cracks all the issues above. Perhaps the current distribution of students to universities (having plurality) is actually more suited to serving this function than a typical tech world power law distribution where one or two companies would provide 80% of the edu.

ChicagoDave 7y ago

The problem with Lambda School is the model and vision that suggests a general college education isn't worthwhile. That college should focus on a marketable skill directly leading to some job. That's optimal, but that leaves out the social aspects, the critical thinking aspects, and the safe space to have an open mind and absorb and share ideas. I would argue those other aspects of higher education are far more critical than the bootcamp model and vision. And eventually, it boils down to a waste of time for some subset of students, which is not helpful to our higher education interests.

hundt 7y ago

Interestingly, Lambda School has just announced a new "ISA Financing Blueprint" [0] and "Better Data Transparency" [1] which address some of the concerns from the article. [0] https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-isa-financing-blueprint-and-100m-in-new-financing https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-isa-... [1] https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/building-better-data-transparency-at-lambda-school https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/building-better-data-tr...

kostyal 7y ago

I'm a current student at Lambda School. It's a pretty stressful time at the moment - I don't have any loyalty to Lambda, but the recent string of damaging stories about the quality of teaching and average graduates is concerning. It's true that Lambda is incredibly disorganised and the build weeks etc are chaotic. Equally true that they don't do a good enough job of ensuring we have something to show for ourselves on our portfolio. It's also true that their admission standards are seemingly incredibly lax. About 40% of my cohort struggle to code at a fundamental level - I don't mean that harshly, it's Lambda's fault With that said, I've really enjoyed my time at Lambda overall and it saddens me to see it fail like this. The atmosphere and internal culture that they cultivated is second to none and I have enjoyed my time there a lot. As with many people at Lambda, I joined them at a difficult time of my life, when I was suffering from pretty severe depression. I knew I loved coding but barely spent any time doing it and struggled with impostor syndrome, etc. While at Lambda I benefitted hugely from the daily structure and discipline, and from having a community of people in the same position as me. I've made some great friends, and met some very smart and talented people. What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional.

_ah 7y ago
> What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional. Don't let this stop you. The world needs more good engineers, and if you practice your craft you will always find a home. There are plenty of industry professionals who now look a bit silly for their choice of company (Uber, WeWork) but ultimately it's all just a job and if you have the raw skills you can find a new gig.
conanbatt 7y ago
Just keep at it. The one thing that Lambda does best is the constant drilling of practicing. That method of learning is second to none.
surferbayarea 7y ago

kregasaurusrex 7y ago

Since the original HN post[0] is about 2.5 years old now, one would expect there to be more data released by LS regarding job placement/salaries before a potential student would sign a $30,000 ISA. I've been a fan of the idea of up-skilling at a bootcamp for those who either don't want to spend 4 years getting a CS degree or being unable to finance its associated costs which can be in excess of $75,000. In an increasingly tight labor market, there's fewer jobs available in the 'middle' where companies seem to be either wanting an experienced SME in a specific domain or less-experienced programmers to do testing rather than development. I think the bundling and selling of student CDOs works for a company in its early stages, since the costs for recovering unpaid tuition can range from high to being declared a total loss. Some of the anecdotes make it seem like the company doesn't receive enough feedback from employers in order to strengthen parts of their curriculum that make interviewees fail at some stages during the interview process. Creating a complete curriculum takes more than bundling together Leetcode and Hackerrank problems, where the actual teaching reflects that bootcamps and a CS education aren't in direct parity with one another. [1] Regarding the finances, student loan debt through an established institution can't be removed through filing for bankruptcy. This allows access to federal loans and underwriters that give better rates and agreements for all the business parties invloved. I've been denied refinancing my loans from multiple companies for a combination of those effects including not graduating and having too low of an income. The business seems like a good idea but too fixated on higher short-term valuations in order to attract VC capital; rather than fixing its underlying structural problems. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011033 [1] https://hackernoon.com/bootcamps-vs-college-11dd76a4d127 https://hackernoon.com/bootcamps-vs-college-11dd76a4d127

throaway1990 7y ago

Fascinating story. I think there is value in the service provided by Lambda School but the questionable revenue tactics like selling ISAs or using ISAs to secure loans means students can't really trust them with placements.

neilk 7y ago

I had a sinking feeling when the inventor of the CDO appeared in this article. The housing bubble occurred, in part, because there was optimism that acquiring a certain tangible asset - a house - was a sure path to prosperity for the buyer. And the buyers of mortgage-backed securities had decades of data showing that these were solid investments. What about intangible assets like knowing how to code? Is this what Lambda School is really doing? And like the housing bubble, once the originator can sell the debt, they have some incentives to inflate expectations on both sides. Perhaps Lambda School’s ISA-selling isn’t vulnerable to this flaw. Maybe the ISA-buyers are doing due diligence. But you would have thought the same was true in 2008 too. Like everyone with a Twitter account I’ve interacted with Austen. And I had a mildly positive impression, or at least I thought he deserved more credit. Not sure about that any more. I would like to see his response.

abbadadda 7y ago

This anecdote is particularly damning for Lambda School, like a hedge fund choosing not to update their investment return numbers year after year because they were so great in year 1: > So where does that 86 percent figure come from? Lambda has reported graduate-outcome statistics at the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR), a voluntary trade organization of coding boot camps whose purpose is to ensure that participating schools publish truthful information about student outcomes. Allred has often used this report to defend his company online. But where other boot camps have multiple reports spanning many student cohorts, Lambda has only reported statistics for its first 71 graduates — 86 percent of who, the school claims, found jobs. Sheree Speakman, the CEO of CIRR, told me that Lambda has not undergone the standard independent auditing for the sole report it has submitted, and that her communications to Lambda School regarding further reporting and auditing have gone unanswered.

_hardwaregeek 7y ago

The more I think about bootcamps, the more they appear to be a rather insulting business proposition. Did they genuinely believe that one can take someone off the street, albeit someone relatively intelligent and motivated, and teach them enough to be a professional programmer in 9 months? Imagine that we replaced programmer with mechanical engineer. Or with marketing executive. Would that sound believable? What is it about programming that makes people believe that they can learn it in a hilariously short amount of time? Sure, we programmers may be harboring some imposter syndrome and secretly believe that programming is super easy. Sure, programming doesn't require lots of math. But it's still hard! It's still a craft that requires problem solving ability, lots of semi-arcane knowledge and a detail oriented mind.

conanbatt 7y ago
Because you can, and because lots of people are doing it.
sean2 7y ago
I don't think we could pump out the well rounded developers like 4 years of undergrad can, but I don't see how we couldn't pump out SQL technicians, front-end developers, or otherwise specialized workers that could alleviate the supposed shortage of developers. I also helped a person go from zero knowledge of programming to pumping out android games in a month of self study. So I know that smart, motivated people can get pretty far pretty fast. In regards to your point, I don't think this person knows UML or ever learned big O notation, but this person was able to gain the skills required to do what they wanted, plus some pro-programmer friends and stackoverflow to fill in the "semi-arcane knowledge" when required.
- _hardwaregeek 7y ago
  I think we can pump out good apprentices. After 9 months of study, the person could definitely have enough skills to write semi-valid code and work on some small projects with supervision from a developer. However I would not call this person after 9 months a developer. A developer should be able to look at a codebase, learn it, learn the relevant technologies and start contributing. I doubt a bootcamp graduate will be able to do that. Or worse, they'll do that and wreak havoc on the codebase. > front-end developers I suspect this is part of the issue. Plenty of people believe that front-end is easier or lesser than back-end, and therefore can be learned quickly. Lots and lots of terrible front-end code has taught me that this is not true. Good front-end developers are really hard to find and subpar ones can lead to horrible user interfaces and direct impact to the bottom line. Even if we're talking the most minimal of front-end stacks, i.e. HTML, CSS and JS, which, I'm not even sure people hire for anyways, there's a lot of subtle issues with accessibility, responsive UI, writing halfway decent JS, etc. If we add on the various libraries (a sign of a good developer is also knowing when to use these libs and when to avoid them), then the amount of knowledge required is far far more than 9 months can provide.

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ubu7737 7y ago

There just isn't a way to speed up comprehension of computing systems and computing technology. Software development is highly conceptual and concepts don't materialize in the brain in a way that's independent from the time variable. I initially thought bootcamps would be a good idea because I thought they could use a streamlined curriculum to put difficult concepts in front of students and then winnow them quickly based on the reactions of said students. Like a phone screen that you spend 2-4 months performing. It costs you up-front to do all that education and subsequent scrutiny of the candidate, but you win by identifying people with the potential you want to migrate into the SD workforce. With public funding and a long schedule, I believed this could be a sustainable way to populate those vacancies. That's not how bootcamps work. Bootcamps are trying to launch people into careers, and I just find that absurd on its face. No level of training is going to compress years of plastic changes in the brain into a shorter amount of time.

surferbayarea 7y ago

A skill of knowing how to use React in a particular way to create simple views is something that will be redundant in a few years. These people will unfortunately be out of jobs. The mundane work of converting sketch files to react views will be automated soon

deleted 7y ago

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rajacombinator 7y ago

There are plenty of red flags in the article but the part about Lambda selling the ISAs removing their incentive is BS - their long term incentives are clearly still aligned because they won’t be able to continue selling ISAs if they don’t deliver. Selling the ISAs presumably just helps with cash flow. That said it makes one wonder why a company that’s raised 9 figures needs to worry about cash flow.

MivLives 7y ago

Lambda grad with a job, who also worked as a PM/TL. Overall I think they're trying. The problem with the PM/TL program is the people who are normally the best at it tend to be the best at finding jobs. The TLs that stick around forever tend to be ones that aren't the best or the worst who are normally replaced when someone complains. Instead it's the okay people who are just cruising. One thing that seems to be overlooked about Lambda is the fact that they are remote. An applicant from the middle of nowhere who lives hours from the nearest city has as much chance of getting in as anyone. It can be harder to find a job there and they won't relocate. Remote work is much harder to get in as a junior dev. Overall though, I wouldn't be in the position I'm currently in without them though. Maybe I just made it in before the line, maybe they're just undergoing growing pains as expand to a profitable size.

AVTizzle 7y ago

On the authors Twitter, he comes across as having an axe to grind: "lmao I woke my boy up" [1] Sounds like he's keeping score of something, which isn't a quality I necessarily want from my "journalists". [1] https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230251533951889409 https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230251533951889409

BlueTemplar 7y ago

This seems more like job training than education - something that should be directly done by the companies that end up recruiting these people instead.

MarkMc 7y ago

All the haters seem to be piling onto Lambda and its CEO, but looking at actual reviews by students it is clear that most students are very happy with Lambda: https://www.switchup.org/bootcamps/lambda-school https://www.switchup.org/bootcamps/lambda-school And the problems mentioned in the article are straightforward to fix: (a) Be honest and transparent about the job placement rate for each batch (b) Don't sell the ISA or borrow against it (c) Improve the quality of teaching and accept a lower growth rate

Step888 7y ago
Take a look at the other coding bootcamps on that site. They all seem to have very positive reviews. The problem is that switchup uses the affiliate links of the bootcamps, so it has a financial incentive to sell the bootcamps it features to its viewers. That's how it makes its money. Now Amazon does the same thing, you'll say. And you'd be right, but with Amazon, it has a reputation to maintain. If Amazon reviews are unreliable, people will stop shopping at Amazon. With Switchup, it's different. Most people will only buy one coding bootcamp in their lifetime. So withchup doesn't have the same incentive to make its reviews super accurate. It mostly has the incentive to sell as many coding bootcamps as it can.

737min 7y ago

Found this blog from last year comparing Lambda to AppAcademy, confirms many of the details and adds some.. no involvement with them. https://blog.appacademy.io/app-academy-versus-lambda-school-which-one-is-better/ https://blog.appacademy.io/app-academy-versus-lambda-school-...

chrisyeh 7y ago

Lambda's marketing is deceptive and should rightly be stopped. But what is so bad about a bootcamp with no up front cost that gets 50% of its graduates a job? https://chrisyeh.com/2020/02/the-cost-of-cynicism.html https://chrisyeh.com/2020/02/the-cost-of-cynicism.html