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Twitter Thread: Experience at Lambda School for UX

145 points by mobileexpert 7y ago

minimaxir 7y ago
This thread touches on the point the other discussions about ISAs don’t: these aren’t free bootcamps because there’s opportunity cost, and that can be unexpectedly expensive.
- prostheticvamp 7y ago
  I don’t think there’s a single discussion about boot camps that doesn’t discuss the immense cost of having to take months away from your money-earning life. Why do you feel that this is an under appreciated topic?
  - heymijo 7y ago
    If it is as you say, an immense cost, can it really be an under appreciated topic?
    - prostheticvamp 7y ago
      Yes. Did you mean to say “can it be over-appreciated”? It can be that, too. It ain’t slavery.
      - heymijo 7y ago
        Yes, that is what I meant. Your last line jumps the shark.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wpietri 7y ago
I really had a lot of hope for bootcamps in general and ISAs in specific. I thought the alignment of incentives might make for radically more effective education. I was very wrong. The ISA incentive appears to be nothing to the VC/startup incentive to Show! Massive! Growth! as you chase ever-larger chunks of money. Somehow we've gone from "move fast and break things" (which is not a terrible slogan to encourage experimentation on non-consequential things) to "move fast and break people" (which horrifies me).
- _bxg1 7y ago
  I still think ISAs as a concept make a lot of sense. It seems like most of the problem is that the classes are often worthless, not the particular way in which you pay for them. There was the whole thing with the collections agencies but that can happen with any type of loan.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    I was hoping that the ISAs would fix the worthless-classes problem. My theory was that if the institution's compensation was more directly tied to how much they helped the student, they'd be better at helping students. Unfortunately, there's still a fundamental broken feedback loop here: the people purchasing an education are definitionally unqualified to evaluate it. I don't see a way to fix that without significant regulation, which unfortunately acts as a brake on evolution of both program content and educational methods.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      Yeah, that's part of why Lambda's ISAs came into the spotlight recently: they were turning around and selling them immediately, which broke that incentive alignment that students may have been counting on.
      - lmeyerov 7y ago
        Stuff like VC funding breaks the alignment between leadership and students: former is rewarded by pump and dump and maybe eventually good, not cohorts 10-50 doing well.
      - austenallred 7y ago
        Make sure you read what is actually happening with the ISAs, because incentive alignment isn’t broken: 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-...
- ergocoder 7y ago
jsjddbbwj 7y ago
She opens the thread by stating that she is a black woman from the Bronx. Then there's nothing in the thread that says she's been treated differently for being black, for being a woman, or for being from the Bronx.
- why_only_15 7y ago
  I think her point was that she didn't have a lot of options in the first place as a black woman from the Bronx, and Lambda could potentially have offered her more opportunity than places in the past.
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    Being a black person in the Bronx doesn't have anything to do with not having a lot of options. Being a poor person - anywhere - regardless of skin color, usually does that.
- matz1 7y ago
  Merely stating that she is a black woman from the Bronx means she has been treated differently ?
  - jsjddbbwj 7y ago
    Why open the thread with that, if it's of no relevance to the story? When I see that in the first post, I think the story will be full of racism, sexism and classism. But nope. Nothing.
    - matz1 7y ago
      Because she think its important, she can write however she want.
      - jsjddbbwj 7y ago
        And I can criticise it. :-)
pembrook 7y ago
To be honest, part of the problem is the field of UX design itself. Unlike “coding” (which is standardized and easier to quantify, ie. Does the program update the database or not?) user experience is a vague, lumpy, subjective mess of buzzwords with no linear pathway to proficiency. We all know UX is extremely important to the success of any startup, but quantifying it is a different story. Designers can’t even agree on their own responsibilities and what to call themselves, with job titles and responsibilities I’ve seen at many companies having 0 correlation to the next. Any great UX/product/service/interaction/blah blah designer I’ve worked with is a former graphic designer with great taste, who over the years learned how to build usable software by working on tons of software products and spending tons of time with users. It’s not exactly something that lends itself to the bootcamp model. It makes much more sense in an apprentice model. If it makes her feel any better, I’m certain 90% of schools teaching multi-year “UX” design programs would not have done a better job. At least she doesn’t have to go into debt this way.
- jdhn 7y ago
  >Designers can’t even agree on their own responsibilities and what to call themselves, with job titles and responsibilities I’ve seen at many companies having 0 correlation to the next. I agree 100%. I've been in the UX field for about 6 years, and if there's one thing I've noticed, it's intense fragmentation when it comes to that actual job title. What's the difference between them? I couldn't tell you as at each job my responsibilities were basically the same. Also, one of the biggest issues that I have with UX bootcamps is that there's a lot of emphasis placed on making the portfolio look visually appealing, but when you get into it there's not always a lot of substance. Same goes for a lot of work on Dribbble that's tagged as "UX" or "UX/UI".
  - austenallred 7y ago
    This is actually the crux of the problem here. We focused the curriculum on UX research-y fundamentals, and the students who wanted to come out as UI designers were disappointed. We tried to build in design-heavy curriculum partway through when we realized how misaligned those expectations were, but couldn’t do an effective job in such a short time frame, so those students just got more frustrated. It’s totally fair, we should have done a better job communicating and shouldn’t have tried to call an audible at the last minute to fix everything.
heymijo 7y ago
I can't read this account and say anything other than Lambda School is an ineffective educational program. You can set aside the issue of ISAs or anything about this woman. This poor of a product from Lambda is indefensible. A consumer or enterprise software startup can get away beginning with an ineffective MVP and iterating. A school offering an educational opportunity has a much higher floor to responsibly operate. This person shows that Lambda is operating well below that floor. Even if the students will never activate the repayment clauses of their ISAs Lambda has failed them. Silicon Valley seems to think that what it can't measure doesn't matter. But Lambda School, by pitching itself as a way for anyone to be a part of the tech boom gets up a person's hopes and then completely and utterly fails to deliver on its promise. That is on top of the opportunity cost of attending a school that fails to deliver anything close to the education advertised.
- nicesnowoman 7y ago
  This, 100%. I'm a student and, while ISAs make Lambda interesting, am mostly disappointed due to the terrible educational quality (and staff's refusal to admit that the quality is pretty low across the board). Still, though, I've noticed the ISAs create some nuanced perverse things happening that are specific to Lambda - students attracted to the value prop are often much lower income (Lambda cited $22K average starting salary amongst their students) than the average bootcamp student. If Lambda fails them, these students may leave in worse financial prospects than they started with no safety net. The ISA also kicks in at 40% when you're only 4 weeks into a 40 week curriculum. After that point, it's very hard to leave due to sunk cost fallacy, and you are roped along wasting time, hoping for them to get their stuff together. I wish I and others left well before.
  - the_watcher 7y ago
    The last part seems like it could easily be improved by simply tying it to the portion of the curriculum covered.
    - nicesnowoman 7y ago
      I doubt they'd do that because it'd be bad for Lambda's financials.
jfarmer 7y ago
What's craziest to me is that someone thought you could put together two groups of students in a high stakes situation without first socializing the interaction. Half the point of school is to get students to first fail in a low-stakes way. Groups need time to develop. Any change in a group will cause it to storm before re-norming. The higher the stakes the more critical it is to navigate storming effectively. You "learn by doing", i.e., by getting students to storm 50 times before the the stakes are high. Students should not have to pay the price for someone else's crash course in learning design.
austenallred 7y ago
This story probably represents the single greatest failure of Lambda School ever. There are times when the whole story isn’t being told, but this isn’t one of them, Nicole is right. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Nicole and her cohort, have cancelled her ISA, and we are working on a full retrospective for her cohort (UX6). It started with misaligned expectations. We worked with a lot of hiring partners to create a UX curriculum that would be easiest to jump into a first UX career from, and it was clear in doing that research that a research-first perspective with less emphasis on design is what would get students hired faster in a field that can be notoriously difficult to break into (relative to software engineering). We hired experts in that aspect of UX design, which can be terribly broad. Partway through the data started to show that half of the class was pretty happy and about half was not. Usually it’s not split like that - there’s always an outlier student or two but not half totally happy and half frustrated, so we started to dig in. Two things happened: 1. We realized half of the students were expecting a design-heavy experience, and we hadn’t communicated well enough what to expect. There were pieces on design, but you wouldn’t come out of this curriculum as a UI designer, and students were expecting that. 2. We decided to try and help those students who wanted the UI emphasis, hired more folks, and started creating curriculum in a pretty rushed manner to help them reach their goals. In retrospect that was a huge mistake; there simply wasn’t enough time to build a full design-heavy curriculum in flight, and the students who wanted design-heavy curriculum were very disappointed. That cohort was (rightly) frustrated because we tried to do too much too late. I recognized that was a risk going into those curriculum changes, but took on the risk because the most important thing is making students successful and happy. In retrospect it was the wrong call. I wish like hell that I could go back and make everything perfect for that cohort of students; there are about 20 of them and I’ve spent time one on one with every one. We brought in more people to work with them one on one and that curriculum is much better now, but understandably 5 or 6 students in that cohort had lost their faith in our ability to deliver and opted to leave the program. Of course, we cancelled their ISAs; we lost a ton of money training these students and they don’t owe us anything, but that’s the right thing to do. We promise an awesome experience and in this instance didn’t deliver. We tried to do too much in too short a timeframe and missed the mark.
- kingbirdy 7y ago
Antoninus 7y ago
Obligatory: https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069?lang=en https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069?lang=e... and Lambda School fits into many of the described.
waterside81 7y ago
For anyone else wondering ... an ISA is an Income Share Agreement. Lots of comments here mentioning this but I didn’t know what it stood for
- nsx147 7y ago
  Thx
djeikyb 7y ago
Kim Crayton has done great analysis of this type of code school on her podcast, including interviews with students: https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/?s=bootcamp https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/?s=bootcamp https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fhashtagcauseascene.com+bootcamp https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fhashtagcausea...
tchaffee 7y ago
Can someone confirm or correct my suspicion? That the founders are interested in education finance reform and not so much education? Are any of them former teachers? What's their background in pedagogy? It's cool to hack code, systems, and to hack together a software product. This feels like they are hacking people's lives and futures and if you're going to do that, maybe some credentials are called for. Happy to be corrected if the founders have a long history of involvement in education.

145 points by mobileexpert 7y ago

This thread touches on the point the other discussions about ISAs don’t: these aren’t free bootcamps because there’s opportunity cost, and that can be unexpectedly expensive.

prostheticvamp 7y ago
I don’t think there’s a single discussion about boot camps that doesn’t discuss the immense cost of having to take months away from your money-earning life. Why do you feel that this is an under appreciated topic?
- heymijo 7y ago
  If it is as you say, an immense cost, can it really be an under appreciated topic?
  - prostheticvamp 7y ago
    Yes. Did you mean to say “can it be over-appreciated”? It can be that, too. It ain’t slavery.
    - heymijo 7y ago
      Yes, that is what I meant. Your last line jumps the shark.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

wpietri 7y ago

I really had a lot of hope for bootcamps in general and ISAs in specific. I thought the alignment of incentives might make for radically more effective education. I was very wrong. The ISA incentive appears to be nothing to the VC/startup incentive to Show! Massive! Growth! as you chase ever-larger chunks of money. Somehow we've gone from "move fast and break things" (which is not a terrible slogan to encourage experimentation on non-consequential things) to "move fast and break people" (which horrifies me).

_bxg1 7y ago
I still think ISAs as a concept make a lot of sense. It seems like most of the problem is that the classes are often worthless, not the particular way in which you pay for them. There was the whole thing with the collections agencies but that can happen with any type of loan.
- wpietri 7y ago
  I was hoping that the ISAs would fix the worthless-classes problem. My theory was that if the institution's compensation was more directly tied to how much they helped the student, they'd be better at helping students. Unfortunately, there's still a fundamental broken feedback loop here: the people purchasing an education are definitionally unqualified to evaluate it. I don't see a way to fix that without significant regulation, which unfortunately acts as a brake on evolution of both program content and educational methods.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Yeah, that's part of why Lambda's ISAs came into the spotlight recently: they were turning around and selling them immediately, which broke that incentive alignment that students may have been counting on.
    - lmeyerov 7y ago
      Stuff like VC funding breaks the alignment between leadership and students: former is rewarded by pump and dump and maybe eventually good, not cohorts 10-50 doing well.
    - austenallred 7y ago
      Make sure you read what is actually happening with the ISAs, because incentive alignment isn’t broken: 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-...
ergocoder 7y ago

jsjddbbwj 7y ago

She opens the thread by stating that she is a black woman from the Bronx. Then there's nothing in the thread that says she's been treated differently for being black, for being a woman, or for being from the Bronx.

why_only_15 7y ago
I think her point was that she didn't have a lot of options in the first place as a black woman from the Bronx, and Lambda could potentially have offered her more opportunity than places in the past.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  Being a black person in the Bronx doesn't have anything to do with not having a lot of options. Being a poor person - anywhere - regardless of skin color, usually does that.
matz1 7y ago
Merely stating that she is a black woman from the Bronx means she has been treated differently ?
- jsjddbbwj 7y ago
  Why open the thread with that, if it's of no relevance to the story? When I see that in the first post, I think the story will be full of racism, sexism and classism. But nope. Nothing.
  - matz1 7y ago
    Because she think its important, she can write however she want.
    - jsjddbbwj 7y ago
      And I can criticise it. :-)

pembrook 7y ago

To be honest, part of the problem is the field of UX design itself. Unlike “coding” (which is standardized and easier to quantify, ie. Does the program update the database or not?) user experience is a vague, lumpy, subjective mess of buzzwords with no linear pathway to proficiency. We all know UX is extremely important to the success of any startup, but quantifying it is a different story. Designers can’t even agree on their own responsibilities and what to call themselves, with job titles and responsibilities I’ve seen at many companies having 0 correlation to the next. Any great UX/product/service/interaction/blah blah designer I’ve worked with is a former graphic designer with great taste, who over the years learned how to build usable software by working on tons of software products and spending tons of time with users. It’s not exactly something that lends itself to the bootcamp model. It makes much more sense in an apprentice model. If it makes her feel any better, I’m certain 90% of schools teaching multi-year “UX” design programs would not have done a better job. At least she doesn’t have to go into debt this way.

jdhn 7y ago
>Designers can’t even agree on their own responsibilities and what to call themselves, with job titles and responsibilities I’ve seen at many companies having 0 correlation to the next. I agree 100%. I've been in the UX field for about 6 years, and if there's one thing I've noticed, it's intense fragmentation when it comes to that actual job title. What's the difference between them? I couldn't tell you as at each job my responsibilities were basically the same. Also, one of the biggest issues that I have with UX bootcamps is that there's a lot of emphasis placed on making the portfolio look visually appealing, but when you get into it there's not always a lot of substance. Same goes for a lot of work on Dribbble that's tagged as "UX" or "UX/UI".
- austenallred 7y ago
  This is actually the crux of the problem here. We focused the curriculum on UX research-y fundamentals, and the students who wanted to come out as UI designers were disappointed. We tried to build in design-heavy curriculum partway through when we realized how misaligned those expectations were, but couldn’t do an effective job in such a short time frame, so those students just got more frustrated. It’s totally fair, we should have done a better job communicating and shouldn’t have tried to call an audible at the last minute to fix everything.

heymijo 7y ago

I can't read this account and say anything other than Lambda School is an ineffective educational program. You can set aside the issue of ISAs or anything about this woman. This poor of a product from Lambda is indefensible. A consumer or enterprise software startup can get away beginning with an ineffective MVP and iterating. A school offering an educational opportunity has a much higher floor to responsibly operate. This person shows that Lambda is operating well below that floor. Even if the students will never activate the repayment clauses of their ISAs Lambda has failed them. Silicon Valley seems to think that what it can't measure doesn't matter. But Lambda School, by pitching itself as a way for anyone to be a part of the tech boom gets up a person's hopes and then completely and utterly fails to deliver on its promise. That is on top of the opportunity cost of attending a school that fails to deliver anything close to the education advertised.

nicesnowoman 7y ago
This, 100%. I'm a student and, while ISAs make Lambda interesting, am mostly disappointed due to the terrible educational quality (and staff's refusal to admit that the quality is pretty low across the board). Still, though, I've noticed the ISAs create some nuanced perverse things happening that are specific to Lambda - students attracted to the value prop are often much lower income (Lambda cited $22K average starting salary amongst their students) than the average bootcamp student. If Lambda fails them, these students may leave in worse financial prospects than they started with no safety net. The ISA also kicks in at 40% when you're only 4 weeks into a 40 week curriculum. After that point, it's very hard to leave due to sunk cost fallacy, and you are roped along wasting time, hoping for them to get their stuff together. I wish I and others left well before.
- the_watcher 7y ago
  The last part seems like it could easily be improved by simply tying it to the portion of the curriculum covered.
  - nicesnowoman 7y ago
    I doubt they'd do that because it'd be bad for Lambda's financials.

jfarmer 7y ago

What's craziest to me is that someone thought you could put together two groups of students in a high stakes situation without first socializing the interaction. Half the point of school is to get students to first fail in a low-stakes way. Groups need time to develop. Any change in a group will cause it to storm before re-norming. The higher the stakes the more critical it is to navigate storming effectively. You "learn by doing", i.e., by getting students to storm 50 times before the the stakes are high. Students should not have to pay the price for someone else's crash course in learning design.

austenallred 7y ago

This story probably represents the single greatest failure of Lambda School ever. There are times when the whole story isn’t being told, but this isn’t one of them, Nicole is right. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Nicole and her cohort, have cancelled her ISA, and we are working on a full retrospective for her cohort (UX6). It started with misaligned expectations. We worked with a lot of hiring partners to create a UX curriculum that would be easiest to jump into a first UX career from, and it was clear in doing that research that a research-first perspective with less emphasis on design is what would get students hired faster in a field that can be notoriously difficult to break into (relative to software engineering). We hired experts in that aspect of UX design, which can be terribly broad. Partway through the data started to show that half of the class was pretty happy and about half was not. Usually it’s not split like that - there’s always an outlier student or two but not half totally happy and half frustrated, so we started to dig in. Two things happened: 1. We realized half of the students were expecting a design-heavy experience, and we hadn’t communicated well enough what to expect. There were pieces on design, but you wouldn’t come out of this curriculum as a UI designer, and students were expecting that. 2. We decided to try and help those students who wanted the UI emphasis, hired more folks, and started creating curriculum in a pretty rushed manner to help them reach their goals. In retrospect that was a huge mistake; there simply wasn’t enough time to build a full design-heavy curriculum in flight, and the students who wanted design-heavy curriculum were very disappointed. That cohort was (rightly) frustrated because we tried to do too much too late. I recognized that was a risk going into those curriculum changes, but took on the risk because the most important thing is making students successful and happy. In retrospect it was the wrong call. I wish like hell that I could go back and make everything perfect for that cohort of students; there are about 20 of them and I’ve spent time one on one with every one. We brought in more people to work with them one on one and that curriculum is much better now, but understandably 5 or 6 students in that cohort had lost their faith in our ability to deliver and opted to leave the program. Of course, we cancelled their ISAs; we lost a ton of money training these students and they don’t owe us anything, but that’s the right thing to do. We promise an awesome experience and in this instance didn’t deliver. We tried to do too much in too short a timeframe and missed the mark.

kingbirdy 7y ago

Antoninus 7y ago

Obligatory: https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069?lang=en https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069?lang=e... and Lambda School fits into many of the described.

waterside81 7y ago

For anyone else wondering ... an ISA is an Income Share Agreement. Lots of comments here mentioning this but I didn’t know what it stood for

nsx147 7y ago
Thx

djeikyb 7y ago

Kim Crayton has done great analysis of this type of code school on her podcast, including interviews with students: https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/?s=bootcamp https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/?s=bootcamp https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fhashtagcauseascene.com+bootcamp https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fhashtagcausea...

tchaffee 7y ago

Can someone confirm or correct my suspicion? That the founders are interested in education finance reform and not so much education? Are any of them former teachers? What's their background in pedagogy? It's cool to hack code, systems, and to hack together a software product. This feels like they are hacking people's lives and futures and if you're going to do that, maybe some credentials are called for. Happy to be corrected if the founders have a long history of involvement in education.