4 ms·

Most open world reviews i.e. non curated ones I have seen for Lambda school have been negative to at best neutral. I believe they have a place in the education

Most open world reviews i.e. non curated ones I have seen for Lambda school have been negative to at best neutral. I believe they have a place in the education market if they do it right. Model is good enough but execution appear to be severely lacking. It’s interesting that pg is a big fan though.

arvindamirtaa 6y ago
> It’s interesting that pg is a big fan though... ...as an investor. He may not be intimately familiar with the actual situations of the students from his PoV (mostly throguh conversations with Austen or his team). But then again, this is far from the first time a negative comment has come out against Lambda. And his position hasn't changed so far. So, there is that.
- akanet 6y ago
  When I spoke to Allred about this, he indicated that he and pg did not have a particularly close relationship. If this is true, it seems likely that pg's vocal patronage is mostly based on the theory, not practice, of Lambda.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    are you suggesting pg sometimes takes a strong public position on things he doesn't actually know too too much about? Some of which he has a financial interest in? Could be.
bambax 6y ago
> pg is a big fan though He seems to have a lax definition of the word "earnest". (See his latest blog post.)
- richajak 6y ago
  Observe the actions, not the words. If you are confused, most probably it is a scam, trust your instinct. It takes time for everything to unravel. quoted from: richajak, the not-so-wise man
joshxyz 6y ago
Yep, pg shilling it on twitter is the whackest thing lol.
jstummbillig 6y ago
The biggest mistake ls could make is not recognizing how little room there is for (perceived) failure with their product. It is among the most impactful, personal products you can buy online (considering life time and money investment). Customers will understandably be in a vulnerable place. You are not exactly selling someone a boat. You are quite literally selling tech savvy people their future and they know how to use social media. Those who are brave enough to voice their troubles with education in the open – which is a stigma, maybe so than ever – will have no trouble finding an empathic, educated audience. This is akin to treading in self-driving space: Every player is super aware of the non-existent room for error. The whole space has constantly been 3-5 major consecutive incidents away from imploding under the sheer pressure of human perception. ls cannot merely be slightly better than established programs in giving people an education and a job. You have to outperform by a substantial margin to get everyone on board when you inject yourself into peoples lives to this extent. You ALSO have to convince everyone that you do. It's pretty unfair and also pretty exciting.
- zo1 6y ago
  I was quite shocked to read about this sort of behavior from the founder (this is from the Reddit thread, so may be wrong): "Caleb Hicks was asked why he wouldn't give students a survey on how they liked the changes and he said he "wasn't going to run the school on a survey"." What a way to respond to your users giving you feedback about the direction of the process/entity they bought into.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  > You are quite literally selling tech savvy people their future It's a bit overkill. You can just do it yourself. Plenty of resources available for free. Students have to put the work in regardless.
  - jo032 6y ago
    this is what I don't get though. Why mortgage your future earnings to take a MOOC from a random startup employee when you can get the same from a world class professor for free?
dmkolobov 6y ago
Is it interesting? The fact that pg would ignore the negative behaviors of a YC alumni company is not surprising in the least.
MivLives 6y ago
I think that there's another factor to this. The cohorts have grown over time. When you have thirty people in the entire cohort the experience is going to be very different then when you have 130 or more. The earlier students reviews are going to read a lot different then later student ones.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
Investors will only ever speak positively of their portfolio companies. Lambda school receives high praise in general because so many of us tech types want their value proposition to be true. Just look at how negative the comments about traditional colleges are whenever the topic comes up on HN. Or look at all of the concern about growing student debt loads. Or the concern that 4 year college degrees are not teaching CS students what they need to actually function in real world software jobs. Lambda School arrived on the scene with a new business model that claims to fix all of that, and they did it as a highly-praised YC startup. It seemed like a home run. Yet I’ve heard so, so many stories like the OP’s about how they’ve dropped the ball on the educational quality of their programs. They seem to be approaching this as a typical startup problem where they start with the ugliest MVP that people will pay for and then incrementally improve it only where absolutely necessary to keep the money coming in. This works if you’re selling a SaaS tool to some company on a monthly basis, but it doesn’t work when you’re taking critical years of young people’s early careers and charging them on the tail end. Even worse, their customers have an incentive to downplay all of the problems. No one benefits by trashing the source of their education and only career credentials, so instead they say how great it was no matter what. We’re starting to see people pull back the curtain and show what’s really happening.
sugarwater 6y ago
PG should enroll and try the program himself before he offers any praise.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

arvindamirtaa 6y ago

> It’s interesting that pg is a big fan though... ...as an investor. He may not be intimately familiar with the actual situations of the students from his PoV (mostly throguh conversations with Austen or his team). But then again, this is far from the first time a negative comment has come out against Lambda. And his position hasn't changed so far. So, there is that.

akanet 6y ago
When I spoke to Allred about this, he indicated that he and pg did not have a particularly close relationship. If this is true, it seems likely that pg's vocal patronage is mostly based on the theory, not practice, of Lambda.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  are you suggesting pg sometimes takes a strong public position on things he doesn't actually know too too much about? Some of which he has a financial interest in? Could be.

bambax 6y ago

> pg is a big fan though He seems to have a lax definition of the word "earnest". (See his latest blog post.)

richajak 6y ago
Observe the actions, not the words. If you are confused, most probably it is a scam, trust your instinct. It takes time for everything to unravel. quoted from: richajak, the not-so-wise man

joshxyz 6y ago

Yep, pg shilling it on twitter is the whackest thing lol.

jstummbillig 6y ago

The biggest mistake ls could make is not recognizing how little room there is for (perceived) failure with their product. It is among the most impactful, personal products you can buy online (considering life time and money investment). Customers will understandably be in a vulnerable place. You are not exactly selling someone a boat. You are quite literally selling tech savvy people their future and they know how to use social media. Those who are brave enough to voice their troubles with education in the open – which is a stigma, maybe so than ever – will have no trouble finding an empathic, educated audience. This is akin to treading in self-driving space: Every player is super aware of the non-existent room for error. The whole space has constantly been 3-5 major consecutive incidents away from imploding under the sheer pressure of human perception. ls cannot merely be slightly better than established programs in giving people an education and a job. You have to outperform by a substantial margin to get everyone on board when you inject yourself into peoples lives to this extent. You ALSO have to convince everyone that you do. It's pretty unfair and also pretty exciting.

zo1 6y ago
I was quite shocked to read about this sort of behavior from the founder (this is from the Reddit thread, so may be wrong): "Caleb Hicks was asked why he wouldn't give students a survey on how they liked the changes and he said he "wasn't going to run the school on a survey"." What a way to respond to your users giving you feedback about the direction of the process/entity they bought into.
rorykoehler 6y ago
> You are quite literally selling tech savvy people their future It's a bit overkill. You can just do it yourself. Plenty of resources available for free. Students have to put the work in regardless.
- jo032 6y ago
  this is what I don't get though. Why mortgage your future earnings to take a MOOC from a random startup employee when you can get the same from a world class professor for free?

dmkolobov 6y ago

Is it interesting? The fact that pg would ignore the negative behaviors of a YC alumni company is not surprising in the least.

MivLives 6y ago

I think that there's another factor to this. The cohorts have grown over time. When you have thirty people in the entire cohort the experience is going to be very different then when you have 130 or more. The earlier students reviews are going to read a lot different then later student ones.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

Investors will only ever speak positively of their portfolio companies. Lambda school receives high praise in general because so many of us tech types want their value proposition to be true. Just look at how negative the comments about traditional colleges are whenever the topic comes up on HN. Or look at all of the concern about growing student debt loads. Or the concern that 4 year college degrees are not teaching CS students what they need to actually function in real world software jobs. Lambda School arrived on the scene with a new business model that claims to fix all of that, and they did it as a highly-praised YC startup. It seemed like a home run. Yet I’ve heard so, so many stories like the OP’s about how they’ve dropped the ball on the educational quality of their programs. They seem to be approaching this as a typical startup problem where they start with the ugliest MVP that people will pay for and then incrementally improve it only where absolutely necessary to keep the money coming in. This works if you’re selling a SaaS tool to some company on a monthly basis, but it doesn’t work when you’re taking critical years of young people’s early careers and charging them on the tail end. Even worse, their customers have an incentive to downplay all of the problems. No one benefits by trashing the source of their education and only career credentials, so instead they say how great it was no matter what. We’re starting to see people pull back the curtain and show what’s really happening.

sugarwater 6y ago

PG should enroll and try the program himself before he offers any praise.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]