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What is sad to me looking from the outside it is that it didn’t have to be that way. Most of negative reviews seem to boil down to too many students, not enough

• Tomte 6y ago
  > But why Lambda School had to grow that much that fast? Isn't that obvious? They have investors. It's precisely what Joel writes about in https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-ben-and-jerrys-vs-amazon/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-...
  • soneca 6y ago
    I know the incentives are there to have exponential Silicon Valley hyper growth. But there are also incentives to be a company that still exists and it is big 20 years from now. And there are ethical decisions that could be made despite of the incentives. Even being a YC company, I believe it didn’t have to be that way. Edit: thanks for the link, great article. ”Land grab” is a great term for what I currently think about Lambda School. Except the “land” is people’s life and hopes.
    • morelisp 6y ago
      > Even being a YC company, I believe it didn’t have to be that way. YC is a startup incubator. A startup, as defined by YC's founder, is a company that grows fast. Trying to convince anyone in SV that this is extremely dumb or dangerous or unethical is a waste of time.
    • mxcrossb 6y ago
      A lot of these companies are in the “the only reason it’s a good price is we are burning VC money” and “the only reason we have VC money is our promise to grow” zone. Customers can enjoy watching the slow motion train crash.
      • TeMPOraL 6y ago
        That's why I consider startups a Faustian bargain. You get easy access to capital, in exchange for your company's soul. And the devil always comes to collect. The problems start where this deal causes collateral damage on the market - harming customers directly, or indirectly by preventing competitors who aren't looking for an exit from existing.
        • pc86 6y ago
          > indirectly by preventing competitors who aren't looking for an exit from existing. This is huge, and definitely hurts in the short term, but could it actually be good in the long term? Let's say the break-even price for Service A is $x/mo/user. Nobody really knows the technical problems underlying A, but startups #1-3 get venture funding and start offering Service A for .75x, for a couple years each, burning a few million in some dentist's or VC's capital each and build a huge staff to figure out the tech. Eventually one of the companies gets acquihired and two of them fail. Bootstrapped Startup #4 opens shop, offers A to 1.15x, and hires engineers from startups 2 and 3 who know the tech inside and out. Consumers get a great product.
          • paledot 6y ago
            And this in capitalism is known as "efficiency".
          • TeMPOraL 6y ago
            I worry that those startups #1-3 burn a good chunk of their money on customer acquisition, not on solving technological problems (though scale creates its own problems too). That money would be unnecessarily wasted. I also doubt a huge staff is needed to figure out the tech part. But I understand your point: startups can be viewed as economy's distributed R&D. Speculative investment makes a lot of sense - it could be that without startups #1-3, #4 wouldn't exist because it couldn't afford the risk of developing an innovative product. But my main gripe is how VC-backed startups repay the investment - they're being pressured into user-hostile and sometimes antisocial business models. It's so common that these business model became accepted as standard these days! So perhaps a way forward isn't to reduce venture funding, but curtail the socially destructive business models directly.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      The sad truth is, there probably isn’t a tradeoff here. ITT Tech survived and grew for almost half a century while offering many students a worse experience at a higher price than the worst I’ve ever seen Lambda School accused of.
  • vba 6y ago
    interestingly, from joel "With all of Microsoft’s muscle, money, and marketing skill, they are just not going to be able to break into auctions or instant messaging, because the network effects there are so strong." I remember AIM well (used AOL until they became TalkTalk), but I also remember using MSN messenger even more and being much more ubiquitous, granted that could have been generational (I wasn't a teenager until the mid-naughties). Ultimately it seems MSN did win out.
    • eropple 6y ago
      It's funny that you say that, because I grew up in the same time frame (graduated high school in 2006) and I don't think I ever touched MSN Messenger. Where I was, it was AIM all the way. So perhaps less generational, more just the network effects that existed on the ground.
      • whereistimbo 6y ago
        I remember the times where Yahoo! Messenger and MSN/Windows Live Messenger could chat each other. Those were the days.
• jgalt212 6y ago
  > praise how insanely ambitious the founder was It seems to me that VC's often link ambition with intelligence and other assorted skills needed to get the job done.
  • marcinzm 6y ago
    I'd argue that you can hire employees for intelligence and other assorted skills but without an ambitious founder few startups would succeed.
    • WJW 6y ago
      It's more that the less ambitious founders would be willing to "settle" for decent-but-not-unicorn outcomes for their companies, which are not the outcomes that VCs are looking for. The VC-funded startup model will gladly have 99 out of 100 founders go bankrupt as long as the 100th starts a unicorn. Investors will push companies to take existential risks to achieve growth at all costs. Obviously, most founders are not OK with these odds and only the most delusional (if you want to spin it negatively) or ambitious (if you want to spin it positively) will go for it.
  • papito 6y ago
    I believe Adam Neumann was ambitious, with a "unique leadership style".
    • danjac 6y ago
      I get the feeling some older VCs are playing out their mid-life crises by vicariously enjoying the lifestyles of their "crazier" founders. Perhaps it would be better for the world if they just bought that motorbike or sports car instead.
      • papito 6y ago
        It's hard to do when the VC next door just bought a super-yacht that can launch its own mini-yacht, yo.
• Siira 6y ago
  Perhaps their success rate has gone down, but their absolute successes have grown enough for them to accept it. Perhaps they should add some more expensive tiers for better student support.
  • czechdeveloper 6y ago
    I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
• michaelcampbell 6y ago
  > praise how insanely ambitious the founder was If this isn't a warning sign of a spectacular failure, I don't know what is. Not to mention praising it, after all the ink spilled on "rockstar" "ninja" types and how bad they are, yet they still get kudos and praise. If you ever have a manager that espouses the "we don't want the heroic cowboy type here", run, because that's EXACTLY what they want.
  • ramzyo 6y ago
    It’s interesting you say that, because that’s what I tell people on my team, and I mean it.
  • viridian 6y ago
    Why would you automatically assume a hiring manager wants the exact opposite of what he/she claims? I tend to take people at their word.
    • PragmaticPulp 6y ago
      Take all absolute statements and mind-reading tricks on HN with a grain of salt. If a manager says they don’t want heroics, it’s not reasonable to assume that they actually do want heroics but they’re somehow trying to communicate that to the team by speaking in opposites. If someone says they want one thing then asks for the opposite, verbalize that you were following the original directive. Have a conversation like professionals and sort it out. This HN comments that treat employers and managers like a foreign species that will only lie and abuse you are really not healthy. Learning how to establish healthy professional relationships with your managers as actual human beings is a critical workplace skill.
  • UncleMeat 6y ago
    I don’t want heroes on my team. It isn’t sustainable. Heroics are discouraged in performance reviews and promotion considerations. Nobody will die if people aren’t working nights and weekends. If I see people engaging in what seems like heroics I will have a very serious chat with them to understand why they are doing it and make absolutely certain that it isn’t coming from any pressure to do so.
• yanslookup 6y ago
  My original comment was too mean spirited, even for this alt account. I think what I meant to say is, Austen Allred does a good job of talking his book on Twitter. He also seems like a great Dad and partner.
  • pmart123 6y ago
    I had a similar impression. His most of his tweets veer off topic from education and feel a little forced.
    • austenallred 6y ago
      Haha! Most of my tweets are randomness from what I’m experiencing or reading about that day. Am I lonely? Interesting. My family keeps me pretty occupied. Though I suppose I could be to some degree. I suppose we all are.
    • nrmitchi 6y ago
      What? Are you following his personal twitter account? Because I am too. Unless I am mistaken, it is a personal twitter account. I fully expect to see personal stuff on a personal twitter account, and don't expect it to be 100% focused only on the topic of someone's business.
  • dang 6y ago
    Thanks for the course correction. Small things like that compound into big effects on the community.
• austenallred 6y ago
  CEO of Lambda School here. This is disappointing, of course. We have 180+ people working really, really hard to make Lambda School the best experience it can be. At times we’ll fall short, and, as another poster pointed out, the margin for error is just razor thin; thousands of happy and successful students can be out there, but it’s the ones who don’t make it or have a good experience that cause us to lose sleep (and make it to the top of HN). We take our responsibility in that regard very seriously; students come to us to change their lives and do something really, really difficult, and anything we do affects people in a very profound way. To the parent’s point, in this particular instance I don’t think this student's frustrations are the result of too much growth or lack of resources per student. We haven’t really grown over the past year or so, and the school is still very well resourced. We have just north of 2,000 students and ~180 full-time staff members, the majority of which are student-facing. Those may be suboptimally distributed (they are, and always will be to some degree) but a cheap education as a result of aggressive cost cutting this is not. As such, the solution is much less exciting than “need to spend more money” or “need to grow more slowly.” This student’s frustration comes from a series of changes we made simultaneously (something we avoid doing when we can). Some of these changes worked very well. Some did not. And this is the tricky part: some of the changes that a subset of students did not like are unquestionably for their benefit. So we’re working through those changes as well as debates around the trade-offs around, “Do we want our students to love us or be successful?” The specifics of what students didn’t like: The first is a mentor/mentee program we set up within the school. Employers tell us literally every day they want students who truly understand the development and release cycle, and work on teams. We created a mentor/mentee program where every student has a chance to do that, and the result of that program so clearly creates better outcomes that employers ask specifically for students who have done that. Some students love it. Some students see it as one more thing distracting them from writing more code, and believe the only thing that will determine their career success is ability to write code (as you all know, ability to write code is necessary but not sufficient to success as an engineer). We’re digging into the details of how and why it fails when it does. I don’t yet know what we’ll do there but the solution is likely more quiet and subtle iteration to the student experience. The other change was our slowly winding down of the Team Lead program. We used to have a program where we would hire some students on short contracts to serve as something akin to TAs. Sometimes this worked very well, often times it didn’t work well, and the experience was brittle and unreliable, so we shifted that budget back into full-time roles. Doing so has revealed gaps that TLs were plugging that should have never existed (the majority of which should have been solved by software and not people from the get-go.) So, Lambda School is not yet perfect and likely never will be. We’re properly resourced and not growing too quickly. We’re trying out best to make everyone we admit happy and successful. Turns out that’s extraordinarily difficult to do, and we’re doing the best we can, and I’m always open to any feedback on what we can or should do better.
• javaIsGreat 6y ago
  I dont know anything about Lambda's failures to serve students other than most students are upset at paying for less than steller experiences (most of the other prestigious bootcamps share this), but my gut tells me I dont think they grew to fast, its just the calibur of student went down, i feel like the hot new bootcamp of the day is able to get really bright and/or qualified students. More average learners require more time and resources and the nonspecial sauce will NOT get them a dream job in less than a year which is the opposite of what all of the marketing leads u to beleive for all the bootcamps. Lambda seems to have been trying to branch out to more normal learners. Students that dont share those bright/already qualified credentials, do benifit a little bit of a "rub" effect by being associated with those bright/qualified students, and get to study/work with them during the course of the bootcamp so everyone wins in the short term. For average learners without significant backround IT knowledge or a prestigious degree, realistically they are going to need more than 3-6 months or a year to get a cushy programming job in the US (which seems to be what all of the bootcamps advertise they can offer students). I consider myself an average/below average speed learner, took a bootcamp, i was surprised to learn the guy i was pair programming with had a CS degree from MIT lol. Some devs already had work programming experience, but most of us normies benifited by pairing with them and talking to them about problems/code/computers/study habits.
  • 908B64B197 6y ago
    > I was surprised to learn the guy I was pair programming with had a CS degree from MIT lol. That surprises me. Someone who could drink from the firehose should not need some bootcamp to learn web dev.
    • javaIsGreat 6y ago
      I think some CS grads come out of school with a lack of practical framework knowledge, i mean like React or Ruby on Rails, rather than spend 5 months learning/building on their own, these top tier students choose to learn/build in a managed environment so it takes them 3 rather than 5 months. They are promised assistance with applying to jobs as well which can be a nerve wrecking process for a university grad. If you have the money and want to jump into the work force ASAP it makes sense to me. The in person bootcamps ive found have had great community vibes to them. Fun being surrounded by fellow students/teachers, schools all have fun/studious/interesting faculty and students. I taught the first few weeks of a FREE intro to software engineering bootcamp and had a few lower tier university CS grads who were happy with the curriculum/services rendered, they would just tune me out when i was covering something they already knew and would study/program while the less informed students would work through problems/Q/A with me.