14 ms·

Lambda School lays off 65 employees

232 points by caust1c 5y ago

kgin 5y ago
Nobody has ever called hiring more people "right-sizing" when they thought a larger size was right for the company.
bpodgursky 5y ago
Looks like a refocusing on the full-time program. Doesn't seem _too_ surprising, given how many part-time programs (ie, Coursera) have struggled to retain users distracted by jobs and life. I hope they figure it out. 4-year university education for everyone is a broken model, and students deserve a cheaper path that doesn't eat half a decade of their life.
- fridif 5y ago
  Agree. I used to be against the technical interview process, but now I wholeheartedly believe in every facet of it (Leetcode, book knowledge, project based behavioral questions, system design). The quicker everyone learns these important concepts, non of which are taught in school or in bootcamps, the quicker one gets to be productive in programming.
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    leetcode/hackerrank is the worst thing to happen to tech interviews this decade.
    - fridif 5y ago
      Explain your reasoning, and I will explain mine. While some of the leetcode questions have tedious edge cases and ambiguous logic, there is no doubt in my mind that lists, trees, arrays, queues, maps, graphs, sorting, binary searching, and memoization are crucial for being an amazing programmer
      - andrew_ 5y ago
        If you truly believe that the measure of amazing programmer is churning out bullshit exercises on a timed call, I can only state that I'm thankful we don't work together. It's incredibly audacious gate-keeping and I'd dare say, discriminatory. It ignores disabilities, social adjustment conditions, etc that wouldn't impact daily work. I know too many incredible engineers that don't think in the way that those timed exercises require, and these folks are wildly talented and wildly successful.
        fridif 5y ago
        I do agree with you that the system blocks more people than it should. Personally, I think there should be many more apprenticeships than there are currently. There are many technical roles that can be fulfilled by people of all backgrounds. But, for the most serious roles, there needs to be skill scrutiny and performance under pressure. Think of the difference between a performing artist and a music teacher. Both are vital roles and have related but distinct skill sets. The performing artist must have everything drilled and ready to go on stage, much like a heart surgeon shouldn't be doing research on the operating table.
        andrew_ 5y ago
        Are we going to ask a symphonic performer to produce scales during an interview, a heart surgeon to suture a laceration? We would not, it would be insulting for a myriad of reasons.
        fridif 5y ago
        If a symphonic performer can't run through some scales, or a doctor cant suture a laceration, I would say that is indicative of a major problem. If you owned a restaurant, would you hire a hostess that couldn't operate a telephone, or a cook that couldn't turn on a stove? Similarly I wouldn't hire a programmer that could not turn an array into a linked list.
        5y ago
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      I don't think you quite appreciate the volume of utterly incompetent candidates (with plausible resumes) companies get for every software dev opening. It's a deluge, and no company on earth can deal with interviewing them all. The only realistic alternative to hackerrank is to do strict university filtering, only interviewing candidates who come from ranked universities. This is obviously terrible. Hackerrank, even though it annoys you, is an ENORMOUS leveling of the playing field, giving opportunities to people who didn't have the money or connections or whatever to make it into a top CS program. If you aren't those people, you don't understand what doors it opens.
      - andrew_ 5y ago
        I'm not sure you appreciate the volume of utterly incompetent interviewers and processes now out there. I have 20 years of experience, a sizable catalog of open source work available for browsing, and yet even at this level I'm subjected to the nonsense that is leetcode. Another beef - I have yet to see an exercise which is remotely relevant to the work being done. Shuffling arrays, regurgitating interview preparation exercises, mutating objects, all-out silly exercises like "convert this number to a roman numeral" don't measure a candidate. So where do you set the bar? This goes being annoying - leetcode exercises are pure laziness and a red flag of an inept hiring process for all but the least experienced candidates. The job market solved this problem eons ago - references, references, references. If you have none and you have no portfolio on which to measure your ability, you fall below the bar and sure, then I'll concede that some measure of basic ability is necessary. No one asks for, calls, or contacts references anymore (we do). Want to know if someone is capable? Talk to the people they've been working with. Scrutinize references for obvious softballs. If you actually care about the person you want to work with, and think you want to work with someone you respect, put a modicum of effort in. We've shifted to using tiered collaborative "projects" that we book an hour to two hours to work through with a candidate. We give them the ability to review what we'll be working on together, in detail, before the call so that they can prepare. It's also _not_ about finishing, there is no finish line, it's about collaboration, and we tell the candidates that. We've had many candidates state this was being their ability, and see themselves out. Thats FAR more respectful of a candidate than leetcode for someone who's spent 10 years delivering microservices for a profitable business. It's also far more representative of the work they'll be asked to do: - Being given a description of work - Pairing or collaborating - Stating what they do and do not know - Researching a thing I'd hire someone that failed an array shuffling algo bullshit leetcode challnge, but worked very well with a small group for an hour, and was able to deliver good answers and make progress on a task. > Hackerrank, even though it annoys you, is an ENORMOUS leveling of the playing field, giving opportunities to people who didn't have the money or connections or whatever to make it into a top CS program. I hope I've made it clear that this has nothing to do with leveling the playing field, and nothing to do with getting into CS programs. I mentioned prior that I have 20 years of experience professionally, no degree, and the last 4 people I've recommended for hire had only one prior position, were bootcamp grads (one self-taught), and are excelling in every area. They're wonderful, motivated people. What Hackerrank DOES do is shift the burden of actually caring about the people you're speaking to. If volume is an issue, the process is BROKEN.
- sg47 5y ago
  I feel that immersive programs are the way to go. Teach each subject in 3 month chunks. Candidate can continue to apply for jobs with the skills they have learnt. Let's say they have acquired enough skills to find jobs at the 3rd, 6th or 9th month, they can leave the program. This compulsion to finish 4 years is nonsense.
celim307 5y ago
Anyone with knowledge know if this is isolated to lambda falling behind their peers, or the industry itself starting to turn away from hiring boot camp grads?
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Totally anecdotal from an employer perspective, but I haven't seen any companies turning away from bootcamp grads.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Possibly related to the submission here from a few days ago: "Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices."[1] Additionally, I found another story from a few months back with a lot of comments: "Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year."[2] 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26946972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26946972 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  In my experience, the signal to noise ratio for bootcamp is very low. You might get a diamond in the rough sometimes but it's so inefficient compared to a hiring pipeline from real schools. Lambda now has a program where you can "try" one of their graduates for a few weeks free of charge. Contrast that with the signing bonuses you see negotiated at serious career fairs... That should give you an idea how much people trust Lambda's grads.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    > Lambda now has a program where you can "try" one of their graduates for a few weeks free of charge. Any idea how this works? It seems like it would be difficult to have such a program without running afoul of labor laws. Does Lambda have the equivalent of a temp staffing agency subsidiary to facilitate this program?
    - painfulpox 5y ago
rightsizing 5y ago
Never heard of a right-sizing before. The linguistic hurdles of execs will never cease to amaze me!
- fridif 5y ago
  To be fair, while I'm no "corporate simp", it is entirely possible that a company has hired too many people and needs to fire them to return to the "right size" for profitability to be sustained.
  - hobs 5y ago
    We needed to reduce headcount to maintain profitability. You can keep some marketing speak without being absolutely full of it.
    - elliekelly 5y ago
      > We needed to reduce headcount to maintain profitability. Is Lambda School profitable? They’re still pretty new. And in an entrenched/moderately regulated space. I’d be surprised.
      - hobs 5y ago
        Then say margins, runway, etc - just say what's happening.
  - mattm 5y ago
    How do they know this new size is the "right size"?
- granzymes 5y ago
  It's definitely not a new euphemism. Here's a HN comment from 2008 discussing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=403637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=403637
  - 5y ago
afavour 5y ago
Also of note: > One immediate change, however, is that we are pausing new enrollment in our part-time programs. This all surprised me a little since I imagined schools like this would be doing well, pandemic job losses and expanded unemployment ought to make for a great market of prospective students. I guess it hasn’t been that simple.
- tetrahedr0n 5y ago
  I think the problem is that their part time outcomes were much smaller than full time. And it wasn't entirely an instructor or curriculum related problem. You are correct that schools like this (secondary/trade, not ISA, necessarily) do well during economic downturns, historically.
  - SkyPuncher 5y ago
    My (limited) experience tutoring at another code school resonates with this opinion. It would be great to see a high rate of positive outcomes from part-time students. Many of them simply had too many other priorities to focus on making their coursework successful.
symlinkk 5y ago
Kind of weird seeing this after following Austen on Twitter for so long, he is always bragging on there about how well they’re doing. I guess things aren’t always as great as they seem!
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  After seeing him on HN a few times it's really no surprise. He always seems to spin things positively. He even does it in this post.
idoh 5y ago
That's too bad. I'm rooting for Lambda School, they are trying hard to innovate in the area of education. Maybe ISAs are the future, maybe not, but the traditional university track of spending out $100K+ is clearly not the future. They should have been really excelling during the 2020 year of covid, I wonder where things went wrong. Anyone know?
- lifer555 5y ago
  I am a recent LS graduate. The program is a total shit show. I was able to get a job but I would never recommend it to anyone. They are just very good at marketing. Great idea, terrible execution.
  - pilingual 5y ago
    What about it makes you say that?
    - staticautomatic 5y ago
      The job is at a fast food restaurant.
      - lifer555 5y ago
        I got an entry level SWE position. A bunch of my peers have also landed really awesome positions. It's all about what you put into it, but Lambda School as a whole is just very chaotic. I think if executed properly it would be a pretty good option for people.
        void_mint 5y ago
        I have worked with and managed quite a few code school grads (in my city there are several). This matches my experience with them. You kind of just get force-fed a bunch of content, and if you're a person that does the (extra) work to retain that information, you have the opportunity to find success. I have also observed that lots of code school grads move away from coding immediately on graduation. Lots of QA/PM types come from them (at least here). This is not necessarily a negative.
teruakohatu 5y ago
Can someone explain how you can train Data Scientists in 6 months? What jobs do these grads walk into? The tech prerequisite is: "You should feel extremely comfortable with how a computer works including: touch-typing, web browsers, search engines, and basic computer programs." The Curriculum: Stats, Linear Algebra AND Data Wrangling: 4 Weeks Modeling: 3 Weeks Data Engineering, Databases, SQL, Productionisation: 3 Weeks Machine Learning, NLP, Neural Networks: 3 Weeks Python, OOP, Algorithms & General CS: 3 Weeks Project work: 3 Weeks At that pace over so many subject is anyone walking out able to remember what a dot product or a t-test is from week 1?
- HenryKissinger 5y ago
  > Stats, Linear Algebra AND Data Wrangling: 4 Weeks Ridiculous. Introductory statistics and linear algebra are two separate undergraduate level courses. And if you want a real grasp of statistics, you need to learn probability theory first, which is another semester long course. To say nothing of "data wrangling", whatever the fuck it means.
  - potatoman22 5y ago
    Ehh, you could come close to condensing 1-2 college courses into 4 weeks. It wouldn't be fun though.
    - granzymes 5y ago
      I don't think I could retain the information if it was that compressed, either.
    - mrcartmenez 5y ago
      There’s decent science on why this isn’t possible. Basically you need to space things out to give the brain time to work out what to put into long term memory
      - medvezhenok 5y ago
NoblePublius 5y ago
My last memory of Lambda School was Austin blocking me on Twitter after asking him why every dev bootcamp grad I’ve ever hired is now on my product team.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  You must have a big product team, or hire barely any bootcamp grads.
  - NoblePublius 5y ago
    at the time I had 15 product managers, five of which had come to me as entry level developers out of Flat Iron and some course in Boston I can’t remember the name of. I had a Ruby dev bootcamp grad switch to my finance team as controller (he was also a CPA). He manages timber leases now.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  Can you explain this to me?
- malwarebytess 5y ago
  The implication being bootcamp grads can't into software engineering?
  - NoblePublius 5y ago
    The implication is that good developers don’t need bootcamps as much as potential product managers need them for crash courses on development fundamentals. I’ve lived this personally as an actual founder of a non profit dev bootcamp.
    - aidaman 5y ago
      How do you manage anyone with that level of lack of self awareness? Yea, of course prospective product managers will go to bootcamps to learn the technicals. And why would "good developers" go to a bootcamp? That would defeat the entire purpose. Think smarter. And if you actually think coding bootcamps don't work, just take a fking look at the alumni... https://www.linkedin.com/school/hack-reactor/people/ https://www.linkedin.com/school/hack-reactor/people/
wbronitsky 5y ago
The levels of inhumanity and doublespeak in here are staggering. This post attempts to euphemize 65 people losing their incomes, and probably healthcare, to the point that it reads almost as farce. Not to mention what the impact will be on those remaining, students and staff alike. "...they believe it's impossible to make this model work. We strongly disagree." This is wildly insensitive to those involved. I find it hard to imagine how the 65 people laid off today are going to make that make sense when trying to look for new jobs. "...today's restructuring and right-sizing..." Is this to say that the 65 people who lost their jobs today were somehow wrong? Again, it staggers me how lacking in empathy these words about people losing their jobs, and probably healthcare, indefinitely. "For employers looking to hire senior product, engineering, design, community management, or instructional staff, we'll be sharing a list of interested staff looking for their next opportunity on social media" And good luck current students; these people will take all the jobs you're aiming for. Wow.
- catillac 5y ago
  I get what you’re saying here, but think you’re being a little too harsh. I’m not sure what else to call a reduction in force for PR purposes, I don’t imaging just saying “fired 65 people” is productive. In this comment: “ "For employers looking to hire senior product, engineering, design, community management, or instructional staff, we'll be sharing a list of interested staff looking for their next opportunity on social media" And good luck current students; these people will take all the jobs you're aiming for.” Sounds like Lambda School grads are pretty junior and they’re giving people that are senior a good recommendation. I don’t think there’s much overlap between LS boot camp grads and senior people leaving LS as employees. Maybe I’m wrong?
  - malwarebytess 5y ago
    I think the critique is for the corporate need to propagandize every act such that it paints all decisions, and by extension the leadership, in the best way possible. It's revolting anti-truth. Marketing and propaganda are among the most disgusting inventions of human-kind.
- 5y ago
legerdemain 5y ago
> Lambda pioneered the income share agreement (ISA) in the career > and technical education space, and we're now watching many of > the schools who followed us abandon their ISA offerings because > they believe it's impossible to make this model work. We strongly > disagree. In fact, many things at Lambda School are working very > well, and we are... > ...laying off 65 Lambda School employees.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I think that’s an uncharitable rewriting. To Austen’s credit, he leads with the difficult, negative message (as he should) in the very first sentence.
azuriten 5y ago
> In fact, many things at Lambda School are working very well, and we believe we're on the path to proving this model successful and sustainable. While that may be true (doubt it), I work at a startup with about 150 employees and if we lost 32% of our employees I'd be polishing my CV and wondering when I'll be cut loose. That's not to mention all the negative stories coming out of Lambda School.
- 5revive 5y ago
  especially when you consider that at this point they raised 100 million in funding. For such a relatively small team thats a ton of money they are burning through.
  - mathattack 5y ago
    Is that money being spent on people, or covering investors on ISAs or the CA settlement?
akanet 5y ago
Any former employees interested in speaking to a motivated reporter about their experience, please feel free to contact me. My contact information is on my account bio. I am happy to speak to you completely off the record, in any manner that makes you comfortable. I have never lost a source.
- pmorici 5y ago
  "motivated reporter" Strange way to describe oneself as a reporter isn't it? Shouldn't a reporter's goal to be to follow the facts where ever they lead devoid of any particular motive?
  - jishnum 5y ago
    Off-topic, is there any cue in the above comment to indicate 'motivated' should be read as 'has a defined motive' vs 'enthusiastic / hard-working' ?
    - whiddershins 5y ago
      That’s not off topic, because i read the comment the other way.
    - pmorici 5y ago
      Well, if you click through and look at the OPs work they have previously written an article about the company they describe as, "basically accused the school and its chief officer of fraud". On the comment itself though it is looking for former employees and stressing the anonymous source angle. If I'm promising not to reveal the identities off the bat I'm clearly fishing for negative views on something. Have you ever read an article where an anonymous source said something glowingly positive about a subject? I sort of agree that Lambda School is probably over selling itself but if I were looking to learn more about it in a balanced manner I would probably use more neutral language when soliciting information.
  - chrisoverzero 5y ago
    That’s not what “motivated” means in this context.
temp8964 5y ago
I hope they success. The traditional higher education is becoming more and more a scam. Federal government is backing almost all the student loans, but universities automatically increase their tuitions. The student loan crisis is a clear indication that this model is not working. For the past 20 years, in-state public university tuitions have increased more than 200% [1]. Now the total student loans count to approximately $1.6 trillion [2]. In the past, America had a tradition of wealthy people create new universities. Now we only have the rich donating to established universities, but no longer building new ones. Elite universities are all about powers, instead of educating more people, that's why they don't make efforts to expand their campus or create new campuses. Ever heard Harvard build a new campus in a different city? Or Yale acquire an not so successful private university to level to it up so that their success can spread out and more students can be benefit? No. I cherish people who want to build a new model for higher / technical education. And wish them the best luck. There certainly will be trails and errors. And I hope them can power through. 1. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2017-09-20/see-20-years-of-tuition-growth-at-national-universities https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co... 2. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/081216/who-actually-owns-student-loan-debt.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08121...
- paxys 5y ago
  If you look at how much these bootcamps charge (both in terms of tuition and income sharing), college is by far the cheaper option.
  - tetrahedr0n 5y ago
    My ISA with lambda is for $30k USD that I started paying after I landed a job. There is no additional tuition. Program is less than a year. That's significantly cheaper than any of the universities I could have gone to. The trade off, in my mind, is that I didn't become a SWE in lambda. Engineering is far more broad than learning how to build a CRUD app. Since Lambda, my self appointed curriculum has been engineering fundamentals, design patters/language/etc. Knowing how to write a BST is a lot different than understanding the core concepts behind everyday algos.
Ericson2314 5y ago
Anecdotally we are seeing a lot of slack at the junior dev end of the labor market, and a popping of the bootcamp bubble. But make no mistake, this is mission accomplished not mission failed for some. We're the last best-paid skilled trade, and Capital is after us.
- wyclif 5y ago
  What do you mean by "slack at the junior dev end of the market?"
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    "slack" means there's more supply than demand. Imagine a bunch of strings, maybe some sort of graph, that aren't being pulled very tight. So in this case there are more junior devs than the employers want to hire.
    - wyclif 5y ago
      I find this to be true as well. Almost all the openings I see are for senior devs.
- vxNsr 5y ago
  Yup I still consider myself junior level and the only available positions I see are senior.
BrianOnHN 5y ago
This is a real testament to the failures of higher education. The revenue-sharing once seemed "at least aligned" to me. But it's become clear that Lambda school is classic game theory at work, optimization without regard for process. Because of this, I'm corned into thinking that education, like healthcare, is one of those things that should be off limits to profit seekers. And yes, that means having to do the hard work as a society and identifying how we can maximize education through common resources for a common good.
lquist 5y ago
"which made the decision to make these changes very difficult" Odd choice here. I think it's kind of textbook not to say that the decision to layoff people was hard on you.
carabiner 5y ago
Headline missing (YC S17).
zackkrida 5y ago
Calling a downsizing a “right-sizing” is so infantalizing and condescending
deleted 5y ago
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joshxyz 5y ago
You know I like how it's a fast paced learning track that's better than 4 year degrees - no argument on that if. But this Austin Allred guy is one sketchy motherfucker. And seeing PG not reacting about the shitty reviews LambdaSchool is getting is the most hypocrytic thing I've seen at all. Aged like fucking milk.
- tetrahedr0n 5y ago
  Lol, absolutely. Austin may have been the right guy to start the company, but IMHO, he should've handed it off to someone with a background in education a long time ago.
  - aidaman 5y ago
    No. Coding bootcamps should be run by software engineers. Which is the farthest from what Austen is.
- 5revive 5y ago
  why would PG care? His job was to get a bunch of hype for Lambda so their initial investment could be marked up to whatever the last raise put the company at. Austin is probably one of PG's favorite tech guys because he basically took a bootcamp, wrapped it in 1 legal nuance and with a fuck ton of twitter hype made PG/YC probably a 10x return.
- prawn 5y ago
  I find this very interesting too. Firstly, let's be charitable and assume PG can look beyond any investment he has in judging this. I think he'd look at it then as some potholes on the way to an eventual smooth highway. He likes disruption of old, flawed ways. He likes motivated sorts doing the disrupting. Airbnb and Uber and the like are not without their own bumpy roads. And the potholes here are lay-offs for people who otherwise saw employment for a period with Lambda. Or payments to Lambda that trigger only when you're making money yourself. He might think of those as reasonable downsides en route to a more polished, future Lambda service. The model itself (pay if you earn) isn't outrageous. We had something similar (but government-based) with HECS in Australia, that's evolved a bit since.
painfulpox 5y ago
I am about to start with a company through the Fellowship program on Monday. There is a staffing agency that we are paid through. The pay isn't phenomenal, but it is a buck or two above a living wage for the state you reside in. If the company decides they like us and want to keep us on, then they reimburse Lambda for what they paid us during the Fellowship. We aren't locked into the Lambda pay rate if we are hired, and are encouraged to negotiate our offers. There is supposed to be an actual position open for hire in order for organizations to take advantage of the program, but obviously that could be exploited. I am cautiously optimistic, though.
- painfulpox 5y ago
  First reply and managed to screw it up!
NoblePublius 5y ago
“ We're trying to do something that hasn't been done before – prove that an accessible, incentive-aligned education model can work sustainably for all students willing to put in the work. ” “Willing to put in the work” shows me that Austen is already rationalizing his failure in terms of his indentured servants —- I mean students — not working hard enough.
recent_ds_grad 5y ago
Reading this feels a bit unfortunate, I was looking forward to making a post on next week's 'Who's Hiring May 2021' thread having finished their data science curriculum recently then polishing up my resume & personal site over the weekend. Going through a fully remote bootcamp backed by YC seemed like an excellent fit to be done in 6 months right around when second wave covid was about to hit, having been doing Advent of Code & Hackerrank challenges in Python for the better part of a year and was excited at the opportunity to formalize in-demand skills combining data analysis and programming. While I think Lambda is doing a fairly decent job with the curriculum on the data science side (having been condensed from 9 -> 6 months); the job market has doubled down on being competitive through hard skills while the school has doubled down on training students in soft skills, and isn't providing enough resources to upskill before reaching the ceiling of becoming a mid-level software engineer within a few years of landing their first job. Some of the curriculum especially unit 3 felt like a chore where I had a lot of trouble with how quickly material was being crammed in, with almost no regard to ensure understanding of the previous day's. The forced mentor/mentee relationships and track teams also felt like I'd gotten zero value-add from, and Lambda continues to have the pitfall of no student accountability whilst passing forward multiple students who didn't contribute a single line of code to our build week projects that will need to be fully redone if showing them off as portfolio pieces. This lack of being thorough and due diligence coupled with seeing recent posts in the #hired channel receive lower salary offers seems to have confirmed that not enough is being done to address the skills gap between college grads and the lousy reputation bootcamp grads have been getting as of lately. Having maxed out the amount I'm able to borrow in student loans & exceeding the max number of credits taken during my time at university to be eligible for a degree, a non-traditional education approach like Lambda really appealed to me and I wish the staff and school the best of success going forwards. Hopefully the Amazon partnership will be a stepping stone for big tech to tell Lambda and the broader hiring market what they want from junior developers in an ever-tightening labor market. The CS and labs units felt like an excellent experience and the students in our labs project have been valuable to work directly with on a real-world software engineering application. Disclosure: I have no contractual agreements with an ISA.
- sugarwater 5y ago
  Can agree with you 100% about Unit 3 in the data science track. I know a few of my peers that walked out without even setting up their local development (because they were on windows and there was little help or instruction for students with windows). But I'm glad you got something good out of CS and Labs. I'd describe CS as neutral for me... It was just grinding CodeSignal. Labs was extremely disorganized and suffered from a lack of leadership and its sudden shortened length (from 2 months to 1 month).
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villgax 5y ago
Do they themselves hire folks they train? This is akin to Byju's in India with WhiteHatJr coding classes for kids by milking the parents fear of not wanting their kids to be left out. That monster ended up unleashing a fake kid to be used in their Ads & launching completely useless & random app(which they themselves create & pass off to parents) onto play stores & boasting about it with Twitter a/c's of kids who are not old enough to even register an account. The only shade that they hide behind is that they hire only women teachers, nobody out here is denigrating on that point yet they try to make that the case by hiring sub-par faculties.
mathattack 5y ago
Is what killed them the CA regulatory issue, or part time programs not being a fit with ISAs?

232 points by caust1c 5y ago

kgin 5y ago

Nobody has ever called hiring more people "right-sizing" when they thought a larger size was right for the company.

Looks like a refocusing on the full-time program. Doesn't seem _too_ surprising, given how many part-time programs (ie, Coursera) have struggled to retain users distracted by jobs and life. I hope they figure it out. 4-year university education for everyone is a broken model, and students deserve a cheaper path that doesn't eat half a decade of their life.

fridif 5y ago
Agree. I used to be against the technical interview process, but now I wholeheartedly believe in every facet of it (Leetcode, book knowledge, project based behavioral questions, system design). The quicker everyone learns these important concepts, non of which are taught in school or in bootcamps, the quicker one gets to be productive in programming.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  leetcode/hackerrank is the worst thing to happen to tech interviews this decade.
  - fridif 5y ago
    Explain your reasoning, and I will explain mine. While some of the leetcode questions have tedious edge cases and ambiguous logic, there is no doubt in my mind that lists, trees, arrays, queues, maps, graphs, sorting, binary searching, and memoization are crucial for being an amazing programmer
    - andrew_ 5y ago
      If you truly believe that the measure of amazing programmer is churning out bullshit exercises on a timed call, I can only state that I'm thankful we don't work together. It's incredibly audacious gate-keeping and I'd dare say, discriminatory. It ignores disabilities, social adjustment conditions, etc that wouldn't impact daily work. I know too many incredible engineers that don't think in the way that those timed exercises require, and these folks are wildly talented and wildly successful.
      - fridif 5y ago
        I do agree with you that the system blocks more people than it should. Personally, I think there should be many more apprenticeships than there are currently. There are many technical roles that can be fulfilled by people of all backgrounds. But, for the most serious roles, there needs to be skill scrutiny and performance under pressure. Think of the difference between a performing artist and a music teacher. Both are vital roles and have related but distinct skill sets. The performing artist must have everything drilled and ready to go on stage, much like a heart surgeon shouldn't be doing research on the operating table.
        andrew_ 5y ago
        Are we going to ask a symphonic performer to produce scales during an interview, a heart surgeon to suture a laceration? We would not, it would be insulting for a myriad of reasons.
        fridif 5y ago
        If a symphonic performer can't run through some scales, or a doctor cant suture a laceration, I would say that is indicative of a major problem. If you owned a restaurant, would you hire a hostess that couldn't operate a telephone, or a cook that couldn't turn on a stove? Similarly I wouldn't hire a programmer that could not turn an array into a linked list.
        5y ago
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    I don't think you quite appreciate the volume of utterly incompetent candidates (with plausible resumes) companies get for every software dev opening. It's a deluge, and no company on earth can deal with interviewing them all. The only realistic alternative to hackerrank is to do strict university filtering, only interviewing candidates who come from ranked universities. This is obviously terrible. Hackerrank, even though it annoys you, is an ENORMOUS leveling of the playing field, giving opportunities to people who didn't have the money or connections or whatever to make it into a top CS program. If you aren't those people, you don't understand what doors it opens.
    - andrew_ 5y ago
      I'm not sure you appreciate the volume of utterly incompetent interviewers and processes now out there. I have 20 years of experience, a sizable catalog of open source work available for browsing, and yet even at this level I'm subjected to the nonsense that is leetcode. Another beef - I have yet to see an exercise which is remotely relevant to the work being done. Shuffling arrays, regurgitating interview preparation exercises, mutating objects, all-out silly exercises like "convert this number to a roman numeral" don't measure a candidate. So where do you set the bar? This goes being annoying - leetcode exercises are pure laziness and a red flag of an inept hiring process for all but the least experienced candidates. The job market solved this problem eons ago - references, references, references. If you have none and you have no portfolio on which to measure your ability, you fall below the bar and sure, then I'll concede that some measure of basic ability is necessary. No one asks for, calls, or contacts references anymore (we do). Want to know if someone is capable? Talk to the people they've been working with. Scrutinize references for obvious softballs. If you actually care about the person you want to work with, and think you want to work with someone you respect, put a modicum of effort in. We've shifted to using tiered collaborative "projects" that we book an hour to two hours to work through with a candidate. We give them the ability to review what we'll be working on together, in detail, before the call so that they can prepare. It's also _not_ about finishing, there is no finish line, it's about collaboration, and we tell the candidates that. We've had many candidates state this was being their ability, and see themselves out. Thats FAR more respectful of a candidate than leetcode for someone who's spent 10 years delivering microservices for a profitable business. It's also far more representative of the work they'll be asked to do: - Being given a description of work - Pairing or collaborating - Stating what they do and do not know - Researching a thing I'd hire someone that failed an array shuffling algo bullshit leetcode challnge, but worked very well with a small group for an hour, and was able to deliver good answers and make progress on a task. > Hackerrank, even though it annoys you, is an ENORMOUS leveling of the playing field, giving opportunities to people who didn't have the money or connections or whatever to make it into a top CS program. I hope I've made it clear that this has nothing to do with leveling the playing field, and nothing to do with getting into CS programs. I mentioned prior that I have 20 years of experience professionally, no degree, and the last 4 people I've recommended for hire had only one prior position, were bootcamp grads (one self-taught), and are excelling in every area. They're wonderful, motivated people. What Hackerrank DOES do is shift the burden of actually caring about the people you're speaking to. If volume is an issue, the process is BROKEN.
sg47 5y ago
I feel that immersive programs are the way to go. Teach each subject in 3 month chunks. Candidate can continue to apply for jobs with the skills they have learnt. Let's say they have acquired enough skills to find jobs at the 3rd, 6th or 9th month, they can leave the program. This compulsion to finish 4 years is nonsense.

celim307 5y ago

Anyone with knowledge know if this is isolated to lambda falling behind their peers, or the industry itself starting to turn away from hiring boot camp grads?

bpodgursky 5y ago
Totally anecdotal from an employer perspective, but I haven't seen any companies turning away from bootcamp grads.
kbenson 5y ago
Possibly related to the submission here from a few days ago: "Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices."[1] Additionally, I found another story from a few months back with a lot of comments: "Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year."[2] 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26946972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26946972 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017
908B64B197 5y ago
In my experience, the signal to noise ratio for bootcamp is very low. You might get a diamond in the rough sometimes but it's so inefficient compared to a hiring pipeline from real schools. Lambda now has a program where you can "try" one of their graduates for a few weeks free of charge. Contrast that with the signing bonuses you see negotiated at serious career fairs... That should give you an idea how much people trust Lambda's grads.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  > Lambda now has a program where you can "try" one of their graduates for a few weeks free of charge. Any idea how this works? It seems like it would be difficult to have such a program without running afoul of labor laws. Does Lambda have the equivalent of a temp staffing agency subsidiary to facilitate this program?
  - painfulpox 5y ago

rightsizing 5y ago

Never heard of a right-sizing before. The linguistic hurdles of execs will never cease to amaze me!

fridif 5y ago
To be fair, while I'm no "corporate simp", it is entirely possible that a company has hired too many people and needs to fire them to return to the "right size" for profitability to be sustained.
- hobs 5y ago
  We needed to reduce headcount to maintain profitability. You can keep some marketing speak without being absolutely full of it.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    > We needed to reduce headcount to maintain profitability. Is Lambda School profitable? They’re still pretty new. And in an entrenched/moderately regulated space. I’d be surprised.
    - hobs 5y ago
      Then say margins, runway, etc - just say what's happening.
- mattm 5y ago
  How do they know this new size is the "right size"?
granzymes 5y ago
It's definitely not a new euphemism. Here's a HN comment from 2008 discussing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=403637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=403637
- 5y ago

afavour 5y ago

Also of note: > One immediate change, however, is that we are pausing new enrollment in our part-time programs. This all surprised me a little since I imagined schools like this would be doing well, pandemic job losses and expanded unemployment ought to make for a great market of prospective students. I guess it hasn’t been that simple.

tetrahedr0n 5y ago
I think the problem is that their part time outcomes were much smaller than full time. And it wasn't entirely an instructor or curriculum related problem. You are correct that schools like this (secondary/trade, not ISA, necessarily) do well during economic downturns, historically.
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  My (limited) experience tutoring at another code school resonates with this opinion. It would be great to see a high rate of positive outcomes from part-time students. Many of them simply had too many other priorities to focus on making their coursework successful.

symlinkk 5y ago

Kind of weird seeing this after following Austen on Twitter for so long, he is always bragging on there about how well they’re doing. I guess things aren’t always as great as they seem!

ZephyrBlu 5y ago
After seeing him on HN a few times it's really no surprise. He always seems to spin things positively. He even does it in this post.

idoh 5y ago

That's too bad. I'm rooting for Lambda School, they are trying hard to innovate in the area of education. Maybe ISAs are the future, maybe not, but the traditional university track of spending out $100K+ is clearly not the future. They should have been really excelling during the 2020 year of covid, I wonder where things went wrong. Anyone know?

lifer555 5y ago
I am a recent LS graduate. The program is a total shit show. I was able to get a job but I would never recommend it to anyone. They are just very good at marketing. Great idea, terrible execution.
- pilingual 5y ago
  What about it makes you say that?
  - staticautomatic 5y ago
    The job is at a fast food restaurant.
    - lifer555 5y ago
      I got an entry level SWE position. A bunch of my peers have also landed really awesome positions. It's all about what you put into it, but Lambda School as a whole is just very chaotic. I think if executed properly it would be a pretty good option for people.
      - void_mint 5y ago
        I have worked with and managed quite a few code school grads (in my city there are several). This matches my experience with them. You kind of just get force-fed a bunch of content, and if you're a person that does the (extra) work to retain that information, you have the opportunity to find success. I have also observed that lots of code school grads move away from coding immediately on graduation. Lots of QA/PM types come from them (at least here). This is not necessarily a negative.

teruakohatu 5y ago

Can someone explain how you can train Data Scientists in 6 months? What jobs do these grads walk into? The tech prerequisite is: "You should feel extremely comfortable with how a computer works including: touch-typing, web browsers, search engines, and basic computer programs." The Curriculum: Stats, Linear Algebra AND Data Wrangling: 4 Weeks Modeling: 3 Weeks Data Engineering, Databases, SQL, Productionisation: 3 Weeks Machine Learning, NLP, Neural Networks: 3 Weeks Python, OOP, Algorithms & General CS: 3 Weeks Project work: 3 Weeks At that pace over so many subject is anyone walking out able to remember what a dot product or a t-test is from week 1?

HenryKissinger 5y ago
> Stats, Linear Algebra AND Data Wrangling: 4 Weeks Ridiculous. Introductory statistics and linear algebra are two separate undergraduate level courses. And if you want a real grasp of statistics, you need to learn probability theory first, which is another semester long course. To say nothing of "data wrangling", whatever the fuck it means.
- potatoman22 5y ago
  Ehh, you could come close to condensing 1-2 college courses into 4 weeks. It wouldn't be fun though.
  - granzymes 5y ago
    I don't think I could retain the information if it was that compressed, either.
  - mrcartmenez 5y ago
    There’s decent science on why this isn’t possible. Basically you need to space things out to give the brain time to work out what to put into long term memory
    - medvezhenok 5y ago

NoblePublius 5y ago

My last memory of Lambda School was Austin blocking me on Twitter after asking him why every dev bootcamp grad I’ve ever hired is now on my product team.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago
You must have a big product team, or hire barely any bootcamp grads.
- NoblePublius 5y ago
  at the time I had 15 product managers, five of which had come to me as entry level developers out of Flat Iron and some course in Boston I can’t remember the name of. I had a Ruby dev bootcamp grad switch to my finance team as controller (he was also a CPA). He manages timber leases now.
DangitBobby 5y ago
Can you explain this to me?
malwarebytess 5y ago
The implication being bootcamp grads can't into software engineering?
- NoblePublius 5y ago
  The implication is that good developers don’t need bootcamps as much as potential product managers need them for crash courses on development fundamentals. I’ve lived this personally as an actual founder of a non profit dev bootcamp.
  - aidaman 5y ago
    How do you manage anyone with that level of lack of self awareness? Yea, of course prospective product managers will go to bootcamps to learn the technicals. And why would "good developers" go to a bootcamp? That would defeat the entire purpose. Think smarter. And if you actually think coding bootcamps don't work, just take a fking look at the alumni... https://www.linkedin.com/school/hack-reactor/people/ https://www.linkedin.com/school/hack-reactor/people/

wbronitsky 5y ago

The levels of inhumanity and doublespeak in here are staggering. This post attempts to euphemize 65 people losing their incomes, and probably healthcare, to the point that it reads almost as farce. Not to mention what the impact will be on those remaining, students and staff alike. "...they believe it's impossible to make this model work. We strongly disagree." This is wildly insensitive to those involved. I find it hard to imagine how the 65 people laid off today are going to make that make sense when trying to look for new jobs. "...today's restructuring and right-sizing..." Is this to say that the 65 people who lost their jobs today were somehow wrong? Again, it staggers me how lacking in empathy these words about people losing their jobs, and probably healthcare, indefinitely. "For employers looking to hire senior product, engineering, design, community management, or instructional staff, we'll be sharing a list of interested staff looking for their next opportunity on social media" And good luck current students; these people will take all the jobs you're aiming for. Wow.

catillac 5y ago
I get what you’re saying here, but think you’re being a little too harsh. I’m not sure what else to call a reduction in force for PR purposes, I don’t imaging just saying “fired 65 people” is productive. In this comment: “ "For employers looking to hire senior product, engineering, design, community management, or instructional staff, we'll be sharing a list of interested staff looking for their next opportunity on social media" And good luck current students; these people will take all the jobs you're aiming for.” Sounds like Lambda School grads are pretty junior and they’re giving people that are senior a good recommendation. I don’t think there’s much overlap between LS boot camp grads and senior people leaving LS as employees. Maybe I’m wrong?
- malwarebytess 5y ago
  I think the critique is for the corporate need to propagandize every act such that it paints all decisions, and by extension the leadership, in the best way possible. It's revolting anti-truth. Marketing and propaganda are among the most disgusting inventions of human-kind.
5y ago

legerdemain 5y ago

> Lambda pioneered the income share agreement (ISA) in the career > and technical education space, and we're now watching many of > the schools who followed us abandon their ISA offerings because > they believe it's impossible to make this model work. We strongly > disagree. In fact, many things at Lambda School are working very > well, and we are... > ...laying off 65 Lambda School employees.

sokoloff 5y ago
I think that’s an uncharitable rewriting. To Austen’s credit, he leads with the difficult, negative message (as he should) in the very first sentence.

azuriten 5y ago

> In fact, many things at Lambda School are working very well, and we believe we're on the path to proving this model successful and sustainable. While that may be true (doubt it), I work at a startup with about 150 employees and if we lost 32% of our employees I'd be polishing my CV and wondering when I'll be cut loose. That's not to mention all the negative stories coming out of Lambda School.

5revive 5y ago
especially when you consider that at this point they raised 100 million in funding. For such a relatively small team thats a ton of money they are burning through.
- mathattack 5y ago
  Is that money being spent on people, or covering investors on ISAs or the CA settlement?

akanet 5y ago

Any former employees interested in speaking to a motivated reporter about their experience, please feel free to contact me. My contact information is on my account bio. I am happy to speak to you completely off the record, in any manner that makes you comfortable. I have never lost a source.

pmorici 5y ago
"motivated reporter" Strange way to describe oneself as a reporter isn't it? Shouldn't a reporter's goal to be to follow the facts where ever they lead devoid of any particular motive?
- jishnum 5y ago
  Off-topic, is there any cue in the above comment to indicate 'motivated' should be read as 'has a defined motive' vs 'enthusiastic / hard-working' ?
  - whiddershins 5y ago
    That’s not off topic, because i read the comment the other way.
  - pmorici 5y ago
    Well, if you click through and look at the OPs work they have previously written an article about the company they describe as, "basically accused the school and its chief officer of fraud". On the comment itself though it is looking for former employees and stressing the anonymous source angle. If I'm promising not to reveal the identities off the bat I'm clearly fishing for negative views on something. Have you ever read an article where an anonymous source said something glowingly positive about a subject? I sort of agree that Lambda School is probably over selling itself but if I were looking to learn more about it in a balanced manner I would probably use more neutral language when soliciting information.
- chrisoverzero 5y ago
  That’s not what “motivated” means in this context.

temp8964 5y ago

I hope they success. The traditional higher education is becoming more and more a scam. Federal government is backing almost all the student loans, but universities automatically increase their tuitions. The student loan crisis is a clear indication that this model is not working. For the past 20 years, in-state public university tuitions have increased more than 200% [1]. Now the total student loans count to approximately $1.6 trillion [2]. In the past, America had a tradition of wealthy people create new universities. Now we only have the rich donating to established universities, but no longer building new ones. Elite universities are all about powers, instead of educating more people, that's why they don't make efforts to expand their campus or create new campuses. Ever heard Harvard build a new campus in a different city? Or Yale acquire an not so successful private university to level to it up so that their success can spread out and more students can be benefit? No. I cherish people who want to build a new model for higher / technical education. And wish them the best luck. There certainly will be trails and errors. And I hope them can power through. 1. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2017-09-20/see-20-years-of-tuition-growth-at-national-universities https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co... 2. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/081216/who-actually-owns-student-loan-debt.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08121...

paxys 5y ago
If you look at how much these bootcamps charge (both in terms of tuition and income sharing), college is by far the cheaper option.
- tetrahedr0n 5y ago
  My ISA with lambda is for $30k USD that I started paying after I landed a job. There is no additional tuition. Program is less than a year. That's significantly cheaper than any of the universities I could have gone to. The trade off, in my mind, is that I didn't become a SWE in lambda. Engineering is far more broad than learning how to build a CRUD app. Since Lambda, my self appointed curriculum has been engineering fundamentals, design patters/language/etc. Knowing how to write a BST is a lot different than understanding the core concepts behind everyday algos.

Ericson2314 5y ago

Anecdotally we are seeing a lot of slack at the junior dev end of the labor market, and a popping of the bootcamp bubble. But make no mistake, this is mission accomplished not mission failed for some. We're the last best-paid skilled trade, and Capital is after us.

wyclif 5y ago
What do you mean by "slack at the junior dev end of the market?"
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  "slack" means there's more supply than demand. Imagine a bunch of strings, maybe some sort of graph, that aren't being pulled very tight. So in this case there are more junior devs than the employers want to hire.
  - wyclif 5y ago
    I find this to be true as well. Almost all the openings I see are for senior devs.
vxNsr 5y ago
Yup I still consider myself junior level and the only available positions I see are senior.

BrianOnHN 5y ago

This is a real testament to the failures of higher education. The revenue-sharing once seemed "at least aligned" to me. But it's become clear that Lambda school is classic game theory at work, optimization without regard for process. Because of this, I'm corned into thinking that education, like healthcare, is one of those things that should be off limits to profit seekers. And yes, that means having to do the hard work as a society and identifying how we can maximize education through common resources for a common good.

lquist 5y ago

"which made the decision to make these changes very difficult" Odd choice here. I think it's kind of textbook not to say that the decision to layoff people was hard on you.

carabiner 5y ago

Headline missing (YC S17).

zackkrida 5y ago

Calling a downsizing a “right-sizing” is so infantalizing and condescending

deleted 5y ago

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joshxyz 5y ago

You know I like how it's a fast paced learning track that's better than 4 year degrees - no argument on that if. But this Austin Allred guy is one sketchy motherfucker. And seeing PG not reacting about the shitty reviews LambdaSchool is getting is the most hypocrytic thing I've seen at all. Aged like fucking milk.

tetrahedr0n 5y ago
Lol, absolutely. Austin may have been the right guy to start the company, but IMHO, he should've handed it off to someone with a background in education a long time ago.
- aidaman 5y ago
  No. Coding bootcamps should be run by software engineers. Which is the farthest from what Austen is.
5revive 5y ago
why would PG care? His job was to get a bunch of hype for Lambda so their initial investment could be marked up to whatever the last raise put the company at. Austin is probably one of PG's favorite tech guys because he basically took a bootcamp, wrapped it in 1 legal nuance and with a fuck ton of twitter hype made PG/YC probably a 10x return.
prawn 5y ago
I find this very interesting too. Firstly, let's be charitable and assume PG can look beyond any investment he has in judging this. I think he'd look at it then as some potholes on the way to an eventual smooth highway. He likes disruption of old, flawed ways. He likes motivated sorts doing the disrupting. Airbnb and Uber and the like are not without their own bumpy roads. And the potholes here are lay-offs for people who otherwise saw employment for a period with Lambda. Or payments to Lambda that trigger only when you're making money yourself. He might think of those as reasonable downsides en route to a more polished, future Lambda service. The model itself (pay if you earn) isn't outrageous. We had something similar (but government-based) with HECS in Australia, that's evolved a bit since.

painfulpox 5y ago

I am about to start with a company through the Fellowship program on Monday. There is a staffing agency that we are paid through. The pay isn't phenomenal, but it is a buck or two above a living wage for the state you reside in. If the company decides they like us and want to keep us on, then they reimburse Lambda for what they paid us during the Fellowship. We aren't locked into the Lambda pay rate if we are hired, and are encouraged to negotiate our offers. There is supposed to be an actual position open for hire in order for organizations to take advantage of the program, but obviously that could be exploited. I am cautiously optimistic, though.

painfulpox 5y ago
First reply and managed to screw it up!

NoblePublius 5y ago

“ We're trying to do something that hasn't been done before – prove that an accessible, incentive-aligned education model can work sustainably for all students willing to put in the work. ” “Willing to put in the work” shows me that Austen is already rationalizing his failure in terms of his indentured servants —- I mean students — not working hard enough.

recent_ds_grad 5y ago

Reading this feels a bit unfortunate, I was looking forward to making a post on next week's 'Who's Hiring May 2021' thread having finished their data science curriculum recently then polishing up my resume & personal site over the weekend. Going through a fully remote bootcamp backed by YC seemed like an excellent fit to be done in 6 months right around when second wave covid was about to hit, having been doing Advent of Code & Hackerrank challenges in Python for the better part of a year and was excited at the opportunity to formalize in-demand skills combining data analysis and programming. While I think Lambda is doing a fairly decent job with the curriculum on the data science side (having been condensed from 9 -> 6 months); the job market has doubled down on being competitive through hard skills while the school has doubled down on training students in soft skills, and isn't providing enough resources to upskill before reaching the ceiling of becoming a mid-level software engineer within a few years of landing their first job. Some of the curriculum especially unit 3 felt like a chore where I had a lot of trouble with how quickly material was being crammed in, with almost no regard to ensure understanding of the previous day's. The forced mentor/mentee relationships and track teams also felt like I'd gotten zero value-add from, and Lambda continues to have the pitfall of no student accountability whilst passing forward multiple students who didn't contribute a single line of code to our build week projects that will need to be fully redone if showing them off as portfolio pieces. This lack of being thorough and due diligence coupled with seeing recent posts in the #hired channel receive lower salary offers seems to have confirmed that not enough is being done to address the skills gap between college grads and the lousy reputation bootcamp grads have been getting as of lately. Having maxed out the amount I'm able to borrow in student loans & exceeding the max number of credits taken during my time at university to be eligible for a degree, a non-traditional education approach like Lambda really appealed to me and I wish the staff and school the best of success going forwards. Hopefully the Amazon partnership will be a stepping stone for big tech to tell Lambda and the broader hiring market what they want from junior developers in an ever-tightening labor market. The CS and labs units felt like an excellent experience and the students in our labs project have been valuable to work directly with on a real-world software engineering application. Disclosure: I have no contractual agreements with an ISA.

sugarwater 5y ago
Can agree with you 100% about Unit 3 in the data science track. I know a few of my peers that walked out without even setting up their local development (because they were on windows and there was little help or instruction for students with windows). But I'm glad you got something good out of CS and Labs. I'd describe CS as neutral for me... It was just grinding CodeSignal. Labs was extremely disorganized and suffered from a lack of leadership and its sudden shortened length (from 2 months to 1 month).

deleted 5y ago

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villgax 5y ago

Do they themselves hire folks they train? This is akin to Byju's in India with WhiteHatJr coding classes for kids by milking the parents fear of not wanting their kids to be left out. That monster ended up unleashing a fake kid to be used in their Ads & launching completely useless & random app(which they themselves create & pass off to parents) onto play stores & boasting about it with Twitter a/c's of kids who are not old enough to even register an account. The only shade that they hide behind is that they hire only women teachers, nobody out here is denigrating on that point yet they try to make that the case by hiring sub-par faculties.

mathattack 5y ago

Is what killed them the CA regulatory issue, or part time programs not being a fit with ISAs?