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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 cu

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).
- jwilber 5y ago
  “ 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).” I remember the pains in undergrad of trying to get tensorflow to correctly make use the gpu on a windows machine. Not fun! Anyways, not trying to be rude here, but this is pretty concerning to read. If someone needs to have their handheld through installs then I’m not sure how effective I’d ever expect them to be in any autonomous role with any ambiguity (hint: data science requires both). Even more concerning if this is at a later stage of the curriculum.
  - sugarwater 5y ago
    It's in the third month of the curriculum, after primarily only working with Google Colab in the previous two. Keep in mind that a majority of the students have never seen or touched a command-line, and trying to install various tools resulted in a lot of errors for a lot of students, troubleshooted by TLs that were only students 2+ months ahead.
    - jwilber 5y ago
      Right, that all makes sense, but you can’t join a company just to say, “well only 6 months ago I’d never touched a command-line!”. I know plenty who have succeeded from boot camps and plenty who haven’t. I think the best thing boot camps can do is have a stronger acceptance criteria - letting anyone in just sets them (and the brand’s reputation) up for failure. But I guess they need to make money.

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).

jwilber 5y ago
“ 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).” I remember the pains in undergrad of trying to get tensorflow to correctly make use the gpu on a windows machine. Not fun! Anyways, not trying to be rude here, but this is pretty concerning to read. If someone needs to have their handheld through installs then I’m not sure how effective I’d ever expect them to be in any autonomous role with any ambiguity (hint: data science requires both). Even more concerning if this is at a later stage of the curriculum.
- sugarwater 5y ago
  It's in the third month of the curriculum, after primarily only working with Google Colab in the previous two. Keep in mind that a majority of the students have never seen or touched a command-line, and trying to install various tools resulted in a lot of errors for a lot of students, troubleshooted by TLs that were only students 2+ months ahead.
  - jwilber 5y ago
    Right, that all makes sense, but you can’t join a company just to say, “well only 6 months ago I’d never touched a command-line!”. I know plenty who have succeeded from boot camps and plenty who haven’t. I think the best thing boot camps can do is have a stronger acceptance criteria - letting anyone in just sets them (and the brand’s reputation) up for failure. But I guess they need to make money.