4 ms·
Lambda School ISA terms have a 5 year enforcment term. How is that justifiable?
Learn from a predatory loan victim and just teach yourself to program. Hindsight is 20/20.
I get it; I made a bad decision and signed a $30k contract for for 7 months of "Education" under the guided assumption I would immediately (or at least quickly) get a job after with my newly developed skills (Web Development(Node.React)/Computer Science Track 2018). I was poor af at the time and $50k a year was way more than I could ever make doing what I was doing.
This did not happen. I did not get a job making over $50k.
After several months, I took a crap PHP job making $12 an hour. A family member worked for the company and got me the job. I figured, at least I'd be learning a new skill and decided it was better than making considerably more money bartending.
I worked there full-time for a year and then part-time for another year leveling up my PHP/Laravel skills as well as devoppsy stuff (They had their own server. It was actually pretty cool). The reason I went part-time was to pursue a crypto venture with some friends, also written in PHP/Laravel but included Vue as well. I got pretty proficient in Vue over the year and had that project as well as some others to show for it. Using these projects in my portfolio, I landed a much better job.
I started doing some Vue contract work for an actual software company and, after a few months, they hired me full-time.
2021, over two years after completing Lambda School, I got a over $50k paying job which I was qualified for due to my two years of programming experience. For, the icing on top, the past two years haven't even been related to what the Lambda curriculum was. I haven't even used those technologies since 2018.
Here I am now, obligated to pay %17 percent of my pretax income for a course I did years ago that didn't help me at all get to where I am now. How is that fair? I'm pretty sure I have no legal basis as a contract is a contract, but this is just wrong.
There has to be many people in this same boat; A lot can happen in 2 years, let alone 5! I'd like to hear some feedback on this.
- wmf 5y agoIf you had to repay $30K in two years that would be a whopping 30% of a $50K salary. I'm also not sure how you managed to graduate from Lambda yet none of your JS/Node/React training is benefiting your current Vue work...
- billippio 5y agoTo clarify, I just recently started making over $50k, which means I have to start making payments for 24 months which will total to the max of $30k. My point is that, the only reason I got this job is from having actual work experience and personal projects from the past two years. The tech industry changes fast; 2 years is a life time. I'm not saying I didn't learn anything there. I'm just saying $30k is pretty steep for a rudimentary understanding of Javascript/Node and and a framework I wouldn't even recognize today.
- dwrodri 5y agoI empathize with your situation, in the sense that it is quite frustrating paying for a service that didn't fulfill its end of the bargain. Perhaps there should be more legislation focusing on the terms of ISAs. Until a few years ago, they were a financial instrument that had been discarded by higher ed because they simply didn't work quite well, and mostly relied on a few high earners "bearing the load" of the debt accrued by all ISA holders. On the topic of bootcamps--I have one question for the tech vets in this thread: have you ever considered spending your time at a bootcamp? How did it go? I think there's a "reverse pipeline problem" in tech where the demand for technically-minded mentors/teachers is really high, but the amount of people WILLING to fill that role is small. Money could be the answer, but I don't know if it's the entire answer or even the largest part of the answer. Also worth noting that sometimes the most competent technicians are also quite incompetent when it comes to teaching, which is a common stereotype in academia. In my mind, this is the biggest problem with tech education right now. If I build a successful career in tech, or become a competent technical person who works with computers, what drives me to care about teaching or mentoring? Perhaps all of tech suffers from a bit of a Lisp Curse, to a certain extent[1] 1: https://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/misc/the-lisp-curse/ https://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/misc/the-lisp-curse/
- billippio 5y agoThat was a good article!