Lambda School Announces $14M Series A Led by GV
lambdaschool.com
lambdaschool.com
Many many have tried to tackle the challenges of education & its dynamics & how long-term all of it is and how short-term the typical strategic horizons and business models are.
Super excited about their journey ahead. This is one of these efforts that in this moment already have massive impact and down the road their impact can be difficult to even grasp and imagine when you think of it.
We’re working on launching in the UK in 2019, and will begin expanding from there.
Whatever knowledge, if any, people will acquire at the end is almost certainly going to be extremely shallow. Perhaps no better than reading intro sections of Wikipedia articles yourself over say 4 months instead of 1.
Before joining Lambda School you are required to do our pre-course work, which includes the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We then cover those topics again at a more advanced level once you begin the course, but a lot of time then is spent on making sure HTML is semantic, using preprocessors and mixins, responsive design, manipulating the DOM with vanilla JS, that kind of thing, so you understand what is happening under the hood. Then we dive into the “finer points” of JS for a while (ha), then React. So the front-end portion alone, including the precourse work, is longer than most code bootcamps. Then we get into backend in JS, then start writing “more advanced code” in Python.
By the time we’re writing C you’re already very comfortable with JS and pretty comfortable with Python, so we can ramp up the learning curve a bit. Bear in mind it’s all day every day with no context switching whatsoever; you’d be surprised what you can learn at that speed with people there on-demand to guide you and answer questions.
Hour for hour Lambda School’s full coursework is about 1500 hours; about 75% of the time you’d spend on the core track of a CS degree. Of course, our intentions are very different and much less theoretical/lower level. Our goal is for you to write great code at a great company, so we dive into theory where necessary and appropriate.
Of course, the most important part of Lambda School is that somewhere along the way you’ve learned how to learn. And when your new job says, “Alright our stack is Elixir and Phoenix” you don’t say “Um but I only know JS” you say, “Alright, link me to the docs.” There’s no way we could teach you everything you need to know and use, we really just give you the foundation that lets you continue to learn while being paid to do so.
How can I best get a friendly dev involved (he has shipped a c# VR game and worked a bunch of custom js scripts)?
I was always a self learned programmer who made projects in python for fun so I was really excited when I first got to college thinking that I'd be able to make the projects at scale that I wanted to.
But as freshman year ended I realized the department at my school for the most part was stagnant and focused excessively on the theoretical side of CS. Forget learning new frameworks we were still talking about Java at the end of the second year. This was really frustrating as I felt I had lost lot of my creative energy and started to hate coding itself. Thanks to the strength of my prior work and some connections I managed to get interviews for dev internships at some really good startups. I completely crashed and burned. I was not prepared to code under pressure or walk through my solutions with someone watching. I was really disheartened from the experience and contemplated switching majors and giving up on tech as a whole.
7 weeks into Lambda now I can create a pretty sophisticated iOS app, use custom APIs and manage sync with a database backend. I've managed to learn Swift and become decent at reading ObjC which I'm sure I can get better at with time. Most importantly though I feel like I can learn anything or at least logically approach any technical problem and I'm so ready to hit up the interviewers whom I feel I disappointed for a second chance.
Doing this program is no joke, and definitely not for everyone. I find myself coding, reading docs, watching videos for 10 hours everyday and at least 4-5 hours on weekends. From the get go I realized what you put in is what you get out. However the instructors do such a good job of keeping the feedback loop small for what you learn in class to the projects you build that it keeps you motivated to implement the next feature and keeps you hungry to learn more.
As others have pointed out below, programming is becoming more of a blue-collar field - so maybe lambda is headed in the right direction. That being said, I really liked the academic side of CS! I feel like nobody ever wants to talk about CS theory, ever. Even teachyourselfcs[1], with it's focus on teaching computer science, has no recommendations for a theory book at all. I loved reading Sisper, Automata Theory was my favorite course in college.
I also feel like having a CS education is valuable because you get a chance to learn about low level things that you'll probably never touch in your career, but it's useful to know. I liked learning about logic gates, how a computer is built, how a compiler / interpreter works, the theory behind a computer, etc. I feel like once you know the low-level side of things, you can move past blue-collar type of coding and really create interesting projects. It just sucks that no employer really cares if you know about that stuff. They only really care about projects you've made yourself outside of class (preferably using a framework). None of my classes taught me to do that, and it's hard to do a side project when you're focusing on doing homework.
I apologize for the rant. I'm really happy for you fspacef. I thought about quitting my degree several times. I never got CS on the first try, it took me until 2nd semester of my sophomore year to really "get" programming. I barley passed calculus and I had to retake my algorithms class. I'm happy that you were able to find another solution when college didn't work out. I guess... I'm just jealous - haha.
I've always had ideas for projects or softwares I'd like to build but I'd always hit a roadblock that I couldn't learn my way around on my own. This felt frustrating time and again as I felt like I had bits and pieces of the stack but no way to put them together.
I should also add that half of the time in Lambda's curriculum does go to learning CS theory. Lambda has given me a structure and syllabus that has accelerated what I would have probably learnt through college just at a slower rate. The idea that it takes 4 years to learn this stuff seems so arbitrary in hindsight. I do also believe college has it's value and now if I go back I would go deeper into other passions such as Economics or Political Science.
Also I don't think you should be regretful, if you have the time there are part time courses that you could do in another (related) fields example UI/UX or maybe learn another type of programming (mobile vs web, android vs iOS). Good luck!
I am interested in knowing more about this. Could you expand on why you don’t think any of those books are theory? If it isn’t too much to ask can you mention why each one of the books recommended for the different areas aren’t “theory”?
As I mentioned in my original comment, I barley passed Calculus. CS Theory is still math, but just... without numbers. The class felt more like solving puzzles, if anything. Writing proofs and doing homework was fun. I regret renting the book, I'm thinking of buying it just to work on the exercises within.
Will be adding Sipser to my reading list.
Personally I don't think people should be learning frameworks in school except for elective classes. CS is so vast that there is more than enough foundational knowledge to learn without going into specific tooling.
Learning Java in your second year seems like a problem though unless you mean the class used Java but was focused on teaching other topics like data structures/algorithms/garbage collection.
I do wonder though that with MOOCs becoming cheap, and that motivated students are able to get a lot of value from them, would Lambda School slowly transform into another credentialing/ signaling system for hiring? If that happens, I guess we will come around to a full circle of disruption in education.
How much you make per student * how many students = revenue.
How much you make per student is a factor of how much they’re getting paid.
If we help a student get hired for $90k they’ll pay us back $30k. So if we place 3,333 students/yr at that price point over the long run we’ll do $100m/yr in revenue. Of course, that’s a lot of students, but that’s also a lot of revenue, yet a tiny fraction of the total market of up-and-coming software engineers.
Cost of capital is very real, and it’s one thing to say that and another thing to do it, but we don’t have to replace the university wholesale for that to work, we just have to be the best trade school there is.
MOOCs are great, but are hardly the be-all-end-all of education. Content is everywhere, ability to actually learn from it is more difficult, and expert help, structured end-to-end curriculum, a community of learners on the same pace, etc. just make for a better learning experience. Sometimes it feels like if I made a nickel for every time I heard, “I learned more in 3 weeks of Lambda School than a year of self study” I could fund the whole company.
But some of that success has to be attributed to riding a boom wave of demand for software engineers. I'm a mid-career software engineer and have seen at least two "bust" cycles where experienced, well-credentialed, and just smart engineers went 12+ months between jobs. The effects of that have been reflected in undergraduate CS enrollments - we see big dips in the mid 90s and prior to 2006 (where a huge push up in enrollments begins again - https://cra.org/data/generation-cs/phenomenal-growth-cs-majo...). How well positioned the Lambda School revenue model to handle a 50% drop in demand and significant drop in starting salaries?
I am a big believer in the trade school process for software engineers, but I also think that the long term view for programmer careers is one that includes greatly reduced salaries in the average case and one reason I feel that way is that a learner can be productive in the workforce with a shorter-term and less specialized educational background.
From a selfish perspective, I would love for a recession to happen today. When recessions happen money is tight and people go back to school who otherwise would have been employed.
Of course, we are exposed to risk at the market level; if we stop hiring software engineers as a society Lambda School is in trouble, so we’re betting on that not happening.
That said, the purpose of Lambda School is to take people to the highest point of economic potential as quickly as is possible, not just to be a tech trade school. It’s crazy that there’s no institution in the US that’s great at optimizing human capital other than four years of school and hundreds of thousands of dollars at a university. So soon we’ll be training for other verticals as well that aren’t just tech.
I agree the current university system is not effective for everyone, but economic potential flattens out quickly for tradespeople, which fits the “coders” job description. Most rock star coders I know in SV who have remained coders are making roughly the same now as they were in 2001, adjusted for inflation. Which means their purchasing power has dropped significantly. Meanwhile those I know who have a liberal arts degree + an MBA or JD have steadily increased their purchasing power. They made much less initially, but steadily and reliably accumulated experience that is highly valued in the market as a function of time. Will the best React or Angular coder grad today command 10x their salary in 10 years?
Also SF Bay Area is notoriously age biased against older “doers”. Good luck finding a coder job in a GV startup if you are over 35 at a salary commensurate with your experience.
I agree a 4 year degree is insufficient, but I would argue it is a necessary foundation on which to layer on even more education. A career is a marathon, not a sprint. And it should be about more than how fast one can achieve high score.
Overall though, I agree there is a niche for this. This has been done for other verticals, particularly in nursing. So it should work great for a very specific population and a very specific market need.
But I don’t see it as being a fix to “optimizing human capital” over a lifetime. (I’m not sure education should be about optimizing anything.) I see it as a short term win-win until companies do in fact automate away 99% of coding, and for the under 30 student in an economy that is overheated, in a country that doesn’t provide a quality public education to alll its kids.
I’ll be a buyer until the market cools and more candidates flood in, but I’ll continue to recommend they enter a degree program.
Hour for hour Lambda School is about 75% the length of the core track of a CS degree + homework (we’re now almost 8 months, not including required precourse work: ~1500 hours). We also teach what we consider the requisite CS fundamentals (for example architecture, operating systems, system calls/processes). Students write a lot of C, etc.
We started Lambda School specifically because we didn’t feel right sending folks to code bootcamps where tbey’ll plateau because they lack fundamentals.
Try interviewing a student or two: we’ve had employers come to us saying, “Well we need Java engineers with a CS degree” that have now come back with requests to hire 50 students. Email hiringpartners@lambdaschool.com and I’ll happily set it up (goes for all of HN).
There are arguments for and against this mechanism. I'm against it, clearly they are for it -- everyone should make up their own mind. Wikipedia has a high-level write up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_Share_Agreement
The only viable alternative is to take a loan and go to college.
The average us student debt is ~$40k (https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/).
So what model do you think is better?
a) College "give us $40k now, good luck with your job search"
b) Lambda School "we'll teach you for free; we'll help you find a job; if, and only if, you get a high-paying job, you'll re-pay us $30k for the education that we already gave you"
Option 4: Self teach using one of many of the free curriculums online
(Not arguing for or against any of these, just pointing out that there are additional options)
This school is solving a very real problem and giving hope to so many people who feel trapped in their current situation. I am really excited they are getting this funding and looking forward to see what the school, and its graduates, accomplish.
Great work team!
I've a question: how is Lambda School different from the other many other coding bootcamp programs (apart from the unique model of paying the fee only upon finding a job with adequate salary)?
Bootcams can focus on what’s “hot” right now without regard to job placement though the good ones do.
Incentives are hard in this space. Not sure how for-profit companies who get paid by students can ever be exactly incentivized to focus on honest evaluation and strong fundamentals.
Maybe the FAANG companies should start/fund a bootcamp, but then you'd have to be selective, and you'd end up with something totally different... :/
But yes you’re correct.
This reminds me of some recent comments about the iPhone XS performance for the Speedometer 2.0 JavaScript benchmark [1]. The comment was something like "Apple just optimized their processor to beat benchmarks." In reality, the benchmark uses the TodoMVC project to run through dozens of real-world JavaScript frameworks. So even if Apple was just optimizing for some benchmarks, they've also improved the performance of real-world applications that use React and Ember.js.
Lambda School might be teaching some "buzzwordy" programming languages and frameworks, and the students might learn just enough to pass technical coding interviews and get a job, and they might have just enough experience to start contributing code and working on features that bring in more paying customers (or raise more VC funding), and they can ramp up quickly enough to not get fired. And those customers/VCs give money to the company, so the company can pay the employee, who gives some of the money to Lambda. This seems like a good "benchmark" to optimize for.
[1] https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1043277162676072449?lang=en
Lambda itself may be fine, I can't judge it specifically (and appreciate Austen engaging :)).
That said, I agree that if they come in with "enough experience to start contributing code [etc]", that's a good benchmark!
But for the school to be successful, they don't really _need_ to go that far, which is my point about incentives: They just need them to look good enough on paper to get in the door, and know just enough that someone will take a chance on some percent of them, and rely on the fact that firing is hard -- in this model, their 'incentive' is to just churn out as many grads as possible, with the nicest resumes possible.
After writing that, though, I think I'm being more cynical than needed, prob based on some sub-par bootcamp grad interview experiences. I hope Lambda is really committed to good education, and I wish them the best, it's a worthy ambition and a hard problem.
It seems that would be a very bad idea long-term.
The reality is the alignment of incentives causes everything else to be different. There are a few concrete examples, but it really flows through everything we do.
1. Length: your average code school needs to pump you in and out of the same physical location and still have margins on what they charge upfront, so the standard is 12 weeks. That’s generally 8 weeks of “instruction” time and 4 weeks of “project” time. The fact that they can get anyone at all to semi-employable with 8 weeks of instruction is a miracle, but most employers agree it’s not enough, and frankly most bootcamp grads look pretty weak. Lambda School is 30 weeks full-time plus 4 weeks of required precourse work, so our instruction time is at least 3x that of most code schools. That, of course, lets us cheat relative to most other schools.
2, Curriculum. What you’ll usually hear separates us are that we teach CS fundamentals, write code in Python and C not just JS, and that kind of thing. But what is harder to explain is how much time and effort we put into instructional design. We’re entirely online and free upfront, so if we suck you close your laptop in week 3 and walk away, and we’re required by contract to forgive the entire income share agreement. We have some of the best instructional designers in the world on staff, and if an instructor isn’t performing they’re sadly let go. It’s that simple.
3. Mastery-based progression, and Bloom’s 2 sigma problem (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem). Perhaps the most remarkable study in the history of pedagogy was Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem. I’m not the instructional designer so I’ll let you read about it yourselves, but basically we practice small group and one-on-one instruction with a mastery component. Specifically, every student is placed in a group of 8 students with one PM (what we call our TAs), and at the end of every week we have what we call a “sprint challenge.” That tests all of the cumulative knowledge you should have gained that week, and you must pass all of them to move on to the next level and graduate. So what if you don’t? You simply repeat the week in a new group until you’ve mastered the concept. Now every educator on planet earth knows that’s a superior way to learn, but it’s very expensive manage. We spend the money because we need to be able to confidently say, “Every Lambda grad can do all of these things” to every employer if we’re going to win long-term.
4. Very robust career services. Lambda School doesn’t stop once you graduate; in fact that’s probably the most important part to a student’s success. We have a program called “Lambda Next” that is still structured and rigorous, but helps you in writing code that signals what you now know, sourcing and applying for jobs, interviewing, and negotiating a salary/benefits package. We’ve had a remarkable number of students earn back the entire price they’ll pay Lambda in negotiation alone.
So these are just a few examples, but really it comes down to the fact that our DNA is structured differently than most code bootcamps as a result of our business model.
I'm in the FSW program but we're past that now. I've watched how people move in and out of the cohort I'm in.
I went in knowing how to make a basic website, a bit of sqlm and a bit of a few other of the topics covered. This put me ahead of about 60-70% of the cohort.
I have noticed students getting very hung up on the particular stack. It does seem that a few are just copying and pasting code to get it to work.
This was also the case when I went to college though.
What I don't see people mentioning is the effort their putting into improving the curriculum. It's a living thing unlike most college classes I've been in. They no longer teach Bootstrap for example (which was probably causing most students more trouble than it was worth).
I'm on average doing something coding related 8-10 hours a day now. Occasionally I take days off and go play Minecraft or something. I make about one extra project every two weeks the latest being ( https://whatisthecolorofthesky.netlify.com/ )
The people I see being the most successful are the ones who probably could have succeeded without Lambda. However I think a sense of direction, a constant source of help, and a sense of community accelerates the pace.
I don't know if I'm going to regret spending 7 months (plus whatever the job search takes) of my life doing this but hey it beats what I was doing before.
If you're curious what the class content looks like it's in my Github which is linked in my profile.
I've thought about applying quite a few times (I'm technical but self taught, so I've always felt like I'd benefit from a quick bootcamp to soften my jagged edges).
If the schedule were more friendly to European timezones I'd have signed up already. Hopefully that's coming soon?
Not that I think conversion courses are without issues, but the selling point of Lambda School seems fairly weak to me in the light of these.
But I don't want to do another degree (the only comparable option would be a 3 year, full time BSc in Computer Science).
Sure, the tuition costs would be lower, but the opportunity costs (plus 3 years of not really working while I study) are easily 10x higher than doing Lambda School.
Plus, a local university won't teach me the skills I need to become a better 'practical' web/mobile developer. It's a lot of (admittedly very interesting) theory, not the kind of vocational training I need.
With Lambda School I could strengthen my weak areas in 3-6months and don't need to travel to do so. A bargain for the price!
https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OMSCS/comments/9ly1z2/thank_you_all...
It used to be ~$7K, not sure what it is now. Lambda school is $20K if you pay upfront, $30K if you do an income share where you only pay afterwards.
1.How are you different from General Assembly and Flat Iron School?
2.Both General Assembly and Flat Iron were acquired. How does Lambda expect to survive when their biggest competitors couldn't?
This concerns me since many of these bootcamps are going the route of itt technical institute.
2. By making enough money we can control our own destiny.
Has anyone compared those three schools?
I am personally really happy with the program, I started 3 years ago and there are so many different projects and different paths you can choose that I am planning on staying there for some time
In my opinion 42 is a very good school for those who already have a lot of experience and want to learn a new skill set, without the need of any support. If you want to qualify for a free bed in their dorms, you have to complete very complicated projects in a very short amount of time, making it difficult for a beginner to succeed.
Holberton school does not only provide peer-to-peer learning, but also rely on the community local tech (and non-tech) community: mentors (SWE/SRE professionals), school alumni and students. Even though there are no teachers, there is a constant support from the staff and the larger community to help you understand the concepts, build your career, especially for those who came with zero experience and completely different backgrounds. As a student, you also have to work hard and have deadlines, but following any deadline, you get peer learning sessions and whiteboarding sessions to make sure everyone understands the concepts. We have to re-create the projects from scratch but on the whiteboard, explaining every single step and algorithms, asking and answering the questions of everyone. This way, they ensure that everyone can be successful.
School 42 is a great school, but was simply not the right choice for me and in my opinion, Holberton School is a much better choice. But as always, it depends on your background, challenge, context and motivation.
I never heard about Lambda, so I can’t comment. Seems like a great program too, but online.
Clicked hoping to see a functional programming oriented bootcamp. We need one of those.
Turns out the market for that is much smaller.
I'm really happy someone asked that question; we used to get it every day, but we don't get it anymore.
There are, however, some major differences in how the UK structures student loans vs Lambda School:
1. If you attend Lambda School you don’t begin making payments until you’re making $50k+/yr in the field you study. In the UK it’s $24k (at current exchange rate) regardless of what you study.
At Lambda you pay a 17% of income for 2 yrs, capped at a maximum of $30k, so if you get a job for $50k you’ll only end up paying $17k. In the UK you pay a full tuition (generally around $50k + however much you borrow for living costs for four years).
In the UK you have a 3-7% interest rate, Lambda has no interest.
In the UK if you make payments for 30 years and still haven’t paid it off it’s forgiven. At Lambda that happens at year 5.
And perhaps this is the most important: In the UK if you default the University was paid a long time ago. The university gets paid day one and doesn’t have to care. At Lambda if you don’t get a job Lambda School never gets paid, so the incentives of the school are aligned with the incentives of the student, instead of the taxpayer writing a check to cover it.
I've considered doing something like this to fill in gaps of knowledge and really strengthen my programming ability in the event I need to shoot out some resumes but unsure how the tuition payback works if I finish the course but retain my current job?
Contractually the income share agreement says you’re required to pay if your job is in “software” or “data science.” Obviously it has to be broad, which could be problematic in edge cases, and I don’t want people to have to trust us.
See: Coinbase Ventures, Slack's fund, etc.
Someone made a similar comment about YC a few weeks ago – how if you were building dev tools, even though $150k for 7% results in a lower valuation than many founders could find elsewhere, you could consider the equity the price for access to the YC network and existing companies to use your product.
In response to the edit: No Lambda School student has, to my knowledge, ever paid for tuition with a loan of any kind, nor have we ever received any money from the government.
Companies like Lambda clearly show that the education market is being disrupted and it is clear to see why. Our current university education system is completely dysfunctional and it is probably most dysfunctional for CS education. The pace of learning is too slow, the topics you learn are not relevant to the student and often the topics you learn are outdated. The universities don't innovate because they are completely disconnected with what students need to succeed. Half of the courses an undergrad takes are completely irrelevant topics which the "educational experts" call general education. When I was in college, I took courses like history of rock music, art history, greek mythology, and asian-american studies. I only took these courses because I was required to take them. In the grand scheme, they are completely pointless and are basically a waste of time...yet we have students taking half their course load in these types of courses. Why? The reason it is like this is because these so called education experts are trying to mold some sort of "model citizen" in their view point. For the student, it just wastes their time and money. If the student wants to learn these topics, they could do it on their own....but to require it as mandatory to get a CS degree or equivalent...is a shining example of how disconnected our university system is from reality of what students need to be successful in a career.
That's why schools like Lambda are brilliant in the grand scheme of disrupting education. They cut out all the crap and only focus on the core skills that employers want in their employees and students need to be successful in a career. Lambda isn't free but they certainly are doing a significant better job than some of these other schools I see like University of Phoenix, Devry and so on which appear to be complete scams. There was also that WozU school that was promoted on here...which also now appears to be a scam based on student reports of the program.
I think as a society, we need to encourage the creation of effective schools, even if they are private schools like Lambda. If that means diverting people away from government colleges/universities then so be it.
Also another topic that is often brought up is in regards to credentials. From what I see, the base for traditional university degrees is slowly being eroded away. Many people say to go to a traditional university because of networking and connections...which is true but only in the present day. For employers, they need to hire people who are effective at the position and provide maximum value. If the MIT CS degree potential employee doesn't know how to code effectively or only knows obsolete CS topics...how effective will this person be at the company? Not very much. The employer will want to hire the person who knows how to code and has relevant knowledge, even if that person doesn't have a degree from a traditional university. This concept is obvious in a fast growing market like CS. Employers will eventually gravitate towards candidates who have the skills to be successful and avoid hiring people just because they were able to network or get a connection to the company's hiring manager.
Becoming a software developer is an insanely difficult and ungrateful journey.
This type of "School" make me incredibly uncomfortable has they really promote an unrealistic image of the "Software Developer Career" where everything is super easy , and within 6 months ( seriously ? ) you'll be ready and making 120K$/Year.
Software is a very particular type of industry where turn over is insanely high and most of the stuff a developer has to do has often nothing to do with the technology he learnt at school but instead is about mixing all his CS knowledge ( Software/System Architecture , OSI Model , POSIX etc... ) to come up with the best possible solution to solve an issue.
Today it seems like Coding School are now becoming the norm , and "Software Developer" is now widely considered as just "Coding" or being a "Coder".
This is sad and frightening at the same time.
The majority of software development is essentially blue collar work now. You don't need a CS degree to make a mobile app or a JS-driven web page. At least 50% of developers haven't used a POSIX library in their entire career. They probably don't know what POSIX is. Software development is mostly glueing together other people's code in ways that don't trip you up later. We'll always need some of the low-level clever coders to build the foundation libraries we use, but that doesn't mean every developer has to be one of those people, or even capable of being one of those people.
And the thing is ... I think this is great. Making software is fun, comfortable desk work that loads of people should have the opportunity to do. Given the demand for new applications we need to make the barriers to working as a developer as low as possible.
In particular, for those of us who came up through development 10+ years ago but didn't get formal CS training, we're often being shuffled into these blue collar jobs even though we've put the time and effort into developing all of the CS skills that we'd need for the more sophisticated jobs. I went to a trade school for a non-CS degree, then spent over a decade writing everything from kernel code and device drivers to novel software exploits to designing and implementing video codecs, compiler toolchains, type systems, and large scale distributed systems. With the rising tide of bootcamps, all of that still matters, and there are still some good opportunities out there, but the pool of opportunities for interesting and fulfilling work is shrinking rapidly as the volume of jobs doing devops, mobile and web frontends, or menial node.js crud applications has been growing exponentially.
And like lots of blue-collar work companies are scrambling to offshore it to the cheapest locations and don’t care about quality because it’s all disposable.
I could not in good faith recommend this to anyone now, become a plumber or a nurse, that’s not going offshore anytime soon.
It’s still very difficult, certainly. Almost every Lambda School student will tell you it’s the most difficult thing they’ve ever done. And they’re not done learning at that point, just able to contribute to the point that they can be paid to continue learning.
Do I believe the pool of people capable of doing that is bigger than and different than the pool of people currently graduating from universities with a four year degree? Absolutely.
Huh? What's "unrealistic" about it? Lambda and App Academy regularly graduate students making that kind of money.
> most of the stuff a developer has to do has often nothing to do with the technology he learnt at school
Given you agree that much of what you learn during a CS degree gets supplanted by real-world knowledge once you get a job, I don't see what your problem is with bootcamps like this one.
(Makers Academy grad here; 4 years into tech and gainfully employed at http://pivotal.io thank you very much)
Makes sense.
A simple search on linkedin shows that most of Google Employees comes from Berkeley, Stanford etc...
Not from bootcamps or "coding school".
https://haseebq.com/how-to-break-into-tech-job-hunting-and-i...
> Despite having first learned how to code almost a year before, having a background as an English major and former professional poker player, I was able to land a total of 8 offers including Google, Uber, Yelp, and Airbnb (where I ultimately joined). In this three-part blog post I’m going to describe my advice to a job-seeker trying to break into the tech industry.
Second, I’ll bet you $100 that there’s a Lambda School grad working at Google this time next year ;)
- grad must have a rejection from an onsite interview at Google before lambda school
- position must be for a T3 swe II
To be honest I subscribe to the idea that the FANG etc interviews are proxies for an IQ test. So it is entirely possible lambda school trains a high enough IQ individual and they pass a full loop. And by that I mean they pass based on their IQ AND the training they got in the program.
(Email in profile, also on Twitter.)
42 is a tuition-free school. It means you don't get to pay anything to the school EVER.
42 is not remote. You need to go to the school to do your projects. We believe it is important to be in contact with other students, exchange, learn from each other.
42 provides free accommodation as long as you show your commitment to learning and improving = if you stop coming to school you do not have access to accommodation anymore.
42 program is about 2 to 3 years long. Best students can graduate in a bit over a year when some others stay 4 or 5 years, it really depends on how dedicated you are, but everybody can have its own rhythm.
Check it out :) https://www.42.us.org/