Comment by tom_b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tom_b | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The education model (immersive, time-intensive, mastery learning) Lambda School has in place seems like a very sweet spot between bootcamps and traditional university CS programs.

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.

Of course we started in a market where we got that sweet spot, but I think it’s there for most industries. The only reason every single bachelor’s degree is four years is because that’s what accrediting bodies require if you want to pull down federal student loan dollars; not because that amount of time makes the most sense.

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 have hired several coding school grads - not Lambda but very similar. I’ve seen these employees plateau and have recommended they consider going back to a traditional degree program to power the next phase of their career.

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.

I agree with your points on code bootcamps; I think you should check out Lambda School’s curriculum and see how vastly different it is from code bootcamps, which are essentially 8 weeks of “learn how to build your first app”, 4 weeks of “now build your first app” then “now go get a job!” (Curriculum is here: https://learn.lambdaschool.com/syllabus/cs-fsw)

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com