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Comment by ngngngng | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn on Lambda. On one hand, it seems far superior to traditional higher education, since the schools success depends on the success of the students. At the same time, profit sharing is a terrible financial decision. When compared with other bootcamps, it's basically a bet against yourself. You're willing to risk tens of thousands of dollars more money for some risk insurance.

I have such a hard time accepting that people can't just teach themselves things using free online resources. It's been shown in many studies that self directed learning doesn't work, but it worked for me. And I can't stand the idea of smart people paying thousands to learn things they could learn for free.

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profit sharing is a terrible financial decision [...] it's basically a bet against yourself.

It's a hedge, which is different than a true bet against yourself (i.e. a short). Semantics aside, surely hedging against yourself is not always a terrible financial decision?

For example, insurance is a hedge. Taking out life/health/car insurance is not always a terrible financial decision.

Taking out a large student loan is tantamount to taking a "long position" on yourself. You are betting that you'll make lots of money in the future, enough to easily pay off the loan.

If that is a good bet for you, go for it. But surely some people want a less risky option, either because they have less risk tolerance or they have lower expectations for their future gains, or whatever.

As another way of thinking about it, profit sharing is selling equity in yourself. If we accept your premise that profit sharing is "always a terrible financial decision", then surely no rational corporation would ever sell equity in itself except as a last resort; they would be financed by debt whenever possible. But of course we can observe this is not how things work.

If people can self learn they will. I think doing so is much, much more difficult than others pretend like it is.

Given that you could earn the entire cost of Lambda School (at the cap - the most expensive) in about three months of engineering time, it’s a rational decision even if you just speed up the process.

> If people can self learn they will. I think doing so is much, much more difficult than others pretend like it is.

I'm not sure. But what's definitely true is that it's WAY harder as an adult.

Most self-taught programmers I know (including myself) learned to program as children/teenagers. Learning at that age is easier -- if not biologically, then at the very least because you have tons of free time.

The few I know who self-taught programming but didn't learn as youth already had really strong backgrounds in mathematics or physics, and leaned heavily on the skills that studying those fields teaches you.

> Learning at that age is easier ... at the very least because you have tons of free time.

That isn't really a valid argument here though because Lambda School is a full-time program to my understanding, so it's expected you somehow have 8 hours a day to put into it.

Does lambda school come with a .edu email address for students ?

No, Lambda School is not an accredited school.

Perhaps you should look into getting it? Accreditation does exist for vocational schools, and you'd go a long ways towards alleviating the concerns of potential students if you pursued it:

http://www.accsc.org/Accreditation/Standards-of-Accreditatio...

Have looked at it. It provides more negatives than pluses. Waiting months or years for someone to review every curriculum change would completely kill us.

If you don’t need a degree, most universities have visiting student programs that are less expensive compared to their degree programs also. Maybe lambda school should partner with a university non degree program so students can have access to an online library and a .edu email also.

I appreciate the response. I really do have a lot of respect for what you guys are doing.

But I can't help but feel that it's like communism in China. Sure it's far better than what was there before. But is it the best option?

My wife was recently accepted into Lambda School. From my research, I think it'll be a good deal. Your two points are spot on IMO: better education due to incentive alignment at the cost of higher payment if it works. But I think I give more weight to the "better education" point and less weight to the "higher payment" point.

For one, I think incentive alignment is extremely powerful. Austen Allred talks about it a bit here.[1] (Great interview). Although reducing risk for the students is a benefit, it seems that the effect it has on the quality of lambda's education is much more important. In fact I think that a good source of startup ideas is to simply find existing systems with misaligned incentives and then figure out how to align them--I'm planning to try something like that in the music industry myself.

Also, I don't think profit sharing is a terrible financial decision. You're not just paying to reduce risk: you're paying to get a better education. You could take a normal pay-up-front bootcamp and slap an income share agreement on it, but that won't recreate lambda school. (Austen makes this point in the interview as well).

As for self-directed learning: it also worked for me, but I do think a lot of people need extra support before they can do it effectively. I was fortunate in that I was introduced to programming as a kid and thus had lots of time to just mess around. It's harder once you've already entered the grind.

[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/a-cs-education-thats-free-until...

A lot of people aren't driven enough by themselves. So although they -could- look things up and start working on projects, they -don't-.

Another thing is the teachers/mentors. I'm not sure about Lamba School's quality but in general having a teacher or mentor who can guide you is very beneficial. The thing with programming is that there's so much you have to learn at first.

I am also completely self taught. I learned Ruby to apply into one academy but got rejected. But I continued to work through their recommended materials anyway and now I work remotely fulltime as a software developer.

I just discovered Ruby, do you have and recommended places to learn the language?

I believe I started with Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional by Peter Cooper. I liked The Well Grounded Rubyist and I've heard Eloquent Ruby is also good. Design Patterns in Ruby is less about ruby and more about design patterns, but still a good read.

I learned a lot about Rails from Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial book.

I learned the most through doing, though. I would work on building my own website and looked up anything I didn't know.

But it’s not just about the learning, also signaling. Smart people also making not much more than minimum wage on freelancing sites.

"it seems far superior to traditional higher education, since the schools success depends on the success of the students. "

Higher Education is not 'Job Training'.

Also, nursing is not software.

I would love for nursing school to take on some more advanced methods, but I'm doubtful lambda is the way to go.

My hunch is that aside from some very critical basis things ... that much of nursing is learned on the job.

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