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Comment by akanet | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm the author of the piece, perhaps better known here as founder of CoderPad. Feel free to ask me anything but things are a bit crazy right now!

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I don't think you mentioned that the student doesn't have to pay back Lambda after 60 months of deferred payments. That seems important. From the Lambda site:

"The income share agreement has no interest. It's a flat percentage that goes away once you've reached the $30k payment cap, you've made 24 payments, or after 60 months of deferred payments (even if you haven't paid us anything)."

But you wrote in the article:

"Students with no safety nets experience real financial pain from the nine-month hiatus from work, in addition to the looming dread of possibly having to pay Lambda $30K one day."

Yeah, got cut for brevity, but students definitely experience serious anxiety about even the five year horizon.

It's a pretty important point though. Compare with a student loan, which never goes away. Failing to mention that seems in pretty clear bad faith.

That seems really disingenuous. Can't you update the article with this important detail?

It's not disingenuous; I think an earlier draft had it. This came down from 4000 words. I'll try to ask my editor to add this as a correction but things are pretty hectic. It's a fairly minor omission in my opinion, but I understand disagreeing.

It's hardly a "fairly minor omission" in a country where the conventional tertiary education saddles the average student with a debt that is often far bigger than $30k, doesn't expire, and cannot be escaped even through bankruptcy, meaning that even retirement benefits can be garnished above a meagre $750/month.

Agree it’s a minor point, can’t expect OP to fit every contractual detail in a short article.

Well, it is to me.

Writes a 2000+ word article, cuts 14 "for brevity".

Overall, I think this was an insightful article, but cutting that out seems misleading, even underhanded.

And let's be honest here, I am no fan of Lambda school and I think it's way too expensive for an online school.

But if the editor cut those 14 words out, it wasn't to make the article more concise, it was to make the audience more outraged and more likely to share that article with others -- thereby increase the number of page views.

Not that I would expect the author to admit that. The author can't speak to the intent of his editor, obviously. And even if he could, I don't think his editor would be too pleased with him if he did that.

That seems like a giant omission. 5 years is nothing compared to student loans. There are people in their 40s still paying back loans they took when they were 18

Got cut? Meaning you knew about this crucial detail and consciously decided to not include it?

"Yeah, got cut for brevity, but students definitely experience serious anxiety about even the five year horizon."

Lambda School is <5 years old. Pretty disingenuous man.

Still seems like a way better deal than student loans, which can follow you until you die.

Thanks for publishing it! It takes a lot of courage to go against the "who's hot in the valley" zeitgeist.

Also, CoderPad was life changing when we started using it at Airbnb. It made phone interviews so much more effective, thanks for creating it.

Not having VCs of my own helped a lot!

Why is that? Can you elaborate?

You mention that there's value in Lambda's mission, but I'm curious as to whether you believe that Lambda's business model is redeemable.

It's hard to argue that there's clearly a major risk involved in attending a program like this, but at the same time it seems to be working for some individuals. Would these high-achieving individuals be able to teach themselves? Possibly. But I'm not sure that going back to the traditional college route is the right choice either. And how can we better help those who lack the aptitude or enjoyment of programming and find out too late into these programs?

Bootcamps probably need a longer and more rigorous trial period - one thing that students were really pissed about was that they didn't find out that Lambda was bad until after the month-long forgiveness period ended.

Why did you choose to write about this program as opposed to other programs that teach people coding skills, but have vastly worse payment plans, including some which can't even be dispensed in bankruptcy? The criticism seems unmoored from its placement in the set of alternatives for people who want to try to see if they can get a job coding. The undergraduate degree is notoriously bad for this purpose, from time, practicality and cost perspectives. How do you propose that people learn these skills- or learn if they are capable of achieving these skills?

Why? Its prominence.

Exactly ^, Lambda has gotten a lot of mindshare quickly, based on some provable misrepresentations. That’s not good for either bootcamps or startup ecosystem generally.

Do you admit it has advantages over the alternatives? It sure doesn't sound like that in the article, where all you do is bash the company, without mentioning how it is an improvement.

"How do you propose that people learn these skills- or learn if they are capable of achieving these skills?"

Is that too difficult to answer for you?

There might not be a good answer, but that doesn't make the existing attempts good. That argument is the same logic I could use to say "Why did you criticize their plan of hitting people in the head as treatment for stage IV cancer if you haven't got a better proposal?"

Can you explain in what sense people voluntarily signing up for an educational course that they only have to pay for if they make a solid living within 5 years is the equivalent of hitting terminal cancer patients in the head?

Well, I can try. So, are you familiar with the general construction "A is to B what C is to D"? If you're American, you might have seen these analogy questions on the SAT.

Yes, I understand what that kind of comparison is, but you haven’t substantiated it.

It’s a pretty horrible analogy - demeaning to cancer patients aside from anything else, and seems to seek to tarnish a seemingly well-intentioned business by linking it to something awful, without any basis.

I don’t suggest the company is beyond criticism or without a need to improve; it’s still a fairly new company after all.

Demeaning to cancer patients? Huh. I thought I was writing out a really incredibly obviously clear instance of "if a thing is bad, you cannot criticize it unless you provide an alternative - if you cannot provide a better option, then the thing must not be bad". I didn't realize I needed to scaffold this so much for people to actually focus on the logic being criticized and not get hung up on "but this thing isn't bad!?@!??!" How would you have presented it? Or, do you think it's not actually possible in this context to explain why that construction is illogical without upsetting people who like the school?

Anyone who is committed to serious enquiry and good-faith discussion understands that there is a very large class of things that might seem bad at first glance, but turn out not to be so bad, or indeed quite good, when compared against the available alternatives.

This class of things includes pretty much anything that's really important in the world - including economic systems, government policies, human behaviours, and, yes, companies, including ones that offer deferred payment for education that can lead to higher incomes and better standards of living for the customer.

You're clearly intelligent enough to know this but are poisoning the debate by making a comparison with something that is horrible but not at all comparable.

What the hell. Obviously I know that many things are maybe not bad. That's why I picked an example where people would not argue about whether it was bad in order to demonstrate the logical point.

It is clear that I not only didn't get my point across but that people don't even believe that the point existed, and I miscommunicated so badly that you're not even willing to believe that I was ever arguing in good faith. Fuck this.

It's more like, these guys are offering a plan where you get treatment for stage IV cancer and you only have to pay if it works. The other options require you or someone else to pay huge amounts up front, regardless of outcome, and are no better at getting results.

I wasn't commenting on whether it works. I was showing that his objection to criticism that didn't include a suggested better alternative was illogical.

It wasn't just criticism without an alternative. It was saying, this thing is bad, don't use it. If the other things are worse, you still have to use it. This is why your analogy was ineffective, because you used a thing that was obvious worse than the other approaches.

People need to learn things. If funding education through an ISV is the best way to do that, then they should do that, even if there are problems with it. What the article really seemed to be implying was that they shouldn't do it that way, that there was something wrong with it, which justified an extremely negative view of the company, and leaves people with no option to learn to code without large upfront costs or loans to pay back if they are unsuccessful.

Describing the very best option in purely negative terms is misleading.

If you are telling people to stop doing a thing with a x% chance of working, but the other options have a lower chance of working, you are effectively saying don't do the thing at all.

You are assuming here that you and the speaker have a shared belief that this way to accomplish the thing has a chance of working and is worth doing in the absence of alternatives (or that it is obviously better than alternatives). That is almost certainly a false assumption when someone tells you "don't do that thing". Instead of continuing to hold those assumptions, you should either ignore their opinion altogether or attempt to find out which of those beliefs you don't share.

These documents show that, as recently as August 2018, a hedge fund paid $10K to purchase half of Lambda School’s ISAs.

Was this at $10k/ISA? And was it half of all ISAs or all of half of the ISAs?

i see now that i could have worded that better - but 10k per entire ISA, and half of ISAs minted

Hey man. Thank you for publishing this article, and doing actual journalism (researching the actual data, and giving people opportunity to respond). I've been recommending lambda school to my friends, only based on their marketing. I may stop doing that now.

I have to be honest that I’m not really seeing any major issues here. They _used_ to do something and now they don’t, so he didn’t lie about it. They _have_ had low placement rates and informed their investors, but it’s unclear what the average or common placement rate is and if it’s significantly different from what they claim. And _some_ students didn’t like the curriculum. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You also make reference to some internal documents. Perhaps sharing them will help further the story?

I disagree that this is an accurate assessment of my claims. When you claim that you "never have" done something after you've already done it, you're making a statement about both the present and the past. Your point about averages or something is also difficult for me to parse.

Hey Vincent! Great to see you here. Are you gonna go back on IH for office hours this year?

Also how much time did you spend on all of the research for this piece?

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