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Comment by caust1c | Hacker News Reader

Having friends in the program, I can tell you it's run like a circus.

Expecting 10 people who don't have any experience programming to cooperate on a project without any support or oversight is just asking for student failures.

Of course they'll say that the students have supports through their PMs, EMs or TLs (depending on the mood, they change the role title), but they're never available and miss meetings constantly. Also, they've reogranized the curriculum multiple times during the tenure of my friends, and don't wait till the next batch like a sane school would.

I feel really bad for the excellent teachers they brought on board. They ended up with a lot more than they bargained for.

Half or more of the program is composed of the crappy group projects.

The people who succeed after lambda school is in spite of the program, not because of it.

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I agree with almost everything you say. However all the college projects I was part of, there was no supervision whatsoever. We were all children learning to be adults. Some of us were already there before others. I'm guessing lambda students are more adults than kids. Bottom line, TA support is golden. Supervision, not so much.

This is a golden example of where in person beats online. It's so much easier to weed out the people who will not show up when you do things in person (and there are plenty of those in College). But even diligent people are more likely to flake when things are online. There's simply less commitment.

I've been enrolled at Lambda for just about a year now, so I feel qualified to comment here.

> Of course they'll say that the students have supports through their PMs, EMs or TLs (depending on the mood, they change the role title), but they're never available and miss meetings constantly.

This statement is full of hyperbole, however it gets at what I feel is Lambda's biggest problem: Team Lead quality and consistency.

The problem is a misalignment of incentives (sound familiar?). TLs are current students who are further ahead in the curriculum. The schedule makes it effectively impossible to have a job and TL, in addition to being a student, so I'm guessing most of those who apply for a TL position do so largely for the paycheck.

I don't mean to say that all TLs are bad or don't care about the success of their teams. In fact my experience has been mostly positive. But ultimately students are not at Lambda to be TLs. They are at Lambda to get high-paying tech jobs.

From the point of the student, the TL quality being low is a huge minus, plus the fact that they are also busy means that you don't get that much help.

From the point of the business, I can see the trade off. Running a cheap shop is essential for the kind of deal they offer: A time-capped value-capped full-risk sharing agreement.

Lambda's model could have much, much higher quality if there were a less restraining cap on the ISA, but that will affect sign-ups and might increase the trouble of the people that fall-off the track.

I dont know what is the best positioning of price-quality, but I'm sure many people would prefer to pay more through ISA to have a higher success rate and stronger guidance.

That said, Lambda is really just 3 years old, they need to figure out a million things.

In fairness, all start-ups are "run like a circus." That's the point of a start-up--to figure out new/better ways of doing things. Most of the time it doesn't work, and then you try something else.

If you want the stability and reliability of Harvard, don't get your education from a scrappy upstart.

That's great, except they're charging students $30k for the privilege of beta testing their "circus".

I thought they only had to pay if the students actually landed a decent paying job.

This is true. I suppose I was being a bit hyperbolic.

Having said that, it still seems like a bad deal even for students who get jobs. If the curriculum is not up to par, it's likely that successful students would have also been successful with self-teaching or less-expensive online courses. There's also the opportunity cost of being out of work for 9 months.

It seems unfair to treat your students as guinea pigs for iterating a startup - especially when you're already often targeting desperate people.

Not about lambda, but I had the opportunity to read the full details of an ISA contract from other school and there might be some times when student will be mandated to payback even if they don't get a job. Related to this: someone in Reddit is trying to collect the docs..

"Crappy group projects" are actually great training for life in the real world.

I'll counter this by saying that in my experience school projects are no better. TA's and prof's don't have enough time to give to groups. Students are left to figure things out on their own. Some classes assume (wrongly) that concepts were taught in prior classes so you have to figure it out on your own.

Not sure when you graduated - I'm sure it was better when there were more resources and less students - but today that's not the case.

Did your friends learn to code?

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