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Comment by damnencryption | Hacker News Reader

> I like the idea, and I think it's worthwhile

I can't think of any reasonable person who will accept 4 weeks of unpaid work and be treated as a trial product on top of that.

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I think a ton of reasonable people would do that. Getting a job as a developer is reasonably difficult without connections or experience in the field. Many of us have degrees or years of being a geek before we get our first job. I think that leads to success but it's not a necessary pre-requisite.

I see people coming out of bootcamps from non-glamorous backgrounds who take months to find a job or eventually give up. If companies can explore this talent pool with lower risk, I'd think they could identify some significant potential

A take-it home project with 1 week maximum allows for that with some amount to be paid to the person. Many respected companies do it that way if not whiteboard interviews.

Lambda already takes a cut out of these student's future salaries.

Sorry, I don't agree. The way this is advertised is gross.

A 1 week take home project doesn't give experience, doesn't test how well the student works with others, doesn't showcase communication skills, etc.

There is a LOT more to development than coding

> There is a LOT more to development than coding

Agreed. Many companies already have paid work hours for hiring. I just listed those examples because those seems to be more common than work days ATM and isn't most employment in US at will unlike EU and developed parts of the world?

I understand the company will still have some cost to that but why should individuals be worked for free to offset that?

The alternative isn't that these people get paid, the alternative is that they continue to get their resumes screened and either remain unemployed or go back to the undesirable field they were in pre-bootcamp.

That's the reality for many people. This can help those people- although I agree that it won't help anybody who's qualified to field an offer right off the bat.

I don't think the OP disagrees, but the keyword here is "unpaid", let alone the opportunity cost for working at a potentially bad-fit company for a month.

Just compare the value proposition to something like college. People will sacrifice quite a lot to get into the career they want to be in- and it's very often worth while.

I won't make the argument that this is preferable to fielding and accepting an offer immediately, because obviously it isn't. However, this is preferable to going unemployed for months on end or giving up and going back to unskilled work- which is the reality for many folks right now.

You can’t? What if there is a measurable economical advantage for you? If you’re super inexperienced these four weeks unpaid internship might be way more valuable long term than four weeks sitting on a couch writing job applications with a near-empty CV.

That's definitely the way our students see it.

May be hard for many who have secure tech careers to empathize with how difficult it is to break into a new industry and what a leg up this experience gives them.

People with secure tech careers in hard-to-break-into-industries get those careers by being able to work for little-to-no-pay due to their privileged upbringing.

This isn't sour grapes, I am one of those people. This program is exactly the sort of thing I would have taken advantage of because I could.

Hooking your students up with companies is a good thing, but companies should expect to compensate people for labor, even for a trial period when it's on the scale of an entire month.

This isn't in Lambda School's direct power to solve, but the real issue here is companies are entirely unwilling to properly mentor new cohorts of engineers. You're expected to graduate from college/trade school a rockstar and start your new job landing PRs in time for the daily deploy. It's bad for the profession.

Based on reading the Lambda School income sharing agreements, I suspect the student is already obligated to repay a substantial some. As a terminal phase of the program, the student would be pretty much “all in” financially when seeking a fellowship.

There’s selection bias as well because coding boot camps have a strong appeal to the desperate in their careers and better viability for students with independent means (since Federal Financial Aid and conventional scholarships tend not to be available).

Psychologically there’s a lot of sunk cost with deferred payment to influence decision making.

Sorry, just to be clear: I like the idea of pairing new devs with experienced devs in an apprenticeship-like role, especially since the software industry tends to lean pretty heavily toward the weird "You need experience for this entry-level job" thing (especially for stable jobs with larger organizations).

I'm not so convinced of a 4 week internship trial thing when it's structured like this though.

Yeah, it sounds like you're just going to end up wasting the senior engineer's time hand-holding the intern for 4 weeks while they learn an existing codebase, and then they go off on their merry little way. The concept is interesting, but 4 weeks just really isn't enough time to get a new-hire up to speed to be very helpful with software in most corporate settings.

Try it and see ;-)

They basically are using this as the final exam of the school, in place of working on a project with peers.

That would mean the final exam is optional - and most students will not take it (at least until the fellows program gains more traction to take on more students).

This is _not_ the final exam. Your comment is uninformed.

I would've loved this as a new university grad. I remember lamenting that nothing like this seemed to exist at the time.

Q: What kind of reasonable person would spend 4 YEARS doing work and PAYING between $10k - $35k a year (on average) for the privilege of doing so? And get 0 support for finding a job afterwards?

A: US college student.

Keep that in mind when you complain about 4 weeks of unpaid work with a high chance of getting a highly paid job afterwards.

"High chance" because obviously Lambda will stop working with companies who see it as a free labor program.

I am unaware of any colleges that don't have a career services office that help students get jobs and internships during and post-graduation. Even community colleges have these things. Though, like Lambda School, they can be of questionable quality.

Additionally, Lambda School is specifically to focus on getting a job. Getting a job can be one outcome of college, but it's not necessarily the specific focus. For that, a comparison to a trade school might be more on point, where the specific focus is to learn a trade and then get people a job in that trade afterwards. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be Lambda School to Barbers College.

sigh something is wrong here and I can't pinpoint exactly what.

I can - it's that secondary education has issues that are getting worst faster than they are being solved.

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