It’s interesting that pg is a big fan though.
Customers will understandably be in a vulnerable place. You are not exactly selling someone a boat. You are quite literally selling tech savvy people their future and they know how to use social media. Those who are brave enough to voice their troubles with education in the open – which is a stigma, maybe so than ever – will have no trouble finding an empathic, educated audience.
This is akin to treading in self-driving space: Every player is super aware of the non-existent room for error. The whole space has constantly been 3-5 major consecutive incidents away from imploding under the sheer pressure of human perception.
ls cannot merely be slightly better than established programs in giving people an education and a job. You have to outperform by a substantial margin to get everyone on board when you inject yourself into peoples lives to this extent. You ALSO have to convince everyone that you do.
It's pretty unfair and also pretty exciting.
"Caleb Hicks was asked why he wouldn't give students a survey on how they liked the changes and he said he "wasn't going to run the school on a survey"."
It's a bit overkill. You can just do it yourself. Plenty of resources available for free. Students have to put the work in regardless.
- Easier to put in 40-60 hours per week in a structured environment vs having the discipline to do that at home week after week - Less time wasted on figuring out what topics you need to study in the first place - Daily access to a senior engineer that you can ask questions to - Good advice on how to land the first job
In my case I think those benefits were absolutely worth $20k+. Yes, I could have gotten the same result on my own given more time to study, but every job and promotion I've had since then would have come a few months later.
The biggest benefit imo was being around smart motivated people doing the same thing. It was much easier to work from 9 am to 8 pm 6 days a week if you were around others smart motivated people doing the same. Also being able to talk to people about what you were learning helped tremendously. It helped to clear up misconceptions, develop mental models, ect. Working on group projects helped me to learn to read others code and to learn git. The network I developed has proven useful in later job searches and just in general keeping abreast of developments. It was honestly the best 6 months of my life.
Not everything was perfect obviously. My biggest gripe is the outcomes were oversold. I remember being told they had a 99% placement rating within 3 months. Each cohort was somewhere around 33 people. That would mean that around 1 person for every 3 cohorts would not get a job within 3 months. However just in my cohort, 5 did not have a job within 3 months. Within 6 months all but two had jobs, but still, 95% in 6 months is not 99% within 3. Other than outcomes I had a few gripes with how the teaching was done. Overall though it was a great experience for me.
No single service will be valuable to everyone. There might be services that provide no added value to anyone, but I would argue those are not actually services.
...as an investor.
He may not be intimately familiar with the actual situations of the students from his PoV (mostly throguh conversations with Austen or his team).
But then again, this is far from the first time a negative comment has come out against Lambda. And his position hasn't changed so far. So, there is that.
Lambda school receives high praise in general because so many of us tech types want their value proposition to be true. Just look at how negative the comments about traditional colleges are whenever the topic comes up on HN. Or look at all of the concern about growing student debt loads. Or the concern that 4 year college degrees are not teaching CS students what they need to actually function in real world software jobs.
Lambda School arrived on the scene with a new business model that claims to fix all of that, and they did it as a highly-praised YC startup. It seemed like a home run.
Yet I’ve heard so, so many stories like the OP’s about how they’ve dropped the ball on the educational quality of their programs.
They seem to be approaching this as a typical startup problem where they start with the ugliest MVP that people will pay for and then incrementally improve it only where absolutely necessary to keep the money coming in.
This works if you’re selling a SaaS tool to some company on a monthly basis, but it doesn’t work when you’re taking critical years of young people’s early careers and charging them on the tail end.
Even worse, their customers have an incentive to downplay all of the problems. No one benefits by trashing the source of their education and only career credentials, so instead they say how great it was no matter what. We’re starting to see people pull back the curtain and show what’s really happening.
He seems to have a lax definition of the word "earnest". (See his latest blog post.)
quoted from: richajak, the not-so-wise man