Lambda School lays off 65 employees
lambdaschool.com
lambdaschool.com
The tech prerequisite is: "You should feel extremely comfortable with how a computer works including: touch-typing, web browsers, search engines, and basic computer programs."
The Curriculum:
Stats, Linear Algebra AND Data Wrangling: 4 Weeks
Modeling: 3 Weeks
Data Engineering, Databases, SQL, Productionisation: 3 Weeks
Machine Learning, NLP, Neural Networks: 3 Weeks
Python, OOP, Algorithms & General CS: 3 Weeks
Project work: 3 Weeks
At that pace over so many subject is anyone walking out able to remember what a dot product or a t-test is from week 1?
Ridiculous. Introductory statistics and linear algebra are two separate undergraduate level courses. And if you want a real grasp of statistics, you need to learn probability theory first, which is another semester long course.
To say nothing of "data wrangling", whatever the fuck it means.
Approving coursework doesn't mean that the concepts sunk in. It just means you have new tools to further your understanding of everything, but it still takes a long time for it to sink in. During that time maybe you just need to do nothing, just let it sink in, but in my experience everyone ends up needing some time.
[1] Students are welcome to "expand their horizons" when they aren't paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of being forced to do so.
This highly cited paper is a good introduction to the subject:
Lol why?
What difference do you think it make which topics you put in which courses?
the worst I've seen for summer undergrad classes are 2.5 hours M-F = 15 hours a week
But since you did, I won't. Have an upvote instead.
According to the example contract on their site, their income share agreements last up to seven years. Even if they fail to teach a student anything, the student can spend years studying on their own (or even get a degree), and still owe money.
Countless truly excellent and free/cheap resources on these topics exist and you don't have to give a way a significant percentage of your yearly salary.
Just think of all the things you never bother to learn despite having a latent interest even though you can open a new Youtube.com tab right now and fire away. It's hard to start, and then it's overwhelming when you do, and then you feel like a failure when you don't stick with it.
Isn't it worth quite a lot to snap out of it and finally do it? It doesn't surprise me that people find this to be worth thousands of dollars. When you consider how fatally expensive it is to procrastinate your goals forever, maybe these schools are a bargain.
This is literally me, although today I finally found the motivation to actually put together two of the parts I 3d printed a while ago. Maybe some day I'll finish the robot.
I suspect many/most coders think a "personal trainer for coding" is a great idea - for other people (especially their idiot co workers). But they obviously don't need one themselves, and would never need to pay for new...
Is my take on how that's a virtue.
What Lambda School is trying to do right now is just fish for good students and hope they graduate as quickly as possible so they can collect as many ISAs as possible for as little cost as possible.
Some companies only hire people from specific colleges.
I think a good model for this is the Insight Fellowship. By selecting mostly STEM Ph.D. graduates, the pool of students already has some relevant background/foundation. The focus can then be on the tools and methods for applying DS in a corporate/business setting, which is actually relevant for jobs.
I suppose this is a reminder of The Law of Small Numbers and sample size importance!
Enough buzzword to pass an interview. Unless someone already has a pretty solid degree, it's impossible to learn the fundamentals that quickly. And if they do, they should take grad classes on data science, not go into a bootcamp...
You don't. You show them slideshows and hold their hand through a bunch of labs and then give them a certificate saying they graduated.
All the DB related stuff seems like a bonus, ML should be easy to pick up if you have good LinAlg and stats knowledge and Python you can pick up along the way.
I also agree on your last point. I don't understand how someone would be able to remember a fraction of this knowledge when you're changing topics so often.
But when you need to learn a lot of things in a short period of time you don't have time to reflect and think how it all works together.
I find this often in my programming projects. Each sub-project requires a lot of focus and concentration. That seems to make it easy to forget about the previous (sub-)project almost totally. Putting in lots of new stuff into your brain means some older stuff gets pushed out of there.
The more you learn the more you forget. The only way to fight this is to try to understand the connections between the sub-topics, but if you are in a hurry you don't have time for that.
Doesn't it ring alarm bells that society attempts to herd 100% of students through 4 year programs? That sounds far from optimal, no?
It seems highly likely to me that if you get someone who excels on the steep parts of learning curves, 6 months studying the right things would be just as effective (if not more) than 4 years doing mostly busy work.
> What jobs do these grads walk into?
I think they walk into entry level jobs. I know I much prefer working with people that love to live on steep learning curve slopes over those who prefer to go at the pace of the system.
> remember what a dot product or a t-test is from week 1?
I have been in data science for many years and most of the terms I was taught college (like t test) never come up. Maybe once or twice a year I have to spend 60 seconds to refresh on dot product algo.
Society doesn't attempt to herd anywhere near 100% of students through 4-year programs; you just made that up.
I saw countless people at my cow college who were utterly unqualified to be there, but because "It's free money!" and Mommy and Daddy expect them to go, they went.
For entirely too many of the young women, it was Four Year Husband Selection Tryouts, and for too many of the young men, it was Random Sexual Encounter Weekend. A couple of folks were there because we had the most powerful supercomputer in American academia, or for our excellent agricultural and engineering programs, but they were the exception rather than the norm.
Going back at age 28 after a six year stint in the Navy gave me a very different perspective though, so I may not be the best example.
About 45% of high school graduates enroll immediately in a 4 year program.
This is still being pushed by politicians. It’s still what pretty much every parent hopes for their children as well. On this website I’ve seen people derisively describe people as not college educated.
This is unfortunate, because I've met quite a few very smart people who never went to college, or who started but had life circumstances that pulled them away before they were able to complete a degree.
College is not a panacea and the sad but honest truth is that most jobs do not require a college degree. Most of the jobs in America can easily be done with on-the-job training; we've just seen companies shift to a model where they want to offload those costs to the American worker by letting them spend $50,000 to $250,000 and four years of their lives "proving" they can get an education that many of them don't really need, and don't really want in the first place.
We also allowed well-meaning people to pass laws preventing companies from conducting IQ tests and thereby sorting people as was done many years ago. I know this is true because years ago I used to eat lunch with the Director of Human Talent Acquisition at my company almost every day, and we would discuss this. He was a very engaging gentleman in his mid-70s with an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of current and past HR topics, philosophies, and controversies. He had worked for a well-known Fortune 50 company for almost 35 years before "retiring" to my company, a mere Fortune 1000 player. He can recall using IQ tests to sort applicants into positions for which we now demand bachelor's degrees, or in some cases, even master's degrees.
A bit sad, if you ask me. Our culture should be progressing, not regressing...
It should but it is likely that the alarm will not be raised enough. We are ALL taught from grade 1 to "prepare for college, so it can turn us into adults" as a life philosophy.
It probably does not help that every single one of our teachers was forced through that system in order to be granted the "privilege" of teaching us.
I don't know what you were doing in college but anyone who can learn four years of material in six months probably doesn't need Lambda School in the first place.
Where I live, colleges prepare you to be able to choose to be many things - continue academia, or be part of the workforce under diverging titles. They assume you don't know what you want to be yet - and it is mostly true. But if you are at a point in life where you know what you want to be, you can skip most of it (or even do it live when needed). The "keep your options open" attitude of colleges have a lot of overhead. What most people need from a 4 year college can be easily condensed into a year. It WON'T be 4 years worth of material. But if you know what you want (not keeping your options open) you don't need most of it.
I don't think you should need college degree to code. But I don't think I could learn what I learned there in 6 months either.
I expect that is not typically the case at MIT.
But you have to be a pretty determined self-starter.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but expectations should be set appropriately.
If you've pre-screened to select for candidates who would be able to take that and run with it, I'm not suprised that you could achieve a sufficient amount of decent outcomes.
I'm a Lambda grad (Full stack web, not DS) and at the end of the program, I was knowledgeable about a lot more than I understood; and that also includes being knowledgeable about a lot of my shortcomings that I was painfully unaware of before Lambda.
A year after Lambda working as a SWE and I am now finally starting to feel a sense of domain... I hesitate to call it expertise, so lets say domain 'comfort' when it comes to building and maintaining react or react-like FE applications and node BE apis. I've had a mentor at my company since I started and mentorship is necessary for anyone coming out of a bootcamp with no prior industry experience, IMO.
The expectations set within the bootcamp are reasonable, IMO. Instructors never made it seem like we were going to fully internalize everything we were being bombarded with. Practicing what you learn is crucial to turning any of the things taught into a skillset, and that is made very clear.
I imagine the outcomes are pretty good for those who get through the program, as well. They were great for me and most of my cohort peers that I keep in contact with. The ISA model, IMO, makes a lot of sense and I'd be surprised if Lambda couldn't make it work in the long run.
I think the problem above is probably somewhat worse for data science than software engineering in general, but it applies broadly to quantitative jobs in the tech industry, in my experience.
Total Hours of College: 4 years, of which 2 years are "core" coursework and 2 years are general education.
2 Years * 2 semesters per year * 15 weeks per semester * 15 credit hours per week = 900 hours for a degree.
Lambda School: 6 months * 4 weeks per month * 40 hours per week = 960.
Obviously this doesn't account for a number of variables such as 0-credit "mandatory" labs, out-of-class work/projects/studying, but a Lambda student who spends an extra 5-10 hours per week during the program would end up with 1000-1200 total hours.
But this still ignores the main advantage of a program like Lambda, which is the ISA. An education that would be inaccessible to students at the margin -- think people who can't afford to move to a university, qualify for loans, or take 2+ years off of work -- can get in if they're committed enough. Even if Lambda were a total scam, at worst you're out 6 months and $0. If Local State University doesn't get you a job, you're out 4 years and $50k+.
So it's 2,700 hours for a 4-year degree, versus 960 hours in Lambda School, just using your method of calculation. It's also not counting the internships or summer programs that students in 4-year schools usually partake in. And it does not count extracurriculars during the schoolyear, like hackathons, interview preparation, programming competitions, student group projects, etc. Finally, you're assuming that an entire half of a college degree is geneds, which is really not the case. It's more like 1/4 geneds, 1/2 required major/concentration courses, 1/4 electives which many students opt to take technical courses in. So probably more like 3,200 (minimum) to 5,000 hours in a 4-year college.
Learning difficult material means taking breaks and digesting stuff subconsciously.
Therefore, learning anything difficult takes a certain minimum of calendar time as well as hours in the classroom.
In my experience, anything more is dangerous.
The signal to noise ratio is so awful these days that it is a serious liability to understand what you're talking about in data science interviews.
I have seen been on hiring side of multiple larger organizational interviews where the "answers" to the questions asked during interviews were not even correct. Candidates that knew what they were talking about would be rejected because clueless interviewer didn't know what they were talking about.
Whenever I have to interview I have to play guessing games with interviewers trying to understand what they think is the correct answer. I've had to explain that, yes you can do statistical inference with a linear model, that Poisson regression and Logistic regression are in fact only different in terms of a link function, and of course also had to explain why a Poisson random variable might help in modeling number of purchases. In all these cases the correct answer was "use XGBoost".
A lot of my role is just analyzing data for patterns , implementing rules into our product, building models using very basic libraries and putting them into production, monitoring models in production.
That is the main concern I have regarding these bootcamps is that they focus way too much on surface knowledge.
Technically the prerequisites are very loose but the best success stories I hear are usually more like, someone got a STEM degree but actually not all of those degrees translate into well-paying jobs, after this boot camp they were able to shift over to a data science career.
I can't directly answer your question, but I'm sure the answer has something to do with figuring out and teaching the base requirements of the topic, methodically, with well experienced industry professionals.
"...they believe it's impossible to make this model work.
We strongly disagree." This is wildly insensitive to those involved. I find it hard to imagine how the 65 people laid off today are going to make that make sense when trying to look for new jobs.
"...today's restructuring and right-sizing..." Is this to say that the 65 people who lost their jobs today were somehow wrong? Again, it staggers me how lacking in empathy these words about people losing their jobs, and probably healthcare, indefinitely.
"For employers looking to hire senior product, engineering, design, community management, or instructional staff, we'll be sharing a list of interested staff looking for their next opportunity on social media" And good luck current students; these people will take all the jobs you're aiming for.
Wow.
In this comment:
“ "For employers looking to hire senior product, engineering, design, community management, or instructional staff, we'll be sharing a list of interested staff looking for their next opportunity on social media" And good luck current students; these people will take all the jobs you're aiming for.”
Sounds like Lambda School grads are pretty junior and they’re giving people that are senior a good recommendation. I don’t think there’s much overlap between LS boot camp grads and senior people leaving LS as employees. Maybe I’m wrong?
Marketing and propaganda are among the most disgusting inventions of human-kind.
1. The market is pretty hot right now; 65 jobs is a drop in the bucket.
2. Do you really think someone looking for a senior engineer would have otherwise hired a brand new grad, Lambda School or otherwise?
I am an outsider, but clearly looks to me like they chose to not fight that battle, which was just legal thuggery. Colleges in the U.S. are a racket that make the mafia look like a bunch of amateurs. The Bankruptcy Exception for student loans is one of the most corrupt scams going on in the USA today.
Lambda lied to their students for years about loan dischargeability. They were told to stop by the regulator, so Lambda did. The regulator did nothing to penalize them.
Why is it even in their interest to say that? It's not like them saying it makes it true. And if it were true, it would mean that Lambda is a bigger risk for the student who therefore may be less likely to apply.
Or do you mean Lambda was selling them to banks?
Some people treat this like a bad thing, but it's really pretty basic risk-mitigation and cash-flow stabilization. This is kind of like basic factoring, or "modern" solutions like Pipe (https://www.pipe.com/).
There is an argument to be made that it disaligns Lambda and student incentives ("outcome it doesn't matter because Lambda already got paid") but long term, defaulting students would definitely decrease the sales values of the ISAs.
Part of the argument here is that calling these ISAs non-dischargable would lower the risk to the investor, which would make those ISAs worth significantly more.
I wonder how true this is. Declaring bankruptcy comes at a huge cost. It's not something people do lightly. Most people, if they have the money to pay back the loan, would probably do so. Once they're in that position (presumably with a stable job), they have little incentive to declare bankruptcy.
But that goes hand-in-hand with the aligned outcomes; it's best for Lambda if these people get good jobs afterwards, because they're more likely to pay the ISA in full.
If they don't, they're less likely, the risk is higher, and the ISA is worth less (to the investor).
The potential for bankrupcy is also a risk, which lowers the yield. Removing the risk of bankrupcy heightens it.
We could argue about the magnitute of these risks all day; I'm sure people significantly better at math than I am have done a lot of work here.
I'd expect that all of the clarifying questions you're looking for answers to are covered in internal Q&A's, at least that's how it has been done at every startup I've ever worked at.
Any statement has to balance the message across these three. For example, a statement that's "too negative" about future prospects risks spooking people in #3 - causing further damage to the business, as well as to people in #2.
Indefinitely? Damn
On the comment itself though it is looking for former employees and stressing the anonymous source angle. If I'm promising not to reveal the identities off the bat I'm clearly fishing for negative views on something. Have you ever read an article where an anonymous source said something glowingly positive about a subject?
I sort of agree that Lambda School is probably over selling itself but if I were looking to learn more about it in a balanced manner I would probably use more neutral language when soliciting information.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
Or are you suggesting other motives?
I don’t have a horse in this race.
While that may be true (doubt it), I work at a startup with about 150 employees and if we lost 32% of our employees I'd be polishing my CV and wondering when I'll be cut loose. That's not to mention all the negative stories coming out of Lambda School.
They should have been really excelling during the 2020 year of covid, I wonder where things went wrong. Anyone know?
I have also observed that lots of code school grads move away from coding immediately on graduation. Lots of QA/PM types come from them (at least here). This is not necessarily a negative.
Code schools are actually pretty gross. The idea is fine, but reality and greed kind of ruin them.
I'm aware that many other bootcamps and programs have done this, and it is obviously extremely misleading.
I have not heard that Lambda has specifically done this; are you claiming that they are as well? Your comment kind of implies it, without outright saying it.
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-postsecond...
Congratulations by the way!
I have made an effort to reach out to potential mentees, but the interaction falls apart when it becomes very clear that all they really need is for someone to give them a job or introduce them to someone who will give them a job.
> I joined right before they made a ton of terrible changes to the program
What were these?
I'd take a look at the subreddit r/LambdaSchool to read more about the changes (note that Austen the CEO is the only mod there and removes posts). One example is the removal of the Team Lead program (which kind of sucked in the first place because they didn't vet anyone) and replaced it with an auto-graded system so everyone was just on their own. There are students who went through the entire curriculum and didn't have a single person review their code. Ever. This is just one example of how chaotic it is.
I haven't had contact with anyone from the school since they exiled all the alumni last year. But before that I'd say at least 80% of my cohort got hired by 4 months out. Sad to hear how far it's fallen.
Out of curiosity what was your cohort size?
He gave me an email address and then didn’t reply to some very specific examples I gave of obvious mistakes that are not based in cost or labor saving.
Anyway, why should he listen to me. Except that these are just elementary learning mistakes, and the whole thing appears to be run in a chaotic and unprofessional manner.
My friend will almost certainly quit. It is just so unfortunate because the premise is great.
But there are companies that have been successful with it. (General Assembly, App Academy is having some success, Hack Reactor is growing, Flatiron School, Thinkful, Spring Board)
Next generation of bootcamps will be much higher quality instruction based on technology. (See Fullstack Academy)
And they will be partnered with big FAANGs, or built in-house by FAANGs. (Again, Lambda pioneering)
Traditionally, you’d expect technology companies to have a pipeline to identify and cultivate junior talent (an apprenticeship). Instead, they rather pass the buck to leetcode and bootcamps. Quality engineers are expensive, so you have to operate your bootcamp similar to the traditional higher education TA model (low paid teaching the paying). Are ISAs predatory? Hard to say, depending on what you think of equity, free will, determinism, and “someone has to take the chance and pay for this.”
They do. It's called internships.
Not all degrees are 100k. Lots of STEM degrees pay themselves off. The real issue is the time commitment. Most code school students (IME) are career changers that can't afford to spend 2-4 years changing skillsets. Also, Lambda School caps ISA at 30k, which I would argue is insane for a 6 month fulltime program. To your 100k example, college is actually cheaper.
You can cherry pick, but with most random programs the value prop is much less obvious. And there are hundreds of them for every stand out program. In CS particularly you are probably ok right now, but it doesn’t generalize well, like your example.
[edit] if not clear, I’m not arguing post-secondary isn’t worthwhile, just picking a program like Waterloo isn’t good evidence.
Going to a mediocre state school for CS will pay itself off quickly, regardless of which school.
But this Austin Allred guy is one sketchy motherfucker.
And seeing PG not reacting about the shitty reviews LambdaSchool is getting is the most hypocrytic thing I've seen at all.
Aged like fucking milk.
Austin may have been the right guy to start the company, but IMHO, he should've handed it off to someone with a background in education a long time ago.
And the potholes here are lay-offs for people who otherwise saw employment for a period with Lambda. Or payments to Lambda that trigger only when you're making money yourself. He might think of those as reasonable downsides en route to a more polished, future Lambda service.
The model itself (pay if you earn) isn't outrageous. We had something similar (but government-based) with HECS in Australia, that's evolved a bit since.
The revenue-sharing once seemed "at least aligned" to me. But it's become clear that Lambda school is classic game theory at work, optimization without regard for process.
Because of this, I'm corned into thinking that education, like healthcare, is one of those things that should be off limits to profit seekers. And yes, that means having to do the hard work as a society and identifying how we can maximize education through common resources for a common good.
Is Lambda School profitable? They’re still pretty new. And in an entrenched/moderately regulated space. I’d be surprised.
We expect certain words in a layoff press release, and so the writers of those press releases use those words.
The traditional higher education is becoming more and more a scam. Federal government is backing almost all the student loans, but universities automatically increase their tuitions. The student loan crisis is a clear indication that this model is not working. For the past 20 years, in-state public university tuitions have increased more than 200% [1]. Now the total student loans count to approximately $1.6 trillion [2].
In the past, America had a tradition of wealthy people create new universities. Now we only have the rich donating to established universities, but no longer building new ones. Elite universities are all about powers, instead of educating more people, that's why they don't make efforts to expand their campus or create new campuses. Ever heard Harvard build a new campus in a different city? Or Yale acquire an not so successful private university to level to it up so that their success can spread out and more students can be benefit? No.
I cherish people who want to build a new model for higher / technical education. And wish them the best luck. There certainly will be trails and errors. And I hope them can power through.
1. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co...
2. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08121...
The trade off, in my mind, is that I didn't become a SWE in lambda. Engineering is far more broad than learning how to build a CRUD app. Since Lambda, my self appointed curriculum has been engineering fundamentals, design patters/language/etc. Knowing how to write a BST is a lot different than understanding the core concepts behind everyday algos.
On the condition of getting the federal student loan is that the loan is exempts from bankruptcy. The loans follow us to the death or until it is paid off. It actively screws those naive students until to the point of no return. I have a friend who is still stuck paying the loan more than 15 years because the wage are not above the cost of living.
This is a huge legal binding part caused a lot of them instantly debts trap while the universities keep pushing the envelopes with the tuitions without oversight
Edit: But there are federal loan forgiveness programs. They have many of them. If your degree in your career and it end up into career ending situation, they have a program for this. However, I don't know if those program changed due to DeVos involved meddlings with various programs.
1. If you go bankrupt, most stuff can be taken away if you can't pay for it. I can take your car, house, etc, but I can't take you education. You still have the full and complete value of that, so I'm not sure it's obvious that bankruptcy should remove the debt.
2. When you graduate, you typically haven't really got any money yet. It would be very easy for recent grads to just go bankrupt before they start accumulating wealth, and then go on with their lives without the loan debt.
Your second point is fair, though. That's why student debt shouldn't be a thing.
It shouldn't need to be said, and yet it appears that it does, that bankruptcy is not without consequences for me, even if you fail to rob me blind in the process. A bankruptcy will limit my ability to rent an apartment, get a car loan, or win certain jobs. There is no story of people scamming bankruptcy in the US, not even in the recent past when educational debt was still dischargeable.
Additionally, I found another story from a few months back with a lot of comments: "Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year."[2]
You might get a diamond in the rough sometimes but it's so inefficient compared to a hiring pipeline from real schools. Lambda now has a program where you can "try" one of their graduates for a few weeks free of charge. Contrast that with the signing bonuses you see negotiated at serious career fairs... That should give you an idea how much people trust Lambda's grads.
Any idea how this works? It seems like it would be difficult to have such a program without running afoul of labor laws. Does Lambda have the equivalent of a temp staffing agency subsidiary to facilitate this program?
There are so many shady, obvious blunders like this when it comes to Lambda School
None of them were really teaching Linux sysadmin, clustering, scaling, etc. The real world needs developers that understand more than just frontend development.
There are no shortcuts to experience and aptitude.
> Lambda pioneered the income share agreement (ISA) in the career
> and technical education space, and we're now watching many of
> the schools who followed us abandon their ISA offerings because
> they believe it's impossible to make this model work. We strongly
> disagree. In fact, many things at Lambda School are working very
> well, and we are...
> ...laying off 65 Lambda School employees.> One immediate change, however, is that we are pausing new enrollment in our part-time programs.
This all surprised me a little since I imagined schools like this would be doing well, pandemic job losses and expanded unemployment ought to make for a great market of prospective students. I guess it hasn’t been that simple.
You are correct that schools like this (secondary/trade, not ISA, necessarily) do well during economic downturns, historically.
But make no mistake, this is mission accomplished not mission failed for some. We're the last best-paid skilled trade, and Capital is after us.
So in this case there are more junior devs than the employers want to hire.
While I think Lambda is doing a fairly decent job with the curriculum on the data science side (having been condensed from 9 -> 6 months); the job market has doubled down on being competitive through hard skills while the school has doubled down on training students in soft skills, and isn't providing enough resources to upskill before reaching the ceiling of becoming a mid-level software engineer within a few years of landing their first job. Some of the curriculum especially unit 3 felt like a chore where I had a lot of trouble with how quickly material was being crammed in, with almost no regard to ensure understanding of the previous day's. The forced mentor/mentee relationships and track teams also felt like I'd gotten zero value-add from, and Lambda continues to have the pitfall of no student accountability whilst passing forward multiple students who didn't contribute a single line of code to our build week projects that will need to be fully redone if showing them off as portfolio pieces.
This lack of being thorough and due diligence coupled with seeing recent posts in the #hired channel receive lower salary offers seems to have confirmed that not enough is being done to address the skills gap between college grads and the lousy reputation bootcamp grads have been getting as of lately. Having maxed out the amount I'm able to borrow in student loans & exceeding the max number of credits taken during my time at university to be eligible for a degree, a non-traditional education approach like Lambda really appealed to me and I wish the staff and school the best of success going forwards. Hopefully the Amazon partnership will be a stepping stone for big tech to tell Lambda and the broader hiring market what they want from junior developers in an ever-tightening labor market. The CS and labs units felt like an excellent experience and the students in our labs project have been valuable to work directly with on a real-world software engineering application.
Disclosure: I have no contractual agreements with an ISA.
I know a few of my peers that walked out without even setting up their local development (because they were on windows and there was little help or instruction for students with windows).
But I'm glad you got something good out of CS and Labs. I'd describe CS as neutral for me... It was just grinding CodeSignal. Labs was extremely disorganized and suffered from a lack of leadership and its sudden shortened length (from 2 months to 1 month).
I remember the pains in undergrad of trying to get tensorflow to correctly make use the gpu on a windows machine. Not fun!
Anyways, not trying to be rude here, but this is pretty concerning to read. If someone needs to have their handheld through installs then I’m not sure how effective I’d ever expect them to be in any autonomous role with any ambiguity (hint: data science requires both). Even more concerning if this is at a later stage of the curriculum.
Keep in mind that a majority of the students have never seen or touched a command-line, and trying to install various tools resulted in a lot of errors for a lot of students, troubleshooted by TLs that were only students 2+ months ahead.
Does this mean you paid up front?
Also, exceeding the max number of credit hours while at university is a mistake. Classes should only be a part of a university experience. Good students takes advantage of the other opportunities such and internships and working in research groups. If you want more education then go to grad school.
And why would "good developers" go to a bootcamp? That would defeat the entire purpose.
Think smarter.
And if you actually think coding bootcamps don't work, just take a fking look at the alumni...
Odd choice here. I think it's kind of textbook not to say that the decision to layoff people was hard on you.
Doesn't seem _too_ surprising, given how many part-time programs (ie, Coursera) have struggled to retain users distracted by jobs and life.
I hope they figure it out. 4-year university education for everyone is a broken model, and students deserve a cheaper path that doesn't eat half a decade of their life.
The quicker everyone learns these important concepts, non of which are taught in school or in bootcamps, the quicker one gets to be productive in programming.
While some of the leetcode questions have tedious edge cases and ambiguous logic, there is no doubt in my mind that lists, trees, arrays, queues, maps, graphs, sorting, binary searching, and memoization are crucial for being an amazing programmer
I know too many incredible engineers that don't think in the way that those timed exercises require, and these folks are wildly talented and wildly successful.
But, for the most serious roles, there needs to be skill scrutiny and performance under pressure.
Think of the difference between a performing artist and a music teacher. Both are vital roles and have related but distinct skill sets. The performing artist must have everything drilled and ready to go on stage, much like a heart surgeon shouldn't be doing research on the operating table.
If you owned a restaurant, would you hire a hostess that couldn't operate a telephone, or a cook that couldn't turn on a stove?
Similarly I wouldn't hire a programmer that could not turn an array into a linked list.
> I can only state that I'm thankful we don't work together
I truly pity the folks that have to interview with you.
How would you interview them, so as to choose the best candidate the first time?
For the music teacher I would have them record the piece, and send in the best take. I wouldn't demand they get on stage and play the piece.
The only realistic alternative to hackerrank is to do strict university filtering, only interviewing candidates who come from ranked universities. This is obviously terrible.
Hackerrank, even though it annoys you, is an ENORMOUS leveling of the playing field, giving opportunities to people who didn't have the money or connections or whatever to make it into a top CS program.
If you aren't those people, you don't understand what doors it opens.
Another beef - I have yet to see an exercise which is remotely relevant to the work being done. Shuffling arrays, regurgitating interview preparation exercises, mutating objects, all-out silly exercises like "convert this number to a roman numeral" don't measure a candidate.
So where do you set the bar? This goes being annoying - leetcode exercises are pure laziness and a red flag of an inept hiring process for all but the least experienced candidates. The job market solved this problem eons ago - references, references, references. If you have none and you have no portfolio on which to measure your ability, you fall below the bar and sure, then I'll concede that some measure of basic ability is necessary. No one asks for, calls, or contacts references anymore (we do). Want to know if someone is capable? Talk to the people they've been working with. Scrutinize references for obvious softballs. If you actually care about the person you want to work with, and think you want to work with someone you respect, put a modicum of effort in.
We've shifted to using tiered collaborative "projects" that we book an hour to two hours to work through with a candidate. We give them the ability to review what we'll be working on together, in detail, before the call so that they can prepare. It's also _not_ about finishing, there is no finish line, it's about collaboration, and we tell the candidates that. We've had many candidates state this was being their ability, and see themselves out. Thats FAR more respectful of a candidate than leetcode for someone who's spent 10 years delivering microservices for a profitable business. It's also far more representative of the work they'll be asked to do:
- Being given a description of work
- Pairing or collaborating
- Stating what they do and do not know
- Researching a thing
I'd hire someone that failed an array shuffling algo bullshit leetcode challnge, but worked very well with a small group for an hour, and was able to deliver good answers and make progress on a task.
> Hackerrank, even though it annoys you, is an ENORMOUS leveling of the playing field, giving opportunities to people who didn't have the money or connections or whatever to make it into a top CS program.
I hope I've made it clear that this has nothing to do with leveling the playing field, and nothing to do with getting into CS programs. I mentioned prior that I have 20 years of experience professionally, no degree, and the last 4 people I've recommended for hire had only one prior position, were bootcamp grads (one self-taught), and are excelling in every area. They're wonderful, motivated people. What Hackerrank DOES do is shift the burden of actually caring about the people you're speaking to. If volume is an issue, the process is BROKEN.
There's nothing wrong with hackerrank-esque platforms themselves. They're actually pretty sweet if you want to work through a couple narrowly scoped problems and get instant feedback while picking up a new language. There are even some diamonds in the rough that are actually decent multi-stage problems you can work through with a candidate during an interview. They make data structures and general code literacy more accessible to aspiring programmers, which is not a Bad Thing.
If hiring teams are attempting (and failing miserably) to use these platforms as a shortcut, that's on them. Their system may be busted, but coding sandboxes aren't forcing teams to not put effort into their hiring processes; that's entirely up to the folks making decisions.
Never said that I did. I said they were the worst thing to happen to tech, and elaborated that it's because of their overuse and abuse in hiring. Many good things start with good intentions and are abused.
FWIW, this is what I was keying off of.
“Willing to put in the work” shows me that Austen is already rationalizing his failure in terms of his indentured servants —- I mean students — not working hard enough.