Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Students then got a survey "explaining" why the change was actually a good thing by asking questions such as "Do you understand why companies value mentoring experience?" Not just failing to reveal the truth (these were cost-cutting measures), but not even taking the effort to come up with a convincing lie.
It was destabilizing: Austen's twitter account would read ambitious, hyperoptimistic; meanwhile, drastic changes would be made within the program with vague rationales ("after speaking with hiring managers, we've made these changes..."), and probing further simply got deflections or gaslighting surveys.
There were a ton of good people in the program, and I learned a lot there. But fundamentally there needs to be trust between institution and student when you're asking people to make this level of time and financial commitment. And at no point did I feel like Lambda at its top level prioritized student wellbeing over PR, costs, or metrics to be sold to investors.
People tend to be really understanding when you are brutally honest, and brutally cynical when you bullshit them even a little.
But I'm not sure that would work if you're pivoting constantly and in a downward spiral. There are simply too many decisions happening for "we need to cut costs" to feel valid all the time. Lambda school appears to be in that category so far as I can see.
For most everyone else? There is often a need to provide at least some surface ‘here is why everything is not actually super terrible so you should stay’ sugar coating or it is not going to go down well.
The larger the group, the more apparent the effect and I suspect it’s due to lack of trust and/or familiarity with the speaker. If you’ve had your sleeves rolled up and been in the trenches with someone, you either know you can’t trust them already (and in which case, why are you still here?!?), or can trust them well and can see a positive outcome if it works.
If you can’t trust them, it’s just a signal that things are terrible and don’t know how terrible they really are - and what choice does someone have to anchor and assume it’s worse (or maybe a little better).
- We really don't appreciate bullshit, all it does is erode trust
- No, no, let me explain how bullshit is actually good for you...- First, we need to clarify how we've changed the accountability model.
- Second, we need to clarify why we've changed the accountability model.
- Third, after we understand the bandwidth and instructor availability in this new model, we'll continue to tighten the proactive feedback on technical skills.
There is a reason 99% of politics is bullshit. shrug
Not like California is going Red anytime, well, ever, after all.
This does not apply to people who chose to go to a coding bootcamp?
> ... For those who are used to hard reality
This does not apply to people who chose to go to a coding bootcamp to avoid a life of a menial, lower-paying job?
The students would understand, yes, but not accept getting something other than what they signed up for.
It's bad ones that think they can spin something negative into something positive. All it does is break trust and employees just think they're full of shit.
The urge to spin things positively is the common default though for new execs for some reason, telling the truth about bad news when it's hard to do so is part of what makes someone good.
It’s also possible they rationalize it in some way that they’re “protecting their employees” from the bad news. In practice people like to be clued in to the truth and are more likely to respond positively to honesty in my experience.
There was a period where it was a requirement for an executive that they be credible and have a solid track record of under promising, over delivering, before they would ever be considered for leadership. Part of that comes with the experience to know (as in know in their bones, from direct experience) how important it is to be straightforward while not causing panic, and to set a solid and realistic direction instead of lying about it.
People required that of their leaders because they had seen and felt the anguish and loss that doing otherwise causes when it is something important. We've had a insane run of peace and prosperity, and it's easy to forget that and take the fluffy fun face instead.
The degradation of quality from the removal of human presence is a common narrative, and the students react to it so much more than management ever realizes.
> at no point did I feel like Lambda at its top level prioritized student wellbeing over PR, costs, or metrics to be sold to investors.
This is exactly how I would describe it. $BOOTCAMP was around for a few years, was purchased by private equity, immediately doubled it's prices, gutted the mentoring team, and "revamped" the curriculum, which really meant they were just pushing everything to video learning.
They have made some minor curriculum improvements as of late, but they have a long way to go to get back to what the program was when it was just starting out - which was ironically much higher quality in my opinion.
I do agree that I've seen a LOT of bootcamps try to "scale" out their programs by removing human teachers and using video/written content or by increasing student to teacher ratios. I'm curious if the experience I had still holds today at any bootcamps or if the drive to "scale" has messed up the industry
I wouldn't be surprised if this is how every bootcamp pitches to their investors. "We're just starting out with an MVP. Once we've nailed the curriculum we're going to scale our instruction without increasing labor costs".
An entrepreneurial team comes along and puts their hearts and souls into setting up a business and establishing the brand with some high quality product. That brand becomes worth something. The easiest way to monetize that brand is to use it for a con job. It sucks.
You thought you were getting quality, it's what you paid for, well you're getting cheap and nasty and we're taking excess profit for as long as the brand lasts. You took the bait and got the switch. Usually (but not always) the original entrepreneurial team is unwilling to do this, because they believed what they were doing was something more than just making money. Private equity is just making money and are extremely willing to do this.
[1] I prefer unregulated markets as far as the alternative is usually worse. There are obvious exceptions at the extreme ends (monopoly, health and safety, fraud, adverse externality etc.) How far away from the extreme you think regulation stops working is a lot of interesting case-by-case discussion where intelligent, reasonable and informed people can disagree in good faith improving their understanding and the quality of suggested policy in the process. It would be nice to see a bit more of it in the media!
I suspect we're politically rather opposed, as I see this as a consequence of capitalism putting a price tag on everything, and something that regulation is appropriate for (some way of forcing brands to publicise when they've changed something, so that customers can know whether a review they read still applies, although the details of how to do that would be difficult). Indeed I'd argue that the only reason customers can trust a brand like Coca-Cola is strong regulation in the form of trademark law.
Do you want locally bottled Coke(tm) with the red label and dynamic ribbon for your very thirsty child or locally bottled "Odin's Thirst Quencher! (est. 2021)"?
Coke are going to enforce quality control and safety to protect their brand or get out of that market. There is no regulation you can rely on in this mythical country - but there are quite a few countries like that which you may know yourself from having visited them. In France, say, you have regulation that safety is not a concern. When you don't have it you have brands - the owner has the incentive to protect them. So it goes also in France, or the USA or other wealthy countries to the parts of commerce that are not regulated (whether they could be or whether that's because it's not feasible).
But the higher issue is information. Should you be able to sell the same product with a very different quality under the same name? Let's say we agree the answer is ideally "no, you can't do that." Now we want to regulate that you can't do that. How is it enforced? There may be ways. There may be grey areas. The cost may be prohibitive in many instances or there might be new solutions to mitigate those problems.
What is isn't is easy which you can see as soon as you apply it to the industry and case under discussion. Intensive industry training schools.
> Coke are going to enforce quality control and safety to protect their brand or get out of that market. There is no regulation you can rely on in this mythical country - but there are quite a few countries like that which you may know yourself from having visited them.
I'd argue that in a lawless country people have no faith in the brands either. Look at the fake Apple stores in China, or at parents importing identically-branded baby formula from abroad because they (justifiably) didn't trust the locally produced version.
There are plenty of times what you trust is the interests of the brand holder to defend the value of the brand where regulation can't help you. Coke in a sealed bottle is extremely likely to be coke in a sealed bottle in Mogadishu. The brand "Coke" gives you some information about the probability of not drinking poison. Obviously it isn't perfect. I think it's evident that it isn't something to be dismissed as inconsequential information either. Coke will be trying very hard to make sure nobody impersonates them and kills their customers anywhere in the world because it would be an advertising disaster. Better that than nothing.
(Just quietly I hate the coca cola company and think they are pretty evil. Diabetes. Obesity. They're similar to a cigarette company. Meh. Useful points can still be made using their business as an example.)
Barq's famously does this and doesn't seem to have any issues.
It works for any business really.
Starbucks in particular-- there's not enough quality coffee in the world for them to serve it at any price.
They've even gone so far as to redefine the term "blonde" to something that's more like full-city--lighter roasts imply higher quality beans--full city is several shades darker than blonde, and blonde should almost always come with at least some chaff. I've never seen chaff in a bag of Starbucks beans, but it could be possible they're taking extraordinary measures to remove it... But I doubt it.
The regulation you suggest seems a bit silly. If transparency is good for a brand, companies can already implement it. (And if customers don't care enough to pay for transparency, why force them to?)
What's the externality that your proposed regulation is trying to internalize?
Also keep in mind that disclosure regulations put an undue burden on smaller companies and upstarts, as they don't benefit from economies of scale. (You need roughly the same amount of lawyers and accountants etc to comply here, no matter how big your business is.)
The externality is the cost of staying informed. The theorems about the efficiency of a free market assume perfect information. If someone reads Consumer Reports and decides that brand XYZ is making a good product they want to buy, but brand XYZ switches to producing lower-quality products in between when the review is written and when the reader buys the thing, then we lose all the benefits that the free market was supposed to give us.
Huh? That comparatively freer markets make people better off in the real world is an empirical observation, and doesn't rely on theorems. (You can make a few assumptions and prove a few theorems, if you want to. But it's not essential.)
> If someone reads Consumer Reports and decides that brand XYZ is making a good product they want to buy, but brand XYZ switches to producing lower-quality products in between when the review is written and when the reader buys the thing, then we lose all the benefits that the free market was supposed to give us.
Eh, there's a simple fix that people intuitively implement already: trust brands more that have been around longer.
Assume the delay between the review being written and you buying stuff is eg a quarter of a year. Then, simplified, someone who goes only for brands that have been around for at least ten years only runs at most a 1 in 40 chance of getting duped like this.
By the way, the name for the scheme you are describing here is an 'exit scam'. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_scam
I challange you to find some econ papers that describe exit scams as externatilities.
> The externality is the cost of staying informed.
Btw, that's not an externality. That's just a regular cost.
It can be either or both. Information discovery can simply be a cost of transaction, sure, fine. Find out about the stuff you're thinking of buying. Regular transaction cost.
Where there are markets and methods of transacting in those markets where one can assume the product that was being sold previously with a given name is precisely similar to the one being sold when you want to buy it there is some information acquired without additional cost. If it becomes more popular for some market participants to start messing with that such that everyone has to double check everything all the damn time even when purchasing from people who would not tolerate selling like that because of the uncertainty that is now in the marketplace. That is clearly a cost imposed on people not involved in those messed up transactions. The honest sellers have an additional cost to demonstrate they aren't crooks. The buyers have an additional cost to find that out. The sensible buyer buys from the honest seller with an additional transaction cost that has nothing to do with a change in policy or behavior of either party, it's a result of some other transaction they were not party to and had no control over. That's an externality. One usually enforced via social norms first ("I've come back because you lied to me!" - we've all seen someone, somewhere taking out their fury like that) and regulation second (because yelling at shop attendants is a rubbish thing to do).
Pretty sure such externality, while undesirable in itself, does not render useless all the benefits of a marketplace. The idealised form of the microeconomic model known as "perfect competition" has perfect information as an assumption. As soon as you apply the model to a real market that assumption has to be somewhat relaxed. The relaxation may make little difference (eg there's not much to know, it doesn't change much and we all basically know it) or an immense difference (eg insider trading on the stock exchange). Such models are for positive economics (describing what is happening) rather than being prescriptive about what should happen (normative economics).
I hope explaining the jargon doesn't come off as being a condescending idiot here. The jargon is used for gatekeeping in many of these discussions and it bothers me that this is how it works.
The 'perfect competition' model is indeed not applicable here. But that's not a problem: we know empirically that markets work (and work better the freer they are). The theory just gives us the intellectual tools to investigate why that is so.
What you are describing is still not a proper externality. In the same sense that eg having a competitor is not described as an externality.
(Or similarly, given your logic, the existence of shops where people have to pay for stuff would be an externality, because now they have to make sure that they are not in a 'shop' where everything is free first. The example is admittedly a bit silly, but if you substitute 'hospital' for 'shop', it's somewhat applicable to the UK.)
About 'perfect competition' about real world competition: you might like to have a look at https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/compet
It's not empirically true in all cases; lemon laws are broadly in the same category as what I'm advocating, and empirically make people better off.
> Eh, there's a simple fix that people intuitively implement already: trust brands more that have been around longer.
> Assume the delay between the review being written and you buying stuff is eg a quarter of a year. Then, simplified, someone who goes only for brands that have been around for at least ten years only runs at most a 1 in 40 chance of getting duped like this.
That's a lot less practical now than it used to be; the pace of innovation is higher, which is good, but has brought a lot of churn and it's hard for reviewers to keep up.
A decade ago I rented a large U-Haul for a move. I knew how crappy they were and purchased the insurance just figuring it in as the "true" cost of the rental.
I pick up the truck at like 4:00pm. The truck they gave me had some serious damage to the box, it had been painted over. I documented everything and went on my way.
I return the truck at ~12pm the next morning. I get a call a few hours later from U-Haul saying I'd damaged the truck to the tune of $1700 or so. I told them, "So whats your theory? That I drove the truck 100 miles, damaged it and had time to paint over the damage and for that paint to dry in 16 hours? And, I bought the insurance anyways SO WHY THE F** ARE YOU CALLING ME?!"
Some businesses are so routinely corrupt its unusual if they're not trying to cheat you.
Another time, I took my vehicle which had very expensive tires (think $650 each) to an Allen Tire for a slow leak in one of them (would deflate once a week). I took pictures of my tires bcause I had been dreading this and putting it off for months because-- I knew what would happen. And it did:
They called me a few hours later and said one of my tires had been slashed and that I would have to replace both rear tires. The guy was a great actor. He genuinely sounded distressed over my misfortune. I told them to put the tire back on and I'd pay a reasonable fee. They refused, "Sir we can't do that, the car is unsafe to drive."
I am livid at this point. I made probably a poor decision... I calmly explained that I was missing my regularly scheduled shooting practice (which was true) and I am coming down there, with the guns that I intend to take to the practice, so I hope my old tire will be on the car so I won't be late.
When I got there (no guns of course), they had magically discovered a nail in the tire and they were sorry for the mistake. The same bastard trying to scam me was outrageously apologetic for the "mix-up."
anyways, if you made it through this slog of a post thank you! Little bored this evening...
If capital becomes abundant enough that rates of return become low enough, then the long term becomes more and more important in corporate planning.
If interest rates are high, then short term gutting of the business _is_ the rational move.
(Interest rates have been rather low in the last decade or so. Not sure if that had much of an influence?)
The decision is between a higher probability shorter realization, bigger annualized result vs longer realization, lower annual return (possibly bigger return if things go particularly well) with a bigger probability of things going wrong, especially a few years into the future where the crystal balls get less sure of themselves.
I can get a real 30% return this year and I'm out with high probability. Vs I could get 150% in 7 years time but not much this year or next and maybe it won't work out because the unknown unknowns etc?
If you're pretty sure you're on a winner you take option b and hold. If you're less sure, a bird in the hand is worth two in your dreams... Your bonus this year is on this year's results, will you still work there and get the bonus in 7 years? The decision is probably not made by the owners of captial but their professional agents.
The interest rate really doesn't figure in that calculation (real returns rather than nominal). It's all about the return probabilities and good enough with more certainty can win out where you might not like that and think more highly of the longer term prospects.
Factoring in interest rates, when they're high its because inflation is high. At that point an inflation hedged investment (which most equity is) becomes relatively more valuable than money in the bank (bonds) because money in the bank is a sure, steady loser. Capital has to go somewhere and its owners will want to put it where it can "lose the least" Get it invested in some kind of business equity, diversified as hell, across industries, business sizes, geographically, startup vs established, precious metals, Art, all of it. Just get the hell away from bonds which will hemorrhage value from the inflation. Where capital is having trouble finding investment because all captial owners are looking the incentive becomes to hang on and hold, let the business run rather than rip the value out now and have to find somewhere else equivalent to put it which may not be easy at all.
Sorry, I was talking about real interest rates. Inflation doesn't make a difference to them. Real interest rates _do_ make a difference.
> Just get the hell away from bonds which will hemorrhage value from the inflation.
Bond interest rates already price in expected inflation.
The world economy growth rate is set by population growth and technical progress. (Both new technology and new ways developed to use existing tech better).
>Bond interest rates already price in expected inflation.
Look at the incredible growth in the S&P500 during a pandemic with all the economic carnage going on with that vs the bond rates. Then if you still think so, bet so, but against my strongest feelings, which are obviously not any kind of investment advice. There are cashflow timing tax effects to consider there as well. Bond returns are depressed by central bank policy and some capital is forced to allocate there when its a bad deal. (Pension funds mandated to invest in bonds and nothing "risky" like equity). Look at the number of ways an investment in bonds can surprise on the downside. Look at the lack of room with interest rates where they are to surprise on the upside. Unanticipated inflation is a redistribution from lenders to borrowers (can pay it back with worthless currency while the asset it bought appreciates). It's always "unanticipated" in most of the yield curve when it hits.
20 Year US Govt Bond yield is 2.07% sayeth the search engine [1]. That's anticipating basically no inflation at any point for the next 20 years and a 2%ish economic growth rate in the economy. Seem like a reasonable assumption? Bond income (coupon payment) is taxable as you get it. Capital appreciation of equity isn't taxable until you sell it. In times of inflation that really matters and causes you to make a small fortune out of a bigger one.
Eg if we discovered that an asteroid was going to hit earth in ten years, you can bet that interest rates would go up like crazy---without any growth nor growth expectations.
Of course, real interest rates can be related to real growth in the economy.
> Look at the incredible growth in the S&P500 during a pandemic with all the economic carnage going on with that vs the bond rates.
I'm not sure what you mean here? Econ 101 says that the price of stocks is the discounted present value of all expected future dividends (and stock buybacks etc). If you follow that simple model, it would already predict that a short term disruption to the economy should not impact stock prices.
Of course, reality is more complicated. But even this simple model captures the phenomenon of robust stock prices while a pandemic is still going on.
> Bond returns are depressed by central bank policy and some capital is forced to allocate there when its a bad deal. (Pension funds mandated to invest in bonds and nothing "risky" like equity).
Yes, regulation makes things more complicated here. Also keep in mind that in most jurisdictions companies pay bond or loan interest with pre-tax money, but they pay dividends or stock buybacks with post-tax money.
The wider context of the discussion was about junk bonds from private equity. They benefit from the difference in tax treatment, but don't benefit from pensions funds' mandates to invest in safe assets or central bank purchases of government debt.
I'm not sure why you would cite 20 Year US Govt Bond yields here? If you are interested in inflation expectation in the US, just look at TIPS spreads https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10YIE which give you that information directly.
TIPS spreads are the difference in price between inflation adjusted bonds and non-inflation adjusted US government bonds.
> It's always "unanticipated" in most of the yield curve when it hits.
Eh, there's also unanticipated lack of inflation. The risk goes towards both sides. (A risk that only goes in one direction would be rather strange, if you have at least a few smart market participants who can benefit from correction prices.)
I'm coming up on 45 and through my whole life, markets have been regulated in favor of corporate officers and the government agencies and officials paid to represent them.
The regulatory capture you refer to is one of the downsides of over-regulation. De-regulating is not necessarily a panacea for regulatory capture. Sometimes the regulatory body that has been captured has power of regulation that is in some way completely necessary and that is use as an excuse to institute an abusive barrier to entry or similar. Or just regulated to grow the career, influence & power of the persons who are charged with advising and enforcing the regulation.
Whether two people looking carefully and sensibly at a market see it the opposite way, one as over-regulated the other as under-regulated can be largely ideological and a good faith disagreement, both of whom can achieve a better understanding and policy prescription through sensible exchange of ideas - especially with regards important details like enforcement, corruption, abusive practice that is or could happen etc.. There isn't nearly enough of that about.
If you are sufficiently purist, none of them is free or unregulated. But they are regulated in different ways and to different degrees.
You can learn a lot by observing how these varying degrees impact outcomes.
Part of the reason they got in that position is that they were charging to little to make money. It only follows that prices will go up and probably service down as the company stressed customer service in the hopes of attracting better future capital.
Bob founds a company that makes widgets. Bob sells the company to a PE company. The PE company runs the company into the ground. That opens a gap in the market for (a new) Bob to open a new company that makes widgets.
If shareholders or private equity or private equity's debtors are willing to subsidise Bob this way, who are we to complain?
I regularly work with PE firms.
You can't paint the whole industry with one brush stroke. I've seen more than a handful of companies get bought by PE to become very successful for everyone involved (PE, management, customers)...and the opposite.
That being said - it's very common to see companies in the large cap space ($5B~$10B in enterprise value) to be repositioned to match the market dynamics or financially engineered. While you might have had a poor experience, the rest of the market may have been willing to wait in 15 minute lines for $10 bottles of water.
If you disagree with PE, the easiest way to "stick it to them" is to vote with your wallet. Simply stop going to Sea World and you'll see PE change their tune pretty quickly.
Yep, I can definitely believe you've worked with PE firms.
Ironically this is exactly the sort of attitude that the parent is complaining about. You could never grow a business with this mindset, but you can coast and cannibalize one just fine. Nobody likes 15 min lines or $10 water bottles; they tolerate them because there are other experiences that are worthwhile along the way. You remove these experiences and you are basically just screwing people who are going off outdated information about the quality of the experience. Voting with dollars is fine but there is a big information asymmetry and a hysteresis effect of having a quality brand reputation (built over years of not trying to screw people). Any voting with dollars is years removed from the results.
The hysteresis effect you mention requires that people would stupid when spending their own dollars.
> Nobody likes 15 min lines or $10 water bottles; they tolerate them because there are other experiences that are worthwhile along the way. You remove these experiences and you are basically just screwing people who are going off outdated information about the quality of the experience.
Perhaps other people just have different preferences from you and make different trade-offs?
And this attitude would exist regardless of whether PE is involved. When you get the $1B+ market cap size, these entities are not benevolent entities - they are profit seeking machines.
Of course there are other PE businesses that are ran with only minor changes. I have a friend whose firm invests in dermatology offices and has created a network of small offices nation wide. From my understanding they really do try to keep the same staff on and mostly do back office changes but that’s his word so take it for what it is. I personally find large scale PE work pretty soulless but there are definitely firms that care about the companies they take over.
Well, as long as they sell the bonds only to consenting adults, what's wrong with that?
By that did you mean "the Fed"?
The Fed mostly buys government debt, don't they? Have they recently taken to buying private equity debt?
Some people prefer riskier investments. Let them have it.
Other people prefer safer investments, let them have what they want, too.
There's nothing inherently sacred about bonds. It's just a contract that basically says 'either we pay you x dollars on time, or you get to take ownership of the company'.
PE doesn't have to change their tune; by the time consumers realize that the product has changed, the firm has already made their money.
Given that PE is generally looking for profits over the 3-7 year time period, this would line up with their goals.
Other businesses could absolutely have the same incentives. We see similar acquisitions from Google, Facebook, etc. where products are absorbed into the parent company or otherwise shut down. However, there's a larger chance that the purchasing business has incentives that align with the company being purchased. An established and trusted brand is incredibly valuable; many parent companies would be content to let that business thrive as a semi-autonomous business unit.
Would you argue that PE is less or more likely to employ the strategy I've outlined in my original comment? My prior would be that PE is more likely to use that strategy than other businesses.
As always, I'm open to my views being changed on that. Clearly not all PE deals involve stripping a company down, and plenty of other businesses would be happy to strip a company down. As someone with more experience with PE, I'd be interested in your views and why you have different priors than me.
I think you're naively looking at the headlines of PE that focus on large cap buyouts. For every story about Toys R' Us, there are hundreds of PE buyouts that do no cost cutting and use PE capital to grow their businesses.
As I noted earlier, the big PE funds - Apollo, KKR, etc. - are notorious for stripping away large healthy brands and financially engineering them to leave them loaded up with debt. I can certainly appreciate why people think the whole industry is like this. For the record - not only do not I have access to these funds, I would politely decline working with them if I had the chance (we actually said no to biz with one of the big firms years ago). They easiest PE route is in fact investing in healthy businesses with good management teams and then selling them in 3~5 years when multiples naturally go up. The less work that is required to turn the business around the easier it is on the PE fund. Financial engineering and cost cutting is just a cheap trick that can only be used in certain situations.
There is a HUGE market of mid market PE firms that survive on growing both top line and earnings as a result of growth orientated initiatives, and don't leave the company hanging with swathes of debt. In fact, there is a category called Growth PE which has invested in many of the tech companies we discussed here. Look up Insight Venture Partners, TCV, Tiger Global, etc.
Happy to elaborate further if you're interested.
Not only that, but Lambda seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]
I don't think I've seen a single hire out of a bootcamp work out in the end. Except a few cases where the person actually came from a STEM degree from a good school (and more crucially, already had some exposure to programming during the degree) but it's unclear to me that they actually needed the bootcamp and not just a good primer on modern software development and something like the Missing Semester [2] or a few classes at their school covering software engineering.
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
The TA thing, a TA doesn't teach, a TA pretty much grades/code reviews. They answered questions. (I did this while I was hunting for a job).
They also don't count that towards placement.
I have an IS degree, but some other people I know succeed with pretty much anything you can think of. I don't have enough of a sample size to know if we're all just exceptions or not.
That sounds like... teaching doesn't it?
That said, the hit ratio from bootcamp graduate to productive hire is incredibly, incredibly low. I think there's a place for bootcamps, but I'm not sure most bootcamps are operating in that space.
I don't know how to fix it, but I did think the Lambda School income share arrangement at least served/tried to align incentives for the school to actually help the students transform themselves.
There is some natural overlap there, but that isn't the same thing as alignment.
So there is 5
My own brother is one such story, and within 5 years in the industry, he became a manager and now runs engineering at a small startup. He did have programming familiarity before his bootcamp, which helped him make the most of the bootcamp, but zero prior formal training or professional experience.
That said, my brother also reported that the majority of his class didn't seem to be really on top of the material, and I wouldn't doubt that that's typical.
That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people.
One thing I've tried to emphasize with my mentees is the need to go beyond the curriculum (because it simply doesn't cover enough) and do personal projects. I always tell them the narrative about how back in the early 00s, the only resources available were things like w3schools.com, documentation, and the occasional dubiously accurate blog entry. I was able to learn almost everything I learned not for the sake of learning it but because I wanted to build X or Y. Bootcamps will teach you a vertical slice of some skills that are relevant in [current year], but they do not do a very good job of getting you started on a lifelong process of self-learning and side projects, which is the only way you get anywhere in this industry. Plus the only way to stand out when you went to a bootcamp anyway is having a very exceptional github profile with open source contributions that demonstrates you actually have an interest and do things beyond what is required by the bootcamp.
I just want to echo this, I have also worked with some really really sharp engineers coming out of these bootcamps. They were also people changing careers. I would really hate for the questionable aspects of these bootcamps to reflect on all of their grads, because some of the grads are fantastic.
I guess traditional colleges are the same way, right? A degree is like an informal union card that says "Hey this person can sit for 4 years and take tests."
Even now I'll show off my projects during interviews. The rare times this backfires I know that company would have sucked anyway.
You need this to be successful at anything. My cynical take is most people aren't, and see programing as some get rich quick scheme. If they did have these qualities they for the most part would already be successful
Could not agree more. When I was 14 years old my friends would go out to the mall to hang out. I would sit at home working on the modem routines for my BBS program.
If I didn't get paid to work in IT, I would be doing it for free.
Anyway, my point is, it's very important to make sure students understand that their confusion surrounding how things are structured in JavaScript is natural, and that they can (and should, on their own preferably) look forward to learning more stable/sensical languages in the near future. It's a shame I have to do this for my students instead of the course just doing it for me, however.
Eg just disallow for...in to be used at all (but allow for...of)
No iterating over objects except via eg Object.entries
No inheriting objects from other objects (ie no prototypal inheritance)
No var
No anonymous functions (ie only named function declarations or lambda/fat-arrow expressions, to avoid `this` binding gotchas)
Etc
I think the only real big blocker to a thing like this is that it'd need tooling (eg a transpiler that injects error throws at appropriate places), and tooling is another big hairy thing that makes JS less approachable for beginners.
It's almost like we could use a better frontend language. Too bad there isn't some magical universal assembly language supported by all major browsers we could use as a launchpad for such a thing ;)
A junior developer who is just learning how to code will not deal with all of JS historical baggage; they will deal with historical JS when joining a large historical codebase. A junior developer will also not be dealing with the different quirks arising from different browser runtimes. These are concerns for businesses who already have products.
But a Student does not encounter these things while learning and writing greenfield apps. Otherwise we are advocating for a student to learn an additional "learning" language. That sounds ideal for a 4 year university program.
The key problem with js is the relationship between objects and functions is extremely confusing. You end up having to explain associative arrays, and spend 30+ minutes doing some hand-waving to even begin to describe what an object actually is in JavaScript. Then they get it. Contrast that with something like Java or even Rust where, despite the other complexities, it's pretty clear what the data is and how it is stored.
When you're teaching, you should be enabling the student to do one more thing that they couldn't do before. If you're spending 30+ minutes trying to explain what an object is, you're trying to do way too much. You don't need to have a 100% complete and correct understanding of Javascript's object model to use objects.
> Contrast that with something like Java or even Rust where, despite the other complexities, it's pretty clear what the data is and how it is stored.
That's nonsense. Particularly with Rust, now you're deep in the weeds of pointers, stack vs heap vs other segments, and borrow checking rules.
[1] helped design a JS class at Stanford for first-time programmers. Also designed an intro Rust class.
Programming is a very particular and abstract way to look at performing a task and most people need to be eased into it, trained to think like a computer.
This ideea that you can take a shoe salesman, make them "proficient" at JavaScript, and let them loose in the job market is a bit strange. It might work for a very limited number of people with an knack for it, but most people I've seen will approach the task as some sort of incantation of magic formulas that make the computer work. When the complexity of the task exceeds what can be achieved with magic formulas, they give up in frustration.
With Java you will spend a huge amount of time on pointless ceremony that can seem important to a beginner but is really pedantic enforcement of programming preferences from the Java designers (everything is a class for example).
With Python you have a pretty easy language but the dependency management situation is a disaster. Python in a Google Colab notebook where everything is pre-installed could be good.
Dependency management with either Java or Python is PITA IMO, but my idea would be to avoid dependencies during this initial phase of learning the basics.
On one hand, it seems like an antiquated curriculum. On the other hand, a surprising number of mid-sized companies still run on Rails or Django.
(I don't comment on the usefulness of Rails and Django to small companies and individuals, because they're not the ones hiring bootcamp grads.)
The other thing about Python is that, because it's already so popular for teaching, it has an ecosystem of tools around that. E.g. it has turtle graphics in the standard library (!), which is a very good way to explain loops, recursion etc for visual learners. There's also IDEs like https://thonny.org/ that visualize program execution step-by-step.
Elm would probably work too.
Also, the language has clear defects, but they irritate much more the experienced folks than the rookies (that are not so surprised when encountering inconsistencies).
Oh, and I have also trained many people using Java, and I initiated my dev career with Java 0.99 (or 0.98?). Most of my courses started with the sentence "let me tell you a joke: public static void main(String[] args)" :)
Also, most languages have quirks. What are you going to teach them? Python, which also has almost 30 years of baggage? Java, which requires you to spend significantly more time to produce basic functionality? Haskell, so they can gloat about the power of purity and monads on Hacker News?
I understand that javascript might not be the ideal intro language in theory. But I think it probably is the best one in the bootcamp specific use case.
Ruby's also got a much better web dev story, which is good for junior devs (without ML and/or infrastructure backgrounds) who are looking to enter the market. After learning Ruby, either JS or Java could be a great 2nd language.
> It's much more beginner friendly and is a thoroughly consistent OO language—i.e., everything is an object, including numbers and strings.
This sort of thing occurs to you and me and makes sense because we have a broader understanding of software engineering. In practice, I just don't think "everything is an object" means much to someone who's a month into a bootcamp.
IMO learning very beginner-friendly language like Ruby to a low-intermediate level first actually speeds up the process of getting to an employable level with a more difficult language like JS.
From a sheer utilitarian perspective, healthcare and safety nets are positive ROI. Imagine the job-producing startups that don't exist because "how do you pay for insurance?"
I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next generation.
Long term care is needed by a lot of folks over the age of 65 (~70% of adults age 65 will require at least partial long term care).
Even "reasonably cheap" care (in my experience, roughly the same quality as living in a college dorm, with a roommate and a meal plan) can easily run 10k/month - or 120k a year.
Of those needing long term care (roughly half of all folks): Men will need that care for an average of ~2 years, women nearly 4 years. 20% will need that care for 5 years or longer.
I watched my parents spend all of their inheritance covering long term care costs for their parents (Alzheimers is a bitch). Once the inheritance was gone, they worked longer than they would have preferred to continue covering those costs (my mother only retired this year when my grandmother died of covid - as horrendous as it sounds, it was almost a blessing).
My personal take is that "single family homes" and "private healthcare" are a literal fucking disaster for long term wealth inequality. That policy combination takes a lot of middle class families and leaves them poor.
* - I personally don't think it's an accident at all, I think it's very, very intentional.
Families should take care of their own. If nobody is willing to do that for you, you probably aren't deserving.
Might be more fair to say ‘every tomahawk missle fired randomly at a target at the Middle East is an entire middle class families lifetime income down the tubes’.
That's not true, the money isn't just lost. The money is passed to the children of the person who extracts the money from the sick people. It's by design.
I can only imagine the hardships your family endured for this sentence to come out. I'm glad things are working out for you guys and I'm sorry for your loss.
...
> * - I personally don't think it's an accident at all, I think it's very, very intentional.
Its extremely intentional wealth stealing, and it's even worse than just lost generational wealth transfer. Filial responsibility laws mean that your illness and long-term care are your children's financial burden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws .
In the worst cases, people estranged from their parents for decades end up bankrupted. Depending on what state your grandmother lived in - your mother may have been on the hook even if she hadn't chosen to keep working to care for her mom.[1]
The idea that paying for elderly parents' expensive (intentionally or accidentally) care is a choice only applies to people in less than half of the states. These laws make the only choice "pay the provider directly now" or "pay the provider costs and late fees, etc via the courts". So anyone who wants to claim that the people who care for their parents are chosing to do so is claiming wrong - if your parent spends their last days in one of 26 states, the parent is chosing what your wealth is used for.
[1] I hope that didn't come across as suggesting your mom was only making a financial choice, or that she didn't make her choice out of love. I'm sorry you lost your grandmother and I hope your mom enjoys her retirement.
I can't imagine there are too many people in this world with half a million dollars ready to go.
The only reason I see expenses really causing massive debt is if you choose to accept/request medical procedures you can't pay for.
While it's morbid to consider the idea of just letting yourself die because you don't want to go into debt, it still is a choice... isn't it?
Medical technology is quite advanced these days. Advanced != free. And there's a thing where the longer you try to prolong someone's life the more progressively expensive it becomes, not just from a "price of care" perspective but an "[externalized] cost of care" perspective. Is it worth X carbon dioxide emissions to keep a person on a "level-III dialysis machine"? Is it worth X acres of rainforest to extract an anticancer drug to keep someone's cancer at bay?
Anyways the political divide, in the US, between the left's clueless utopianism and the right's underhanded support of market-distorting profitmongers, has become so farcical that it's impossible to question if humans should have "a general right to have their life extended" even if there are actual, difficult questions to go around.
[0] capital We, as in "the state"
[1] if you ever have the experience of being by the bedside of someone who is dying (n=2 for me), you will see people who come to visit, and have so much pathos, I suspect largely due to their own hangups about death. To be at your best in your role, you will want to shoo them away as quickly as possible.
Have you ever been to a US hospital? They don’t have a menu where you browse treatments and prices. You get your treatment and then later on you get a massive bill
That’s all putting aside the fact that a society allowing people to suffer from treatable illnesses is completely unnecessary and cruel considering that providing free care to everyone is something many countries do successfully
At the extreme end of diminishing returns, I'd guess that most deaths of elderly people in hospital are preventable because machines to perform the function of failed heart, lungs, kidneys, GI tract, etc. exist. But it's expensive, and countries with socialized healthcare don't pay for it for everyone because they don't have infinite money. My dad died this way when his lungs filled with fluid while in hospital.
What part of my comment are you referring to? I can’t really tell from what you wrote
I'm saying no country provides free healthcare for all treatable illnesses. And not providing it is necessary because the cost would be too great.
I agree it's cruel though.
No. I'm glad I could clear up this very difficult topic for you.
I understand if you are unconscious, you can't decide, or in a coma. But what if you are lucid and asked by a doctor if you want a procedure or not?
Sure, if anyone wants to use their time to learn something new that would be a plus for them.
That said, the formula is a political choice just as the UBI benefits are a political choice. We could give everyone the same SSA benefits regardless of prior income and index the amounts to age instead. UBI and SSA could be the same administration with lower amounts for younger people and higher amounts for retirees.
https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/questions-an...
And to add insult to injury, people will rather think you deserve it than face the fact that we're all in the same stinking boat.
He also could probably have declared bankruptcy early and been able to focus more on learning useful skills instead of killing himself trying to pay bills he never could. That is what bankruptcy is for.
But hard to say what was really going on.
Something tells me you've never even come close to walking in those shoes.
The second you stop generating profit, the state starts treating you like a broken toy.
There are methods to avoid being destroyed by situations like this, but some never try or don’t bother to even figure it out. Doesn’t mean it still isn’t hard work, and stressful as hell, but it is there to stop the destruction. Folks have to look and try though.
the battle cry of every 20-something laissez faire evangelist
Shit sucks sometimes. It's often hard or nearly impossible to cope. Sometimes the terribleness comes from those you loved the most, or least expected it from. Sometimes it comes from a literal random stranger. Life isn't fair, and there is no guarantee - and fundamentally cannot be - that things work out for anyone, no matter how right or wrong their actions.
Sometimes this kills someone directly. Sometimes it just wears them down, sometimes someone can take a direct hit to the face that would kill most others and just smile.
Often the bigger part of the damage or ongoing problems stem from our own inability to face reality, what is going on, and make use of the tools we do have and what we have around us to actually make things better - but that is a problem no one can fix but us. Ultimately, we end up with the consequences of this, deserved or not. There is no magic bullet to solve this either, just hard and uncomfortable work.
There are tools however, and our current society provides a LOT of them. I fully recognize how hard it is to use them during hard times. Probably more than 99% of the posters here. But pretending they don't exist or aren't available is BS as well. Pretending that they don't exist and that is why society is unfair and fucked up because of this is also just wrong and corrosive to society - and people even actually using these tools.
How many people read these posts and actually think there IS no other option and they're permanently fucked, and so never actually take the actions they can to make it better - or even take drastically worse actions that just compound the problem?
A lot more than anyone wants to think about, I can assure you.
Bankruptcy exists. I've seen many people use it (including one close friend) and everyone came out fine at the end. Was it embarrassing for them? Yes. Was it fun? No.
I've always worked my ass off and saved money to avoid the risk, and still barely survived, as I saw how unfun it was as a child and felt many of the effects first hand. But it worked for them to do it, and I knew I had the option if it went even further south.
The whole point of bankruptcy is to get the creditors off your back so you can actually get your life back on track again - like learn a useful skill, or get a new job despite the market being screwed, or not go homeless, or build back a functional life after crippling medical issues and/or debt.
Is it guaranteed that said person will do so? No - there is no way to even attempt to give such a guarantee.
Is it a useful tool someone can use to do so? Yes, you bet.
And if you think I'm 20, lol.
I am in New Zealand, which is fairly civilised, and I think your statement is mostly wrong.
Firstly, I have seen people get some government help, but it is rarely enough. Even with government help and sharing the load with siblings you may still need to help your parents full time.
Secondly, many people choose to look after their parents because they want to, or sometimes they don’t trust that others will give them the same quality of care. Even with high quality private care, I have seen plenty of children dedicate a lot of time to their parents (similarly friends looking after sick friends).
For some children it is acceptable for them to hand parents over to aged care, provided by the state. Many other children choose instead to do as much as they can to help their parents, often because they have experience of the systems and see the reality of overburdened elderly care.
When infirm people have nobody else to help them except government services, their care is sometimes of low quality, although still expensive for the economy to provide. A mature economy with many elderly perhaps doesn’t have enough people to provide the number of dedicated hours needed to support all of their infirm? I did a quick search and it looks like New Zealand spends about 1% of GDP on long term aged health care. That seems surprisingly low to me - although I didn’t look at how much other countries spend. https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=crown+expenditure+%22aged%...
[We] find that, if the program pushes individuals above a threshold level of initial assets, then they escape poverty, but, if it does not, they slide back into poverty…Our findings imply that large one-off transfers that enable people to take on more productive occupations can help alleviate persistent poverty.
Their paper clearly illustrates that many poor people stay poor not because of their talent/motivation, but because they are in low-paying jobs that they must work to survive."
More on this here: https://ofdollarsanddata.com/why-do-poor-people-stay-poor/
"That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people."
Some folks thrive in this environment either by natural ability or their learning style and others do not. For whatever the reason the coding bootcamp gets the flack for underperforming folks and it seems to me unfair: Why are they held to this super high standard to teach a difficult subject (computer programming at a high level) to all kinds of learners at all levels?
College is gated by GPA and standardized test scores. You can quibble over the effectiveness and wisdom of this specific gate, but the upside is that mediocre students aren't going to spend a year and $30,000 convincing themselves they're going to major in CS at MIT. At Lambda, students quit their jobs, and take months out of their lives, only to find out 4 months later that programming isn't for them.
Heck, there are "intro" (OK, some of them aren't really) MOOC classes that, while more theoretical in some cases, should give you a pretty good idea if this is something you're really willing to devote a lot of time and money to.
I recently learned this is increasingly no longer true. Many top institutions have made standardized test scores optional in recent years, and we're a few years away from it becoming normal to not even take the SATs and get into multiple ivy league schools as a top student.
because this is the standard they advertise to and represent as the capability of their learning platform and their teachers?
How does this compare to traditional colleges? We hear a lot about students saddled with massive debt and useless degrees, but I don't have a good sense of what percentage that is.
And my understanding of Lambda is that you don't end up with debt if the school fails you?
Compare to graduation rate of traditional colleges: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40
"The overall 6-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time undergraduate students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree at 4-year degree-granting institutions in fall 2012 was 62 percent. That is, by 2018 some 62 percent of students had completed a bachelor’s degree at the same institution where they started in 2012. The 6-year graduation rate was 61 percent at public institutions, 67 percent at private nonprofit institutions, and 25 percent at private for-profit institutions. The overall 6-year graduation rate was 65 percent for females and 59 percent for males; it was higher for females than for males at both public (64 vs. 58 percent) and private nonprofit (70 vs. 64 percent) institutions. However, at private for-profit institutions, males had a higher 6-year graduation rate than females (26 vs. 25 percent)."
That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people.
This is what I really wonder about - how many of the negative comments are from students not succeeding possibly because of unrealistic expectations around teaching (and what's actually required for learning). Lots of kids fail in college too (particularly in CS) where the attention given to students (and projects) is often worse.
I remember kids constantly complaining at University about how the teachers weren't good or giving them enough attention etc. etc. There's some truth to this, but it's also a common way people take away their own agency for failure.
There's some baseline IQ requirement (for lack of a better term) - LamdaSchool puts the incentives in the right place, but they can't magically get rid of that prerequisite and if their screening isn't good enough some admitted students will fail. At least that failure won't include tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
I think the outcome comparison needs to be with universities - at least with ISAs the incentive alignment protects students even when they fail.
That's certainly the case for me - I landed a job after Lambda as a backend engineer, and I am/was extremely upset by Lambda's continuous deceptive language and degradation of their program
One rule of thumb that we drew after many trials was that, if a candidate coming out of a coding bootcamp did not have a math or science background prior to that bootcamp, they probably would not pass our interview process.
That is, people with a certain intellectual foundation and aptitude can acquire useful skills from coding bootcamps. But people without that aptitude will not obtain it simply because they attended a coding bootcamp.
Separately, while I appreciate that Vincent got answers to questions that many people are asking, the fact that he had to hide his intentions to get an interview with Austen is exhibit number 1 why people have grown to mistrust reporters.
And that's interesting, because often you can't have both. That is, either you accept that corporations lie while the press plays by certain rules of honesty, which prevent them from getting past the smokescreen of lies. Or you support the press in its schemes to penetrate the smokescreen by using deception themselves. But if you support them against Lambda, then you should support them, too, in lying to the institutions you may support, which are also hiding something. Muckrakers need to disguise themselves.
DELETED: A sentence claiming that Vincent runs Coder Pad and has a conflict of interest. I apologize for the error. See his comment below.
I also posit that as bootcamps grew - the quality control and quality of hires(students) decreased with the continued pressure of growing for their investors. Leads to bad outcomes.
It is not dissimilar to when a company blitzscales and the quality of incoming hires diminishes the further down the graph you go. I realize its a bit harsh of a comparison but I do tend to find the earlier hires at solid companies typically have something the later hires don't (though many of the later hires are quite good at their specific roles).
As someone who tutored first year MBAs at one point...
My observation in general was that most people could at least muddle through most classes, even if they were at best mediocre students. But some subset of students pretty much froze at anything beyond the most basic arithmetic--and then probably only because they had calculators.
Whether you call it aptitude or just a phobia about math, it's there.
I even had project groups of generally strong students. But, still, as soon as things got into more complicated spreadsheets, operations research sort of topics, etc., I usually ended up doing more than my share.
Over the years there have been a number of "My first year at business school" sort of books and the common theme in all of them I think is "It was the math that got me."
Then again I guess you could always buy talent to shore up your insecurities.
Honestly, anyone who goes into the corporate world and, outside of pure creative roles, thinks they never will have to deal with big spreadsheets associated with budgets, sales forecasts, and the like is going to be very disappointed. But that doesn't mean most people need to deal with anything that's complex mathematically.
It doesn’t feel necessary at all where I am now.
That said, I definitely did trick him a little bit last year for that first interview. I'll own that. It was worth it.
I'm unsure what the conflict of interest would be - but I no longer run CoderPad nor own any equity in it.
Education largely does not work for most people who enrol. Most college students do not finish, and something like a third of university students do not either. And even among those students who receive the credential, many are probably able to slide through without actually learning much.
Anecdotally I think you'll find education has a pareto distribution: the top few percent of students learn enormously, the top 20% learn a decent amount, the next 20% or so squeek through with marginal benefit, and the bottom half does not even finish.
The reason I get annoyed is that I think these new, data-driven forms of education shoot themselves in the foot by gathering data. If they just shut their ears and pretended that everyone was learning based on the grades/assessments like universities and colleges do, they might be just as successful.
In other words, the proper comparison is not whether the education is most likely to succeed, but how likely it is to succeed in comparison to other forms. Sort of like those quit smoking aids which reportedly double your success rate of quitting--in a notoriously difficult task like quitting smoking, going from a 3% success to 6% is profound.
The sole purpose of a bootcamp is to get a job afterwards. That’s why they market their job placement rates so much.
Uni, video courses, and MOOCs are for education. Not everyone uses them to get a job, so job placement for a video course or uni compared to bootcamp doesn’t give you much info.
Anecdote: I did a self-paced online school to get my first software job. I did research on it in regards to job placement.
After getting my first software job, I have since taking many video courses and even went back to uni to get a degree in Computer Science. All of that was purely for further education, not getting a job.
I wouldn’t go to a bootcamp in my position because I don’t need it. They aren’t focused on education or academics but job training.
But that in itself doesn’t mean what Lambda did was any better. If anything, they both need serious reforms.
But “job benefit” isn’t exactly the same as “job placement”. I went back to school for improve my own CS fundamentals but not to immediately get a job. And many people do the same (go back to school for a promotion or for a raise).
And since those people exist, comparing job placement rates won’t tell you much since the data isn’t comparable.
I respectfully disagree.
I've spent an enormous amount of time inside universities (as both a student and employed as an engineer). The vast majority of students have no clear job benefit at the end of their degree.
Most students are studying something with no obvious job correlation. The largest schools at most second/third rung universities in the western world are humanities (which I'm not knocking, but the employment rate for these degrees into related roles is abysmal).
Honestly, it's really sad to see. I've spoken with countless third year humanities/law students that are completely lost and have no idea what to do as graduation approaches (about 20% of law graduates at my last uni went on to practice law). Oh, and they're crippled with debt (in both Australia and the US).
In my experience, the worse off the student, the more likely they were to study something with poor career outcomes (one of the worst offenders was the bachelor of business, which was a popular choice for students hoping to escape the lower/middle class but had atrocious outcomes). I chalked this up to fewer educated role models when they were growing up.
HN is fairly skewed towards tech. The tech-related courses (CS, EE, etc) have great employment prospects, but they're the outlier.
Obviously there's a huge exception for technical college degrees like CS, science, etc which are worth a ton. This applies to degrees in business, liberal arts, etc.
> In my experience, the worse off the student, the more likely they were to study something with poor career outcomes (one of the worst offenders was the bachelor of business, which was a popular choice for students hoping to escape the lower/middle class but had atrocious outcomes). I chalked this up to fewer educated role models when they were growing up.
Grandparent said these people can't afford to go to school; I don't think what you've said contradicts that.
In terms of CS, I'm sure most of them are going for a job. But the fact that those who aren't isn't 0%, it makes it difficult to compare.
Also, the reasons for people not graduating college and not graduating from a 3-6 month bootcamp will likely differ as well. 4 years is a long time. There are many reasons why someone might drop out. So again, comparing graduation rates and job placement rates between uni and bootcamp won't really tell you much useful data, especially if you're trying to compare which one prepares students better.
And just to be clear, I'm not saying Uni is better or defending it. I have my own with college [1]. But I see too many people trying to deflect criticism from bootcamps when those criticisms are very well justified.
[1] Is a Computer Science Degree Worth It?: https://betterprogramming.pub/is-a-computer-science-degree-w...
It is irrelevant for the other 99%, so it doesn’t make it any harder to compare it.
> Also, the reasons for people not graduating college and not graduating from a 3-6 month bootcamp will likely differ as well. 4 years is a long time. >There are many reasons why someone might drop out. So again, comparing graduation rates and job placement rates between uni and bootcamp won't really tell you much useful data, especially if you're trying to compare which one prepares students better.
Sure, the comparison shouldn’t be that simplistic.
They have an admissions test, which is essentially an IQ test.
They would never admit to that, and their admitted population is very diverse (gender, race, age, etc.). But, they don't just admit anybody; in times of high unemployment the vast majority of people who take the test are not admitted. They also interview prospective candidates to weed out anyone with obvious, serious people skills issues. I wonder if this is what's missing from most bootcamps?
I could write a book
And Lambda is worse as they take off the top from future earnings.
Glad this dumpster fire is big enough to garner serious attention finally.
Can't wait till austen et al come into the thread with their PR bullshit and lies as per usual.
edit- tale->take
Other negative values:
Much of what was taught was useless knowledge. Some of it was harmful (the pet theories of wacko lecturers).
Anything useful was still rote learning with zero reality.
It is all channeled towards exams of well defined problems with correct answers - harmful at the meta level.
Note that Canterbury University engineering school is well respected in New Zealand.
I happily believed in the schooling system for the first two years (a simple continuation of high school), but the final year of uni then became an insane grind after I realised how pointless the material was (I am more academically inclined, so it took me a while to learn my stupidity). I still wanted to finish the degree - possibly due to sunk cost fallacy - although the piece of paper got me my first software job.
Opportunity cost of 3 years of life is insanely huge (I didn’t really get anything long term out of university socially: the first two years were fun at the time). It is normally a four year degree, but I skipped the first year (no academic consequences, although the decision probably had social repercussions due to my young age compared with majority of classmates).
I sadly still see the same issues happen with university these days: I have seen a nurse (University degree) and a early childhood teacher (University degree) get “taught” the most insane useless shit. The degrees cost years of life, lots of money, and a heavy cost to their egos (it is an extremely evil system at times: compulsory arselicking etcetera).
The rote learning and pointlessness of the material were the biggest things I hated as well. 3 years is definitely a long time. Though something I realized after I left uni is that the value doesn't come from the education really, it comes from all the events and opportunities the uni affords you access to and the social component.
> It is all channeled towards exams of well defined problems with correct answers - harmful at the meta level
Absolutely agree with this as well. I can see why you thought uni had negative value. I think it destroys the skills you need to tackle real-world problems, which is why new grads tend to be seen as useless.
It's really curious to see someone else with a similar POV. I haven't met many people in NZ who think like this, or at least they haven't admitted it to me.
My guess is that when you have a degree you're more likely to want to believe it was worth it, whereas I have no such qualms. Though in saying that my best friend who also did eng said he thought the degree was pointless.
Certainly other graduates from my year have said they thought it was worthwhile - but I always wondered whether their opinion is rooted in sunk cost psychology.
I know two fantastic makers that have no higher education, yet they should have been mechanical engineers due to their skills. One was dyslexic, and both would not handle the academic structure, yet it was a waste to see that their talents were never used properly.
Mechanical engineering seems like a dark art to me!
I hope that you found a niche…
I wish I had been smart enough to quit my degree early. Some of the most savvy people I know well, quit school early because it was constricting them.
I was lucky to fall into software which is really easy and financially it has been astonishing. Apple ][ at school and home, writing 6502 assembler as a teenager, helped immensely.
I've been following these stories for a while and it seems like a lot of the big players are ridiculously predatory and are providing a catastrophically bad service. I'd like to ask if there are any that you think are actually doing a good job?
One in particular I'm curious about is Hackbright.
One question I have about this: Do you think Lambda is uniquely problematic in this space or are they perhaps a more typical case? Are others worse?
Anecdotally, back in 2019 I asked our internal recruiter to reach out to Lambda school to see about graduate resumes sent our way for jr software development positions. He emailed them but claims they weren't terribly responsive and never sent him any candidates. At the time, we just assumed fancy startups were getting first pick. Now I think the well was dry.
Y'all I felt bad for most of these folks. The majority were not taught how to solve problems, but rather how to take generic steps in design thinking in order to create a cookie cutter portfolio. There was rarely any consideration for anything on the either side of UX, be it business or development, so they were learning in a vacuum. A couple of the schools had former grads teaching in order to boost placement %. How are you supposed to learn from someone who's never executed in the real world is beyond me. The most successful folks almost always had tangental previous work experience to draw from. And in the rare instances someone had learned some UI skills? Yikes. All that in a market that has been oversaturated with junior UX/UI candidates the last couple year, it's no wonder places are starting to ditch the UX programs. Plus now, you always have college students with UX degrees to compete with.
I think a lot of people believed it would be easier to break into UX because there was no code/is less technical which led to this burst bubble. Not to say that's not true, but designing software for humans is more complicated than a persona and some low-fi wireframes!
As the old saw says, those who can do, those can't teach. And this is sadly particularly prevalent in IT, because a competent SWE will make a lot more grinding out code at a FAANG than teaching at a boot camp.
—1/4 are doing what they did before or something similar.
—1/4 became engineers. Some have moved more into management roles.
—2/4 have ended up as PMs, founded a startup or in product design, like myself.
Those were successful gave it 100% of their time and focus. Those who stuck with their day job and tried to do it in the evenings struggled. Also, nobody got a job straight out of bootcamp. Many did after 3 to 6 months of additional work post graduation.
Also, It's interesting to see how things have changed. I paid like $6,000 and we met for class 3 days a week and had hours of pairing work and mentoring outside of class each week for 12 weeks. Now it seems like many of these schools cost at least $20,000 and are much more hands off.
It is amazing that was almost 10 years ago. Time flies.
"They said we were experimenting on the backs of children," Danner said.
"But when SpaceX launched their first five rockets and they blew up, was that OK?" he continued. "We're in a more high-stakes world of human development. Still, you can't say that you don't like the way things are but don't want people to try new things."
This is one of the problems of mixing VCs in the education space. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work when the “things” are humans, not code and technology.
Also, last time I checked, SpaceX wasn’t promising 80% of its rockets would work back in its early days.
Good ol’ fashion false equivalency.
Is your criticism that these places are making false promises, or:
> “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work when the “things” are humans, not code and technology.
RCTs and placebos work exactly this way. People literally die to help us learn what does and does not work. We lost 8-9 months of COVID-19 deaths because of a system that needs to go slow, and yet had experimentation regimes that still put participants at risk.
I don't know of any verification method that doesn't require some degree of risk for the participants, but I'd love to hear one.
I’m criticizing both the false claims and the VC model of hyper scaling and hyper growth being applied to education.
"Move fast and break things" isn't the motto of the medical industry, but it is for tech. So how is this even related?
If you want to talk about medicine, that’s a completely different discussion.
It wasn't really the trajectory I saw back in 2015, but it felt that the bootcamps focused so much on teaching popular JavaScript tools and not really how to problem solve or even the language basics or even what the technology space can offer. I think it is a very tough thing to get right in 3 months(my class length) or even less...
I wonder if the push to scale out these programs meant lowering standards, since folks with the ability / discipline to finish are few.
If so, the unintended consequences are interesting:
Letting in more folks -> more folks with issues finishing -> more customer support -> more issues -> more doubts about the worthiness of the credentials from employers -> more folks having trouble finding placement -> lowering standards to let in more folks.
I imagine the above coupled with investor pressure and your own hype / marketing makes for a situation like Lambda School.
Even if it's true that selection bias is huge and the best qualified people going into a bootcamp are the best performers coming out, that doesn't necessarily mean the bootcamp wasn't useful. These people could have otherwise gone their whole lives always being one small nudge away from becoming a great programmer, but would have never realized it without the right conditions. If a bootcamp simply creates those conditions for them to make it happen for themselves, that still seems important.
I graduated from a bootcamp 7 years ago and even back then it was becoming clear that despite admissions clear preference for people that would be successful regardless, there were those in the group that would struggle to find work.
A large portion of my cohort came from top tier universities and a good chunk of them with degrees in Engineering, CS, or Math. Those folks did well and found jobs relatively easily. Career switching folks that had tech exposure through product or UX experience also did well. Folks that struggled a bit seemed to come from good but not great schools and with a major/work experience in a non-technical field.
Working together day to day I started getting this impression and then I saw it play out in hiring. The top tier folks either got jobs almost immediately or held out a few months to land at a FAANG type company. The middle of the pack seemed to find jobs at around the 3 month mark and the bottom group took as long as 6 months.
There isn't this huge pool of students from very good schools with technical degrees that allows these camps to scale up their enrollment while maintaining their initial success
This always seems to be the rub with for-profit education. When you need to grow at all costs eventually that means accepting more students...
I was not the target Lambda student in that I already had web dev knowledge but wanted to delve deeper and felt like I was spinning my wheels on my own. The accountability created by the program is what I was after.
The curriculum was adequate and, with one exception, the instructors were engaging and knowledgeable. While we did have some limited interaction with the instructors themselves, digging in to individual problems was the job of the team lead (a student further ahead in the program who went through an application process) and this is where things got grim.
TLs changed frequently and their quality was all over the place. Some followed the meeting protocol, some let their group run the meetings, others missed meetings regularly. Multiple times my TLs were unable to help much because the curriculum had changed and we were learning something they hadn't been taught. At best, they made sure we all understood the lecture by being thorough during our 1 on 1 meetings. At worst, they were a hindrance.
The final for the web dev curriculum is what they call "labs" and the TL for your labs group has expanded responsibilities. In theory, having gone through labs already, they are supposed to be kind of like lead devs - offering architecture suggestions, helping with deployment snags, shepherding us through merge conflicts, etc.
My labs TL was, more than anything, an obstacle. Mostly they forwarded our questions to the section lead and they weren't a particularly efficient go-between, so after a few weeks of deflecting our follow-ups we started messaging with the SL directly and were receiving timely responses. Our TLs only contributions to our project were the initial heroku projects and an unfinished code climate integration.
In the end, having projects and due dates was helpful for me but in no way do I feel it was worth the cost of tuition.
Another Lambda alum here mentioned feeling like student wellbeing took a back seat to marketing and PR and nothing encapsulates this more perfectly than the photo at the top of their homepage of a student who dropped out after repeating one of the early sections once or twice. Who cares what became of them as long as it looks good on the website!
edit: on top of the problems with Lambda’s offerings, losing 7 out of 9 executives since 2020 is rough: https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1452658652448362497
but once they're a clear fraud i expect (hope?) Jason to concede completely.
We all know that kid who would learn stuff regardless of what environment he was put in, and his opposite. And then probably a fair few in the middle where the environment actually matters.
When you're looking at outcomes, how do you know which school is worth paying for? I'm facing this issue myself right now for my primary school kids.
The big issue statistically is selection. For an analogy, think of cars. Are Volvos safe, or do they just attract safer drivers? It's not impossible to tease out from stats in principle, but has anyone done it? With schools it's even worse. Is one school in a richer area? What about the cost, that will skew selection too? Does one school use an entrance exam? And the really big one, does a school kick out underperformers?
With respect to coding schools you have to wonder whether the "best" students are already creamed off by universities, such that Lambda School and their like are really just salvaging a few people who fell into unfortunate circumstances and are trying to help themselves out. Along with some unfortunates who are never going to be coders but buy the premise that you can be taught these things in a short period of time, you just have to pay.
In any case it seems like they are forced to produce numbers quite fast for business reasons, and this has caused them to present the stats in the most positive light possible. The virus situation is not an entirely crazy excuse, but it will be interesting to see what happens.
Answer: with a randomised controlled trial. That is, the school randomly rejects a number of applicants who meet the enrolment criteria, then it follows up after 5 years to see if the accepted students are significantly better off than the rejected candidates (eg. in terms of income).
Austen Allred, the CEO of Lambda School, has already floated such an idea: "I’d love to eventually do an impact study that statistically shows how much more attendees of Lambda School make over the course of their lifetimes." https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1433260773040693257
To get accepted and graduate from a reputable university you have to get good results in standardized tests and work your self through multiple courses for at least 3 years. That by itself doesn't mean anything but there's a level of rigor and self-drive required to succesfully traverse this experience.
I mentored in one of these bootcamp programs and you would be surprised how little people give a shit, even though they are paying. Most of them know that the job placement guarantee is a safeguard for their own laziness.
These programs accept people who think pursing a career in tech would be cool and easy until they realize is a tough learning experience and a tough job. Perhaps tougher than anything else they have done in their lives.
The problem with these companies is that they have to balance the quality of students with the quantity required to meet scale. This is probably the worst type of VC backed business because the investor expectations on scale are in direct conflict with the quality of potential students pre-bootcamp and the demanded quality by employers post-bootcamp.
Networking, connections, and (external) credentialism?
I think the post you responded to was talking about the latter type of “success” at universities, but both are valid metrics of success.
I think what actually mattered was laddering up from a sorta-crappy place to a less-crappy place to an actually-good place, and consciously filling in gaps in my skills, especially those relevant for interviewing. When I interviewed at the well-regarded startup, for some reason someone asked me to implement merge sort (lol!) Well, fortunately I had skimmed the algorithm on the plane over, on the off chance someone asked me.
I could definitely get an interview at a FAANG at this point, because their recruiters reach out to me. As to whether I could get the job, I think it would mostly depend on my luck, skills, and preparation.
> one single thing that makes traditional university education successful
Probably is "external credentialism", if there were a single thing. Think of the largest employer in the US (federal government). Credentials are CRAZY important for positions in that org.
I think the tech industry needs to realize that their talent needs can't be solved this way. We need a more proactive and consistent system to identify potential and educate students. I think VC money creates incentives that impact quality, so for starters we should be thinking of these businesses as real non-profit organizations. Not wannabe mega tech corps.
It's worth noting that Lamda school actually does use an industry-standard "IQ test" [0], although it seems the cutoff is quite low (23 out of 50 whereas the median score according to Criteria Corp is 24).
[0] https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/how-to-ace-the-criteria...
I think it's more accurate to say that high ranked universities try to pick people who will succeed. That can be through intelligence and drive but it can also be through the backing of an ultra-rich relative (if someone will buy the school a building to get you into your college of choice you're probably going to do fine professionally).
That aside, I think your point is largely correct. I know someone founded one of the older bootcamps and in the early days it was fairly easy to choose only smart people, often with degrees from top schools ironically. Paired with the dearth of junior candidates job placement was 99% and pretty easy.
Acceptance standards have had to drop dramatically as the number of bootcamps has increased and the backlog of smart people who'd always wanted to get into tech has been wiped out.
If this was really widespread surely the campuses would have (literally) thousands of donated buildings?
0) Bootcamps are extremely sensitive to complaints to their regulators. If you are eg. seeking a refund for monies paid and have a grievance, know that forms like this [https://www.bppe.ca.gov/forms_pubs/complaint.pdf] exist for your state, and know that bootcamps will be very motivated to reconcile the matter before you fill one out.
1) Many bystanders think the ISA business model is predatory. I've seen it compared to slavery. I've talked with hundreds of low-income, high-promise people, and ISAs are 1000% more attractive to that audience than more conventional debt-like instruments, even debt-like instruments with forgiveness protocols. When people talk about what's good for low-income students, and say it's not ISAs... I don't think these people have a cohesive theory of educational access??? I can't explain it.
2) There is a lot of skepticism about the practice of hiring recent grads as alums. I think it's a good idea for prospective bootcamp students to ask a) which specific individuals with work experience will teach me, b) what kind/how much access will I have, c) can I talk to them. I will also observe that recent grads do the bulk of of non-lecture/non-curriculum work in pretty much every educational context ever. I live next to UC Berkeley, which has more graduate TAs than all other instructional staff put together.
3) This looks bad for Lambda. I hope they course-correct and I hope prospective students look at all their options. PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS: You should write off Lambda because a) you have better options, or b) because you've talked to current students, not c) because of coverage like this. I can't speak to Lambda but I can say I've read coverage like this about places that might be the best option out there for some students (eg General Assembly). Anyone who likes coding and wants to make it their job should go to the best bootcamp they can get into. It's an incredible onramp into a world of prosperity, and "worst bootcamp" is a quality designation that is close to "median university CS program" in terms of return on investment IMO.
Yeah, the state pays for education and people like you pay taxes to the state.
Anything else trends toward slavery.
> the school can still reach profitability by enrolling 2,000 students a month while only placing less than half of its graduates in qualifying jobs.
>Class sizes are like 150 students to one instructor — I've only heard that number going up
I don't see what the problem is here. For students, the only cost associated with Lambda is the opportunity cost. The incentives are still aligned here -- the school wants people to get placed. It can't "scam" students with higher teacher:student ratios or bad curriculums without hurting its bottom line. If it's failing at teaching students, that's incompetence, not a drive for profitability. If only 40% of students get placed -- that's still 40% more than would have been placed without Lambda, right?
>"Those students that are in the bottom 10%, why would they invest resources into helping those students succeed? Just let them fail out after six months"
...exactly? You are going to school for free. The school is not obligated to waste resources on students falling behind, because those students aren't paying anything.
If you think 6 months of wasted time is a bad deal, just wait until I tell you about this other educational program that lasts 4 years, costs over $100,000, and has a much lower placement rate: Your local university's liberal arts degrees.
Still, it's unfortunate to hear that Lambda is playing the same placement-rate games as bootcamps. I'm surprised they have to do this at all; if I was running admissions, I would be extremely selective, only accepting extremely bright students that I feel the university system had "missed," to get placement rates as high as possible. Maybe they try to do this, and this is just a sad sign of the state of non-college education opportunities?
I don't see what the problem is here. For students, the only cost associated with Lambda is the opportunity cost.
Another scenario: you’re making slightly below $50k, you get a promotion to $50k in the middle of the program. The promotion had nothing to do with what you learned in the program, but it’s up to you to argue otherwise.
Students have brought up both of these things in the official subreddit, but I can’t link to them since they set it to private after last year’s major backlash.
I'll also add that while most students opt for the ISA, some students pay the up-front price. That's because the ISA historically attached a premium e.g. $20k pay up front or go with an ISA with a $30k cap. If you were sold on their claimed 86% placement rate, who needs that insurance?
I don't know much about Lambda School, but my guess is that it does what colleges do, but faster and with incentives better aligned. College is more about distinguishing people than training them. (If education is actually about training, then why is >60% of the wage benefit of education from the credential rather than the years or credits earned?[1]) Someone with a college degree has shown they are reasonably intelligent and can obey instructions to complete boring tasks over long periods of time. This means they're probably a useful employee. I think Lambda School (and similar outfits) distinguish people more quickly than college and try to train them better.
To give people some idea of how bad education is: I learned computer science at an ABET-accredited college. The vast majority of the career skills I developed were from learning on my own, not from my coursework. Nowhere in my classes was there any discussion of source control. I had to teach my classmates how to use Subversion.
So often we forget that almost all education is terrible. We're only jarred out of status quo bias when a new type of school comes along.
edit: oh, you're geoff greer. I emailed you a couple times about floobits when I was still running coderpad
CS teaches us:
- How computers work (assembly, compilers)
- Logic and math (automata theory, set theory, numerical analysis)
- How to make computers do what we want (algorithms, data structures, performance)
If they taught you how to use subversion, that data might be useless by the time you graduate. Hopefully, the other stuff they taught you will make you able to better understand source control.
Yep. Its not.
And the fact that modern day computer science institutions do not teach it, is a huge failing on the part of these programs, and is something that they should be strongly criticized for.
People go in to CS programs, believing that they are going to be taught basic skills like that, and they are tricked by these unstated lies.
But, if we really want to keep with this "cs"/software engineer distinction, then fine. Lets stop lying to students, and lets, as a society, attempt to convince people to go into software engineering more, because that is what most of these students actually want.
And lets relegate "computer science" to a much less prestigious, and much more "esoteric" field of study, that is looked down upon, in comparison to what students actually want, which is to learn software engineering.
But, unfortunately, modern day "computer science" is currently held up as the "prestigious" field of study, when it actually does not deserve that prestige. It deserves the ridicule, that modern day academics currently put on "software engineering" or "information systems", that are currently looked down upon as the fields of study that people go into, if they can't hack it in CS.
> we apply the concepts that we learn from CS in our jobs.
> that data might be useless by the time you graduate.
I am not sure where this myth comes from, that software engineering is just about some specific language, or tool.
Learning about the "concepts" of source control, or documentation, or working with a team, or writing readable code, or designing good APIs, are things that have little to do with CS, but goes beyond just "learn this specific tool".
Algorithms, and math, while can sometimes be useful, are still only one very small part of what it means to be a software engineer.
You can't draw that conclusion without a control group. It is entirely possible that a control group that spent that boot camp time doing independent study and job hunting would have higher placement rates and that Lamda school would thus have a negative effect.
I would guess that Lamda school does have a positive effect but that effect is smaller than 40%.
Sure we can all pretend that "everyone can do it" but... everyone can't. Placement rates as a metric are just deciding when to filter the low performers out.
I never did it but have watched the process from a few different viewpoints. My impression is that the gatekeeping on the entry side is pretty strong (not just exam results, good schools may have multiple interviews before letting you in) but they also have ton of resources available to help you if you are bogged down. This latter part is helped by high tuition.
As for the vetting, as far as I can see they are fine with a bunch of false negatives, which results in more homogeneity than may be desired. It doesn't seem to be particularly empirical.
1. Some people who graduate with CS degrees can't write good code. It is shocking how little you can learn while still graduating.
2. Some college graduates are lack the social/organizational skills for office work
3. Industry has a limited appetite for junior engineers because they're often a net drain on the company for the first 6-12 months and once they become productive can usually get a pay bump by switching jobs.
Many new grads have exaggerated expectations and refuse to consider or accept "lower" than working in big tech.
Related to this, there are also the new grads that have some extremely niche role that they want to fill. I recall from a bit ago a new grad on reddit that wanted to do machine learning to save the whales while traveling on a research ship. Coming to the realization that most jobs aren't in the "safe the world" category was something of a shock / disillusionment for them.
At least traditionally, many new grads have refused to consider other geographic areas. The "I want to do software development, but I am not willing to move out of {local area}." Some of this may be changing with remote jobs being more feasible - though there may still be restrictions on "you must reside within {some state} to qualify for WFH". This may be changing a bit, for some companies... but I still suspect that some companies are still going to require a "you may need to come into the office occasionally with a 24h notice."
To point 3, even with the "they are a net drain and they job hop soon" there's also the "we need to add more capacity in the mid and senior levels before we add additional juniors to these teams." There are a lot of places where it's "here's a new junior, there's the code - go for it" because the mid and senior devs don't have the capacity to mentor them.
I also suspect there is a common thought process of new grads that the quantity of applications is more important than the quality of the application -- sending out hundreds of applications even if there significant mismatches between the resume and the job posting that could be trivially corrected.
In fairness to new grads, the minimum requirements on job posting are often wildly out of line with what the job requires and what the employer will accept. I still meet plenty of junior engineers getting their first gig by applying to jobs that say 2+ years of experience when they have 0.
Also note that most of the points made in contention would apply just as well to medical schools and medical school graduates. For instance, there are plenty of unsocialized medical school graduates - they are still called doctors. But if they studied STEM, they're supposedly "too bad to deserve a job". Weird.
I'm leaning more towards there being an oversupply of STEM graduates.
If you fail or withdraw, you have to pay back prorated tuition at the rate of several hundred dollars per day you were there. There is no grace period, if you get three days in and decide it's not for you then you owe them almost a thousand dollars.
Ever worse: their instructional material is very much lacking rigor, the degree of guidance they provide is far lower than you'd get at a community college (which would also be a lot cheaper), and the whole vibe of the community borders on cult-like toxic positivity (any criticism of the company will get you kicked out).
It's very close to predatory. They lure in disadvantaged people with promises of vastly improving their lives, but I'm betting a substantial percentage of them leave with thousands in debt and virtually nothing to show for it. And the best part? If you're dismissed or withdraw that nice easy-to-pay income share agreement goes away and you just owe them thousands effective immediately regardless of your financial situation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26946972
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26802601
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26987632
Interview with Lambda School CEO Austen Allred and Vincent Woo.
Did the TL/PM/TA thing for a bit too. There were clearly people in it that were struggling. They started to have the ability to drop backwards a single week of course. That decision was reversed as it was kind of crazy to have people in between cohorts.
By the time I was done I don't think the UI program had anyone graduate from it. I was interviewed by lawyer at one point who was working on behalf of someone in that program. I am unsure of the quality of the program but it doesn't seem good.
Most of the people I saw who were doing well were going faster then the curriculum. The alumni program was sorta hard to keep track of after the slacks split, a lot of people never made the transition.
I know a lot of people who were successful after bootcamps, Lambda and otherwise. That may just be survivorship bias. I think one of the things that may also influence is when you went into the program. If you were going because you heard about it on hackernews when it was brand new, it was a different experience then when you had people coming in from everywhere.
There's also likely some element of grabbing mind-share while they work to automate the process (plus, gathering data on who make profitable students). Eliminating the instructor will allow N to grow much higher than 150 per course and reduce costs dramatically.
Teaching in a bootcamp-style environment is a team endeavor. Recent graduates can be a part of that mix.
Generally, it makes sense to hire some of the instructor pool out of recent graduates. It is often difficult to find instructors at all. The recent graduates know the curriculum. It also helps those recent graduates develop a deeper understanding of the material and extend their job searching window. It can be a form of peer learning that some students respond well to.
There are also definite limitations. Primarily, the recent graduates might not have great teaching skills, knowledge outside of the curriculum, and knowledge of real-world applications.
On the other hand, some of the arguments in the article are silly. Tech companies drastically cut back on entry level hiring in 2020, and when this happens the non conventional pipelines tend to be the first to go. I wouldn’t extrapolate out this decline as a permanent issue beyond the pandemic. Additionally, the article expresses skepticism that expanding student enrollment at the expense of placement would hamper profitability - common sense is that there will be some variable costs that scale proportionally with student enrollment, and as such the path to profitability would be to improve placement rates. Perhaps most egregiously, the article talks about the high opportunity cost for students investing 9-12 months in lambda school and the immediately after that switches to attacking lambda school for shortening its class lengths. A curious juxtaposition. Frankly, this is a good example of incentive alignment.
Finally, there is the ridiculousness of the graduate at the end who doesn’t want to find a designer job because that would entail making income share payments. Not only is that cutting off your nose to spite your face, but it’s rather odd to feel you didn’t get your money’s worth from a service operating at a significant loss. I guess taxpayer funded K-12 and community college education has made a lot of people accustomed to being insulated from the true cost of education.
It's pretty clear that the business is not sustainable nor does it have much hope of becoming profitable even in the short term.In addition, the school's reputation is tarnishing, and there have also been a few clashes with the institutions that must provide the certifications necessary for the school to operate.
The co-founders, particularly Allred, between the constant lies, problems with reporters, and personalities that many psychiatrists would call delusional do not bode well.Even the casual observer would easily notice his bizarre statements, the furious backpedaling observed over and over, the constant distractions that can be inferred from his almost pathological tweeting about anything but what concerns his position as CEO of a company that is making promises to people who are often in need.
You could say that these visionary leaders are what is needed to disrupt entrenched industries, and that the fight with the authorities are the result of the status quo trying to hold the line, and that some lies are nothing more than making the future, present. I just don't see it for Lambda School.
Pg in particular I would've expected more rigor from, but maybe that's naivete, or the inevitable awkwardness that comes from him living both in the world of high epistemic standards (his essays) and zero epistemic standards with rampant dishonesty (startup/VC culture). To me, the latter undermines the former, but I also am not a rich thought leader.
But when I published my essays, I have 5 readers including my mother, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Mostly self-taught. I'm smarter than the average bear, and pick things up, fairly well, but I've also taken somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 bootcamps, seminars, and college classes.
Not one single one of them (after my tech school, which was actually quite vocationally-based) was particularly useful for immediate use in the real world. I think one or two of the project management ones were in the same zip code, and the Apple DU (dating myself) courses were relatively practical, but they were all "training wheels" classes.
What has been my real education, has been writing code to ship. Everything I write, I write as "ship" code. Even my "throwaway" projects and experiments.
Having a clear end goal, and becoming habituated to finishing all my work, has been incredibly valuable. Solving my own problems, doing my own research, not "kicking the can down the road," and releasing with full tests, documentation, and support, have been great teachers.
People seem to like the work I do.
Bootcamps are nice, but they only light the fuse.
I don't think I was ever qualified to write ship code after any one of my classes. In many cases, I already knew how to ship, and just wanted to learn about different directions. In the last year or so, I've taken a whole bunch of short courses on new Apple tech. I probably won't use what I learned for months, but I like to keep the axle greased.
For example, I learned Pascal as a first language. Outside of high school, no one has the time to learn a dead language for the few cool ideas it has but in high school, it provides indispensable background for a lot of concepts that come later (e.g. BEGIN/END being written out to teach you how much that sucks so that you understand why we use {} in every other language, the := operator making far more sense than the = operator, and other little tidbits).
The same logic applies (for me) to Latin, cooking classes, and Calculus. Ironically, I find that music classes have become so subsumed by the struggle to justify their funding that HS music brushes off non-essential skills just as shamelessly as university music does.
Lots of problems with Lambda, especially the way they teach.
I learned a lot. Faster and better than I could on my own. I only stopped because I fell very ill.
Better than college.
If Austen was more truthful and transparent and moved a little slower, they'd be number one in the space. But you can't move quick when taking people's lives and time. They're not as flexible as software.
What’s so distasteful about this is a lot of the code school community closed ranks around Lambda, refused to acknowledge really absurd student experiences and bad employment rates, and at worst still partnered with it. My guess is this is because admitting a place as polished as Lambda had a problem leads to questions about other schools out there. When you top it off with the insane ISAs Lambda wanted, that school and its defenders put themselves in an extremely ethically dubious position.
For smart poor folks, Lambda School is a pure good.
I come from a blue collar background, I have no college or university degree, and enough debt to make liberal arts student blush. Before Lambda I was able to slowly chip away at that debt by working outside from the literal dawn to dusk, Monday through Saturday, rain, shine, snow. This was horrible both for my body and my family. We decided to try Lambda and it worked. I'm gainfully employed as a developer for a large company, we have health insurance, and I have double digit hours to spend with my family. Sounds like a fairy tale straight outta Austen's book I know. But I tell you this as background, not as the reason why Lambda's good.
The reason I was willing to take the risk at all is because of the ISA. There is no way under my previous circumstances I would have done anything like taking 9 months of work to study without a walk away free card. Before attending Lambda I read every bad review I could find, parsed the complaints, cross-referenced the news articles and comments, and decided "good enough". Worst case scenario I'd waste a few months learning enough to play around with and go back to back breaking labor. Debt-free. But what about being owing them money for a dev career that they didn't deliver?
If I had a dev career, Lambda earned my money, because I sure didn't have one before. Your case may be very different, if you're a great auto-didact, forget Lambda, you can do anything you set your mind to all alone and with full freedom. But I'm not. I know I procrastinate, I can get demotivated, I can get sidetracked, I overplan, I underplan. So I chose Lambda, let them handle the schedule, the planning, and the social proof. More importantly, there was only upside. Of course if someone is already highly compentent dev, Lambda makes no sense, at least not as currently structured. But even a competent dev could benefit from the career services, I certainly did.
Lambda has plenty of room to improve, but as a safeish ladder out of lower income drudgery and into skilled modern work it's good enough.
1/ Taking VC money requires hyper growth. That’s fine if your product is software where the marginal product gets better over time. In their model, you get the early adopter students, who are talented/motivated and juice up the placement stats. But after some critical mass, the marginal student is not as talented or as motivated. It pushes the company to lower its bar and erodes the overall experience for everyone. Same thing happened to General Assembly.
2/ Iterating your business model and making tweaks to the product is fine when you’re dealing with software. It doesn’t go well when you’re dealing with students. People inherently don’t like change. They have feelings and don’t like being lied to. Sure, some people will drink the typical rah-rah startup Koolaid, but over time, most people will see right through it and will assume that management is either incompetent or lying (or both). It’s especially bad when companies use the “do things that don’t scale” PG motto. That’s fine in software but in education you die through death by a thousand cuts when your unit economics don’t work and you need to fix them in a way that deteriorates the student experience.
3/ ISA’s, like communism, sound nice in theory but don’t work at scale and in practice. They’re essentially unsecured student debt. Even student debt — which has long arms and can garnish wages for nonpayment has recently taken a hit from loan forgiveness. ISA’s have none of those protections. They’re also tied to a student’s performance and career luck — which has many factors outside the quality of education. Student debt doesn’t care how motivated you are or how unlucky you are — the security holder must get paid. In ISA’s the security holder is stuck with an IOU that may never get paid.
Education sorely needs reform but I don’t think Lambda is the way. Entrepreneurs also need to think about it a bit differently than how normal startups are built. The software model doesn’t translate well.
I'd just need to mock up a relatively fancy website, some copy, and a good name, and then put on my resume that I am a graduate.
It's almost as if something happened in 2020 that reduced the number of open positions available...
Did it? My impression has been that software dev jobs have exploded (or maybe continued to explode) during COVID. Maybe there was a bit of a slowdown in the first half of 2020?
freecodecamp.org theodinproject limitless various courses.
curriculum is out there, /r/learnprogramming is very helpful, plethora of discords. what do they provide in 2022 that is worth ~10-20k?
let me put it this way. at the end of my bootcamp they had a "hiring day". ~20 employers came by for ~40 students, including Google. I ended up getting a job with the very first hiring manager I sat down with that day, for 160k base.
granted, i'm abnormal, and we had "failures" too, but i have many friends whose career change was eased because the bootcamp had taken care to build quality relationships with employers.
one more example. one time my computer just borked. create react app (or whatever we were doing that day) just refused to run. I had no idea but something in my $PATH was corrupted somehow. i was unable to do anything, and asking for help online wouldve been very futile. instead, i raised my hand, and my instructor (hi Cassio!) came over, showed me how to debug, and had me back up and running in 5 mins so I could continue learning.
BUT i did get a 120k-150k offers elsewhere (ranging from adtech to music), and had friends join FB/Google out of bootcamp and thats easily six figures
being in NYC helps. the low end was like 90k.
It's wonderful that so much material is free, but it's an overwhelming amount of information for the uninitiated. Some people can self-motivate and self-teach starting from zero. Some cannot. Some would just prefer a formal curriculum and instructor. Nothing wrong with that.
And the best bootcamps have a direct relationship into companies for internships and junior dev positions.
Unfortunately as bootcamp hype has exploded, many bootcamps do not offer these things and are of dubious value.
accountability. this one I'm not sure what you mean. meaning I invest 10k now I really have to make it work. yeah, unfortunately people tend to value expensive things more than free.
connections. yes, this is perhaps biggest selling point, the idea that they will place the student, or at the very least help significantly.
hmmm... I wonder if there is a way to quantify that. is it really ~ 1k/week to do all of that?
How disgusting. He should probably tell them no. Even if they wrote some non sense allowing this in the income share agreement, let them go to court.
I've never met a successful boot camp grad who didn't already have a four-year degree.
This is a very complicated problem, because you really do have tons of desperate people who are willing to sign their lives away for a shot at getting ahead.
$50,000 is an extremely low threshold, so if someone adds a few extra shifts working at Best Buy lambda school can then leech their meager income?
I'd argue the social experience of traditional college is easily a part of its cost. If you're coming from a bad background you'll surround yourself better people than you met back home.
It's also much easier to get a generic office job with a bachelor's in art history than it is with a ux certificate.
In the end I ended up with +40k in scholarships as a mediocre high school student, plus a bunch of state grants.
I graduated with <30k of debt, which I paid off aggressively with my programmer job.
I like college. There is a right way to do it as an average student:
- Two years of cheap community college to get the chaff out of the way - Two years in a better school for the higher level classes.
You can't think of it is a party or 'summer camp' which is an image which is sold to a lot of young people. You are there to learn a skill, improve yourself, and graduate into a career.
Income share agreements are just disingenuous loans, eventually most people are going to get to $50,000 a year even if it has nothing to do with their education. At least a loan is upfront about what you're going to pay, I sure wouldn't give my bank account information to some sketchy company.
There's no way in hell I'm ever giving that sort of banking access to an employer, let alone an educational institution. For starters, I share a bank account with my wife and her earnings are none of their god damn business.
* their students' alimony payments
* their students' other court awards
* their students' pensions
* their students' disability payments
* their students' spouse's income
* their student's spouse's alimony, other court awards, pensions, disability payments, etc.
Agreeing to payment is not the same as agreeing to financial surveillance.
If Lambda School believes one of their students is not living up to their income sharing agreement, then they should simply ask the student. If they have a reason to disbelieve a specific student, then they can go to court.
"Let me see all info on regular deposits into your bank account because I'm too lazy and unprofitable to do this in a way that's not creepy and abusive" is NOT reasonable.
:)
I did Dev Bootcamp in NYC in 2015, during what was probably the golden age for these bootcamps. I had a very very good experience, as did about 80% of the people who went through it at that time. The program was hemorrhaging money and was shut down in 2017.
The cost was about 12k for 9 weeks onsite in a big office they rented in downtown Manhattan. Every 3 weeks they had a new cohort, with about 15 students. You could repeat a 3 week section up to 2 times for no extra cost. I got an airbnb in Brooklyn and took the train in. The curriculum was focused on Ruby on Rails, with Javascript in the last 3 weeks.
We had about 5 or so instructors who had real working experience as web developers (so about 1 instructor to every 10 people or so). The instructors were all in their 30s or 40s and were passionate about teaching and had a decent amount of industry experience. They were all sick of doing engineering and enjoyed teaching so were basically taking a break from engineering jobs. We also had a counselor, two administrators, the head of the program, a full time recruiter, and a yoga teacher who came in three times a week.
If you didn't make it through the program for whatever reason, they would refund whatever time you had remaining. If you didn't make it through the first 3 weeks they would refund you 100%. About 1/5 of the people were clearly not cut out for it, about 2/5ths were capable but didn't have much aptitude for coding, and the other 2/5ths learned stuff very fast.
The 4/5ths all managed to get entry level jobs eventually. The people on the low end of that 4/5ths sometimes fizzled out pretty quickly or ended up with support jobs. I know some of them who ended up having pretty good careers as support engineers, making over 100k within a couple of years I am guessing. We all felt sorry for the 1/5th of the people who were just not cut out for it at all. Some of them left but occasionally one would graduate which was a shame because they really had no chance of being successful. There were also people who were not very good but managed to get entry level coding jobs, but I think it was a struggle for them and they eventually left the industry afaik.
Everyone had to really hustle for an entry level job but it was definitely doable. I came out being able to create full stack apps, knew how to build a front end with Angular (very poorly obviously but still) and with a decent enough understanding of how Javascript worked.
The bootcamp had a decent network. It took me about 2 months to get a job making 75k, which I got through a friend at the bootcamp. I managed to get interviews at about 6 or so places leading up to that, but had no idea what I was doing on those interviews. Most of the interviews I think I got from the recruiter at the bootcamp, including one at Bloomberg which would have netted me a pretty big starting salary. About a month into my job my boss remarked to me that I probably would have taken far less than 75k and we laughed about it.
One year later I was making 140k, and today I am making about 70% more than that so yeah, pretty good ROI. I felt like I learned about as much as possible as I could have in this short period. I kept learning stuff afterwards until getting a job, and continued to be interested in learning for years.
I am sure there is still a good business model here. The price I paid seemed like a lot at the time but in retrospect it was absurdly low. I make as much as a doctor now. The race to the bottom some of these businesses are engaging in seems like an awful approach because it is a zero sum game making it into the industry. The rewards are such that if you could get people there with a decent success rate the value of the program would be a lot higher than 12 or even 30k.
Often, you find cases of people who claim to be "software engineers" and list working at the Bootcamp company on their resume. You also get a number of "instructors" who apply for senior roles, which I find interesting.
I guess, overall, I'm not opposed to hiring someone who attended a school like this, I am just not in any way impressed by seeing it on someone's resume. For a junior role, I think it can make sense, but for anything more senior, it's become a bit frustrating to deal with these (and the contractors who pretend like they're interested in full time work until the last second).