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Comment by akanet | Hacker News Reader

Hi I wrote this piece and am perhaps still better known here as the founder of CoderPad, etc. I'm happy to answer any questions throughout the day, so long as they are on-topic and civil.

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Just wanted to say I'm a big fan of your journalism and CoderPad.

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.

I think Lambda is an unusually bad bootcamp owing to their financialization strategy and also lack of prior educational experience in their leadership. I think there are good bootcamps, but the well is being poisoned a bit here.

Wouldn't Caleb Hicks, one of their founders, qualify as having education experience? https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebhicks/ -- I mean, it looks mostly like biz/corporate education stuff, and dev training experience seems to be narrowly focused but I guess it's not nothing.

Hi, thanks for this piece.

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.

I think Hackbright is doing well, enough so that I recommended that a friend attend recently (and she did). I would look closely at the reporting from each, and interview former students. I think prospective students go along too easily with marketing. A friend and former bootcamp operator told me that students ought to think of picking a school much more like buying a house than picking the best air purifier off of Wirecutter or whatever. I think this is true.

Would love to hear a bit about what got you interested in journalism and in lambda school – thank you!

I saw a really silly tweet one of their former execs made and then just started gathering information about them for fun. I tried to get a friend who was a writer to do the story, but she eventually told me to fuck off and do it myself. It took a little bit of convincing myself that such a thing it was possible, but it was a very enjoyable journey.

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