Lambda School is renaming itself to Bloom Institute of Technology
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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...
Lambda’s deferred tuition model is life-changing for the people who can make it through. Many of their students come from backgrounds and life situations where no other option is really possible. That alone makes me want to root for the whole approach.
It’s true that the teaching and curriculum are uneven, and i wish they were less so, but you could say the same about many colleges.
I'm curious what skills engineers use on the job that are taught well in university but are hard to pick up from experience?
Another one, distributed systems are hard to get right.
Every time Lambda is on the front-page there seems to be a new influx of accounts on the site.
> I'm curious what skills engineers use on the job that are taught well in university but are hard to pick up from experience?
Algorithmic complexity. "Don't roll out your own data structures" and "just use a library" works until it doesn't. Operating System fundamentals is another one.
It seems a lot of bootcamps teach with rote, rather than by looking at the underlying concepts. My favorite example is git. I've seen bootcamp grads claim they can use git, but what it really meant is that they memorized a few git commands and as long as they don't stray too fart from those they can sort of work using git. But cherry-picking, rebase, proper branching forget it.
I remember the first time I ran into O(1) vs O(n), I was building a toy Game of Life simulation and trying to lookup cells by finding them in an array. Took me a minute to realize I should use an object instead to index the cells!
And then there was the first time I read through the examples in Cracking the Coding Interview. It filled in a lot of gaps.
Nowadays I work on distributed systems that receive 100M requests/hr with other devs who similarly lack a college education but somehow manage
Hope this helps you feel less frustrated next time you're paired with a colleague who has a different background than you do!
The issue is, the book approaches algorithms and data structure as something to "crack" and rote memorize instead of a new way of thinking. And it's easy to spot if you ask an interview question that looks a lot like one from the book but different enough that there's another data structure better suited for it.
> Nowadays I work on distributed systems that receive 100M requests/hr with other devs who similarly lack a college education but somehow manage
That's 12x what Stack Overflow does [0], so that's quite impressive!
> Hope this helps you feel less frustrated next time you're paired with a colleague who has a different background than you do!
Since your account is brand new, you might want to get familiar with the rules and guidelines of this community [1].
[0] https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
I think so too!
What do you prescribe for the person who has no interest in going to college, then?
Not everyone is going to have the money, or the desire, to spend four years at MIT or Stanford or anywhere in-between, above, or below. What fundamentals does a relatively smart and tech savvy person need in order to go from zero to 60 and get a job developing software? Not every person is going to work at a FAANG, and even then, lots of the developers at FAANGs don't even need top-tier college degrees in software engineering to do what they're asked to do.
People are clamoring for a middle-ground solution that can be completed in 1-2 years and provides enough of a basis for someone to hit the ground running.
If bootcamps aren't the solution, what could be? Seems like industry should be trying to answer this question.
Getting advice from their self-taught doctor or lawyer probably.
>Be kind. Don't be snarky.
None the less, my experience with both medicine and the law is that unless you are quite wealthy, you are best off learning the stuff that applies to you (whether directly or indirectly) and then using lawyers and doctors for things that you either can't handle yourself or would be much better off having someone else do, and basically tell them precisely what to do. I particularly find doctors to be a complete joke, as I've only ever got any use at all from specialists, and think its infuriating that we require prescriptions for most drugs.
Seriously, there's a reason lawyer's compensation is highly bimodal.
Now time is a different thing, but I don’t know if dumping 12k in a bootcamp gets you there in better shape than quitting your job and building your own plan of study.
UW and UC Berkley want to have a word with you!
Anecdata: I used to place bootcamp graduates into their first jobs. After 3 months 90% of each cohort were in technical roles.
After that pretty much all of them went onto further roles. Only a handful didn’t work out and that was mostly my fault for placing them into the wrong companies. Placing them elsewhere seemed to solve that problem.
The problems are specifically with Lambda. They are simply bad at education (and other things) from whatever reports we have seen. Education is difficult. Thinking you can "agile" a curriculum is ridiculous. I would recommend they hire a complete board of profs and industry experts from a variety of institutions and give them months to work out the structure of the program.
I'm constantly amazed how badly people respond. This is blatantly false, they're explicitly noted in the outcomes reporting.
Furthermore, they don't "help with teaching", they're basically paid tutors.
You're taking the weakest interpretation to strawman Lambda with, and I'd argue you're mostly just arguing against falsehoods.
Yes I went to Lambda, and yes I'm employed as a Software Engineer.
"Bootcamps"/Vocational schools, or whatever you want to call them, are the market's response to the college system falling apart at the edges. IMO the weakest universities are as bad as the worst bootcamps.
Edit: Also just curious, have you compared placements rates for Lambda or any other "bootcamps" to any universities?
So they teach the class or just help the teacher (hence helping with teaching)?
> Yes I went to Lambda, and yes I'm employed as a Software Engineer.
Ahh, so there's an incentive to defend the brand here.
They don't teach any part of the class, an instructor gives a live lecture practically identical to any other traditional pedagogy. Some students tutor others, also not a new idea. What do you think is wrong with this idea?
> Ahh, so there's an incentive to defend the brand here.
Wow that was a full disclaimer and you're...leaning on it, with no elaboration? Do you think my question wasn't worth addressing?
You mentioned algorithmic complexity in another reply, and presumably you don't realize that Lambda actually does teach computation complexity.
But if you're going to just lean on my disclaimer and be dismissive in discussion, I suppose that's that.
In college it's frequent to have TAs, students who completed the course and did well in it and help with grading assignments, labs and so on. But they aren't just a few weeks ahead of the students they teach.
> Wow that was a full disclaimer and you're...leaning on it, with no elaboration?
Honestly, every time Lambda is mentioned there's a flow of new accounts who "graduated" from these bootcamps and companies that are "extremely satisfied" with these hires... but never is a company actually named! That's strange, to say the least.
Sure, and I find trying to teach something extremely useful for retention. I found it useful to have students who had just finished the content attempt to explain it.
> Honestly, every time Lambda is mentioned there's a flow of new accounts who "graduated" from these bootcamps and companies that are "extremely satisfied" with these hires... but never is a company actually named! That's strange, to say the least.
Agreed, although it's not obvious to me that it's orchestrated or automatically invalid which seems to be in a background implication here.
I saw a discussion about Lambda where upvoted comments were stating clearly false things, and I felt compelled to engage and I'd have made an account to do it. That also looks like astro-turfing/brigading/dislike-attacks/whatever you want to call it. It also looks like individuals voicing their opinions.
Having an 'incentive to defend the brand' goes without saying IMO, and is the whole purpose of a disclaimer.
Edit: I meant a total of only three years (the third year being the bootcamp).
(I’ve never been super impressed with their curriculum—it seem super scattershot and designed to let students check a bunch of boxes so I’ve never pursued it.)
If you want students teaching you a course, why not simply run something like the MIT missing semester? [0]