Hacker News Reader

Comment by MivLives | Hacker News Reader

Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes. They were taking what they learned and applying it. Others organized groups of people, and essentially formed a small support network of people in a similar position. I completely understand that not everyone has the time for that.

I think two things happened over Lambda's life span that effected the quality of the teaching. The first was the initial pool they advertised too. I think I saw the post on Hacker News before everywhere else. I'd wonder if you're more selective from already technical people at the beginning and then sorta widening the net as time goes on to include more people if you could get initial big numbers push followed by more ok numbers.

The instructors I met were all great. I think a lot of that flack went more towards later cohorts or alternative program from the main full webstack track.

View on HN

Did lambda school have any sort of assessment before accepting students? This really resonates with my observations. The people who got the most out of software bootcamps were those that had tinkered with video game modding, WordPress, etc. and had done some self-learning of coding before going to a bootcamp. In other words, people who knew they liked hacking on tech and had a basic ability to code. They approached the bootcamp with the mindset that they already knew they had technical interest and ability, and wanted direction on building marketable skills.

Do you think greater selectivity applicants would increase the success rate? I had thought the ISA model would incentivize this, but when I learned lambda was selling ISAs that seemed like it removed this incentive.

They had a prebootcamp with a free course that taught the basics. Some people cheat through that though and didn't quite process that... you can't really pull that off through the whole program?

I totally saw people who had never coded before succeed, I'm not sure I could pick out in an interview who would do well and who wouldn't. It's a marathon not a sprint.

For the selectivity thing... I'm really not sure. The selling ISAs thing was a bit weird when I learned about. I honestly kinda wonder about the actuarial calcs of it all.

Honestly I was a little surprised at the cheating too. I think I was a little naive in the beginning that if you actually wanted a job you would understand that you would have to be able to write code. But some folks are in a school mentality that if you get a grade/diploma you're good, regardless of whether you understand the things required to go into that.

Having tried a number of different ways to do admissions, I can assure you doing interviews is possibly the worst.

As far as ISAs go, it all comes out in the wash. If you create a pool of ISAs and students don't get hired you may have more ISAs but the average ISA is worth less, so the only thing that matters is whether each individual student gets hired. There's no financial wizardry that can let you sell $1 for $2 in the long-run.

Yeah that's fair enough. I don't think the people cheating ever got far enough to actually effect job stats. It was pretty easy to sus out who actually knew enough to keep going. I don't fault Lambda for that, it's just the reality of any educational goal line.

For the interview thing, that's just what you were doing at the time. At the rate you were iterating, I'm sure that there's a better process now.

> I don't think the people cheating ever got far enough to actually effect job stats.

Yeah, some do a remarkably good job of cheating and would get into hiring stats for sure, but I think we've almost entirely cut that out now.

Funny how some people think that "programming though Stack Overflow" will keep working after you progress to a certain level

School mentality (and I might add: grifter mentality as well)

I’m Senior Staff and still have to use Stack Overflow regularly!

Sure, not a problem. Most programmers do, probably.

However, I've seen students use Stack Overflow and other resources as a source of "program stamps":

- They enter their problem in an Internet search engine.

- Click on the first result with code in it.

- "Stamp it" on their own code: I.e., copy/paste it.

- Using editor/compiler, find any issues by trial and error and fix them so the editor/compiler doesn't complain anymore.

They might try a simple example or two to see if it works. And that's it.

There's not much reflection on their final solution, or on the bits they copy/paste. They don't seem to understand their solution, nor care about that or their problem solving process. They put in effort, they expect a passing grade.

This is generally true but not always. As you can imagine we have loads of data on this.

If you only selected students who had been tinkering with writing code for 10 years certainly you'd be successful in doing so, but you'd also eliminate ~90% of those who we have seen become software engineers.

The only way we've found that does it well is to have people actually start writing code and see if they enjoy it. That's why we now have multiple free classes, have a free dropout period once you're in the school, and even have a three-week free trial of the school itself.

The notion that financing ISAs removed the incentives isn't really accurate.

First, most of the time ISAs are financed it's in the form of a loan you have to pay back with interest with an ISA and its repayments as collateral, or it's a sale to a neutral SPV with recourse in the case repayments don't hit a certain threshold.

In the rare instance (we've never done that) schools have been able to sell ISAs full stop, it's been at extreme discounts or based on discounted predicted likelihoods of future revenue, and if those ISAs don't repay the buyers bail and the school trying to sell them is out of business.

Edit: It's too late to edit my comment, but I noticed an error we have sold ISAs with minimal recourse not at enrollment, but at the point of _graduation_; we would sell half at an extreme discount at graduation (based on likelihood of being hired) and keep half on our books.

> Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes. They were taking what they learned and applying it.

Is this a knock on Lambda School, though?

You can go to MIT but if you never apply your learnings you won't be a good engineer.

Going through the motions of a CS degree is probably sufficient to land a decent job if you're getting good grades, not cheating, and you get an internship (or similar).

At least from what I've heard of bootcamps, you need to really go above and beyond to have similar chances with that route.

Well there are many many students at schools with CS programs who never get internships (because they don't apply or have an empty resume).

> Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes.

Ironically this is not that different from my university experience.

Mine too actually.

Not ironically at all! If someone expects to attend programming classes (or any classes for that matter), not do any extra work and as a result to become a programmer, that someone will have a rude awakening. Or as one of my university professors said "Attempt to learn this subject by just listening these classes is equivalent to attemting to become a gymnast by watching Olympics on TV".

"They were taking what they learned and applying it."

Am I missing something, surely this is exactly what you should be doing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com