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Comment by adoxyz | Hacker News Reader

My brother went to Lambda school 2019-2020. Would not recommend. They had recent grads that had just completed Lambda the previous year teaching the new students and most of them had just a vague grasp on the content matter. So many inaccuracies and bad practices taught. The only good thing about it was that it was structured and you were coding each day for 5-8hrs so if you weren't the most self-motivated person, you were held accountable. But again, a lot of it was taught badly or inaccurately, so unless you spent a lot of time doing outside research on your own, you weren't learning much. If you do have self-motivation, you don't need Lambda or BloomTech. After graduation, there was no follow up of any kind. So overall, pretty disappointing.

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Before I read this article, I was on the fence and didn’t know much about lambda tech.

Now after reading https://mobile.twitter.com/fulligin/status/14526586408091975..., I’m much more negative.

The CEO seems like a con-man who has conned himself. The worrying part is that some commenters seem to be falling for the lies he’s telling himself.

Same type as those that run uni's. This is all about maximum profits, the original mission was lost long ago. Now it is about sustaining the org for the paychecks of admins.

I guess that sounds a lot like a community college to me, but maybe faster and better.

Can non-self motivated people succeed if they go to say an Ivy League? I didn’t, so it’s a sincere curiosity for me. Would Zuckerberg have ended up bagging groceries if he went to a community college rather than Harvard?

Community colleges deliver a reasonably good quality of education at a very modest price point. They do accept basically anyone who shows up and unfortunately a lot of people are just not that motivated or are not adequately prepared for college level work. That said, if you show up and do the work you can easily get an associates degree and spin that into a career or transfer into a 4 year university. In California I believe that community college transfers generally have a higher graduation rate from 4 year schools than their their freshman admit peers. I have known many people who went to community college who are doing fine. I'm sure Zuckerberg would have been just fine with a community college curriculum (he might not be a billionaire but he could easily achieve a pleasant middle class lifestyle).

Former CC student, yep. The folks who do the transfer program are extremely motivated. A lot of them had shitty jobs beforehand. Far better students than the average 4-year university student I'd work with when I transferred. The quality of education was great and the teachers were wonderful people. Class sizes were usually small and it was easy to get a lot of 1:1 time with the profs.

Cost is more expensive than a code school but not absurd like the first two years of university. My alma mater (is that a thing?) is now $46 a credit, up from about $35 when I attended.

Idk about cost, DevBootCamp was about 11k in 2014.

Only the CC credits are cheaper, yeah. But factoring in the other 2 years of undergrad and it's much more expensive than a bootcamp. Still far, far cheaper than 4+ full years of undergrad, though!

My understanding of community colleges is that they generally make a sincere effort to have qualified instructors with a good grasp of the materials.

If I am interpreting the parent's comment correctly, he's referring to TAs (we called them "team leads") not instructors. Based on the context of the comment I'm assuming that this was a time when we had a TA for every 8 students on top of a layering of instructors for each cohort, and indeed the TAs would do a lot of the 1:1 interaction. There has never been a time we didn't have qualified instructors, though I would readily admit the quality of our instructors has improved over time as we got better at instructional design and hiring.

This is nothing like community college. Community colleges are held to some reasonable level of accountability. It's unlikely that they are going to be leading edge, or trendy, but you know that people learning some critical skills to a reasonable level.

Lambda School and other tech education programs start out well with VC money but it's not sustainable because there is no money in it. This is something that can be reasoned about a priori because you can see the budget focus of community colleges. Tech doesn't change the fundamentals, but the illusion can be sustained in the good times.

Great talent is lost as a result of missing resources and connection and thus opportunities.

to become zuckerberg you need to be smart, industrious and have luck on your side. If he went to CC, he would still make his way to upper middle class life no doubt but maybe not a billionare.

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