In the US, at least, the government has been slow to acknowledge the root of the housing crisis. While simpler designs do build faster, the main impediment is municipal-level zoning controls that prevent the construction of denser housing. These codes often insist on non-brutalism, insomuch as they mandate certain materials, setbacks from the lot line, and other aesthetic intangibles, but their main purpose is to appease residents (voters) who generally wish to impede more people from moving to whee they currently live.
in my first story[1] on lambda school, my point about misrepresented financial incentives was about, fundamentally, lambda selling off its ISAs to a hedge fund. in this case, the school managed to recoup income on a students irrespective of whether they found the job.
btw, this story is notable in that, unlike the other cases brought by the NSLDN, this student opted out of the arbitration clause in her ISA and can therefore sue in civil court. This confers numerous advantages, including being able to compel discovery.
It's okay to be average or below average. Most of us are. We just have to make peace with what we can reasonably do in this short life. History remembers almost no individuals, and to be one so lucky as to be remembered by history is beyond our right to ask for.
This is happening rapidly in the bootcamp space right now (2U, Trilogy, etc). It's unclear whether this will work well in the long term, as the bootcamp sort of begins competing with its host body (marketing, curriculum, lead generation), but only time will tell.
The notion that increasing housing supply is similar to "trickle down" economics is common in discourses of housing policy in America, but it is misguided. Reagan's notion that increasing the margins of the wealthy would induce them to pass profits to workers was mistaken in that its proposed mechanism was entirely altruism.
Price reductions in housing from an increase in supply do not occur because the rich voluntarily leave some housing for the rest of society, but simply that they will less totally dominate the competition for this resource by virtue of there being more of it.
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.
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.
We didn't have to trick anyone for this piece - all dialogue with the school was conducted through a fact checker hired by the publication. I didn't talk to Austen at all.
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.
I agree that colleges suffer from the same perverse incentives. That is why transparency in outcomes reporting is so important, and why fraudulent reporting is so dangerous.
edit: oh, you're geoff greer. I emailed you a couple times about floobits when I was still running coderpad
Thanks for the story. The most brutal thing for me about reporting this story was each individual human horror-show. It's such a serious thing to be responsible for attempting to transform the lives of people who need it so desperately. It is what's most noble about Lambda's mission, to me.
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.
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.
It depends on what you conceive of the school as - is it an educational institution that has an incentive to improve the lives of each one of its students, incurring variable cost for each? Or is it a fishing expedition to land as many students as possible for as cheaply as possible, and letting the ones who were going to get jobs on their own anyway pay for the rest?
I worked at Google on a somewhat core system (Billing) and was completely shocked by how bad pretty much every unit within it was. The overarching service would go down a fair amount, despite the whole thing amounting to a big MySQL queue. Management would turn over as different people sought to make their career on fixing it. I got out, fast. I wonder if they ever fixed it.
I recently visited the Berkeley Nanolab. As I recall, the main waste products are either acids that are neutralized before being returned to the city sewer system, or exotic gases that are vented in dilute enough quantities to be safe.
Sorbet clearly aims to be interoperable with the rest of the ruby ecosystem, whereas crystal is a relatively small garden - Ruby code does not defacto work in crystal.
I once gave a lunch talk at Docker, inc, which included several slides of suggestions of features to add to Docker. Prominently featured was the request for a native command to clean old images. An engineer in attendance remarked incredulously that he could not believe that users would not know how to pipe docker ls into xargs docker rmi.
Any former employees interested in speaking to a motivated reporter about their experience, please feel free to contact me. My contact information is on my account bio. I am happy to speak to you completely off the record, in any manner that makes you comfortable. I have never lost a source.
Listen, I wrote underappreciated first and then had the parenthetical second for a reason. You read the entire piece and this is the bit you reacted to? Jesus Christ. The entire piece is completely factual. Name even one bit of the piece not based entirely in fact, I dare you.
I really haven't, maybe we can work out this misunderstanding. I think you really do need to hear a sincere perspective from the other side and I am happy to provide this for you privately. Reach out anytime!
Austen unblock me on twitter. We can have an OTR chat about the current state of lambda. I promise none of it will be published if you don't want it to be.