cglee

Yes, it feels like the future every time I put it on. For work, the ultra wide has been wonderful when I'm not at my desk. I also get to have the NBA playoffs to the side on a 10ft screen while I work. For videos, it's a complete game changing experience. They're slowly but surely releasing more "immersive" features. Eg, I recently watched an immersive Lakers game and immediately thought I'd pay to watch games like this. It reminded me when HD became default and we finally realized what we were missing. I don't want to watch games where I'm not courtside anymore.

The two things that consistently delight me are AI and my AVP. I'm trying to combine the two.

15 years on Heroku, absolutely no regrets and would do it again and again and again. It's one of those "no one goes there because it's too busy" type of situations. Don't fall for the noise, just use Heroku and move on with your life.

I'm B2C and selling ed to students is an eye-opening experience. It's actually very easy to get people to pay, so the problem isn't conversions. The problem for me is that if you keep following the money, it's natural to become predatory because the most vulnerable need the most education. The more vulnerable, the more likely they'll buy hype. You're essentially selling to the most needy, which feels like payday loans and that sort of business. I don't have it in me to deploy the sales/marketing playbook on vulnerable audiences.

So, the advice of selling to businesses seems better, but I also hear you on selling to K-12 or higher ed as having all the negatives of enterprise sales without the lucrative upside.

So then we're left to selling ed to businesses. But I feel despite all the lip service paid to training and upskilling, corporations don't *actually* want to upskill their workforce. Or at least not at the sacrifice of productivity.

Education is very unnatural, but that's what makes it a worthwhile problem to solve, too.

Great observations. I've been in the edu (coding school) space for over a decade and it tracks with my experience (though it seems you've tackled a lot more market segments than I have). I'm very bullish on AI + Education. If Karpathy's announcement doesn't track, what do you think might work instead?

We have a saying at Launch School: habits over enthusiasm. I've noticed that wanting it isn't enough. Desire is fine but what the real key is a commitment to studying. I think we're saying the same thing with different phrases.

Agree that ISAs can be useful. But it's a tool that can be used to harm or help. Elevating it beyond a financial tool to some sort of educational breakthrough was a disservice, imo.

We agree on the value of community colleges. I wish they were better funded and more people worked to drive CC graduates to six-figure jobs.

How far along are you? I like what Recurse Center is doing, for example.

I think you have to be careful about looking at the diverse student body as "giving them an opportunity". For example, predatory for-profit universities specifically target low-income minority populations not to serve them but because they make for easy prey[1]. I'm not saying Lambda or any particular bootcamp is in this category, just that having a diverse student body isn't a feature unless you know for a fact that you're helping 100% of the students.[2]

Education has a couple of unique attributes that makes it difficult to assess:

     1. the value cannot be perceived until much later after the service is rendered
     2. alternatives are mutually exclusive; eg, people usually just attend one university or coding bootcamp, not all of them (or even two of them)

This is in contrast to, say, a restaurant where diners can immediately determine if they like the food and can compare it with competitors (because they dine at all the restaurants).

Those two attributes make it very easy to lead with hype and marketing and vulnerable people are particularly susceptible to it. imo it's not appropriate to deploy the standard startup playbook in edu, especially if you find yourself attracting vulnerable students.

Ok, now combine that with ISAs, which has some positive qualities but are not as incentive aligning as marketed. And then if you sell the ISA in bundles, then it becomes even less incentive aligning. Well, I guess it's now aligning with investors and loan brokers. But it's certainly not aligning more with student outcomes.

It all makes for a very delicate situation where you have vulnerable students biting on the ISA bait.

I know it seems like I'm just complaining but I've been thinking about these problems for a long time and I come with solutions. Or, particularly, a solution: imo the best thing an edu institution can do is allow students to leave easily.

Why do we never think of restaurants as predatory? The idea is ludicrous to even consider. There are of course terrible restaurants but we can just not dine there again and eat elsewhere. There are lots of restaurants around.

And here's the issue: there are also lots of edu institutions around but every single one of them deploy the marketing->entrapment playbook.[3]

How does marketing work when you have a bad school? Because of the time-lapse between value received and service rendered. The ISA is easily abused in this environment because it's both the marketing and the trap.

Anyway, I'm just riffing here... btw, huge fan of your books and work! Despite what I wrote above, I knew Lambda was making an honest attempt at their curriculum when they hired you.

  [1] https://failstatemovie.com/
  [2] imo, edu institutions need to be judged on how they treat their most vulnerable students, unlike startups who are judged on their best wins (https://twitter.com/cglee/status/1781129096250179640)
  [3] https://medium.com/launch-school/educational-entrapment-f5cc0472051e

I'm the founder of Launch School and I have been thinking about ISAs, coding bootcamps, and software ed for over a decade. I've tried to insert my thoughts here and there, for example:

     - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30782967
     - https://x.com/cglee/status/1232512904953335808

Always happy to chat about ISAs and how to best deploy them. Or, find better alternatives.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this topic and I've come to the conclusion that the best generic advice for folks in your situation is to be under-employed, ie a job where you're not maxed out mentally/emotionally/physically, and save your resources to learn on your own.

Entry-level technical jobs are some of the worst jobs to help you ramp up as a programmer. It's chaotic, demanding, emotionally taxing, and a lot of blind leading the blind. And most importantly, employers expect you to perform "just in time" learning, which is detrimental long-term if you don't yet have strong foundations.

Here's an article I wrote a few years ago about Learning at Work: https://medium.com/launch-school/learning-at-work-c81b6866b0...

Of course, map these thoughts to your specific situation.

I'm embarrassed to say that even after spending nearly a decade operating a mastery-based software engineering school, I've only just heard about this paper now. And having read it just now, I'm feeling better than ever about mastery-based education.

Here's our take on mastery if anyone is interested: https://medium.com/launch-school/mastery-based-learning-2095...

Interesting observation and aligns with my experience of really enjoying small focused tools and apps. This website is a good example.

Further, it feels like there's a corollary here to companies, where financially constrained companies who are smaller and more focused provide better customer experience than cash-flush competitors.

For me it's not shocking that any one person can be this cruel. What's difficult to process is how entire social structures and institutions can be this cruel.

Since they're on the market looking for jobs, our graduates are pretty easy to find so any company can just contact them directly without partnering with us. There's no real way to prevent that. And, I don't want to prevent companies from reaching out to our graduates; I actually want the opposite.

Further, grads can (and should) apply to companies that aren't partnered with us. I don't want them to only apply to a limited set of partnered employers.

We've been operating for about a decade, so we've tried basically everything once :) Our current corporate partnership program is here if you're interested: https://launchschool.com/employers/placement

Hey Adam! This is the weekly check-ins during your job hunt we did. I guess your job hunt duration was too short, so maybe you didn't do too much of this :)

It's rarely 8 hours a day "applying to jobs". This is similar to an employer saying "you should work 40 hours/week". In that 40 hours are lots of varied activity, including breaks and lunch and any other activity that will allow you to succeed.

The idea is that we want to set expectation that people should focus on searching for a job and not, say, go on vacation. The wording here also is far more severe than reality only because we want serious participants.

This is a smart comment because this is exactly what we run into (I operate a coding school that uses ISAs). Employers love our graduates, but if we charged employers, we'd have to play a cat and mouse game of "please don't contact our students directly" or "please don't apply to their website and go through me". By charging students, we can be at ease with making introductions or promoting employer/student activities without having to police their communication.

That said, I believe there's a lot more we can do to help ease the financial burden from students and I love the direction of trying to move the cost of education from students to employers. I'm working on that.

For the past 6 years, I've operated a software engineering school[1] that uses ISAs and I have some thoughts about them. There are two main stated benefits to using ISAs (there are others, but those seem overblown):

  a) commission based pricing (aka, incentive alignment pricing)
  b) deferred payment

Of the two, imo the second is by far the most important thing for students. To the first bullet, I don't personally find commission based pricing to be all that incentive aligning. For example, it's not uncommon for me to advise someone to take a much lower offer because it seemed like a better long-term opportunity. This is in line with Sean's observation that quality education outcomes is difficult to reduce to salary numbers alone.

To the second bullet, the major problem of deferring all payments, however, is that you attract a lot of people looking for a shortcut. This is exactly the opposite attribute top employers are looking for. This is the "adverse selection problem" Sean mentioned.

Ultimately, the solution here is in selecting for the right type of students into the ISA-based program. Sean mentions that credit scores track with the type of students they're looking for. Other ISA-based programs have stated that they've found a secret sauce other than credit scores for detecting the right students.

We've found a different selection criteria:

We ask students to do a lot of work before we engage them with an ISA. I'm calling this model the ISA-later model, just so we can contrast this with an ISA-first model, which is what Sean and everyone else is doing.

An ISA-later program solves nearly all the problems associated with an ISA-first approach:

  - adverse selection is mitigated since you have a long track record of student behavior and performance
  - can still be egalitarian, without relying on credit scores or degrees or any socioeconomic markers
  - still possible to defer all payments, without the lock-in of an ISA-frst approach

There are many other student-friendly benefits of an ISA-later model, but I'll stop here as this comment is getting long.

[1] launchschool.com

This is something that mastery-based learning solves pretty cleanly. Or more accurately, in a MBL pedagogy, there's no need for faster/gifted or slower/remedial paths.

All the debate for/against gifted programs fall into the same trap of not thinking critically enough about the pedagogical model that powers pretty much all of our education from childhood through higher ed. IMO, we're only debating about the symptoms of a outdated pedagogical model, and not talking enough about the underlying problem -- the factory model of education.

If I were to guess, the money is actually in writing about the experience and parlaying it to an entry into Angel or VC.

Long-time MicroConf attendee (and one time sponsor). Still, YC has an outsized influence on young people and I'd like to see the bootstrap model expressed as a more obtainable path to one's first million.

IMO, there needs to be a bootstrapping track. Perhaps the bootstrapping track should even be the primary one. Of course YC won't do this, but IMHO, bootstrapping leads to the best chance for young people to quickly become millionaires.

This is a disgusting comment. I have family members at the protest site. They are non-violent Americans protesting what they believe in.

If we're thinking of the same poll, it was conducted in 2015 and the polling was backed by Caltech, who has a vested interest in TMT and neither the instrument or the raw data were available for other researchers to analyze.

I urge you to do some research into why they're protesting and not jump to wild conclusions. Try to think of the protestors as sane, rational humans who have values that's derived from a unique history and culture.

I'm not saying they're "right" or they're "wrong", but just that they have a perspective that's valid and reasonable.

Casting others as zealots only serves to confirm our own biases and doesn't lead to more understanding, which is what we need.

Some context for the protests: https://medium.com/@akkagawa/maunakea-redirecting-the-lens-o...

Ask your manager to send you to this: http://coleadership.com

This might help: https://medium.com/launch-school/solving-coding-problems-wit...

This is pretty much what we try to do at Launch School (launchschool.com).

This is great and more salary transparency is important. I'm wondering if these numbers jive with your hunch about the local market? I'm asking because I've noticed that when asking for salary numbers, those who make "decent" wages tend to reply more often and this can lead to sampling bias.