I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently gets 4-8 students who show up promptly at 8am. I answer their questions, give them guidance, and teach them best practices I follow as a software engineer with 10 years of work experience. I ask for nothing in return except the joy of students going "ahhh" when something clicked for them.
Things are still early for us, but my dream is to inspire other software engineers to help create a free and open learning center at their local libraries so people have an alternative to coding bootcamps.
FAANGM has left us with an impression that if you build a decent product you will magically make so much money that you can divert portions of it to a fancy office, great salaries, open source and other philanthropic causes, with no consequences. The truth is few industries carry that much of a margin especially when VC, founders, and seniors, take so much off the top.
It's my opinion that some companies should never be done for profit, particularly Political Tech but also other social tech including portions of ed tech.
These industries should be left for FI/RE folks who are rewarded with various social credits, like awards, tax credits, and peer validation.
This is awesome! I love hearing that others are doing this. I do something similar but I run after school clubs. I work mostly with 5th through 8th graders and run clubs 5 days per week in 5 different local schools.
It is a lot of work but so rewarding and I feel it has made me a better developer. I myself have learned so much from doing it. I have met so many amazing kids & parents too and it's made me a much bigger part of my community.
1. How did you broadcast your Meetup to your students?
2. It looks like you have students pull lessons from a repo. Do you find it challenging to manage a handful of students who are all at different places in your lessons?
1. I simply created the meetup group. Showed up, people came. It was empty the first week couple of days, I just made it a point to show up. When there were no people, I simply just read hn or did some work. When the first student came, I made sure to be nice so he feels inspired to come back. The library took note, wanted to make it official with their library program and give us a dedicated room / parking even though we only have 4 consistent students. (Libraries love it when tech community volunteers to help teach).
2. I was honest with students that I can't help everyone and my time is limited (though I try). If they helped each other it would make my life easier. They have been good at helping each other.
3. I don't understand burnout, I'm guessing it's a symptom of ambition and expectations (I'm really not sure because I've never understood it. If I experienced it previously I never noticed). I just make sure to have no expectations. All I hold myself accountable for is to show up. If I did something wrong I apologize and move on, there's no point beating myself up over anything. I don't have big ambitions to make millions and millions, I just want physically show up for people who need help.
4. Yes. I want to open source it completely, such that if people wanted to repackage it into their own bootcamp they have the freedom to do so (not sure what license that would be, but I'm not at that point yet). Right now I just document everything in notion: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f...
In the Netherlands (and by now a couple of other countries, I believe), there's a similar initiative called HackYourFuture [1], in which professional developers volunteer to teach refugees to code. This contributes to solving both to the lack of developers, and the challenges refugees face in contributing to the country they migrated to. It's really gratifying, and with volunteer sessions being limited to three Sundays in a row every now and then, less taxing than going there before work every day.
Other posts here are suggesting the choice is either a commercial school like Lambda or Harvard, so it's also worth noting that there is a whole range of options for folks.
Obviously, there are public and community colleges that teach programming. Many of these have a long history of working with non-traditional students who have jobs or other commitments. Some are remote-only or remote-friendly. In my state (GA), tuition for an accredited public community college is about $6,000 over 2 years for a programming diploma. That's $3,000 per year, and there's no income share required. (I'm not sure if people can do it faster for less money.)
There are also a set of nonprofits and foundations that offer free programming programs to certain populations. I believe NYC has something along these lines.
> Other posts here are suggesting the choice is either a commercial school like Lambda or Harvard
These are very much not the same. For profit schools have an incentive to get more students through while maintaining an acceptable level of quality because that way they make more money. Non-profits have much less motivation to make more money. If they get more applications than they want to fill their prestige goes up as does the quality of their student body. So you see the top US universities having more or less the same size student bodies as when there were 200m people living in the US.
Non-profits optimise for a pleasant work environment for faculty, for profits for maximum numbers students.
> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people
This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things, even a profitable one.
I did some back-of-the-envelope numbers on the one I came into contact with previously (also keep in mind this was 6 years ago now too!):
20-30x students per cohort who paid ~$20K upfront for a 12 week program.
20% signing fee (based on 1st year comp) from employer on placement.
We definitely were not paying top of market as some of these students ended up at Uber and Facebook. That said the all in 1st year cost between base + signing bonus + equity wasn't much short of $200K. So:
30 * $20K + 28 * $200K * 20% = $1.72M/cohort
As for outgoings, all of the mentors were volunteers. As were most of the instructors. The content is mostly a one-time sunk cost to produce and is redelivered across cohorts. The largest overhead would have been a building lease. The biggest constraint on growth is how large you can make a cohort or how many cohorts you run (either multiple per year, or opening new locations).
Really felt like a bit of a racket that had found what was almost an arbitrage: between the inability of Bay Area companies to find local talent, the huge costs and risk associated trying to relocate people via H1B, and the desire for people to re-skill at any cost because tech jobs/salaries were distorting everything else in their city.
Sure it's not a $1B outcome. It's a pretty profitable and repeatable business, and especially given the limited downside risk (mostly carried by the students, who've already paid).
Why don't you think schools can scale? You need instructional material and the equivalent of professors/lecturers and TAs. Instructional material scales really well; that's what textbooks and MOOCs are. Professors scale well; otherwise 100 plus lectures wouldn't work at all. They obviously do. Intro classes in the huge majority of US universities are in the 100-600 range. I wouldn't be surprised if there are bigger. So the only possible limiting factor that might not scale is TAs. You can render this irrelevant by having high enough standards for entry, like GA Tech's OMSCS, or you can work on scaling it.
There are definitely people who can do a challenging Master's degree with minimal help and feedback, just books, marked essay assignments and a final written exam. This is a model that's as old as the University of London. TAs and structure will increase the proportion of those who start who actually finish.
What about running a school obviously doesn't scale?
wouldn't be surprised if there's typically a "finance" guy making profit driven/marketing decisions pulling emotional strings on a the (willingly) naive "entrepreneur" partner
I tried to do something similar, but more as a mentoring program. I’ve been thinking about trying to do that with my company (having us mentor people outside the company—as a recruiting tool).
One thing I suggest is focus on code reviews for your students. I think that’s the best way to tech programming. They’ve already taken a stab at something, so writing comments on how it can be done better and why that way is better is much more useful than a lecture about something abstract.
You nailed it. I focus on code reviews and I agree that its the best way to teach programing. It teaches them how to structure their code to be maintainable. Just getting it to work is not good enough, you have to think about the engineer who is going to take over your code one day.
I made it over time based on observations with my coworkers and my personal work experience (I'm currently a tech lead at PayPal, formerly L4 at Google). What I want to do is to teach people to become good engineers, getting a job should be a side effect of that.
I think mainstream bootcamps value getting a job more than actually becoming a good engineer, which is something I disagree with. This also motivates me to show up at the library every day.
Not sure what pointers you are looking for, but you can start by saying hi in the chatroom.
If you think it is helpful, you can breeze through the lessons and exercises so you know / understand how other students use the curriculum, then work with the more senior students as a team on c0d3.com and build features to make it better. Proudly put all your contributions (features, mentoring work, authoring work - if you contributed to the course material) on your resume.
I'm a current student at Lambda School. It's a pretty stressful time at the moment - I don't have any loyalty to Lambda, but the recent string of damaging stories about the quality of teaching and average graduates is concerning.
It's true that Lambda is incredibly disorganised and the build weeks etc are chaotic. Equally true that they don't do a good enough job of ensuring we have something to show for ourselves on our portfolio.
It's also true that their admission standards are seemingly incredibly lax. About 40% of my cohort struggle to code at a fundamental level - I don't mean that harshly, it's Lambda's fault
With that said, I've really enjoyed my time at Lambda overall and it saddens me to see it fail like this. The atmosphere and internal culture that they cultivated is second to none and I have enjoyed my time there a lot.
As with many people at Lambda, I joined them at a difficult time of my life, when I was suffering from pretty severe depression. I knew I loved coding but barely spent any time doing it and struggled with impostor syndrome, etc.
While at Lambda I benefitted hugely from the daily structure and discipline, and from having a community of people in the same position as me. I've made some great friends, and met some very smart and talented people.
What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional.
> What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional.
Don't let this stop you. The world needs more good engineers, and if you practice your craft you will always find a home. There are plenty of industry professionals who now look a bit silly for their choice of company (Uber, WeWork) but ultimately it's all just a job and if you have the raw skills you can find a new gig.
> What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional.
Been there. I think this feeling comes mostly from the fact that this initiative has had a lot of attention, and of course, a lot of public criticism from people that weren't really able to give qualified opinion.
If you are having a good time there, if you are perceiving value, learning new things that makes sense and seem useful, just ignore those bad opinions and try not to think how others are looking at you.
I myself had a course on investing given by a moderately famous youtuber, and the environment around it was full of sarcasm and debauchery. I somehow managed to ignore it, took the course to the bone and now, less than 12 months after finishing, had a more than 3-fold return on the money I spent on it.
> What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional.
If you are learning more than you would have otherwise, or if you get a decent job at the end of this joining does not make you a clueless fool. Other people who don't know you or what you have done might think so but they don't matter. What matters is what you've learned, and that you'll get a job out of this in the end. Haters gonna hate.
Also learn generic problem solving VS just pattern matching on how to do a specific thing. Frameworks, languages and patterns themselves will keep changing. Core problem solving skills and understanding will stay relevant always.
Having friends in the program, I can tell you it's run like a circus.
Expecting 10 people who don't have any experience programming to cooperate on a project without any support or oversight is just asking for student failures.
Of course they'll say that the students have supports through their PMs, EMs or TLs (depending on the mood, they change the role title), but they're never available and miss meetings constantly. Also, they've reogranized the curriculum multiple times during the tenure of my friends, and don't wait till the next batch like a sane school would.
I feel really bad for the excellent teachers they brought on board. They ended up with a lot more than they bargained for.
Half or more of the program is composed of the crappy group projects.
The people who succeed after lambda school is in spite of the program, not because of it.
I agree with almost everything you say. However all the college projects I was part of, there was no supervision whatsoever. We were all children learning to be adults. Some of us were already there before others. I'm guessing lambda students are more adults than kids. Bottom line, TA support is golden. Supervision, not so much.
This is a golden example of where in person beats online. It's so much easier to weed out the people who will not show up when you do things in person (and there are plenty of those in College). But even diligent people are more likely to flake when things are online. There's simply less commitment.
I've been enrolled at Lambda for just about a year now, so I feel qualified to comment here.
> Of course they'll say that the students have supports through their PMs, EMs or TLs (depending on the mood, they change the role title), but they're never available and miss meetings constantly.
This statement is full of hyperbole, however it gets at what I feel is Lambda's biggest problem: Team Lead quality and consistency.
The problem is a misalignment of incentives (sound familiar?). TLs are current students who are further ahead in the curriculum. The schedule makes it effectively impossible to have a job and TL, in addition to being a student, so I'm guessing most of those who apply for a TL position do so largely for the paycheck.
I don't mean to say that all TLs are bad or don't care about the success of their teams. In fact my experience has been mostly positive. But ultimately students are not at Lambda to be TLs. They are at Lambda to get high-paying tech jobs.
From the point of the student, the TL quality being low is a huge minus, plus the fact that they are also busy means that you don't get that much help.
From the point of the business, I can see the trade off. Running a cheap shop is essential for the kind of deal they offer: A time-capped value-capped full-risk sharing agreement.
Lambda's model could have much, much higher quality if there were a less restraining cap on the ISA, but that will affect sign-ups and might increase the trouble of the people that fall-off the track.
I dont know what is the best positioning of price-quality, but I'm sure many people would prefer to pay more through ISA to have a higher success rate and stronger guidance.
That said, Lambda is really just 3 years old, they need to figure out a million things.
In fairness, all start-ups are "run like a circus." That's the point of a start-up--to figure out new/better ways of doing things. Most of the time it doesn't work, and then you try something else.
If you want the stability and reliability of Harvard, don't get your education from a scrappy upstart.
I'll counter this by saying that in my experience school projects are no better. TA's and prof's don't have enough time to give to groups. Students are left to figure things out on their own. Some classes assume (wrongly) that concepts were taught in prior classes so you have to figure it out on your own.
Not sure when you graduated - I'm sure it was better when there were more resources and less students - but today that's not the case.
I've had a fair amount of experience with coding boot camps having have helped several friends and coworkers apply, get accepted, attend, and complete bootcamps across various cities and institutions.
The idea of bootcamps is fantastic, they allow people that may have not been exposed to computer science to get up to speed on technology and transition careers.
However, there are several problems. First and foremost, while 3-6-9 months are great when you are going from zero knowledge, the challenge is that isn't enough time to really be a junior developer unless you have prior experience. So you will need to continue to augment your education after graduation to ensure that you get a well paying job.
Most people attending bootcamps are doing so after college and later in life, which means even though some bootcamps are cheaper than attending a semester or a full year of college they are still quite expensive because the students are not "students" in that they are usually adults and need to figure out how to pay for school, attend classes, while effectively receiving zero income.
And applying for loans is much more complex because this isn't the same as taking out student debt for college.
The second issue is that all of these bootcamps say that they are for beginners with zero knowledge, but looking over their curriculums that simply isn't the case. Software engineering has gotten much more complex over the past decade. When I first started fumbling around with it myself I could just write some PHP or Perl code, and get up and running quickly. Today you need to know about github, javascript libraries, frameworks, and the typical "Hello World" application isn't a direct route.
Most of these schools don't realize that their first students are already exposed to these concepts, but later students aren't so they don't really adjust their curriculum.
With lambda in particular it also is a bit confusing because the school is online. Which should mean that you are able to provide the service for a lower cost, but they are charging the same amount as in person physically attended schools.
There are a lot of deceptive practices in the industry, lambda isn't alone, such as taking recent grads and giving them low paying jobs as TA (teacher assistants) so that they can provide help to students at a lower cost while also allowing the school to claim that they have higher placement.
The curriculums are really dependent on a per school basis, but I have seen a bunch of stuff that simply doesn't make sense and makes it more challenging for students.
One school had students do a group project, which wouldn't count as part of their final for the first "mod" of the school. However they continued to teach things that you need for the final which would be a personal project. If you got assigned to a bad team you would be working much slower and not able to keep up and then your final which has nothing to do with a group determines whether you proceed or repeat the course (they charge you to repeat). Also it's important to note that 50% of the students didn't pass the first mod, which means you have a 50% chance of being on a slow team that would hamper your learning. Their advice was that it is important to learn to pair, and I agree, but when you get to your first job you are pairing with people that have experience, not where your partner has a 50% chance of failing out.
I firmly believe that bootcamps and providing secondary education choices are essential and if done correctly can really begin to combat the monopoly that colleges hold over education, but it's a challenging mission.
With education there are student loans that you can take out and I think that is essential to get this going in the US because it is simply impossible for most people to not have any income and still pay for schooling for even 6 months, much less a longer period of time.
The other challenge is that you really need to have 3 terms. Beginner, intermediate, advanced. Each student can then apply based on skill set to determine where they place and students can move from one to the next, with each section being 4-5 months. If you did 15 months of education you would be much better off than what the school provides. It's great to get from zero to one in terms of knowledge, but students are still left far from having skills that are immediately beneficial to employers.
There's definitely more work that needs to be done.
As for Lambda itself, when you look at how other coding bootcamps have fared financially it doesn't paint a rosy picture. It's a challenging space to operate and the VC style returns simply aren't there. If you want to offer an online only education that is fantastic but you have places like codecademy that do that and also do not charge you $30k for the privilege of basically accessing information that is online for free.
The challenge with coding is that it really is much easier to get going when you have someone you can ask questions from, so helping to improve that aspect of it while providing it online at a low cost is really the challenge.
Just curious, what's wrong with a community college? It's cheap. It's flexible. Its admission rate is practically 100%. Its courses are not worse than a code camp's. My relative went to a CC, and I reviewed his course work. CCs does not spend much time teaching all the fundamentals, but they do teach some. In their data structure course, they don't teach student why two pivots are not better than a single pivot in quicksort nor do they cover discrete probability or classic complexity analysis extensively, but they do teach (and practice!) asymptotic complexity and why vanilla quick-sort may perform badly. They don't teach students how to prove the boundary conditions of ODE, but they do teach intuition and how to solve and apply a wide variety of ODEs. The examples can go on. They also hire teachers from industry to teach courses on data processing, frontend engineering, and etc.
With the belief that education is all about laying solid foundation for life-long learning, for job or not, I don't really see any need for coding camps. I'm not denying there are success stories, but I don't see coding camps make statistical sense.
I think community colleges are great, and if you can get one on one instruction anywhere it is fantastic. The challenge is that bootcamps are really designed for people who are changing careers. Which means they have already gone through college or actively working. So it becomes an issue because they are reliant on income to survive and they aren't living with their parents.
Basically it's unplanned and so much harder to able to commit two years.
Certainly do-able, but challenging when you are thinking of it from a consumer perspective. Spend two years working towards a career shift or get it done in 6 months.
Maybe community colleges can do a better job of marketing themselves.
But ultimately I think the fact that computer science isn't a requirement in all education is criminal. We study "Math" and "English" in school. "Computer Science" is the equivalent of math 100 years ago, it needs to be a mandated requirement.
Having worked on low cost online educational content & as a bootcamp instructor previously - I think there are a few forces that lead to suboptimal outcomes:
1. No or low admissions bar. Some students very simply SHOULD NOT be admitted to what is intended to be a 3 month course. They either don’t have the learning ability that is required to absorb all of the content in 3 months or the drive.
2. Curriculum pacing - pretty much every human learns different concepts at different pace. A lot of code schools are just trying to assembly-line their course & put people in one end and shove them out the other end in 3 months. If these boot camps offered remediation at a unit level, students on the whole would go much further much faster.
3. Curriculum focus - some people want to be data scientists, others want to write backend code, others want to be iOS developers, others front end. A lot of bootcamps really have curriculum hitting very broad strokes in that 3 month period: big-o, SOLID, html, css, npm/yarn/etc, command line interface, JavaScript, react, elixir, etc. etc. is too much to cram into 3 months IMO. This is a consequence of students hearing this buzzword soup from friends and internet & bootcamps not owning responsibility to serve students.
4. Outcome reporting is hazy at best - CIRR is IMO the best framework for reporting student numbers & should be used as the gold standard. However it should be enforced strictly, if a member doesn’t report CIRR numbers within 3 or 6 months of a cohort finishing they should be penalized in some way by being removed or fined or something. Students need good & recent data to make good decisions & it’s just not their these days.
There are more problems but those are the biggest IMO. There is still a huge opportunity in helping people learn to code but I think it looks more like learncodethehardway.com than Lambdaschool.com
I've found online courses can actually be MORE expensive than meatspace courses because online, they usually make me buy some DRM nonsense that self-destructs at the end of the course. So it's not possible to acquire "books" through any of the traditional means secondhand, theft, borrowing.
> Whether or not this counts as “selling” strikes me as a meaningless semantic distinction: Either way, the school receives some money up front and an investor shoulders some of the risk of the ISA not paying out. And either way, Lambda School students don’t know that the school isn’t as incentive-aligned with them as the school’s marketing indicates.
It is certainly not meaningless! Selling an ISA means that Lambda no longer has any financial interest in its outcome. Borrowing against an ISA is completely different; if the ISA doesn't pay out then Lambda goes bankrupt, which is precisely the incentive alignment they claim to have.
It is selling, because the loan is backed by the ISA. Which means if Lambda can not repay the loan, the loaning company now owns the ISA and can use any sort of aggressive tactics to get the student to repay their ISA.
Just like if you take out a mortgage on a house and fail to pay the loan back, then the bank owns the house.
In this case since the ISA is used as collateral, the company that originated the loan now owns a lien on the ISA, effectively giving it ownership.
Similar to when you lease a car, there is a company that provides the finances for the lease, and has a lien on the car, which means you do not own it. Otherwise you could lease a car for $250/mo, then sell it the next day for $30k, but you can't because there is a lien on the title.
So in this case, while the loan is outstanding, the originating loan company effectively owns the asset used for collateral. Ownership means you have 100% control over the asset, and in this case, Lambda has given away 100% control over the ISA.
It also means that they are not aligned anymore, since they have received financial compensation for the ISA up front, they can default on their repayment of the loan as it doesn't matter because the collateral aren't shares in their company, but just the ISA itself.
I don't think that's quite right. Lambda is taking out loans against the ISA but the only way to discharge the debt is by declaring bankruptcy. If Lambda defaults on these loans the bank will indeed own them but won't be satisfied just taking back the ISA contracts and enforcing them themselves (and presumably, if they default, the ISAs aren't worth what they were financed at anyway). Lambda is still on the hook for the full balance of the debt unless they want to close up and liquidate or file chapter 11.
You seem to think that this "loan" that the investor makes to Lambda School only has to be paid back when the ISAs pay out, and if they never pay out then Lambda School's debt is just forgiven. That would indeed be similar to just selling the ISAs to the investors, but I don't think that's what is described in the article (as Lambda School's current practice). Rather the article says that Lambda School gets a "loan that is secured by students' ISAs" which implies that Lambda School has to pay it back with or without the income from the ISAs.
It's not zero financial interest, but certainly more indirect and less compelling.
If investors in Lambda ISAs are not getting good returns, the value of buying a Lambda ISA will go down. If Lambda can't sell ISAs for a good price, they won't get the operating income they need or will have to shoulder the ISA themselves.
Still, selling the ISA just feels shady relative to the marketing that touts ISAs as aligning incentives.
Selling the ISAs would make it more indirect, but this article is referring to borrowing against the ISAs' future income, which does not make it more indirect.
Why do you find that less compelling? As you point out, even if Austin sold hopes and dreams and/or investor story time for the first two years of ISAs, eventually there will be hard results to model out. So how does that misalign incentives?
The claim made to the student is not that they have some long minded financial alignment with the student cohort in aggregate - it's that specifically, the school does not make any money off the student (individually) until the student has an outcome.
Yes, and that is accurate; borrowing against a student's debt is not "making money" from the student. The transaction you describe does not hedge Lambda's risk; in fact it increases Lambda's risk because now if the student defaults they still need to pay interest as well.
I don't think you mentioned that the student doesn't have to pay back Lambda after 60 months of deferred payments. That seems important. From the Lambda site:
"The income share agreement has no interest. It's a flat percentage that goes away once you've reached the $30k payment cap, you've made 24 payments, or after 60 months of deferred payments (even if you haven't paid us anything)."
But you wrote in the article:
"Students with no safety nets experience real financial pain from the nine-month hiatus from work, in addition to the looming dread of possibly having to pay Lambda $30K one day."
You mention that there's value in Lambda's mission, but I'm curious as to whether you believe that Lambda's business model is redeemable.
It's hard to argue that there's clearly a major risk involved in attending a program like this, but at the same time it seems to be working for some individuals. Would these high-achieving individuals be able to teach themselves? Possibly. But I'm not sure that going back to the traditional college route is the right choice either. And how can we better help those who lack the aptitude or enjoyment of programming and find out too late into these programs?
Bootcamps probably need a longer and more rigorous trial period - one thing that students were really pissed about was that they didn't find out that Lambda was bad until after the month-long forgiveness period ended.
Why did you choose to write about this program as opposed to other programs that teach people coding skills, but have vastly worse payment plans, including some which can't even be dispensed in bankruptcy? The criticism seems unmoored from its placement in the set of alternatives for people who want to try to see if they can get a job coding. The undergraduate degree is notoriously bad for this purpose, from time, practicality and cost perspectives. How do you propose that people learn these skills- or learn if they are capable of achieving these skills?
Hey man. Thank you for publishing this article, and doing actual journalism (researching the actual data, and giving people opportunity to respond). I've been recommending lambda school to my friends, only based on their marketing. I may stop doing that now.
I have to be honest that I’m not really seeing any major issues here. They _used_ to do something and now they don’t, so he didn’t lie about it. They _have_ had low placement rates and informed their investors, but it’s unclear what the average or common placement rate is and if it’s significantly different from what they claim. And _some_ students didn’t like the curriculum. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You also make reference to some internal documents. Perhaps sharing them will help further the story?
I disagree that this is an accurate assessment of my claims. When you claim that you "never have" done something after you've already done it, you're making a statement about both the present and the past. Your point about averages or something is also difficult for me to parse.
I learned to code from scratch using freeCodeCamp.org, tutorials and official documentation. Got a good job after 8 months studying full-time. Almost 3 years now and everything is good (more details on my experience here: https://rodrigohgpontes.github.io).
As a totally outsider (not even from the US), Lambda School seemed too good to be true, in a good way, and I said so here in HN. 9 months of serious commitment, no upfront payment, ISA, all of it seemed good to me.
These days, I don't think the same way. Lambda School and it's founder seem more worried about being a billion dollar company than doing the right thing for its students. Personally, that's strategically stupid and counter-productive. They won't be a billion dollar company because they don't care about their students. But it looks like the direction they took. This mistake is not inherent to VC ventured companies or Silicon Valley, so I think the ones to blame are Lambda leaders, not the system.
So, I still recommend freeCodeCamp.org as the best thing that exists for people that want to learn to code and get a job. I wish some of these effective philanthropy multi millionaire would give them generous money to pursue their mission.
While I find Lambda’s incessant twitter evangelizing as annoying as the next guy, I’m not sure any article I’ve seen is painting a realistic picture about Lambda.
Media outlets have incentives to either paint you as the second coming of Christ or as Satan. It appears Lambda, for a while, actually succeeded at convincing journalists they were the former.
After a while, people get bored with that though. The incentives that drive clicks flip. Suddenly Lambda is now Satan. Burn it down! Downvote all sympathizers!
Here’s the reality: all models for education can work for certain people in certain instances. Lambda is definitely the best choice for some people. But no single company is going to solve something like “education” or “healthcare” because they are political institutions tied to the power dynamics that determine how society is arranged. You cannot brute force this without gaining influence over government itself.
This is not as simple as disrupting where people buy their shampoo or where they see ads.
There are always two sides to every story, but when you have outright fraudulent claims I don't think you can say that the article is simply painting the school as "Satan"
If you stated that you have an 86% placement record and in reality it is 50%, that is a pretty large discrepancy. If the original 86% placement was from the first 70-ish students and now you are over 2500 students, that seems a bit fraudulent.
If placement rates aren't critical to you getting students, then you can say it is 50% publicly and see if that affects your enrollment numbers or not. Otherwise, it would stand to reason that stating a higher placement rate gets you more students.
Also, this isn't run a a non-profit organization, its a for-profit enterprise. So they have a financial incentive to get more students because that equates to more value for them.
Cherry picking a strong cohort and using it to create a narrative is the same thing as cherry picking a weak cohort and doing the opposite.
This is my point. Journalists are picking a narrative first, then seeking out facts to justify that position.
When they thought lambda was going to fix education they were more than happy to report the 86% number without any research. Now that lambda is “evil” they look for the lowest number they can find.
Maybe that’s true im general, but the facts are very consistent - Lambda repeatedly misrepresented them while attracting lots of positive attention. This is what a free press helps correct.
> After a while, people get bored with that though. The incentives that drive clicks flip. Suddenly Lambda is now Satan. Burn it down! Downvote all sympathizers!
What this means is that bullshitting works until it doesn't.
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Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3
I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently gets 4-8 students who show up promptly at 8am. I answer their questions, give them guidance, and teach them best practices I follow as a software engineer with 10 years of work experience. I ask for nothing in return except the joy of students going "ahhh" when something clicked for them.
Things are still early for us, but my dream is to inspire other software engineers to help create a free and open learning center at their local libraries so people have an alternative to coding bootcamps.
It's my opinion that some companies should never be done for profit, particularly Political Tech but also other social tech including portions of ed tech.
These industries should be left for FI/RE folks who are rewarded with various social credits, like awards, tax credits, and peer validation.
It is a lot of work but so rewarding and I feel it has made me a better developer. I myself have learned so much from doing it. I have met so many amazing kids & parents too and it's made me a much bigger part of my community.
Few questions if you do not mind:
1. How did you broadcast your Meetup to your students?
2. It looks like you have students pull lessons from a repo. Do you find it challenging to manage a handful of students who are all at different places in your lessons?
3. How do you avoid burnout?
4. Do you plan on open sourcing your lessons?
1. I simply created the meetup group. Showed up, people came. It was empty the first week couple of days, I just made it a point to show up. When there were no people, I simply just read hn or did some work. When the first student came, I made sure to be nice so he feels inspired to come back. The library took note, wanted to make it official with their library program and give us a dedicated room / parking even though we only have 4 consistent students. (Libraries love it when tech community volunteers to help teach).
2. I was honest with students that I can't help everyone and my time is limited (though I try). If they helped each other it would make my life easier. They have been good at helping each other.
3. I don't understand burnout, I'm guessing it's a symptom of ambition and expectations (I'm really not sure because I've never understood it. If I experienced it previously I never noticed). I just make sure to have no expectations. All I hold myself accountable for is to show up. If I did something wrong I apologize and move on, there's no point beating myself up over anything. I don't have big ambitions to make millions and millions, I just want physically show up for people who need help.
4. Yes. I want to open source it completely, such that if people wanted to repackage it into their own bootcamp they have the freedom to do so (not sure what license that would be, but I'm not at that point yet). Right now I just document everything in notion: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f...
[1] https://www.hackyourfuture.net/program/
Other posts here are suggesting the choice is either a commercial school like Lambda or Harvard, so it's also worth noting that there is a whole range of options for folks.
Obviously, there are public and community colleges that teach programming. Many of these have a long history of working with non-traditional students who have jobs or other commitments. Some are remote-only or remote-friendly. In my state (GA), tuition for an accredited public community college is about $6,000 over 2 years for a programming diploma. That's $3,000 per year, and there's no income share required. (I'm not sure if people can do it faster for less money.)
There are also a set of nonprofits and foundations that offer free programming programs to certain populations. I believe NYC has something along these lines.
These are very much not the same. For profit schools have an incentive to get more students through while maintaining an acceptable level of quality because that way they make more money. Non-profits have much less motivation to make more money. If they get more applications than they want to fill their prestige goes up as does the quality of their student body. So you see the top US universities having more or less the same size student bodies as when there were 200m people living in the US.
Non-profits optimise for a pleasant work environment for faculty, for profits for maximum numbers students.
This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things, even a profitable one.
20-30x students per cohort who paid ~$20K upfront for a 12 week program. 20% signing fee (based on 1st year comp) from employer on placement.
We definitely were not paying top of market as some of these students ended up at Uber and Facebook. That said the all in 1st year cost between base + signing bonus + equity wasn't much short of $200K. So:
30 * $20K + 28 * $200K * 20% = $1.72M/cohort
As for outgoings, all of the mentors were volunteers. As were most of the instructors. The content is mostly a one-time sunk cost to produce and is redelivered across cohorts. The largest overhead would have been a building lease. The biggest constraint on growth is how large you can make a cohort or how many cohorts you run (either multiple per year, or opening new locations).
Really felt like a bit of a racket that had found what was almost an arbitrage: between the inability of Bay Area companies to find local talent, the huge costs and risk associated trying to relocate people via H1B, and the desire for people to re-skill at any cost because tech jobs/salaries were distorting everything else in their city.
Sure it's not a $1B outcome. It's a pretty profitable and repeatable business, and especially given the limited downside risk (mostly carried by the students, who've already paid).
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There are definitely people who can do a challenging Master's degree with minimal help and feedback, just books, marked essay assignments and a final written exam. This is a model that's as old as the University of London. TAs and structure will increase the proportion of those who start who actually finish.
What about running a school obviously doesn't scale?
One thing I suggest is focus on code reviews for your students. I think that’s the best way to tech programming. They’ve already taken a stab at something, so writing comments on how it can be done better and why that way is better is much more useful than a lecture about something abstract.
I think mainstream bootcamps value getting a job more than actually becoming a good engineer, which is something I disagree with. This also motivates me to show up at the library every day.
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I'm not a beginner coder, but I haven't worked on projects in a team environment before, so I signed up on c0d3.com hoping to gain some experience.
Any pointers?
If you think it is helpful, you can breeze through the lessons and exercises so you know / understand how other students use the curriculum, then work with the more senior students as a team on c0d3.com and build features to make it better. Proudly put all your contributions (features, mentoring work, authoring work - if you contributed to the course material) on your resume.
You can reach me via email: library at zheng.network
It's true that Lambda is incredibly disorganised and the build weeks etc are chaotic. Equally true that they don't do a good enough job of ensuring we have something to show for ourselves on our portfolio.
It's also true that their admission standards are seemingly incredibly lax. About 40% of my cohort struggle to code at a fundamental level - I don't mean that harshly, it's Lambda's fault
With that said, I've really enjoyed my time at Lambda overall and it saddens me to see it fail like this. The atmosphere and internal culture that they cultivated is second to none and I have enjoyed my time there a lot.
As with many people at Lambda, I joined them at a difficult time of my life, when I was suffering from pretty severe depression. I knew I loved coding but barely spent any time doing it and struggled with impostor syndrome, etc.
While at Lambda I benefitted hugely from the daily structure and discipline, and from having a community of people in the same position as me. I've made some great friends, and met some very smart and talented people.
What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional.
Don't let this stop you. The world needs more good engineers, and if you practice your craft you will always find a home. There are plenty of industry professionals who now look a bit silly for their choice of company (Uber, WeWork) but ultimately it's all just a job and if you have the raw skills you can find a new gig.
Been there. I think this feeling comes mostly from the fact that this initiative has had a lot of attention, and of course, a lot of public criticism from people that weren't really able to give qualified opinion.
If you are having a good time there, if you are perceiving value, learning new things that makes sense and seem useful, just ignore those bad opinions and try not to think how others are looking at you.
I myself had a course on investing given by a moderately famous youtuber, and the environment around it was full of sarcasm and debauchery. I somehow managed to ignore it, took the course to the bone and now, less than 12 months after finishing, had a more than 3-fold return on the money I spent on it.
If you are learning more than you would have otherwise, or if you get a decent job at the end of this joining does not make you a clueless fool. Other people who don't know you or what you have done might think so but they don't matter. What matters is what you've learned, and that you'll get a job out of this in the end. Haters gonna hate.
Expecting 10 people who don't have any experience programming to cooperate on a project without any support or oversight is just asking for student failures.
Of course they'll say that the students have supports through their PMs, EMs or TLs (depending on the mood, they change the role title), but they're never available and miss meetings constantly. Also, they've reogranized the curriculum multiple times during the tenure of my friends, and don't wait till the next batch like a sane school would.
I feel really bad for the excellent teachers they brought on board. They ended up with a lot more than they bargained for.
Half or more of the program is composed of the crappy group projects.
The people who succeed after lambda school is in spite of the program, not because of it.
> Of course they'll say that the students have supports through their PMs, EMs or TLs (depending on the mood, they change the role title), but they're never available and miss meetings constantly.
This statement is full of hyperbole, however it gets at what I feel is Lambda's biggest problem: Team Lead quality and consistency.
The problem is a misalignment of incentives (sound familiar?). TLs are current students who are further ahead in the curriculum. The schedule makes it effectively impossible to have a job and TL, in addition to being a student, so I'm guessing most of those who apply for a TL position do so largely for the paycheck.
I don't mean to say that all TLs are bad or don't care about the success of their teams. In fact my experience has been mostly positive. But ultimately students are not at Lambda to be TLs. They are at Lambda to get high-paying tech jobs.
From the point of the business, I can see the trade off. Running a cheap shop is essential for the kind of deal they offer: A time-capped value-capped full-risk sharing agreement.
Lambda's model could have much, much higher quality if there were a less restraining cap on the ISA, but that will affect sign-ups and might increase the trouble of the people that fall-off the track.
I dont know what is the best positioning of price-quality, but I'm sure many people would prefer to pay more through ISA to have a higher success rate and stronger guidance.
That said, Lambda is really just 3 years old, they need to figure out a million things.
If you want the stability and reliability of Harvard, don't get your education from a scrappy upstart.
Not sure when you graduated - I'm sure it was better when there were more resources and less students - but today that's not the case.
The idea of bootcamps is fantastic, they allow people that may have not been exposed to computer science to get up to speed on technology and transition careers.
However, there are several problems. First and foremost, while 3-6-9 months are great when you are going from zero knowledge, the challenge is that isn't enough time to really be a junior developer unless you have prior experience. So you will need to continue to augment your education after graduation to ensure that you get a well paying job.
Most people attending bootcamps are doing so after college and later in life, which means even though some bootcamps are cheaper than attending a semester or a full year of college they are still quite expensive because the students are not "students" in that they are usually adults and need to figure out how to pay for school, attend classes, while effectively receiving zero income.
And applying for loans is much more complex because this isn't the same as taking out student debt for college.
The second issue is that all of these bootcamps say that they are for beginners with zero knowledge, but looking over their curriculums that simply isn't the case. Software engineering has gotten much more complex over the past decade. When I first started fumbling around with it myself I could just write some PHP or Perl code, and get up and running quickly. Today you need to know about github, javascript libraries, frameworks, and the typical "Hello World" application isn't a direct route.
Most of these schools don't realize that their first students are already exposed to these concepts, but later students aren't so they don't really adjust their curriculum.
With lambda in particular it also is a bit confusing because the school is online. Which should mean that you are able to provide the service for a lower cost, but they are charging the same amount as in person physically attended schools.
There are a lot of deceptive practices in the industry, lambda isn't alone, such as taking recent grads and giving them low paying jobs as TA (teacher assistants) so that they can provide help to students at a lower cost while also allowing the school to claim that they have higher placement.
The curriculums are really dependent on a per school basis, but I have seen a bunch of stuff that simply doesn't make sense and makes it more challenging for students.
One school had students do a group project, which wouldn't count as part of their final for the first "mod" of the school. However they continued to teach things that you need for the final which would be a personal project. If you got assigned to a bad team you would be working much slower and not able to keep up and then your final which has nothing to do with a group determines whether you proceed or repeat the course (they charge you to repeat). Also it's important to note that 50% of the students didn't pass the first mod, which means you have a 50% chance of being on a slow team that would hamper your learning. Their advice was that it is important to learn to pair, and I agree, but when you get to your first job you are pairing with people that have experience, not where your partner has a 50% chance of failing out.
I firmly believe that bootcamps and providing secondary education choices are essential and if done correctly can really begin to combat the monopoly that colleges hold over education, but it's a challenging mission.
With education there are student loans that you can take out and I think that is essential to get this going in the US because it is simply impossible for most people to not have any income and still pay for schooling for even 6 months, much less a longer period of time.
The other challenge is that you really need to have 3 terms. Beginner, intermediate, advanced. Each student can then apply based on skill set to determine where they place and students can move from one to the next, with each section being 4-5 months. If you did 15 months of education you would be much better off than what the school provides. It's great to get from zero to one in terms of knowledge, but students are still left far from having skills that are immediately beneficial to employers.
There's definitely more work that needs to be done.
As for Lambda itself, when you look at how other coding bootcamps have fared financially it doesn't paint a rosy picture. It's a challenging space to operate and the VC style returns simply aren't there. If you want to offer an online only education that is fantastic but you have places like codecademy that do that and also do not charge you $30k for the privilege of basically accessing information that is online for free.
The challenge with coding is that it really is much easier to get going when you have someone you can ask questions from, so helping to improve that aspect of it while providing it online at a low cost is really the challenge.
With the belief that education is all about laying solid foundation for life-long learning, for job or not, I don't really see any need for coding camps. I'm not denying there are success stories, but I don't see coding camps make statistical sense.
Basically it's unplanned and so much harder to able to commit two years.
Certainly do-able, but challenging when you are thinking of it from a consumer perspective. Spend two years working towards a career shift or get it done in 6 months.
Maybe community colleges can do a better job of marketing themselves.
But ultimately I think the fact that computer science isn't a requirement in all education is criminal. We study "Math" and "English" in school. "Computer Science" is the equivalent of math 100 years ago, it needs to be a mandated requirement.
1. No or low admissions bar. Some students very simply SHOULD NOT be admitted to what is intended to be a 3 month course. They either don’t have the learning ability that is required to absorb all of the content in 3 months or the drive.
2. Curriculum pacing - pretty much every human learns different concepts at different pace. A lot of code schools are just trying to assembly-line their course & put people in one end and shove them out the other end in 3 months. If these boot camps offered remediation at a unit level, students on the whole would go much further much faster.
3. Curriculum focus - some people want to be data scientists, others want to write backend code, others want to be iOS developers, others front end. A lot of bootcamps really have curriculum hitting very broad strokes in that 3 month period: big-o, SOLID, html, css, npm/yarn/etc, command line interface, JavaScript, react, elixir, etc. etc. is too much to cram into 3 months IMO. This is a consequence of students hearing this buzzword soup from friends and internet & bootcamps not owning responsibility to serve students.
4. Outcome reporting is hazy at best - CIRR is IMO the best framework for reporting student numbers & should be used as the gold standard. However it should be enforced strictly, if a member doesn’t report CIRR numbers within 3 or 6 months of a cohort finishing they should be penalized in some way by being removed or fined or something. Students need good & recent data to make good decisions & it’s just not their these days.
There are more problems but those are the biggest IMO. There is still a huge opportunity in helping people learn to code but I think it looks more like learncodethehardway.com than Lambdaschool.com
It is certainly not meaningless! Selling an ISA means that Lambda no longer has any financial interest in its outcome. Borrowing against an ISA is completely different; if the ISA doesn't pay out then Lambda goes bankrupt, which is precisely the incentive alignment they claim to have.
Just like if you take out a mortgage on a house and fail to pay the loan back, then the bank owns the house.
In this case since the ISA is used as collateral, the company that originated the loan now owns a lien on the ISA, effectively giving it ownership.
Similar to when you lease a car, there is a company that provides the finances for the lease, and has a lien on the car, which means you do not own it. Otherwise you could lease a car for $250/mo, then sell it the next day for $30k, but you can't because there is a lien on the title.
So in this case, while the loan is outstanding, the originating loan company effectively owns the asset used for collateral. Ownership means you have 100% control over the asset, and in this case, Lambda has given away 100% control over the ISA.
It also means that they are not aligned anymore, since they have received financial compensation for the ISA up front, they can default on their repayment of the loan as it doesn't matter because the collateral aren't shares in their company, but just the ISA itself.
I think most homeowners would disagree that when they bought the house, it was actually sold to the bank.
If investors in Lambda ISAs are not getting good returns, the value of buying a Lambda ISA will go down. If Lambda can't sell ISAs for a good price, they won't get the operating income they need or will have to shoulder the ISA themselves.
Still, selling the ISA just feels shady relative to the marketing that touts ISAs as aligning incentives.
"The income share agreement has no interest. It's a flat percentage that goes away once you've reached the $30k payment cap, you've made 24 payments, or after 60 months of deferred payments (even if you haven't paid us anything)."
But you wrote in the article:
"Students with no safety nets experience real financial pain from the nine-month hiatus from work, in addition to the looming dread of possibly having to pay Lambda $30K one day."
Also, CoderPad was life changing when we started using it at Airbnb. It made phone interviews so much more effective, thanks for creating it.
It's hard to argue that there's clearly a major risk involved in attending a program like this, but at the same time it seems to be working for some individuals. Would these high-achieving individuals be able to teach themselves? Possibly. But I'm not sure that going back to the traditional college route is the right choice either. And how can we better help those who lack the aptitude or enjoyment of programming and find out too late into these programs?
Was this at $10k/ISA? And was it half of all ISAs or all of half of the ISAs?
You also make reference to some internal documents. Perhaps sharing them will help further the story?
Also how much time did you spend on all of the research for this piece?
As a totally outsider (not even from the US), Lambda School seemed too good to be true, in a good way, and I said so here in HN. 9 months of serious commitment, no upfront payment, ISA, all of it seemed good to me.
These days, I don't think the same way. Lambda School and it's founder seem more worried about being a billion dollar company than doing the right thing for its students. Personally, that's strategically stupid and counter-productive. They won't be a billion dollar company because they don't care about their students. But it looks like the direction they took. This mistake is not inherent to VC ventured companies or Silicon Valley, so I think the ones to blame are Lambda leaders, not the system.
So, I still recommend freeCodeCamp.org as the best thing that exists for people that want to learn to code and get a job. I wish some of these effective philanthropy multi millionaire would give them generous money to pursue their mission.
It changed my life.
Media outlets have incentives to either paint you as the second coming of Christ or as Satan. It appears Lambda, for a while, actually succeeded at convincing journalists they were the former.
After a while, people get bored with that though. The incentives that drive clicks flip. Suddenly Lambda is now Satan. Burn it down! Downvote all sympathizers!
Here’s the reality: all models for education can work for certain people in certain instances. Lambda is definitely the best choice for some people. But no single company is going to solve something like “education” or “healthcare” because they are political institutions tied to the power dynamics that determine how society is arranged. You cannot brute force this without gaining influence over government itself.
This is not as simple as disrupting where people buy their shampoo or where they see ads.
If you stated that you have an 86% placement record and in reality it is 50%, that is a pretty large discrepancy. If the original 86% placement was from the first 70-ish students and now you are over 2500 students, that seems a bit fraudulent.
If placement rates aren't critical to you getting students, then you can say it is 50% publicly and see if that affects your enrollment numbers or not. Otherwise, it would stand to reason that stating a higher placement rate gets you more students.
Also, this isn't run a a non-profit organization, its a for-profit enterprise. So they have a financial incentive to get more students because that equates to more value for them.
This is my point. Journalists are picking a narrative first, then seeking out facts to justify that position.
When they thought lambda was going to fix education they were more than happy to report the 86% number without any research. Now that lambda is “evil” they look for the lowest number they can find.
I’m sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.
What this means is that bullshitting works until it doesn't.