I was at Lambda when they announced the switch from 9 to 6 months and the elimination of paid team leaders. The feedback was universally negative. In a channel for open student discussion, Austen Allred deleted a poll from Slack because of how lopsided the reaction was. He explained the deletion by saying the poll was "misleading."
Students then got a survey "explaining" why the change was actually a good thing by asking questions such as "Do you understand why companies value mentoring experience?" Not just failing to reveal the truth (these were cost-cutting measures), but not even taking the effort to come up with a convincing lie.
It was destabilizing: Austen's twitter account would read ambitious, hyperoptimistic; meanwhile, drastic changes would be made within the program with vague rationales ("after speaking with hiring managers, we've made these changes..."), and probing further simply got deflections or gaslighting surveys.
There were a ton of good people in the program, and I learned a lot there. But fundamentally there needs to be trust between institution and student when you're asking people to make this level of time and financial commitment. And at no point did I feel like Lambda at its top level prioritized student wellbeing over PR, costs, or metrics to be sold to investors.
It isn't just Lambda School. I mentor for [insert large coding bootcamp here] and I will say things have been going badly across the board for more than 50% of students. They recently had to cut a lot of staff, and completion rates seem to hover around only 50-60% when you take into account all the students they remove from this calculation when they withdraw for "personal reasons". The employment numbers I don't have as much insight into but I have definitely had students who I don't think will get hired easily, and students reach out via LinkedIn 6th months later still looking for a job and wondering if they can work for me.
That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people.
One thing I've tried to emphasize with my mentees is the need to go beyond the curriculum (because it simply doesn't cover enough) and do personal projects. I always tell them the narrative about how back in the early 00s, the only resources available were things like w3schools.com, documentation, and the occasional dubiously accurate blog entry. I was able to learn almost everything I learned not for the sake of learning it but because I wanted to build X or Y. Bootcamps will teach you a vertical slice of some skills that are relevant in [current year], but they do not do a very good job of getting you started on a lifelong process of self-learning and side projects, which is the only way you get anywhere in this industry. Plus the only way to stand out when you went to a bootcamp anyway is having a very exceptional github profile with open source contributions that demonstrates you actually have an interest and do things beyond what is required by the bootcamp.
This one particular student sticks with me. He was in his 60s-70s, and had a burgeoning career in IT/Security in the late 90s, but quit his job to take care of his ailing mother around 2001 or so. He took care of her, living off of her reverse mortgage for 20 years, but now she has passed away, and the term of the reverse mortgage ends soon (or I believe by now has ended) so the bank will be re-posessing his house, his only remaining asset. The guy was not doing well. Even though he was quite smart and had C++ in his distant background, he was making almost zero progress in the course. It soon became clear that he was so drained from working 12-hour days at a Costco warehouse (and doing other similar menial jobs) 6 days a week (and still not making enough to even pay his medical bills) that he wasn't going to be able to make any progress. I repeatedly recommended him for a scholarship (because of his intelligence and skill) but I never heard back, and eventually he dropped off my schedule. I did everything I could to give him what he needed to succeed, but ultimately there was nothing I could do. It haunts me. This country is so fucked.
One huge mistake I think a lot (but not all of) the bootcamps are making is taking the easy route of simply using JavaScript to teach both frontend and backend. JavaScript is a TERRIBLE first programming language. I usually have to spend 2-3 sessions per mentee explaining the idiosyncrasies of JavaScript, where some of the OOP concepts actually come from, and how things work in other languages to put into context the really terrible implementation of these features in js. Main reason being, I tell them, things that run in the browser are different from almost every other runtime environment because on the web it is extraordinarily difficult to deprecate/change things, because if you do then X% of the web breaks. This is why we still to this day have things like "quirks mode" etc. Once a behavior is out there in the wild, you basically have to support it as a browser, and you can drop support for it virtually never. This process has led to the JavaScript we have today -- mountains of functionality dumped on top of a backwards compatible core riddled with idiosyncrasies and poor design decisions that didn't become poor until they were left unchanged for ~20 years.
Anyway, my point is, it's very important to make sure students understand that their confusion surrounding how things are structured in JavaScript is natural, and that they can (and should, on their own preferably) look forward to learning more stable/sensical languages in the near future. It's a shame I have to do this for my students instead of the course just doing it for me, however.
"The overall 6-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time undergraduate students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree at 4-year degree-granting institutions in fall 2012 was 62 percent. That is, by 2018 some 62 percent of students had completed a bachelor’s degree at the same institution where they started in 2012. The 6-year graduation rate was 61 percent at public institutions, 67 percent at private nonprofit institutions, and 25 percent at private for-profit institutions. The overall 6-year graduation rate was 65 percent for females and 59 percent for males; it was higher for females than for males at both public (64 vs. 58 percent) and private nonprofit (70 vs. 64 percent) institutions. However, at private for-profit institutions, males had a higher 6-year graduation rate than females (26 vs. 25 percent)."
That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people.
Isn't that just a case of some students having natural ability where a large percentage do not? If being a good developer was only about knowing syntax and writing efficient algorithms boot camps would work fine.
> two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads
I just want to echo this, I have also worked with some really really sharp engineers coming out of these bootcamps. They were also people changing careers. I would really hate for the questionable aspects of these bootcamps to reflect on all of their grads, because some of the grads are fantastic.
> "That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people."
This is what I really wonder about - how many of the negative comments are from students not succeeding possibly because of unrealistic expectations around teaching (and what's actually required for learning). Lots of kids fail in college too (particularly in CS) where the attention given to students (and projects) is often worse.
I remember kids constantly complaining at University about how the teachers weren't good or giving them enough attention etc. etc. There's some truth to this, but it's also a common way people take away their own agency for failure.
There's some baseline IQ requirement (for lack of a better term) - LamdaSchool puts the incentives in the right place, but they can't magically get rid of that prerequisite and if their screening isn't good enough some admitted students will fail. At least that failure won't include tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
I think the outcome comparison needs to be with universities - at least with ISAs the incentive alignment protects students even when they fail.
One nice thing about software is that you can self-teach to a significant degree. But you probably need some basic aptitude and you need a huge amount of self-motivation. And, as you say, you probably want to structure your learning in a way that works for you.
> things have been going badly across the board for more than 50% of students
How does this compare to traditional colleges? We hear a lot about students saddled with massive debt and useless degrees, but I don't have a good sense of what percentage that is.
And my understanding of Lambda is that you don't end up with debt if the school fails you?
"That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people."
Some folks thrive in this environment either by natural ability or their learning style and others do not. For whatever the reason the coding bootcamp gets the flack for underperforming folks and it seems to me unfair: Why are they held to this super high standard to teach a difficult subject (computer programming at a high level) to all kinds of learners at all levels?
I used to work as a technical recruiter and made several hires out of coding bootcamps (though never from Lambda, which didn't exist at the time).
One rule of thumb that we drew after many trials was that, if a candidate coming out of a coding bootcamp did not have a math or science background prior to that bootcamp, they probably would not pass our interview process.
That is, people with a certain intellectual foundation and aptitude can acquire useful skills from coding bootcamps. But people without that aptitude will not obtain it simply because they attended a coding bootcamp.
Separately, while I appreciate that Vincent got answers to questions that many people are asking, the fact that he had to hide his intentions to get an interview with Austen is exhibit number 1 why people have grown to mistrust reporters.
And that's interesting, because often you can't have both. That is, either you accept that corporations lie while the press plays by certain rules of honesty, which prevent them from getting past the smokescreen of lies. Or you support the press in its schemes to penetrate the smokescreen by using deception themselves. But if you support them against Lambda, then you should support them, too, in lying to the institutions you may support, which are also hiding something. Muckrakers need to disguise themselves.
DELETED: A sentence claiming that Vincent runs Coder Pad and has a conflict of interest. I apologize for the error. See his comment below.
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 think this is a far assessment. There is a certain level of mathematical aptitude that is essential for being able to be successful at programming. Maybe no in the strict sense of math but in understanding how different structures and concepts are able to relate to each other. However in the strict sense of math, there is a requirement there.
I also posit that as bootcamps grew - the quality control and quality of hires(students) decreased with the continued pressure of growing for their investors. Leads to bad outcomes.
It is not dissimilar to when a company blitzscales and the quality of incoming hires diminishes the further down the graph you go. I realize its a bit harsh of a comparison but I do tend to find the earlier hires at solid companies typically have something the later hires don't (though many of the later hires are quite good at their specific roles).
I think there is a double standard applied to educational reformers like MOOCs, bootcamps, and video courses.
Education largely does not work for most people who enrol. Most college students do not finish, and something like a third of university students do not either. And even among those students who receive the credential, many are probably able to slide through without actually learning much.
Anecdotally I think you'll find education has a pareto distribution: the top few percent of students learn enormously, the top 20% learn a decent amount, the next 20% or so squeek through with marginal benefit, and the bottom half does not even finish.
The reason I get annoyed is that I think these new, data-driven forms of education shoot themselves in the foot by gathering data. If they just shut their ears and pretended that everyone was learning based on the grades/assessments like universities and colleges do, they might be just as successful.
In other words, the proper comparison is not whether the education is most likely to succeed, but how likely it is to succeed in comparison to other forms. Sort of like those quit smoking aids which reportedly double your success rate of quitting--in a notoriously difficult task like quitting smoking, going from a 3% success to 6% is profound.
You can’t compare uni and bootcamps because they’re a false equivalency as someone else pointed out.
The sole purpose of a bootcamp is to get a job afterwards. That’s why they market their job placement rates so much.
Uni, video courses, and MOOCs are for education. Not everyone uses them to get a job, so job placement for a video course or uni compared to bootcamp doesn’t give you much info.
Anecdote: I did a self-paced online school to get my first software job. I did research on it in regards to job placement.
After getting my first software job, I have since taking many video courses and even went back to uni to get a degree in Computer Science. All of that was purely for further education, not getting a job.
I wouldn’t go to a bootcamp in my position because I don’t need it. They aren’t focused on education or academics but job training.
It's only a double standard if you're assuming the people critical of Lambda aren't also critical of selling valueless $200k college educations to checked-out students.
So, I learned to code at an odd program at Univ. of Texas - Austin, essentially a bootcamp for coders that began in the 1970's and still runs today. They take about 9 months to get you to a beginning programmer level, then you program (for UT administration) up through a kind of apprenticeship. It worked very well, and the washout rate has historically been about 10%; that is, 90% of those initially admitted go on to become professional programmers. That 10% includes people who quit, move, are expelled, etc. Truly 90% of those admitted get programmer jobs.
They have an admissions test, which is essentially an IQ test.
They would never admit to that, and their admitted population is very diverse (gender, race, age, etc.). But, they don't just admit anybody; in times of high unemployment the vast majority of people who take the test are not admitted. They also interview prospective candidates to weed out anyone with obvious, serious people skills issues. I wonder if this is what's missing from most bootcamps?
That the dirty secret of all higher education. The value of the credential comes from the screening, not the education. Research shows people accepted to ivy league schools who don't attend have the same future incomes as the people who attend.
This sounds like a decent way to run an educational program but a very poor way to run a business (at least a VC backed one). You probably won't get enough volume by doing a hard screen. You need to ensure that your program is good enough that even moderate or marginal candidates come out able to find a job. Otherwise, your business is quite small.
I come from the failed Lambda School UX program. It wasted more than a year of my life. And to add insult to injury, after having succeeded in learning UX on my own + finding employment, I now send them a mortgage payment's worth of $$$ every month, until I reach that $30k limit. What a damn scam.
I wonder how many university students are jealous of you? I spent three years doing a Bachelor of Engineering, which I consider three years lost. The piece of paper got me a job, but I certainly felt I was less valuable after finishing the degree than I was before it (negative learning is a thing).
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.
Just wanted to say I'm a big fan of your journalism and CoderPad.
One question I have about this: Do you think Lambda is uniquely problematic in this space or are they perhaps a more typical case? Are others worse?
Anecdotally, back in 2019 I asked our internal recruiter to reach out to Lambda school to see about graduate resumes sent our way for jr software development positions. He emailed them but claims they weren't terribly responsive and never sent him any candidates. At the time, we just assumed fancy startups were getting first pick. Now I think the well was dry.
I was a 2015 UX Bootcamp grad (Chicago local, later acquired and run into the ground.) I think I paid $8k and have had a pretty great career, though it took a couple months to find that first job. The last 2 years, I've had a side gig where I do practice UX interview - usually to bootcamp grads.
Y'all I felt bad for most of these folks. The majority were not taught how to solve problems, but rather how to take generic steps in design thinking in order to create a cookie cutter portfolio. There was rarely any consideration for anything on the either side of UX, be it business or development, so they were learning in a vacuum. A couple of the schools had former grads teaching in order to boost placement %. How are you supposed to learn from someone who's never executed in the real world is beyond me. The most successful folks almost always had tangental previous work experience to draw from. And in the rare instances someone had learned some UI skills? Yikes. All that in a market that has been oversaturated with junior UX/UI candidates the last couple year, it's no wonder places are starting to ditch the UX programs. Plus now, you always have college students with UX degrees to compete with.
I think a lot of people believed it would be easier to break into UX because there was no code/is less technical which led to this burst bubble. Not to say that's not true, but designing software for humans is more complicated than a persona and some low-fi wireframes!
An anecdote from an early bootcamp grad—I graduated from what was then known as The Starter League in 2012. Those I have kept in touch with have all done pretty well. My guess is:
—1/4 are doing what they did before or something similar.
—1/4 became engineers. Some have moved more into management roles.
—2/4 have ended up as PMs, founded a startup or in product design, like myself.
Those were successful gave it 100% of their time and focus. Those who stuck with their day job and tried to do it in the evenings struggled. Also, nobody got a job straight out of bootcamp. Many did after 3 to 6 months of additional work post graduation.
Also, It's interesting to see how things have changed. I paid like $6,000 and we met for class 3 days a week and had hours of pairing work and mentoring outside of class each week for 12 weeks. Now it seems like many of these schools cost at least $20,000 and are much more hands off.
It is amazing that was almost 10 years ago. Time flies.
> “Danner, who invested $1 million shortly after Lambda School's Series A, compared the complaints to his own experience launching the charter school Rocketship Education, which received public backlash for teaching elementary-school students on laptops without instructors for part of their day.
"They said we were experimenting on the backs of children," Danner said.
"But when SpaceX launched their first five rockets and they blew up, was that OK?" he continued. "We're in a more high-stakes world of human development. Still, you can't say that you don't like the way things are but don't want people to try new things."
This is one of the problems of mixing VCs in the education space. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work when the “things” are humans, not code and technology.
Also, last time I checked, SpaceX wasn’t promising 80% of its rockets would work back in its early days.
> last time I checked, SpaceX wasn’t promising 80% of its rockets would work back in its early days.
Is your criticism that these places are making false promises, or:
> “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work when the “things” are humans, not code and technology.
RCTs and placebos work exactly this way. People literally die to help us learn what does and does not work. We lost 8-9 months of COVID-19 deaths because of a system that needs to go slow, and yet had experimentation regimes that still put participants at risk.
I don't know of any verification method that doesn't require some degree of risk for the participants, but I'd love to hear one.
Anecdotal, but here is my experience: I graduated from General Assembly back in 2015, and bootcamps were just starting to crop up back then. I really liked the experience but it was definitely very clunky, I don't think I learned much about code. My first job afterwards ended up being a support engineer role for a year where I touched code maybe a handful of times, I started out at 55k which I was ELATED with. I then got an opportunity to learn development on the Salesforce platform and took a paycut to 35k just so I can learn the ropes and be 'coding'. This proved to be invaluable experience. 1 year later I moved to SF and I haven't looked back since.
It wasn't really the trajectory I saw back in 2015, but it felt that the bootcamps focused so much on teaching popular JavaScript tools and not really how to problem solve or even the language basics or even what the technology space can offer. I think it is a very tough thing to get right in 3 months(my class length) or even less...
My partner went through a bootcamp, and there was an interview process after the application process. In my partner's case, they hold an advance degree in a STEM field from an Ivy League. A few of their peers had similar backgrounds, and that group didn't have trouble finishing.
I wonder if the push to scale out these programs meant lowering standards, since folks with the ability / discipline to finish are few.
If so, the unintended consequences are interesting:
Letting in more folks -> more folks with issues finishing -> more customer support -> more issues -> more doubts about the worthiness of the credentials from employers -> more folks having trouble finding placement -> lowering standards to let in more folks.
I completed Lambda's part-time web program about a year ago and while I did come out with more knowledge than when I entered, I do not think it was worth the time or the money I have invested.
I was not the target Lambda student in that I already had web dev knowledge but wanted to delve deeper and felt like I was spinning my wheels on my own. The accountability created by the program is what I was after.
The curriculum was adequate and, with one exception, the instructors were engaging and knowledgeable. While we did have some limited interaction with the instructors themselves, digging in to individual problems was the job of the team lead (a student further ahead in the program who went through an application process) and this is where things got grim.
TLs changed frequently and their quality was all over the place. Some followed the meeting protocol, some let their group run the meetings, others missed meetings regularly. Multiple times my TLs were unable to help much because the curriculum had changed and we were learning something they hadn't been taught. At best, they made sure we all understood the lecture by being thorough during our 1 on 1 meetings. At worst, they were a hindrance.
The final for the web dev curriculum is what they call "labs" and the TL for your labs group has expanded responsibilities. In theory, having gone through labs already, they are supposed to be kind of like lead devs - offering architecture suggestions, helping with deployment snags, shepherding us through merge conflicts, etc.
My labs TL was, more than anything, an obstacle. Mostly they forwarded our questions to the section lead and they weren't a particularly efficient go-between, so after a few weeks of deflecting our follow-ups we started messaging with the SL directly and were receiving timely responses. Our TLs only contributions to our project were the initial heroku projects and an unfinished code climate integration.
In the end, having projects and due dates was helpful for me but in no way do I feel it was worth the cost of tuition.
Another Lambda alum here mentioned feeling like student wellbeing took a back seat to marketing and PR and nothing encapsulates this more perfectly than the photo at the top of their homepage of a student who dropped out after repeating one of the early sections once or twice. Who cares what became of them as long as it looks good on the website!
My anecdotal experience as a part-time web dev instructor was not great - I recently quit after just 6 months. A small handful of students were curious and driven, but I have the impression that most students were not very driven. Could be an artefact of my program being part-time, not sure if it’s different in the full-time one (the part-time program enrolment was paused shortly after I joined btw). The main reason I quit was because school provided very little support for instructors in the sense of growth of our skills. I still think the idea is great, but I’m less confident in Lambda School as a company now.
Vincent's interview with This Week in Startups on Lambda School is also very interesting despite the weird McCarthyist line of questioning the host goes down.
The problem with any education is how do you figure out the actual value added?
We all know that kid who would learn stuff regardless of what environment he was put in, and his opposite. And then probably a fair few in the middle where the environment actually matters.
When you're looking at outcomes, how do you know which school is worth paying for? I'm facing this issue myself right now for my primary school kids.
The big issue statistically is selection. For an analogy, think of cars. Are Volvos safe, or do they just attract safer drivers? It's not impossible to tease out from stats in principle, but has anyone done it? With schools it's even worse. Is one school in a richer area? What about the cost, that will skew selection too? Does one school use an entrance exam? And the really big one, does a school kick out underperformers?
With respect to coding schools you have to wonder whether the "best" students are already creamed off by universities, such that Lambda School and their like are really just salvaging a few people who fell into unfortunate circumstances and are trying to help themselves out. Along with some unfortunates who are never going to be coders but buy the premise that you can be taught these things in a short period of time, you just have to pay.
In any case it seems like they are forced to produce numbers quite fast for business reasons, and this has caused them to present the stats in the most positive light possible. The virus situation is not an entirely crazy excuse, but it will be interesting to see what happens.
In their eagerness to disrupt traditional education, all these programs forgot that the one single thing that makes traditional university education succesful is teaching people with aptitude and drive.
To get accepted and graduate from a reputable university you have to get good results in standardized tests and work your self through multiple courses for at least 3 years. That by itself doesn't mean anything but there's a level of rigor and self-drive required to succesfully traverse this experience.
I mentored in one of these bootcamp programs and you would be surprised how little people give a shit, even though they are paying. Most of them know that the job placement guarantee is a safeguard for their own laziness.
These programs accept people who think pursing a career in tech would be cool and easy until they realize is a tough learning experience and a tough job. Perhaps tougher than anything else they have done in their lives.
The problem with these companies is that they have to balance the quality of students with the quantity required to meet scale. This is probably the worst type of VC backed business because the investor expectations on scale are in direct conflict with the quality of potential students pre-bootcamp and the demanded quality by employers post-bootcamp.
IAMA Former founder @ Hack Reactor, one of the larger coding bootcamps. I left Hack Reactor some time after selling to Galvanize in 2018. I now run a clean energy startup and am commenting as a bystander (no insider knowledge @ Lambda). Here are some thoughts in no particular order. Feel free to AMA as well.
0) Bootcamps are extremely sensitive to complaints to their regulators. If you are eg. seeking a refund for monies paid and have a grievance, know that forms like this [https://www.bppe.ca.gov/forms_pubs/complaint.pdf] exist for your state, and know that bootcamps will be very motivated to reconcile the matter before you fill one out.
1) Many bystanders think the ISA business model is predatory. I've seen it compared to slavery. I've talked with hundreds of low-income, high-promise people, and ISAs are 1000% more attractive to that audience than more conventional debt-like instruments, even debt-like instruments with forgiveness protocols. When people talk about what's good for low-income students, and say it's not ISAs... I don't think these people have a cohesive theory of educational access??? I can't explain it.
2) There is a lot of skepticism about the practice of hiring recent grads as alums. I think it's a good idea for prospective bootcamp students to ask a) which specific individuals with work experience will teach me, b) what kind/how much access will I have, c) can I talk to them. I will also observe that recent grads do the bulk of of non-lecture/non-curriculum work in pretty much every educational context ever. I live next to UC Berkeley, which has more graduate TAs than all other instructional staff put together.
3) This looks bad for Lambda. I hope they course-correct and I hope prospective students look at all their options. PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS: You should write off Lambda because a) you have better options, or b) because you've talked to current students, not c) because of coverage like this. I can't speak to Lambda but I can say I've read coverage like this about places that might be the best option out there for some students (eg General Assembly). Anyone who likes coding and wants to make it their job should go to the best bootcamp they can get into. It's an incredible onramp into a world of prosperity, and "worst bootcamp" is a quality designation that is close to "median university CS program" in terms of return on investment IMO.
> 1) Many bystanders think the ISA business model is predatory. I've seen it compared to slavery. I've talked with hundreds of low-income, high-promise people, and ISAs are 1000% more attractive to that audience than more conventional debt-like instruments, even debt-like instruments with forgiveness protocols. When people talk about what's good for low-income students, and say it's not ISAs... I don't think these people have a cohesive theory of educational access??? I can't explain it.
Yeah, the state pays for education and people like you pay taxes to the state.
This article takes the angle that Lambda's profitability efforts may hurt its students:
> the school can still reach profitability by enrolling 2,000 students a month while only placing less than half of its graduates in qualifying jobs.
>Class sizes are like 150 students to one instructor — I've only heard that number going up
I don't see what the problem is here. For students, the only cost associated with Lambda is the opportunity cost. The incentives are still aligned here -- the school wants people to get placed. It can't "scam" students with higher teacher:student ratios or bad curriculums without hurting its bottom line. If it's failing at teaching students, that's incompetence, not a drive for profitability. If only 40% of students get placed -- that's still 40% more than would have been placed without Lambda, right?
>"Those students that are in the bottom 10%, why would they invest resources into helping those students succeed? Just let them fail out after six months"
...exactly? You are going to school for free. The school is not obligated to waste resources on students falling behind, because those students aren't paying anything.
If you think 6 months of wasted time is a bad deal, just wait until I tell you about this other educational program that lasts 4 years, costs over $100,000, and has a much lower placement rate: Your local university's liberal arts degrees.
Still, it's unfortunate to hear that Lambda is playing the same placement-rate games as bootcamps. I'm surprised they have to do this at all; if I was running admissions, I would be extremely selective, only accepting extremely bright students that I feel the university system had "missed," to get placement rates as high as possible. Maybe they try to do this, and this is just a sad sign of the state of non-college education opportunities?
I don't see what the problem is here. For students, the only cost associated with Lambda is the opportunity cost.
The terms of the ISA are five years, and they don’t just apply to coding jobs. You could conceivably go back to school for a degree after the program fails, get a job without any of their help, and still get your wages garnished. They just have to say you learned something in the program that helped you get your job.
Another scenario: you’re making slightly below $50k, you get a promotion to $50k in the middle of the program. The promotion had nothing to do with what you learned in the program, but it’s up to you to argue otherwise.
Students have brought up both of these things in the official subreddit, but I can’t link to them since they set it to private after last year’s major backlash.
I'll also add that while most students opt for the ISA, some students pay the up-front price. That's because the ISA historically attached a premium e.g. $20k pay up front or go with an ISA with a $30k cap. If you were sold on their claimed 86% placement rate, who needs that insurance?
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?
> If only 40% of students get placed -- that's still 40% more than would have been placed without Lambda, right?
You can't draw that conclusion without a control group. It is entirely possible that a control group that spent that boot camp time doing independent study and job hunting would have higher placement rates and that Lamda school would thus have a negative effect.
I would guess that Lamda school does have a positive effect but that effect is smaller than 40%.
[+] [-] tYPSyClA|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bwing|4 years ago|reply
Students then got a survey "explaining" why the change was actually a good thing by asking questions such as "Do you understand why companies value mentoring experience?" Not just failing to reveal the truth (these were cost-cutting measures), but not even taking the effort to come up with a convincing lie.
It was destabilizing: Austen's twitter account would read ambitious, hyperoptimistic; meanwhile, drastic changes would be made within the program with vague rationales ("after speaking with hiring managers, we've made these changes..."), and probing further simply got deflections or gaslighting surveys.
There were a ton of good people in the program, and I learned a lot there. But fundamentally there needs to be trust between institution and student when you're asking people to make this level of time and financial commitment. And at no point did I feel like Lambda at its top level prioritized student wellbeing over PR, costs, or metrics to be sold to investors.
[+] [-] sam0x17|4 years ago|reply
That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people.
One thing I've tried to emphasize with my mentees is the need to go beyond the curriculum (because it simply doesn't cover enough) and do personal projects. I always tell them the narrative about how back in the early 00s, the only resources available were things like w3schools.com, documentation, and the occasional dubiously accurate blog entry. I was able to learn almost everything I learned not for the sake of learning it but because I wanted to build X or Y. Bootcamps will teach you a vertical slice of some skills that are relevant in [current year], but they do not do a very good job of getting you started on a lifelong process of self-learning and side projects, which is the only way you get anywhere in this industry. Plus the only way to stand out when you went to a bootcamp anyway is having a very exceptional github profile with open source contributions that demonstrates you actually have an interest and do things beyond what is required by the bootcamp.
[+] [-] sam0x17|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sam0x17|4 years ago|reply
Anyway, my point is, it's very important to make sure students understand that their confusion surrounding how things are structured in JavaScript is natural, and that they can (and should, on their own preferably) look forward to learning more stable/sensical languages in the near future. It's a shame I have to do this for my students instead of the course just doing it for me, however.
[+] [-] temp8964|4 years ago|reply
Compare to graduation rate of traditional colleges: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40
"The overall 6-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time undergraduate students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree at 4-year degree-granting institutions in fall 2012 was 62 percent. That is, by 2018 some 62 percent of students had completed a bachelor’s degree at the same institution where they started in 2012. The 6-year graduation rate was 61 percent at public institutions, 67 percent at private nonprofit institutions, and 25 percent at private for-profit institutions. The overall 6-year graduation rate was 65 percent for females and 59 percent for males; it was higher for females than for males at both public (64 vs. 58 percent) and private nonprofit (70 vs. 64 percent) institutions. However, at private for-profit institutions, males had a higher 6-year graduation rate than females (26 vs. 25 percent)."
[+] [-] herbturbo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notJim|4 years ago|reply
I just want to echo this, I have also worked with some really really sharp engineers coming out of these bootcamps. They were also people changing careers. I would really hate for the questionable aspects of these bootcamps to reflect on all of their grads, because some of the grads are fantastic.
[+] [-] gonehome|4 years ago|reply
This is what I really wonder about - how many of the negative comments are from students not succeeding possibly because of unrealistic expectations around teaching (and what's actually required for learning). Lots of kids fail in college too (particularly in CS) where the attention given to students (and projects) is often worse.
I remember kids constantly complaining at University about how the teachers weren't good or giving them enough attention etc. etc. There's some truth to this, but it's also a common way people take away their own agency for failure.
There's some baseline IQ requirement (for lack of a better term) - LamdaSchool puts the incentives in the right place, but they can't magically get rid of that prerequisite and if their screening isn't good enough some admitted students will fail. At least that failure won't include tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
I think the outcome comparison needs to be with universities - at least with ISAs the incentive alignment protects students even when they fail.
[+] [-] ghaff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] missinfo|4 years ago|reply
How does this compare to traditional colleges? We hear a lot about students saddled with massive debt and useless degrees, but I don't have a good sense of what percentage that is.
And my understanding of Lambda is that you don't end up with debt if the school fails you?
[+] [-] gigatexal|4 years ago|reply
"That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people."
Some folks thrive in this environment either by natural ability or their learning style and others do not. For whatever the reason the coding bootcamp gets the flack for underperforming folks and it seems to me unfair: Why are they held to this super high standard to teach a difficult subject (computer programming at a high level) to all kinds of learners at all levels?
[+] [-] throwaway789257|4 years ago|reply
One rule of thumb that we drew after many trials was that, if a candidate coming out of a coding bootcamp did not have a math or science background prior to that bootcamp, they probably would not pass our interview process.
That is, people with a certain intellectual foundation and aptitude can acquire useful skills from coding bootcamps. But people without that aptitude will not obtain it simply because they attended a coding bootcamp.
Separately, while I appreciate that Vincent got answers to questions that many people are asking, the fact that he had to hide his intentions to get an interview with Austen is exhibit number 1 why people have grown to mistrust reporters.
And that's interesting, because often you can't have both. That is, either you accept that corporations lie while the press plays by certain rules of honesty, which prevent them from getting past the smokescreen of lies. Or you support the press in its schemes to penetrate the smokescreen by using deception themselves. But if you support them against Lambda, then you should support them, too, in lying to the institutions you may support, which are also hiding something. Muckrakers need to disguise themselves.
DELETED: A sentence claiming that Vincent runs Coder Pad and has a conflict of interest. I apologize for the error. See his comment below.
[+] [-] akanet|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] boringg|4 years ago|reply
I also posit that as bootcamps grew - the quality control and quality of hires(students) decreased with the continued pressure of growing for their investors. Leads to bad outcomes.
It is not dissimilar to when a company blitzscales and the quality of incoming hires diminishes the further down the graph you go. I realize its a bit harsh of a comparison but I do tend to find the earlier hires at solid companies typically have something the later hires don't (though many of the later hires are quite good at their specific roles).
[+] [-] Gunax|4 years ago|reply
Education largely does not work for most people who enrol. Most college students do not finish, and something like a third of university students do not either. And even among those students who receive the credential, many are probably able to slide through without actually learning much.
Anecdotally I think you'll find education has a pareto distribution: the top few percent of students learn enormously, the top 20% learn a decent amount, the next 20% or so squeek through with marginal benefit, and the bottom half does not even finish.
The reason I get annoyed is that I think these new, data-driven forms of education shoot themselves in the foot by gathering data. If they just shut their ears and pretended that everyone was learning based on the grades/assessments like universities and colleges do, they might be just as successful.
In other words, the proper comparison is not whether the education is most likely to succeed, but how likely it is to succeed in comparison to other forms. Sort of like those quit smoking aids which reportedly double your success rate of quitting--in a notoriously difficult task like quitting smoking, going from a 3% success to 6% is profound.
[+] [-] sunny--tech|4 years ago|reply
The sole purpose of a bootcamp is to get a job afterwards. That’s why they market their job placement rates so much.
Uni, video courses, and MOOCs are for education. Not everyone uses them to get a job, so job placement for a video course or uni compared to bootcamp doesn’t give you much info.
Anecdote: I did a self-paced online school to get my first software job. I did research on it in regards to job placement.
After getting my first software job, I have since taking many video courses and even went back to uni to get a degree in Computer Science. All of that was purely for further education, not getting a job.
I wouldn’t go to a bootcamp in my position because I don’t need it. They aren’t focused on education or academics but job training.
[+] [-] akanet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bwing|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2012|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossdavidh|4 years ago|reply
They have an admissions test, which is essentially an IQ test.
They would never admit to that, and their admitted population is very diverse (gender, race, age, etc.). But, they don't just admit anybody; in times of high unemployment the vast majority of people who take the test are not admitted. They also interview prospective candidates to weed out anyone with obvious, serious people skills issues. I wonder if this is what's missing from most bootcamps?
[+] [-] cm2012|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tschwimmer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weezin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barry-cotter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] devteambravo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robocat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] literallyaduck|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arthurwu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akanet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spamizbad|4 years ago|reply
One question I have about this: Do you think Lambda is uniquely problematic in this space or are they perhaps a more typical case? Are others worse?
Anecdotally, back in 2019 I asked our internal recruiter to reach out to Lambda school to see about graduate resumes sent our way for jr software development positions. He emailed them but claims they weren't terribly responsive and never sent him any candidates. At the time, we just assumed fancy startups were getting first pick. Now I think the well was dry.
[+] [-] verogianno|4 years ago|reply
Y'all I felt bad for most of these folks. The majority were not taught how to solve problems, but rather how to take generic steps in design thinking in order to create a cookie cutter portfolio. There was rarely any consideration for anything on the either side of UX, be it business or development, so they were learning in a vacuum. A couple of the schools had former grads teaching in order to boost placement %. How are you supposed to learn from someone who's never executed in the real world is beyond me. The most successful folks almost always had tangental previous work experience to draw from. And in the rare instances someone had learned some UI skills? Yikes. All that in a market that has been oversaturated with junior UX/UI candidates the last couple year, it's no wonder places are starting to ditch the UX programs. Plus now, you always have college students with UX degrees to compete with.
I think a lot of people believed it would be easier to break into UX because there was no code/is less technical which led to this burst bubble. Not to say that's not true, but designing software for humans is more complicated than a persona and some low-fi wireframes!
[+] [-] samsolomon|4 years ago|reply
—1/4 are doing what they did before or something similar.
—1/4 became engineers. Some have moved more into management roles.
—2/4 have ended up as PMs, founded a startup or in product design, like myself.
Those were successful gave it 100% of their time and focus. Those who stuck with their day job and tried to do it in the evenings struggled. Also, nobody got a job straight out of bootcamp. Many did after 3 to 6 months of additional work post graduation.
Also, It's interesting to see how things have changed. I paid like $6,000 and we met for class 3 days a week and had hours of pairing work and mentoring outside of class each week for 12 weeks. Now it seems like many of these schools cost at least $20,000 and are much more hands off.
It is amazing that was almost 10 years ago. Time flies.
[+] [-] sunny--tech|4 years ago|reply
"They said we were experimenting on the backs of children," Danner said.
"But when SpaceX launched their first five rockets and they blew up, was that OK?" he continued. "We're in a more high-stakes world of human development. Still, you can't say that you don't like the way things are but don't want people to try new things."
This is one of the problems of mixing VCs in the education space. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work when the “things” are humans, not code and technology.
Also, last time I checked, SpaceX wasn’t promising 80% of its rockets would work back in its early days.
Good ol’ fashion false equivalency.
[+] [-] lostinquebec|4 years ago|reply
Is your criticism that these places are making false promises, or:
> “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work when the “things” are humans, not code and technology.
RCTs and placebos work exactly this way. People literally die to help us learn what does and does not work. We lost 8-9 months of COVID-19 deaths because of a system that needs to go slow, and yet had experimentation regimes that still put participants at risk.
I don't know of any verification method that doesn't require some degree of risk for the participants, but I'd love to hear one.
[+] [-] mym1990|4 years ago|reply
It wasn't really the trajectory I saw back in 2015, but it felt that the bootcamps focused so much on teaching popular JavaScript tools and not really how to problem solve or even the language basics or even what the technology space can offer. I think it is a very tough thing to get right in 3 months(my class length) or even less...
[+] [-] ctvo|4 years ago|reply
I wonder if the push to scale out these programs meant lowering standards, since folks with the ability / discipline to finish are few.
If so, the unintended consequences are interesting:
Letting in more folks -> more folks with issues finishing -> more customer support -> more issues -> more doubts about the worthiness of the credentials from employers -> more folks having trouble finding placement -> lowering standards to let in more folks.
[+] [-] zbtaylor1|4 years ago|reply
I was not the target Lambda student in that I already had web dev knowledge but wanted to delve deeper and felt like I was spinning my wheels on my own. The accountability created by the program is what I was after.
The curriculum was adequate and, with one exception, the instructors were engaging and knowledgeable. While we did have some limited interaction with the instructors themselves, digging in to individual problems was the job of the team lead (a student further ahead in the program who went through an application process) and this is where things got grim.
TLs changed frequently and their quality was all over the place. Some followed the meeting protocol, some let their group run the meetings, others missed meetings regularly. Multiple times my TLs were unable to help much because the curriculum had changed and we were learning something they hadn't been taught. At best, they made sure we all understood the lecture by being thorough during our 1 on 1 meetings. At worst, they were a hindrance.
The final for the web dev curriculum is what they call "labs" and the TL for your labs group has expanded responsibilities. In theory, having gone through labs already, they are supposed to be kind of like lead devs - offering architecture suggestions, helping with deployment snags, shepherding us through merge conflicts, etc.
My labs TL was, more than anything, an obstacle. Mostly they forwarded our questions to the section lead and they weren't a particularly efficient go-between, so after a few weeks of deflecting our follow-ups we started messaging with the SL directly and were receiving timely responses. Our TLs only contributions to our project were the initial heroku projects and an unfinished code climate integration.
In the end, having projects and due dates was helpful for me but in no way do I feel it was worth the cost of tuition.
Another Lambda alum here mentioned feeling like student wellbeing took a back seat to marketing and PR and nothing encapsulates this more perfectly than the photo at the top of their homepage of a student who dropped out after repeating one of the early sections once or twice. Who cares what became of them as long as it looks good on the website!
[+] [-] poundofshrimp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|4 years ago|reply
edit: on top of the problems with Lambda’s offerings, losing 7 out of 9 executives since 2020 is rough: https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1452658652448362497
[+] [-] digianarchist|4 years ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5hUT8VZNvm8
[+] [-] lordnacho|4 years ago|reply
We all know that kid who would learn stuff regardless of what environment he was put in, and his opposite. And then probably a fair few in the middle where the environment actually matters.
When you're looking at outcomes, how do you know which school is worth paying for? I'm facing this issue myself right now for my primary school kids.
The big issue statistically is selection. For an analogy, think of cars. Are Volvos safe, or do they just attract safer drivers? It's not impossible to tease out from stats in principle, but has anyone done it? With schools it's even worse. Is one school in a richer area? What about the cost, that will skew selection too? Does one school use an entrance exam? And the really big one, does a school kick out underperformers?
With respect to coding schools you have to wonder whether the "best" students are already creamed off by universities, such that Lambda School and their like are really just salvaging a few people who fell into unfortunate circumstances and are trying to help themselves out. Along with some unfortunates who are never going to be coders but buy the premise that you can be taught these things in a short period of time, you just have to pay.
In any case it seems like they are forced to produce numbers quite fast for business reasons, and this has caused them to present the stats in the most positive light possible. The virus situation is not an entirely crazy excuse, but it will be interesting to see what happens.
[+] [-] whoisjuan|4 years ago|reply
To get accepted and graduate from a reputable university you have to get good results in standardized tests and work your self through multiple courses for at least 3 years. That by itself doesn't mean anything but there's a level of rigor and self-drive required to succesfully traverse this experience.
I mentored in one of these bootcamp programs and you would be surprised how little people give a shit, even though they are paying. Most of them know that the job placement guarantee is a safeguard for their own laziness.
These programs accept people who think pursing a career in tech would be cool and easy until they realize is a tough learning experience and a tough job. Perhaps tougher than anything else they have done in their lives.
The problem with these companies is that they have to balance the quality of students with the quantity required to meet scale. This is probably the worst type of VC backed business because the investor expectations on scale are in direct conflict with the quality of potential students pre-bootcamp and the demanded quality by employers post-bootcamp.
[+] [-] shawndrost|4 years ago|reply
0) Bootcamps are extremely sensitive to complaints to their regulators. If you are eg. seeking a refund for monies paid and have a grievance, know that forms like this [https://www.bppe.ca.gov/forms_pubs/complaint.pdf] exist for your state, and know that bootcamps will be very motivated to reconcile the matter before you fill one out.
1) Many bystanders think the ISA business model is predatory. I've seen it compared to slavery. I've talked with hundreds of low-income, high-promise people, and ISAs are 1000% more attractive to that audience than more conventional debt-like instruments, even debt-like instruments with forgiveness protocols. When people talk about what's good for low-income students, and say it's not ISAs... I don't think these people have a cohesive theory of educational access??? I can't explain it.
2) There is a lot of skepticism about the practice of hiring recent grads as alums. I think it's a good idea for prospective bootcamp students to ask a) which specific individuals with work experience will teach me, b) what kind/how much access will I have, c) can I talk to them. I will also observe that recent grads do the bulk of of non-lecture/non-curriculum work in pretty much every educational context ever. I live next to UC Berkeley, which has more graduate TAs than all other instructional staff put together.
3) This looks bad for Lambda. I hope they course-correct and I hope prospective students look at all their options. PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS: You should write off Lambda because a) you have better options, or b) because you've talked to current students, not c) because of coverage like this. I can't speak to Lambda but I can say I've read coverage like this about places that might be the best option out there for some students (eg General Assembly). Anyone who likes coding and wants to make it their job should go to the best bootcamp they can get into. It's an incredible onramp into a world of prosperity, and "worst bootcamp" is a quality designation that is close to "median university CS program" in terms of return on investment IMO.
[+] [-] RNCTX|4 years ago|reply
Yeah, the state pays for education and people like you pay taxes to the state.
Anything else trends toward slavery.
[+] [-] pillowkusis|4 years ago|reply
> the school can still reach profitability by enrolling 2,000 students a month while only placing less than half of its graduates in qualifying jobs.
>Class sizes are like 150 students to one instructor — I've only heard that number going up
I don't see what the problem is here. For students, the only cost associated with Lambda is the opportunity cost. The incentives are still aligned here -- the school wants people to get placed. It can't "scam" students with higher teacher:student ratios or bad curriculums without hurting its bottom line. If it's failing at teaching students, that's incompetence, not a drive for profitability. If only 40% of students get placed -- that's still 40% more than would have been placed without Lambda, right?
>"Those students that are in the bottom 10%, why would they invest resources into helping those students succeed? Just let them fail out after six months"
...exactly? You are going to school for free. The school is not obligated to waste resources on students falling behind, because those students aren't paying anything.
If you think 6 months of wasted time is a bad deal, just wait until I tell you about this other educational program that lasts 4 years, costs over $100,000, and has a much lower placement rate: Your local university's liberal arts degrees.
Still, it's unfortunate to hear that Lambda is playing the same placement-rate games as bootcamps. I'm surprised they have to do this at all; if I was running admissions, I would be extremely selective, only accepting extremely bright students that I feel the university system had "missed," to get placement rates as high as possible. Maybe they try to do this, and this is just a sad sign of the state of non-college education opportunities?
[+] [-] sandofsky|4 years ago|reply
Another scenario: you’re making slightly below $50k, you get a promotion to $50k in the middle of the program. The promotion had nothing to do with what you learned in the program, but it’s up to you to argue otherwise.
Students have brought up both of these things in the official subreddit, but I can’t link to them since they set it to private after last year’s major backlash.
I'll also add that while most students opt for the ISA, some students pay the up-front price. That's because the ISA historically attached a premium e.g. $20k pay up front or go with an ISA with a $30k cap. If you were sold on their claimed 86% placement rate, who needs that insurance?
[+] [-] akanet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shkkmo|4 years ago|reply
You can't draw that conclusion without a control group. It is entirely possible that a control group that spent that boot camp time doing independent study and job hunting would have higher placement rates and that Lamda school would thus have a negative effect.
I would guess that Lamda school does have a positive effect but that effect is smaller than 40%.