Lambda School is SV big bet on reinventing education but students say is a cult

&gt;&gt; <i>&quot;then locks them into an intensive program that ultimately leaves them on the hook to pay back thousands of dollars in their future wages.&quot;</i><p>So like any other student loan? Lambda school is offering an alternative to help those who don&#x27;t have funds or can&#x27;t qualify otherwise. Nobody is forced into it but of course it&#x27;s not free.<p>&gt;&gt; <i>&quot;when a white male student wore a Mexican sombrero to a presentation in front of the class.&quot;</i><p>What? That&#x27;s not racist nor even a problem in the slightest. People who bring up these kind of perceived faults will usually find offense in anything they can and are better removed from the program for the sake of everyone else who&#x27;s actually there to learn.<p>Complaints like these make it clear this is a targeted hit piece with anecdotes rather than a hard-hitting investigation.

&gt; According to the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting, 60.9% of Lambda School students were employed 90 days after graduation, going up to 85.9% within 180 days. Graduates earn a median annual base salary of $60,000, according to that same study — although a Lambda School spokesperson puts that figure at $70,000, and notes that many graduates are in rural areas where average pay is lower.<p>This is one of the only paragraphs of the article with data rather than anecdotes. The article only focuses on students with negative experiences, but if this data is correct, it looks like Lambda School is objectively successful, and I bet only a small fraction of its students regret attending.

I think it would be tough to comment on any of this without having gone through the program myself, though I do wish there was an “undercover” senior software engineer who would sign up for the part time program and do maybe a month or more of the curriculum and write about it.<p>Knowing nothing else about the program the biggest red flag For me is that you owe 40% of the ISA after only 5 weeks of the 9 month program (e.g. less than 14% complete). That seems really excessive, and would seem like it would drive employees to “accept” students even if they knew there was minimal chance they’d be able to complete the entire program.

I know one current student of Lambda. I kind of disagree with much of what is said in the article. The student and family are very grateful for the opportunity. My only concern is that, in their website they could be more specific as to the fact that you need to already have some of the skills. There’s just not enough time for beginners. To their credit, they give plenty of opportunities and alternatives for the ones that get behind. It just going to take more time than anticipated.

I&#x27;m confused by this article&#x27;s complaint that the instruction was so poor that it requires students to &quot;self-teach&quot;, and use materials outside of the coursework to learn.<p>In my experience, and sufficiently technical topic will require a ton of self-teaching. Should LS be expected to teach computer science in a way that prevents their students from ever having to use Stack Overflow? If that is the case, they are not preparing their students for solving problems in the real world, where there are no clear answers. (except the ones you find on Stack Overflow.)

I am married to a current lambda program student. I also regularly interview and hire developers which I believe gives me a good sense of what the market wants.<p>Lambda is a good program with meaningful room for improvement. I’m excited for where they’ll be in a few more iterations and believe that they are worth it today.

&gt; However, current and former students say that they&#x27;ve been disappointed that Lambda School&#x27;s teaching staff isn&#x27;t diverse, in turn: most of the school&#x27;s instructors are male or are not from underrepresented groups.<p>Is this like all the eggs being angry there&#x27;s no chickens yet? Where do you think qualified teachers are going to come from, if not the existing pool of professionals?

This reminds me a lot of Teach For America, a program I was a part of. It has very similar complaints, and very similar defenses. The truth is, there&#x27;s a lot of truth to go around. Teach For America is not perfect. It&#x27;s not for everyone. There&#x27;s a lot of hype on the outside and Kool-Aid to go around on the inside. It inarguably has done harm to some people.<p>But for a lot of people, it works as designed. And I know a lot of people who did become great teachers.<p>My own story is somewhere in the middle [1]. It changed my life immeasurably, even if I never became a great teacher.<p>My guess is that the same broad spectrum of real stories and real outcomes is true of Lambda School.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acjay.com&#x2F;a-former-teachers-story&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acjay.com&#x2F;a-former-teachers-story&#x2F;</a>, if you care to read about it

&quot;If you&#x27;re keeping up, you either already had a foundation or you&#x27;re self-teaching. The actual school is not effective at teaching. People are going outside to get what they need.&quot;<p>That sounds like a lot of technical education.<p>More than maybe any other discipline, classes have such a wide curve of expertise, they become almost impossible to teach to everyone at once.<p>On the need for outside study, I guess I&#x27;ve heard similar things about, of all things, tough music schools. You just end up in a race to see who can practice every waking hour.<p>Maybe there&#x27;s an analogy there. We talk about computer science in terms of concepts and problem solving, but undersell how much muscle memory is involved. There is a ton of training your brain to reflexively handle certain common problems.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;fSVvSB" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;fSVvSB</a>

I read feedback about any bootcamp or any CS program with the background understanding that there must necessarily be loads of dissatisfied customers, people who can’t handle CS or software development. It is illuminating to poke through the article to the source material.

The data is consistent with most other bootcamps, though. There is a standard for reporting student outcomes here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cirr.org&#x2F;data" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cirr.org&#x2F;data</a><p>Hack Reactor, now Galvanize, was one of the founding organizations of the CIRR, circa 2014: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hackreactor.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;tag&#x2F;student+outcomes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hackreactor.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;tag&#x2F;student+outcomes</a>

I can&#x27;t fathom why someone would go to a school that takes 17% of your paycheck for 2 years. I went to Western Governors University to get my undergrad, it costed 6k for 2 terms and I breezed through and got a paper that will help me for life, and I&#x27;m planning on heading to Georgia Tech for a Masters. There are better options out there, there is no need to go to a shady school such as this, even if they promise 0 tuition up-front. Additionally, as tech companies become more lax on their degree requirements, there is less and less value you gain from having a degree in Silicon Valley versus spending a few months grinding leetcode, which definitely pays off.<p>On a side note: it took literally 1 minute to hide the modal window and find the div containing the actual content and expand it, and turn the overflow back on. Did they design it this way on purpose? Otherwise, I think they have to find some new UI developers..

There does appear to be a contingent of Lambda students that have had a poor experience. IIRC they were mostly related to a certain set of instructors.<p>I guess this is the issue of a popular startup - you get everyone talking about you, good and bad. Every startup has the problems listed in this article. It&#x27;s pretty much the reality of startup life. But Lambda gets the microscope treatment.<p>In the end, though, it&#x27;ll make them better for it. It&#x27;s still interesting to note that this type of criticism will _never_ exist of any education system. Public dialogue here is good!

Honestly I don&#x27;t understand the complaints.. For almost any technical career you will need to do some form of self study.. Also this program is aiming to compete with 4 year comp sci students. So yes you&#x27;re going to need to grind to make up in &lt;1 year what took someone 4.<p>However I do think they could do better with diversity.

Thinkful has been doing what Lambda is for the past decade. What makes Lambda different from the rest of bootcamps, absolutely noting.<p>Not to mention Austen Allred always came off like a snake oil salesmen.

Why does hacker news allow paywalled content?

Yet another PR story from Lambda School spun as news on HN.<p>Fake news.