
Lambda School’s Misleading Promises - uptown
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-placement-rate-is-lower-than-claimed.html
======
songzme
I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on
making money than actually helping people who need help.

Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our
local library: [https://www.meetup.com/San-
Jose-C0D3](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.

~~~
chrisseaton
> 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.

~~~
glenngillen
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).

~~~
shalmanese
I've had a look at the books at a few different types of training style
companies and the economics are always grim. It's one of those businesses
where to the outsider, it's impossible to believe they're not spinning off
unbelievable amounts of cash but they are always pretty marginal.

As additional evidence for this, the number of 1B+ exits in this space can be
counted on one hand. General Assembly, for example, was acquired for ~$400M
and it was one of the largest players. There was a player from Utah whose name
eludes me now that had a, I think, ~$2B exit but that might be the only one.

~~~
dathanb82
> There was a player from Utah whose name eludes me now that had a, I think,
> ~$2B exit but that might be the only one.

Are you thinking of Instructure? They're based in Salt Lake City, and
Marketwatch gives their current market cap as $1.86B

~~~
shalmanese
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was the one, thanks!

------
raiyu
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.

~~~
hintymad
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.

~~~
raiyu
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.

~~~
superduperuser
"" Computer Science" is the equivalent of math 100 years ago..."

Would mind expanding on that?

~~~
raiyu
You can't live in the modern world today without understanding math.

You also can't live in the modern world without language and the ability to
communicate.

To me math is a language. Different than our verbal languages, but it is still
a language none the less and essential.

Programming to me is also a language. And it is as essential today as math was
originally. There was a long period of history where lower economic classes
were prevented from learning and educating themselves and the fact that we
have education that is subsidized by the government to various levels in all
major countries is something that we take for granted, but it wasn't a right
that our ancestors had.

The way schools force all kids to learn math, I feel is how schools today
should force all kids to learn programming and computer science.

------
kostyal
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.

~~~
_ah
> 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.

------
caust1c
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.

~~~
sriram_sun
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.

~~~
seem_2211
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.

------
hundt
> 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.

~~~
raiyu
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.

~~~
hundt
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.

~~~
raiyu
Secured by the is the part I focused on. When a loan is secured by something,
the underlying asset is what the loan originating company retains after you
fail to pay for the loan.

So if I take out a mortgage, and fail to pay for it, the bank gets the house,
I am not still obligated to pay the remaining loan amount. Sure there are a
few other items that occur in that process, but ultimately the loan is
forgiven, of course with some credit penalties and future ability to take out
loans. But I am not responsible to continue repaying the loan.

If the loan is secured by the ISA the same thing applies here. Sure there
could be other stipulations and without reviewing the contracts there is no
way to know, but stands to reason that the more likely situation is that they
get the ISA and then can use aggressive tactics to go after the students for
collections such as garnishing wages and also potentially charging them an
interest for failure to repay. Though the original ISA believe has no
interest, that's not to say that late penalties or other fees can't be added
in later potentially.

~~~
hundt
Ah, I think you have a misunderstanding about what collateral is. Collateral
is not generally a limitation on the lender's ability to collect the debt. In
some specific cases (like certain home loans in certain states) the law adds
this limitation but generally collateral is just something the lender can take
in the event of default.

To bring up the car loan example you mentioned earlier, if you decide after a
year that you don't want your car anymore you can't just drive it to your bank
and drop it off instead of paying off the rest of the loan. If you stop paying
it they can repossess it but you will still owe whatever is left on your loan
balance after they auction it.

------
akanet
Hi, I'm the author of the piece, perhaps better known here as founder of
CoderPad. Feel free to ask me anything but things are a bit crazy right now!

~~~
intherdfield
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."

~~~
akanet
Yeah, got cut for brevity, but students definitely experience serious anxiety
about even the five year horizon.

~~~
intherdfield
That seems really disingenuous. Can't you update the article with this
important detail?

~~~
akanet
It's not disingenuous; I think an earlier draft had it. This came down from
4000 words. I'll try to ask my editor to add this as a correction but things
are pretty hectic. It's a fairly minor omission in my opinion, but I
understand disagreeing.

~~~
tomhoward
It's hardly a "fairly minor omission" in a country where the conventional
tertiary education saddles the average student with a debt that is often far
bigger than $30k, doesn't expire, and cannot be escaped even through
bankruptcy, meaning that even retirement benefits can be garnished above a
meagre $750/month.

------
soneca
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](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.

It changed my life.

------
pembrook
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.

~~~
raiyu
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.

~~~
pembrook
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.

I’m sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.

~~~
raiyu
The other wasn't a weak cohort. It was the most recent data.

Also if you were an institution interested in disclosing information fairly
you would simply list all cohorts and let the consumer decide.

But they aren't doing that and instead claim a single number.

By the way, having had recent experiences with a number of bootcamps through
friends I would say that the 50% number anecdotally is accurate. That's also
not taking in to account the drop out rate. If you look at people starting the
bootcamp to placement it would be even lower.

If you have 465,000 customers and you want to round that up to 500k - ok, not
exactly true, but whether you have 465k or 500k isn't going to change my
decision about using your product.

Telling me you place 80% of your students and actually placing 50% is a big
deal. 80% means I have a 4 out of 5 chance of being successful. 50% means I
have a 1 out of 2 chance of being successful. Those odds are very different
and certainly part of the marketing push to get people to sign up.

------
lquist
Doesn't surprise me. Culture starts at the top. Austen has repeatedly proven
to be a liar (this article has a few examples and you can find others in
Verge's reporting) and that culture has been normalized at Lambda.

------
brenden2
From seeing this guy's (Allred's) tweets pop up on twitter a few time, I
always got the feeling that he was a scammer or con artist. This article
provides a lot of evidence that seems to confirm my hunch.

I've seen people have success in startups using similar tactics throughout my
career, and one realization I've had about this is that sometimes perception
matters more than the actual numbers. It's especially true when it comes to
investing and VC fueled businesses where success tends to follow the funding
(i.e., if you get enough money you can buy your way to success).

Eventually, however, everything comes out in the wash. At some point lying
about the numbers won't work anymore, and maybe for Allred this is an example
of that. As a founder, if you don't eventually deliver on what you've
promised, it will all unwind and you'll be left with nothing.

~~~
seem_2211
Taking a more benign view, I don't know if Austen is a scammer, but he seems
like a smart guy, who's a bit over his head, with a smart team, who are in
over their heads. The kind of students they've targeted need more help, not
less, which makes this a bit of a messy situation.

------
danso
The author also posted a 50-minute audio clip of his interview with Austen
Allred:
[https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230162120701964289](https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230162120701964289)

~~~
Fede_V
This is exceptionally good. Fantastic journalism.

------
hundt
Interestingly, Lambda School has just announced a new "ISA Financing
Blueprint" [0] and "Better Data Transparency" [1] which address some of the
concerns from the article.

[0] [https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-
isa-...](https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-isa-
financing-blueprint-and-100m-in-new-financing)

[1] [https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/building-better-data-
tr...](https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/building-better-data-transparency-
at-lambda-school)

------
wbharding
Mildly interesting how this story has gotten 130 points in two hours but is
still placed beneath numerous other HN front page stories with less points in
more time. Not least since the incentives of YC would be to want this story
dead. In the 5 mins it took me to login on mobile it dropped from 15 to 25.

~~~
dang
The submission hit some software penalties, like HN's flamewar detector.
Moderators didn't touch it or even see it until a few minutes ago (I'm getting
a late start this "morning"), when I saw it and turned off that penalty. This
placed the article back on the HN front page.

We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC-funded startups are in a story.
That's literally the first principle of HN moderation, in the sense that it's
the first thing PG told me when he was training me to do this in 2012. I
didn't even have time to grab a chair before he blurted it out.

It's natural for people to question this, so such questions will always come
up. We're scrupulous about following this rule for two reasons. The first is
that we need to be able to answer the questions in good conscience; the second
is that moderating any other way would be dumb. The community's trust is the
most valuable asset HN has. In fact, if you think about it, it's the only
asset HN has.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20not%20more%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment)

------
DantesKite
It’s interesting how learning to code is so challenging. Especially because
it’s something humans make. Over the past few years, coders have been
abstracting the complexity away, but man there’s a lot of it.

On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how
humans learn best. That’s always struck me as odd.

Like nobody has quite cracked the nut for how to do it. Not with programming,
not with language, not with cooking. It’s always so much effort. As if the
lessons people have learned are forgotten as soon as a few years pass.

We know a little bit. Spaced repetition helps. Not doing anything after
studying intensely helps (as in literally just doing nothing after studying
improves retention).

Going for long walks helps. So does transforming concepts into something you
can see (I suspect because we have a lot of “machinery” for visual
computations).

Engaging more of your muscles during an activity (writing as opposed to
typing) helps too.

Engaging extra senses (like smell) seems to help.

But that’s about it. There’s no common modality, no library of how humans
learn, retain, and transfer knowledge.

It’s been like what? 200,000 years since we’ve been on this planet.

We’ve barely touched the surface of what we’re capable of doing because we
keep forgetting.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how
> humans learn best. That’s always struck me as odd._

It's very well studied. I'd start by reading a cognitive science textbook and
go from there. I have _Cognition_ by Reisberg[0], it was well-written and
well-structured.

Alternatively, an entertaining and informative popular account is _Make It
Stick_ by Brown, Roediger and McDaniel[1].

I do agree that the research findings are greatly underapplied, though.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Exploring-Science-Mind-
Seve...](https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Exploring-Science-Mind-
Seventh/dp/0393624137/)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-
Learnin...](https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-
Learning/dp/0674729013)

~~~
DantesKite
I enjoyed the second book recommendation. Looks promising.

Thank you.

------
codegeek
I could be wrong but isn't Lamdba School a perfect example of destroying a
noble idea due to the venture capitalish returns expected from the company ?
If there wasn't so much pressure to grow that fast, perhaps they would have
done a better job focussing on the quality and outcomes instead of growth at
any cost ?

~~~
caust1c
Reading history about the founder, I think he had his eyes set on massive
growth from the outset over the actual experience.

He got starry-eyed working in growth at LendUp and wanted to build his own
rocket ship. I don't think he ever put the students above running a trendy
fast-growing startup.

------
kregasaurusrex
Since the original HN post[0] is about 2.5 years old now, one would expect
there to be more data released by LS regarding job placement/salaries before a
potential student would sign a $30,000 ISA. I've been a fan of the idea of up-
skilling at a bootcamp for those who either don't want to spend 4 years
getting a CS degree or being unable to finance its associated costs which can
be in excess of $75,000. In an increasingly tight labor market, there's fewer
jobs available in the 'middle' where companies seem to be either wanting an
experienced SME in a specific domain or less-experienced programmers to do
testing rather than development.

I think the bundling and selling of student CDOs works for a company in its
early stages, since the costs for recovering unpaid tuition can range from
high to being declared a total loss. Some of the anecdotes make it seem like
the company doesn't receive enough feedback from employers in order to
strengthen parts of their curriculum that make interviewees fail at some
stages during the interview process. Creating a complete curriculum takes more
than bundling together Leetcode and Hackerrank problems, where the actual
teaching reflects that bootcamps and a CS education aren't in direct parity
with one another. [1]

Regarding the finances, student loan debt through an established institution
can't be removed through filing for bankruptcy. This allows access to federal
loans and underwriters that give better rates and agreements for all the
business parties invloved. I've been denied refinancing my loans from multiple
companies for a combination of those effects including not graduating and
having too low of an income. The business seems like a good idea but too
fixated on higher short-term valuations in order to attract VC capital; rather
than fixing its underlying structural problems.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011033)

[1] [https://hackernoon.com/bootcamps-vs-
college-11dd76a4d127](https://hackernoon.com/bootcamps-vs-
college-11dd76a4d127)

------
MivLives
Lambda grad with a job, who also worked as a PM/TL.

Overall I think they're trying.

The problem with the PM/TL program is the people who are normally the best at
it tend to be the best at finding jobs. The TLs that stick around forever tend
to be ones that aren't the best or the worst who are normally replaced when
someone complains. Instead it's the okay people who are just cruising.

One thing that seems to be overlooked about Lambda is the fact that they are
remote. An applicant from the middle of nowhere who lives hours from the
nearest city has as much chance of getting in as anyone. It can be harder to
find a job there and they won't relocate. Remote work is much harder to get in
as a junior dev.

Overall though, I wouldn't be in the position I'm currently in without them
though. Maybe I just made it in before the line, maybe they're just undergoing
growing pains as expand to a profitable size.

------
mikekij
I don't have an informed opinion on Lambda School, but it seems as though most
of the concerns raised in this article are true of universities as well, and
in some cases, worse in universities:

Lambda makes money through some financial engineering : Ivy league schools are
essentially hedge funds with their multibillion-dollar endowments

Lambda's curriculum is lacking : Most CS students are taught theory, but learn
very few of the skills they'll actually need on the job ( e.g. application
deployment, source code management, etc.)

Lambda inflates its job placement stats : This is never defensible, but also
highly prevalent in both non-profit and for-profit higher education
institutions.

I commend Austen for at least attempting to better align students' and
educators' financial incentives.

~~~
sjc33
Lambda School didn't invent the ISA.

------
xwowsersx
I co-started LS before it was in YC. Here's the original course I taught
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnUp9BNCQZM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnUp9BNCQZM)
Weird seeing stories about it now.

~~~
mattcdrake
Are the other videos in this series publicly available? You are great at
explaining things.

~~~
xwowsersx
Thanks! I'm not sure where the other videos are (I don't see them on my
Youtube). I'll see if I can dig them up.

------
fronofro
There are inherent limitations to edu that go unacknowledged.

\- There are a relatively fixed number of high skill jobs.

\- More people with the same skills/portfolio reduces the value of that
skill/portfolio.

\- While people can learn new skills, people have different learning rates and
integrating that knowledge deeply often takes much longer than
teachers/bootcamps want to believe.

\- Most edu info exists for free online, what school/bootcamps uniquely
provide is feedback. Quality feedback is HARD to scale.

\- How much does pre-application screening find people who don't really need
that much help vs trying to help every applicant and getting unmotivated
people in your bootcamp. I have seen very few examples of a bootcamp
fundamentally changing someones motivation/work ethic.

ISAs will be the big winner in the ed tech space and providers of education
will likely come and go unless someone cracks all the issues above. Perhaps
the current distribution of students to universities (having plurality) is
actually more suited to serving this function than a typical tech world power
law distribution where one or two companies would provide 80% of the edu.

------
_hardwaregeek
The more I think about bootcamps, the more they appear to be a rather
insulting business proposition. Did they genuinely believe that one can take
someone off the street, albeit someone relatively intelligent and motivated,
and teach them enough to be a professional programmer in 9 months? Imagine
that we replaced programmer with mechanical engineer. Or with marketing
executive. Would that sound believable?

What is it about programming that makes people believe that they can learn it
in a hilariously short amount of time? Sure, we programmers may be harboring
some imposter syndrome and secretly believe that programming is super easy.
Sure, programming doesn't require lots of math. But it's still hard! It's
still a craft that requires problem solving ability, lots of semi-arcane
knowledge and a detail oriented mind.

~~~
sean2
I don't think we could pump out the well rounded developers like 4 years of
undergrad can, but I don't see how we couldn't pump out SQL technicians,
front-end developers, or otherwise specialized workers that could alleviate
the supposed shortage of developers.

I also helped a person go from zero knowledge of programming to pumping out
android games in a month of self study. So I know that smart, motivated people
can get pretty far pretty fast. In regards to your point, I don't think this
person knows UML or ever learned big O notation, but this person was able to
gain the skills required to do what they wanted, plus some pro-programmer
friends and stackoverflow to fill in the "semi-arcane knowledge" when
required.

~~~
_hardwaregeek
I think we can pump out good _apprentices_. After 9 months of study, the
person could definitely have enough skills to write semi-valid code and work
on some small projects with supervision from a developer. However I would not
call this person after 9 months a developer. A developer should be able to
look at a codebase, learn it, learn the relevant technologies and start
contributing. I doubt a bootcamp graduate will be able to do that. Or worse,
they'll do that and wreak havoc on the codebase.

> front-end developers

I suspect this is part of the issue. Plenty of people believe that front-end
is easier or lesser than back-end, and therefore can be learned quickly. Lots
and lots of terrible front-end code has taught me that this is not true. Good
front-end developers are really hard to find and subpar ones can lead to
horrible user interfaces and direct impact to the bottom line. Even if we're
talking the most minimal of front-end stacks, i.e. HTML, CSS and JS, which,
I'm not even sure people hire for anyways, there's a lot of subtle issues with
accessibility, responsive UI, writing halfway decent JS, etc. If we add on the
various libraries (a sign of a good developer is also knowing when to use
these libs and when to avoid them), then the amount of knowledge required is
far far more than 9 months can provide.

------
taytus
Austen has totally disappeared from twitter. He used to tweet all the time
about their _AMAZING_ success rate.

~~~
prawn
He was also quick in the past to post about LS on HN but no comment in this
thread at all. Might be responding in blog form and outlining a few changes
they're making to address the concerns?

------
rajacombinator
There are plenty of red flags in the article but the part about Lambda selling
the ISAs removing their incentive is BS - their long term incentives are
clearly still aligned because they won’t be able to continue selling ISAs if
they don’t deliver. Selling the ISAs presumably just helps with cash flow.
That said it makes one wonder why a company that’s raised 9 figures needs to
worry about cash flow.

------
abbadadda
This anecdote is particularly damning for Lambda School, like a hedge fund
choosing not to update their investment return numbers year after year because
they were so great in year 1:

> So where does that 86 percent figure come from? Lambda has reported
> graduate-outcome statistics at the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting
> (CIRR), a voluntary trade organization of coding boot camps whose purpose is
> to ensure that participating schools publish truthful information about
> student outcomes. Allred has often used this report to defend his company
> online. But where other boot camps have multiple reports spanning many
> student cohorts, Lambda has only reported statistics for its first 71
> graduates — 86 percent of who, the school claims, found jobs. Sheree
> Speakman, the CEO of CIRR, told me that Lambda has not undergone the
> standard independent auditing for the sole report it has submitted, and that
> her communications to Lambda School regarding further reporting and auditing
> have gone unanswered.

------
hprotagonist
relatedly, it's so nice to see zed shaw tilting at a windmill that deserves it
for once:
[https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069?lang=e...](https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069?lang=en)

~~~
azangru
"If you are contemplating joining a coding bootcamp in 2020...", his tweet
starts.

I wonder whether the quality of education at coding bootcamps has gone
downhill. From what I know of the Web Development Immersive program at General
Assembly in 2014, or the software engineer program at Hack Reactor in 2015,
they both were very decent.

------
manfredo
The lambda school struck me as odd due to its very long 18 month duration.
Most successful bootcamps I've seen have been focused on 2-4 month programs.
They also try to get students that have already taught themselves some coding
(at least be able to code up a hang-man game in a terminal), and focus on
teaching effective abstraction and how to use git. Basically, they don't seek
to take people who don't know how to code and turn out engineers more than a
year later. They take people who know how to code, and refine their skills to
the point that they are employable.

~~~
MivLives
18 months is the part time. 9 is the full time. It used to be six, but they
raised it because people would expect a job on graduation, nine is more
realistic for that.

------
MarkMc
All the haters seem to be piling onto Lambda and its CEO, but looking at
actual reviews by students it is clear that most students are very happy with
Lambda: [https://www.switchup.org/bootcamps/lambda-
school](https://www.switchup.org/bootcamps/lambda-school)

And the problems mentioned in the article are straightforward to fix:

(a) Be honest and transparent about the job placement rate for each batch

(b) Don't sell the ISA or borrow against it

(c) Improve the quality of teaching and accept a lower growth rate

~~~
Step888
Take a look at the other coding bootcamps on that site. They all seem to have
very positive reviews.

The problem is that switchup uses the affiliate links of the bootcamps, so it
has a financial incentive to sell the bootcamps it features to its viewers.
That's how it makes its money.

Now Amazon does the same thing, you'll say. And you'd be right, but with
Amazon, it has a reputation to maintain. If Amazon reviews are unreliable,
people will stop shopping at Amazon.

With Switchup, it's different. Most people will only buy one coding bootcamp
in their lifetime. So withchup doesn't have the same incentive to make its
reviews super accurate. It mostly has the incentive to sell as many coding
bootcamps as it can.

------
nkrisc
About these ISAs: do they require any kind of good faith effort to find a tech
job after completing the boot camp? If someone was just interested in tech,
but worked in an unrelated field with no intention to switch, how would Lambda
protect themselves? Obviously they could probably sue if there was bad faith
on the student's part, but do these agreements address this scenario? Do they
focus on screening students to avoid this?

~~~
hundt
My understanding is that Lambda school is very focused on teaching you what
you need to get a job, so if you were just "interested in tech" you would
probably be better served by Udacity, other free or nearly-free online
courses, or just reading books.

~~~
nkrisc
Right, there are certainly better options. I'm not necessarily interested from
a practical standpoint, more of a theoretical one, being relatively unfamiliar
with how these agreements work beyond a one-sentence description.

~~~
hundt
You can read what Lambda School describes as the "template" for their ISA
contracts:

[https://leif.org/api/products/5b5b8bd0e59b743f9a086ed9/pdf](https://leif.org/api/products/5b5b8bd0e59b743f9a086ed9/pdf)

It says that you agree that you "are entering into this Agreement in good
faith and with the intention to pay us" and will "make reasonable and good
faith efforts to seek employment" as long as you are not paying them.

I don't see any specific provisions describing how that would be enforced and
I bet in practice it is not a major issue for the reason I mentioned above:
there isn't much reason to go through with Lambda School if you don't actually
want a job in tech, so it probably doesn't happen much.

------
AVTizzle
On the authors Twitter, he comes across as having an axe to grind:

"lmao I woke my boy up" [1]

Sounds like he's keeping score of something, which isn't a quality I
necessarily want from my "journalists".

[1]
[https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230251533951889409](https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230251533951889409)

------
Dansvidania
Is this the same, or does it stem from, Lambda School that started with a
kickstarter in 2016?

------
nimbius
>Lambda School is free, but with an asterisk: To attend, you sign a contract
that says that if you get a tech job paying $50K or more, you have to pay 17
percent of your pre-tax income to Lambda School for two years, or until you
pay back $30K, whichever comes first.

30k? Seriously? my trade tech certification was only $2900 for _two years_. Is
Lambda School a 4 year program or a college of some sort? Is room and board of
some kind included? I mean I get that STEM pays a lot...but the cost here
seems a little steep.

There are only 4 STEM related courses on the site. my trade-tech school had
nearly 20 by the time I graduated.

~~~
conanbatt
Was it an 8 hour a day 5 days a week program for two years?

------
ChicagoDave
The problem with Lambda School is the model and vision that suggests a general
college education isn't worthwhile. That college should focus on a marketable
skill directly leading to some job. That's optimal, but that leaves out the
social aspects, the critical thinking aspects, and the safe space to have an
open mind and absorb and share ideas.

I would argue those other aspects of higher education are far more critical
than the bootcamp model and vision.

And eventually, it boils down to a waste of time for some subset of students,
which is not helpful to our higher education interests.

------
sjc33
I found his constant Twitter boasting distasteful and cringeworthy. It always
came off like an infomercial.

Coding bootcamps are not all bad, though, it's just that I think if you are
going to do one then 1) you really need a solid financial cushion (either
parental or own savings) and 2) you should really do a top rated in person
one. I can't imagine doing this through a Zoom for 9 months in my apartment
alone. The value of having social support you get from instructors and being
around other students in the same boat as you can't be understated.

------
chrisyeh
Lambda's marketing is deceptive and should rightly be stopped. But what is so
bad about a bootcamp with no up front cost that gets 50% of its graduates a
job? [https://chrisyeh.com/2020/02/the-cost-of-
cynicism.html](https://chrisyeh.com/2020/02/the-cost-of-cynicism.html)

------
737min
Found this blog from last year comparing Lambda to AppAcademy, confirms many
of the details and adds some.. no involvement with them.
[https://blog.appacademy.io/app-academy-versus-lambda-
school-...](https://blog.appacademy.io/app-academy-versus-lambda-school-which-
one-is-better/)

------
throaway1990
Fascinating story. I think there is value in the service provided by Lambda
School but the questionable revenue tactics like selling ISAs or using ISAs to
secure loans means students can't really trust them with placements.

------
737min
Good to see this finally get called out. Basically Lambda is using CDO’s &
subprime mortgages as a revenue source.. Even if it hekps some of the students
some of the time, we know how this show ends.

------
cm2012
I mean, it's still a vastly, vastly better deal than college or other boot
camps. It has no up front monetary investment, and you only pay for it if i
works for you.

~~~
dehrmann
> it's still a vastly, vastly better deal than college or other boot camps

I'd like to see ten-year outcomes before claiming this. That said, it's also
hard to control for different student backgrounds.

~~~
chasing
I would be more interested in the ten-year outcomes of something like the
Lambda School versus self-teaching or using cheap online resources and
entering the job market. Either way you're going to have to start with a very
junior and entry-level position in order to crack the job market. But at least
you're not on the hook for a huge chunk of your paycheck.

------
Grustaf
As a working developer you will spend a sizeable portion of your time learning
new things, so if you are not good at teaching yourself programming, maybe
it's not a suitable career choice? Especially with amazing MOOCs like
Stanford's Swift course?

At least in the context of something like Lambda school, that does not teach
computer science, as I understand it.

------
heedlessly3
There's no point to doing coding bootcamps. I know plenty of individuals who
were non-CS majors, not even STEM, switch to software developers after self-
study and building up a portfolio.

if you decide you want an accredited university degree, then you can get FAFSA
to fund community college, then transfer an online university such as Florida

~~~
conanbatt
Strongly disagree with this. I know 50 people that think they can learn to do
Data or something with an Udemy class and end up doing nothing.

I think the negative picture painted by the author masks that the company is
placing 50% of graduates which mostly _paid nothing_ for the education they
received. Lambda is not high quality education, but its super cheap and higher
quality than just reading a Knuth Book, or Skenna's algo book which has no
completion rate.

~~~
heedlessly3
Sounds like you know unsuccessful people. I know plenty of developers who
became front-end or dev ops from their own studies. It's not too hard to learn
SQL or data visualization. The majority of questions can be answered via
stackoverflow or slack communities. You don't need to know everything to land
a entry-level job, you just need to prove you know how to problem solve.

Either way, you are not becoming a true machine learning researcher via self-
study nor a bootcamp. You will need at least a master's in CS/Math/Stats to
land those roles. A bootcamp is neither the lowest cost to a softwaredev
career nor is it the a career effective maximizing choice.

------
BlueTemplar
This seems more like job training than education - something that should be
directly done by the companies that end up recruiting these people instead.

------
surferbayarea
A skill of knowing how to use React in a particular way to create simple views
is something that will be redundant in a few years. These people will
unfortunately be out of jobs. The mundane work of converting sketch files to
react views will be automated soon

------
jariel
These courses should be free.

If government agencies really had their acts together, then these courses, as
well as many others would be free, as part of 'extended learning' programs.

For all the crazy amount of grant money being thrown around by so many
governments, and given the need for certain disciplines, it's odd that this
doesn't happen.

------
neilk
I had a sinking feeling when the inventor of the CDO appeared in this article.

The housing bubble occurred, in part, because there was optimism that
acquiring a certain tangible asset - a house - was a sure path to prosperity
for the buyer. And the buyers of mortgage-backed securities had decades of
data showing that these were solid investments.

What about intangible assets like knowing how to code? Is this what Lambda
School is really doing?

And like the housing bubble, once the originator can sell the debt, they have
some incentives to inflate expectations on both sides.

Perhaps Lambda School’s ISA-selling isn’t vulnerable to this flaw. Maybe the
ISA-buyers are doing due diligence. But you would have thought the same was
true in 2008 too.

Like everyone with a Twitter account I’ve interacted with Austen. And I had a
mildly positive impression, or at least I thought he deserved more credit. Not
sure about that any more. I would like to see his response.

------
ucha
I'm wondering why it is that two hit pieces came out at the same time [1]? Is
it just a coincidence?

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/11/21131848/lambda-school-
co...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/11/21131848/lambda-school-coding-
bootcamp-isa-tuition-cost-free)

~~~
azangru
I've seen discontent with Lambda brewing on twitters for quite some time:

[https://twitter.com/KeziyahL/status/1155154616281178114](https://twitter.com/KeziyahL/status/1155154616281178114)

~~~
SamReidHughes
Any program teaching CS or software with relatively open admissions will have
its discontented students, because there are simply people who don't have the
cognitive ability to handle it, and their inability to do the homework is
always the teacher's fault.

