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.
Interestingly enough, all of these comments could have been said about my experience at $BOOTCAMP that I attended and then was later hired at as a mentor.
The degradation of quality from the removal of human presence is a common narrative, and the students react to it so much more than management ever realizes.
> 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.
This is exactly how I would describe it. $BOOTCAMP was around for a few years, was purchased by private equity, immediately doubled it's prices, gutted the mentoring team, and "revamped" the curriculum, which really meant they were just pushing everything to video learning.
They have made some minor curriculum improvements as of late, but they have a long way to go to get back to what the program was when it was just starting out - which was ironically much higher quality in my opinion.
Every time I’ve seen a company bought by private equity, it spells the beginning of the end. The strategy always seems to milk every last drop of cash from the business, without any long term sustainable plan. As an anecdotal case, I visited Sea World over the summer and half the concessions and shows were closed. It was still expensive and crowded and and there were service bottlenecks everywhere. Long lines for a bottle of water. Midday I said to myself, I bet this place was bought out by private equity. I looked up Sea World’s ownership structure when I got home and low and behold, private equity is involved.
It's an issue in market information where regulation can't really work [1]. Vendors have a brand. They establish the value of the brand such that purchasers have a signal that they aren't going to be ripped off. For example you can be pretty sure coca-cola isn't going to cut costs to the point where they don't care about putting poison in the bottle - and you don't need regulation to know they won't do it. Zeus-Cola? Brand means nothing. On holiday in an unregulated land when it's only just launched do you advise your family it will be completely safe to drink?
An entrepreneurial team comes along and puts their hearts and souls into setting up a business and establishing the brand with some high quality product. That brand becomes worth something. The easiest way to monetize that brand is to use it for a con job. It sucks.
You thought you were getting quality, it's what you paid for, well you're getting cheap and nasty and we're taking excess profit for as long as the brand lasts. You took the bait and got the switch. Usually (but not always) the original entrepreneurial team is unwilling to do this, because they believed what they were doing was something more than just making money. Private equity is just making money and are extremely willing to do this.
[1] I prefer unregulated markets as far as the alternative is usually worse. There are obvious exceptions at the extreme ends (monopoly, health and safety, fraud, adverse externality etc.) How far away from the extreme you think regulation stops working is a lot of interesting case-by-case discussion where intelligent, reasonable and informed people can disagree in good faith improving their understanding and the quality of suggested policy in the process. It would be nice to see a bit more of it in the media!
A decade ago I rented a large U-Haul for a move. I knew how crappy they were and purchased the insurance just figuring it in as the "true" cost of the rental.
I pick up the truck at like 4:00pm. The truck they gave me had some serious damage to the box, it had been painted over. I documented everything and went on my way.
I return the truck at ~12pm the next morning. I get a call a few hours later from U-Haul saying I'd damaged the truck to the tune of $1700 or so. I told them, "So whats your theory? That I drove the truck 100 miles, damaged it and had time to paint over the damage and for that paint to dry in 16 hours? And, I bought the insurance anyways SO WHY THE F** ARE YOU CALLING ME?!"
Some businesses are so routinely corrupt its unusual if they're not trying to cheat you.
Another time, I took my vehicle which had very expensive tires (think $650 each) to an Allen Tire for a slow leak in one of them (would deflate once a week). I took pictures of my tires bcause I had been dreading this and putting it off for months because-- I knew what would happen. And it did:
They called me a few hours later and said one of my tires had been slashed and that I would have to replace both rear tires. The guy was a great actor. He genuinely sounded distressed over my misfortune. I told them to put the tire back on and I'd pay a reasonable fee. They refused, "Sir we can't do that, the car is unsafe to drive."
I am livid at this point. I made probably a poor decision... I calmly explained that I was missing my regularly scheduled shooting practice (which was true) and I am coming down there, with the guns that I intend to take to the practice, so I hope my old tire will be on the car so I won't be late.
When I got there (no guns of course), they had magically discovered a nail in the tire and they were sorry for the mistake. The same bastard trying to scam me was outrageously apologetic for the "mix-up."
anyways, if you made it through this slog of a post thank you! Little bored this evening...
I keep redrafting a blog post in my head about this cycle and how it means that even though the world is getting better, every specific brand is getting worse. (There was a wonderful post about Starbucks specifically that I now can't find, talking about how they grew their reputation by having hand-made coffee that people loved before switching to machine brewing that required less skill and people wouldn't hate).
I suspect we're politically rather opposed, as I see this as a consequence of capitalism putting a price tag on everything, and something that regulation is appropriate for (some way of forcing brands to publicise when they've changed something, so that customers can know whether a review they read still applies, although the details of how to do that would be difficult). Indeed I'd argue that the only reason customers can trust a brand like Coca-Cola is strong regulation in the form of trademark law.
I've have had this theory for years-- that restaurants start out, and the ones that survive and multiply do something unique. And then at some size, where economy of scale is involved, they cost reduce to the point that, they've reduced out whatever made them special in the first place. Then you end up with these giants that exist on momentum but are unable to produce a quality product.
It works for any business really.
Starbucks in particular-- there's not enough quality coffee in the world for them to serve it at any price.
They've even gone so far as to redefine the term "blonde" to something that's more like full-city--lighter roasts imply higher quality beans--full city is several shades darker than blonde, and blonde should almost always come with at least some chaff. I've never seen chaff in a bag of Starbucks beans, but it could be possible they're taking extraordinary measures to remove it... But I doubt it.
Yeah it's a reasonable point of view. The other way to go on that is you're in an country whose culture you don't understand which as a wildly corrupt, crony-riddled military dictator and nobody has any rights at all.
Do you want locally bottled Coke(tm) with the red label and dynamic ribbon for your very thirsty child or locally bottled "Odin's Thirst Quencher! (est. 2021)"?
Coke are going to enforce quality control and safety to protect their brand or get out of that market. There is no regulation you can rely on in this mythical country - but there are quite a few countries like that which you may know yourself from having visited them. In France, say, you have regulation that safety is not a concern. When you don't have it you have brands - the owner has the incentive to protect them. So it goes also in France, or the USA or other wealthy countries to the parts of commerce that are not regulated (whether they could be or whether that's because it's not feasible).
But the higher issue is information. Should you be able to sell the same product with a very different quality under the same name? Let's say we agree the answer is ideally "no, you can't do that." Now we want to regulate that you can't do that. How is it enforced? There may be ways. There may be grey areas. The cost may be prohibitive in many instances or there might be new solutions to mitigate those problems.
What is isn't is easy which you can see as soon as you apply it to the industry and case under discussion. Intensive industry training schools.
> Do you want locally bottled Coke(tm) with the red label and dynamic ribbon for your very thirsty child or locally bottled "Odin's Thirst Quencher! (est. 2021)"?
> Coke are going to enforce quality control and safety to protect their brand or get out of that market. There is no regulation you can rely on in this mythical country - but there are quite a few countries like that which you may know yourself from having visited them.
I'd argue that in a lawless country people have no faith in the brands either. Look at the fake Apple stores in China, or at parents importing identically-branded baby formula from abroad because they (justifiably) didn't trust the locally produced version.
It's obviously not a panacea. You may not be able to trust the brand is what it claims to be. You frequently can't in wealthy countries with low corruption indexes.
There are plenty of times what you trust is the interests of the brand holder to defend the value of the brand where regulation can't help you. Coke in a sealed bottle is extremely likely to be coke in a sealed bottle in Mogadishu. The brand "Coke" gives you some information about the probability of not drinking poison. Obviously it isn't perfect. I think it's evident that it isn't something to be dismissed as inconsequential information either. Coke will be trying very hard to make sure nobody impersonates them and kills their customers anywhere in the world because it would be an advertising disaster. Better that than nothing.
(Just quietly I hate the coca cola company and think they are pretty evil. Diabetes. Obesity. They're similar to a cigarette company. Meh. Useful points can still be made using their business as an example.)
Not every brand is getting worse. Some are staying the same, and some are improving.
The regulation you suggest seems a bit silly. If transparency is good for a brand, companies can already implement it. (And if customers don't care enough to pay for transparency, why force them to?)
What's the externality that your proposed regulation is trying to internalize?
Also keep in mind that disclosure regulations put an undue burden on smaller companies and upstarts, as they don't benefit from economies of scale. (You need roughly the same amount of lawyers and accountants etc to comply here, no matter how big your business is.)
> What's the externality that your proposed regulation is trying to internalize?
The externality is the cost of staying informed. The theorems about the efficiency of a free market assume perfect information. If someone reads Consumer Reports and decides that brand XYZ is making a good product they want to buy, but brand XYZ switches to producing lower-quality products in between when the review is written and when the reader buys the thing, then we lose all the benefits that the free market was supposed to give us.
> The theorems about the efficiency of a free market assume perfect information.
Huh? That comparatively freer markets make people better off in the real world is an empirical observation, and doesn't rely on theorems. (You can make a few assumptions and prove a few theorems, if you want to. But it's not essential.)
> If someone reads Consumer Reports and decides that brand XYZ is making a good product they want to buy, but brand XYZ switches to producing lower-quality products in between when the review is written and when the reader buys the thing, then we lose all the benefits that the free market was supposed to give us.
Eh, there's a simple fix that people intuitively implement already: trust brands more that have been around longer.
Assume the delay between the review being written and you buying stuff is eg a quarter of a year. Then, simplified, someone who goes only for brands that have been around for at least ten years only runs at most a 1 in 40 chance of getting duped like this.
> That comparatively freer markets make people better off in the real world is an empirical observation, and doesn't rely on theorems.
It's not empirically true in all cases; lemon laws are broadly in the same category as what I'm advocating, and empirically make people better off.
> Eh, there's a simple fix that people intuitively implement already: trust brands more that have been around longer.
> Assume the delay between the review being written and you buying stuff is eg a quarter of a year. Then, simplified, someone who goes only for brands that have been around for at least ten years only runs at most a 1 in 40 chance of getting duped like this.
That's a lot less practical now than it used to be; the pace of innovation is higher, which is good, but has brought a lot of churn and it's hard for reviewers to keep up.
> Btw, that's not an externality. That's just a regular cost.
It can be either or both. Information discovery can simply be a cost of transaction, sure, fine. Find out about the stuff you're thinking of buying. Regular transaction cost.
Where there are markets and methods of transacting in those markets where one can assume the product that was being sold previously with a given name is precisely similar to the one being sold when you want to buy it there is some information acquired without additional cost. If it becomes more popular for some market participants to start messing with that such that everyone has to double check everything all the damn time even when purchasing from people who would not tolerate selling like that because of the uncertainty that is now in the marketplace. That is clearly a cost imposed on people not involved in those messed up transactions. The honest sellers have an additional cost to demonstrate they aren't crooks. The buyers have an additional cost to find that out. The sensible buyer buys from the honest seller with an additional transaction cost that has nothing to do with a change in policy or behavior of either party, it's a result of some other transaction they were not party to and had no control over. That's an externality. One usually enforced via social norms first ("I've come back because you lied to me!" - we've all seen someone, somewhere taking out their fury like that) and regulation second (because yelling at shop attendants is a rubbish thing to do).
Pretty sure such externality, while undesirable in itself, does not render useless all the benefits of a marketplace. The idealised form of the microeconomic model known as "perfect competition" has perfect information as an assumption. As soon as you apply the model to a real market that assumption has to be somewhat relaxed. The relaxation may make little difference (eg there's not much to know, it doesn't change much and we all basically know it) or an immense difference (eg insider trading on the stock exchange). Such models are for positive economics (describing what is happening) rather than being prescriptive about what should happen (normative economics).
I hope explaining the jargon doesn't come off as being a condescending idiot here. The jargon is used for gatekeeping in many of these discussions and it bothers me that this is how it works.
I know the jargon. (But explaining it doesn't hurt.)
The 'perfect competition' model is indeed not applicable here. But that's not a problem: we know empirically that markets work (and work better the freer they are). The theory just gives us the intellectual tools to investigate why that is so.
What you are describing is still not a proper externality. In the same sense that eg having a competitor is not described as an externality.
(Or similarly, given your logic, the existence of shops where people have to pay for stuff would be an externality, because now they have to make sure that they are not in a 'shop' where everything is free first. The example is admittedly a bit silly, but if you substitute 'hospital' for 'shop', it's somewhat applicable to the UK.)
I'm coming up on 45 and through my whole life, markets have been regulated in favor of corporate officers and the government agencies and officials paid to represent them.
Could be an expression problem on my part. Perhaps I should have written "less regulated" as opposed "more regulated" markets. There's a regulation that when you buy something you can't shoot the counterparty and take your money back in most parts of the world so yes clearly "wholly unregulated" is largely fiction. In the same way that a (fully) regulated market such as a soviet style command economy usually has more than a few loopholes. Eg inmates in prison have a market that is as tightly regulated as anything in the world yet they work around it and it seems nobody has ever succeeded in keeping the drug trade out of jails.
The regulatory capture you refer to is one of the downsides of over-regulation. De-regulating is not necessarily a panacea for regulatory capture. Sometimes the regulatory body that has been captured has power of regulation that is in some way completely necessary and that is use as an excuse to institute an abusive barrier to entry or similar. Or just regulated to grow the career, influence & power of the persons who are charged with advising and enforcing the regulation.
Whether two people looking carefully and sensibly at a market see it the opposite way, one as over-regulated the other as under-regulated can be largely ideological and a good faith disagreement, both of whom can achieve a better understanding and policy prescription through sensible exchange of ideas - especially with regards important details like enforcement, corruption, abusive practice that is or could happen etc.. There isn't nearly enough of that about.
The decision is between a higher probability shorter realization, bigger annualized result vs longer realization, lower annual return (possibly bigger return if things go particularly well) with a bigger probability of things going wrong, especially a few years into the future where the crystal balls get less sure of themselves.
I can get a real 30% return this year and I'm out with high probability. Vs I could get 150% in 7 years time but not much this year or next and maybe it won't work out because the unknown unknowns etc?
If you're pretty sure you're on a winner you take option b and hold. If you're less sure, a bird in the hand is worth two in your dreams... Your bonus this year is on this year's results, will you still work there and get the bonus in 7 years? The decision is probably not made by the owners of captial but their professional agents.
The interest rate really doesn't figure in that calculation (real returns rather than nominal). It's all about the return probabilities and good enough with more certainty can win out where you might not like that and think more highly of the longer term prospects.
Factoring in interest rates, when they're high its because inflation is high. At that point an inflation hedged investment (which most equity is) becomes relatively more valuable than money in the bank (bonds) because money in the bank is a sure, steady loser. Capital has to go somewhere and its owners will want to put it where it can "lose the least" Get it invested in some kind of business equity, diversified as hell, across industries, business sizes, geographically, startup vs established, precious metals, Art, all of it. Just get the hell away from bonds which will hemorrhage value from the inflation. Where capital is having trouble finding investment because all captial owners are looking the incentive becomes to hang on and hold, let the business run rather than rip the value out now and have to find somewhere else equivalent to put it which may not be easy at all.
Real interest rates are the growth rate in the overall economy, which doesn't change much or at least shouldn't in the absence of a crash and recession. For a country getting much above the world economy growth rate is a short term thing that doesn't last. You hit oil (norway) Your capital stock was low (post ww2 germany & japan, pre economic liberalization of china) but you have an educated and entrepreneurial population and you can catch up fast by investing, then reinvesting in capital. Then it tails off when you get back to parity).
The world economy growth rate is set by population growth and technical progress. (Both new technology and new ways developed to use existing tech better).
>Bond interest rates already price in expected inflation.
Look at the incredible growth in the S&P500 during a pandemic with all the economic carnage going on with that vs the bond rates. Then if you still think so, bet so, but against my strongest feelings, which are obviously not any kind of investment advice. There are cashflow timing tax effects to consider there as well. Bond returns are depressed by central bank policy and some capital is forced to allocate there when its a bad deal. (Pension funds mandated to invest in bonds and nothing "risky" like equity). Look at the number of ways an investment in bonds can surprise on the downside. Look at the lack of room with interest rates where they are to surprise on the upside. Unanticipated inflation is a redistribution from lenders to borrowers (can pay it back with worthless currency while the asset it bought appreciates). It's always "unanticipated" in most of the yield curve when it hits.
20 Year US Govt Bond yield is 2.07% sayeth the search engine [1]. That's anticipating basically no inflation at any point for the next 20 years and a 2%ish economic growth rate in the economy. Seem like a reasonable assumption? Bond income (coupon payment) is taxable as you get it. Capital appreciation of equity isn't taxable until you sell it. In times of inflation that really matters and causes you to make a small fortune out of a bigger one.
No, real interest rates are not (necessarily) the growth of the entire economy. Interest rates are the cost of borrowing capital.
Eg if we discovered that an asteroid was going to hit earth in ten years, you can bet that interest rates would go up like crazy---without any growth nor growth expectations.
Of course, real interest rates can be related to real growth in the economy.
> Look at the incredible growth in the S&P500 during a pandemic with all the economic carnage going on with that vs the bond rates.
I'm not sure what you mean here? Econ 101 says that the price of stocks is the discounted present value of all expected future dividends (and stock buybacks etc). If you follow that simple model, it would already predict that a short term disruption to the economy should not impact stock prices.
Of course, reality is more complicated. But even this simple model captures the phenomenon of robust stock prices while a pandemic is still going on.
> Bond returns are depressed by central bank policy and some capital is forced to allocate there when its a bad deal. (Pension funds mandated to invest in bonds and nothing "risky" like equity).
Yes, regulation makes things more complicated here. Also keep in mind that in most jurisdictions companies pay bond or loan interest with pre-tax money, but they pay dividends or stock buybacks with post-tax money.
The wider context of the discussion was about junk bonds from private equity. They benefit from the difference in tax treatment, but don't benefit from pensions funds' mandates to invest in safe assets or central bank purchases of government debt.
I'm not sure why you would cite 20 Year US Govt Bond yields here? If you are interested in inflation expectation in the US, just look at TIPS spreads https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10YIE which give you that information directly.
TIPS spreads are the difference in price between inflation adjusted bonds and non-inflation adjusted US government bonds.
> It's always "unanticipated" in most of the yield curve when it hits.
Eh, there's also unanticipated lack of inflation. The risk goes towards both sides. (A risk that only goes in one direction would be rather strange, if you have at least a few smart market participants who can benefit from correction prices.)
> Every time I’ve seen a company bought by private equity, it spells the beginning of the end.
I regularly work with PE firms.
You can't paint the whole industry with one brush stroke. I've seen more than a handful of companies get bought by PE to become very successful for everyone involved (PE, management, customers)...and the opposite.
That being said - it's very common to see companies in the large cap space ($5B~$10B in enterprise value) to be repositioned to match the market dynamics or financially engineered. While you might have had a poor experience, the rest of the market may have been willing to wait in 15 minute lines for $10 bottles of water.
If you disagree with PE, the easiest way to "stick it to them" is to vote with your wallet. Simply stop going to Sea World and you'll see PE change their tune pretty quickly.
> While you might have had a poor experience, the rest of the market may have been willing to wait in 15 minute lines for $10 bottles of water. If you disagree with PE, the easiest way to "stick it to them" is to vote with your wallet. Simply stop going to Sea World and you'll see PE change their tune pretty quickly.
Ironically this is exactly the sort of attitude that the parent is complaining about. You could never grow a business with this mindset, but you can coast and cannibalize one just fine. Nobody likes 15 min lines or $10 water bottles; they tolerate them because there are other experiences that are worthwhile along the way. You remove these experiences and you are basically just screwing people who are going off outdated information about the quality of the experience. Voting with dollars is fine but there is a big information asymmetry and a hysteresis effect of having a quality brand reputation (built over years of not trying to screw people). Any voting with dollars is years removed from the results.
Why? I've never been to SeaWorld, and it's really easy for me to look up up-to-date reviews before I plan a trip. Easier than ever, in fact.
The hysteresis effect you mention requires that people would stupid when spending their own dollars.
> Nobody likes 15 min lines or $10 water bottles; they tolerate them because there are other experiences that are worthwhile along the way. You remove these experiences and you are basically just screwing people who are going off outdated information about the quality of the experience.
Perhaps other people just have different preferences from you and make different trade-offs?
> Ironically this is exactly the sort of attitude that the parent is complaining about.
And this attitude would exist regardless of whether PE is involved. When you get the $1B+ market cap size, these entities are not benevolent entities - they are profit seeking machines.
In respect to Sea World the more realistic strategy is either run at a minor loss until the real estate is profitable or squeeze dry ASAP and sell. Or the timeless play of load it with debt, payout themselves and declare bankruptcy.
Of course there are other PE businesses that are ran with only minor changes. I have a friend whose firm invests in dermatology offices and has created a network of small offices nation wide. From my understanding they really do try to keep the same staff on and mostly do back office changes but that’s his word so take it for what it is. I personally find large scale PE work pretty soulless but there are definitely firms that care about the companies they take over.
Some people prefer riskier investments. Let them have it.
Other people prefer safer investments, let them have what they want, too.
There's nothing inherently sacred about bonds. It's just a contract that basically says 'either we pay you x dollars on time, or you get to take ownership of the company'.
The issue is that a company purchased by PE often has built up a positive image of their brand. Sea World probably has thousands of positive reviews online; by the time the online consensus catches up to the reality of the experience, it's very easy to be fooled. That's where the money is made: when costs are cut but the brand still has a positive perception.
PE doesn't have to change their tune; by the time consumers realize that the product has changed, the firm has already made their money.
The difference is incentive structure. Running a business successfully is hard, and getting one to profitability is difficult. The easiest way to make money on a purchased business is to cut costs while people perceive it positively, ride that wave until the business isn't perceived positively, then sell the remaining assets. This method, given that it happens frequently, seems to be the easiest and most reliable way to turn a profit from a business over a period of 3-7 years, with no regard for the survival of that business moving forward.
Given that PE is generally looking for profits over the 3-7 year time period, this would line up with their goals.
Other businesses could absolutely have the same incentives. We see similar acquisitions from Google, Facebook, etc. where products are absorbed into the parent company or otherwise shut down. However, there's a larger chance that the purchasing business has incentives that align with the company being purchased. An established and trusted brand is incredibly valuable; many parent companies would be content to let that business thrive as a semi-autonomous business unit.
Would you argue that PE is less or more likely to employ the strategy I've outlined in my original comment? My prior would be that PE is more likely to use that strategy than other businesses.
As always, I'm open to my views being changed on that. Clearly not all PE deals involve stripping a company down, and plenty of other businesses would be happy to strip a company down. As someone with more experience with PE, I'd be interested in your views and why you have different priors than me.
> This method, given that it happens frequently, seems to be the easiest and most reliable way to turn a profit
I think you're naively looking at the headlines of PE that focus on large cap buyouts. For every story about Toys R' Us, there are hundreds of PE buyouts that do no cost cutting and use PE capital to grow their businesses.
As I noted earlier, the big PE funds - Apollo, KKR, etc. - are notorious for stripping away large healthy brands and financially engineering them to leave them loaded up with debt. I can certainly appreciate why people think the whole industry is like this. For the record - not only do not I have access to these funds, I would politely decline working with them if I had the chance (we actually said no to biz with one of the big firms years ago). They easiest PE route is in fact investing in healthy businesses with good management teams and then selling them in 3~5 years when multiples naturally go up. The less work that is required to turn the business around the easier it is on the PE fund. Financial engineering and cost cutting is just a cheap trick that can only be used in certain situations.
There is a HUGE market of mid market PE firms that survive on growing both top line and earnings as a result of growth orientated initiatives, and don't leave the company hanging with swathes of debt. In fact, there is a category called Growth PE which has invested in many of the tech companies we discussed here. Look up Insight Venture Partners, TCV, Tiger Global, etc.
Beginning of the end happened before that because most healthy companies don’t need private equity unless they need a lot of cash for an expansion.
Part of the reason they got in that position is that they were charging to little to make money. It only follows that prices will go up and probably service down as the company stressed customer service in the hopes of attracting better future capital.
I'd assume the most common reason is that the owner wants to do something else, like retire or start another company. You can't really do that without selling, you can hire a CEO but you can never fully delegate the responsibility.
Too many companies end up in a leveraged buyout by PE that is ultimately based not on unprofitability, but just insufficient profitability to satisfy shareholders (some of which are buying in just to force the issue and then unload the stock before the bill comes due for the short-term thinking).
Bob founds a company that makes widgets. Bob sells the company to a PE company. The PE company runs the company into the ground. That opens a gap in the market for (a new) Bob to open a new company that makes widgets.
If shareholders or private equity or private equity's debtors are willing to subsidise Bob this way, who are we to complain?
Just going to add a positive anecdotal example since most of this thread is negative. I finished App Academy back in 2015 and 6 years later, most of my friends are a top tier software companies. In general our cohort did well, although there were definitely people who did not succeed. The experience was truly life changing for some of the folks.
I do agree that I've seen a LOT of bootcamps try to "scale" out their programs by removing human teachers and using video/written content or by increasing student to teacher ratios. I'm curious if the experience I had still holds today at any bootcamps or if the drive to "scale" has messed up the industry
> do agree that I've seen a LOT of bootcamps try to "scale" out their programs by removing human teachers and using video/written content or by increasing student to teacher ratios.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is how every bootcamp pitches to their investors. "We're just starting out with an MVP. Once we've nailed the curriculum we're going to scale our instruction without increasing labor costs".
I had a sort of similar thing with Udacity and their front end web dev nanodegree program. They would literally change the content of classes WHILE people were taking them. I got so confused and fed up that I just quit the program altogether, even though the only thing I had left to do was an exit interview. They weren't going to see another dime of my money.
Why don't companies just speak plainly about these kinds of changes? "We are doing this to cut costs, which we need to do to [Survive/Buy a Yacht/Whatever]"
People tend to be really understanding when you are brutally honest, and brutally cynical when you bullshit them even a little.
To be frank: I think the main reason is because explicit talk of cost-cutting was at odds with leadership's self-aggrandizing Twitter talk. (Disrupting the education industry, putting four-year colleges out of business, etc.)
Good executives do do this, Ben Horowitz addresses it explicitly in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, but I've also seen it personally from good executives I've worked for.
It's bad ones that think they can spin something negative into something positive. All it does is break trust and employees just think they're full of shit.
The urge to spin things positively is the common default though for new execs for some reason, telling the truth about bad news when it's hard to do so is part of what makes someone good.
It’s the default ‘easy’ answer - telling a bunch of people something that sucks is risky and scary and many times they don’t even know how to process it themselves, or that they will be ok if they do.
Yeah - I suspect they may be lying to themselves first.
It’s also possible they rationalize it in some way that they’re “protecting their employees” from the bad news. In practice people like to be clued in to the truth and are more likely to respond positively to honesty in my experience.
100% agree. I also think we're (maybe?) starting to come out of a period where selling bald faced lies and bullshit was a major way to 'make it rich'. Or at least I hope.
There was a period where it was a requirement for an executive that they be credible and have a solid track record of under promising, over delivering, before they would ever be considered for leadership. Part of that comes with the experience to know (as in know in their bones, from direct experience) how important it is to be straightforward while not causing panic, and to set a solid and realistic direction instead of lying about it.
People required that of their leaders because they had seen and felt the anguish and loss that doing otherwise causes when it is something important. We've had a insane run of peace and prosperity, and it's easy to forget that and take the fluffy fun face instead.
Lambda framed these changes as beneficial to students, for reason XYZ. I remember seeing a lot of student comments saying things like "Is lambda ok??" or "We're adults here, if lambda needs to cut costs they can tell us."
For engineering or other pragmatic types? Definitely. For those who are used to hard reality and know how to make it fit in a nice way or move on like field sales? Often.
For most everyone else? There is often a need to provide at least some surface ‘here is why everything is not actually super terrible so you should stay’ sugar coating or it is not going to go down well.
The larger the group, the more apparent the effect and I suspect it’s due to lack of trust and/or familiarity with the speaker. If you’ve had your sleeves rolled up and been in the trenches with someone, you either know you can’t trust them already (and in which case, why are you still here?!?), or can trust them well and can see a positive outcome if it works.
If you can’t trust them, it’s just a signal that things are terrible and don’t know how terrible they really are - and what choice does someone have to anchor and assume it’s worse (or maybe a little better).
This is very close to the language Lambda School actually used. Here is a snippet of something Lambda wrote after a LOT of students complained about the changes the school made to the program (removing TLs, grades, code review):
- First, we need to clarify how we've changed the accountability model.
- Second, we need to clarify why we've changed the accountability model.
- Third, after we understand the bandwidth and instructor availability in this new model, we'll continue to tighten the proactive feedback on technical skills.
And it's working so great in politics. The party that's supposed to help the poor and downtrodden has managed to completely alienate them through precisely this kind of condescending manipulation.
That might work if its a few decisions here and there that look like they're being taken with much gravitas.
But I'm not sure that would work if you're pivoting constantly and in a downward spiral. There are simply too many decisions happening for "we need to cut costs" to feel valid all the time. Lambda school appears to be in that category so far as I can see.
An organization that treats their students with a "your feeble minds won't understand, so let me put some spin on this for you" deserves all the eventual backlash they get.
Posting like this will get you banned on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the topic [1], but "less" doesn't mean "zero" and egregious comments like this are never ok. If you'd review the rules and stick to them going forward, we'd appreciate it.
I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0]. I guess that counts toward their "placement" stats!
Not only that, but Lambda seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]
I don't think I've seen a single hire out of a bootcamp work out in the end. Except a few cases where the person actually came from a STEM degree from a good school (and more crucially, already had some exposure to programming during the degree) but it's unclear to me that they actually needed the bootcamp and not just a good primer on modern software development and something like the Missing Semester [2] or a few classes at their school covering software engineering.
We definitely have a few career changing bootcamp grads working out for us (no STEM background, nothing to indicate they were "almost there" on their own, turned into fine employees).
That said, the hit ratio from bootcamp graduate to productive hire is incredibly, incredibly low. I think there's a place for bootcamps, but I'm not sure most bootcamps are operating in that space.
I don't know how to fix it, but I did think the Lambda School income share arrangement at least served/tried to align incentives for the school to actually help the students transform themselves.
I'm a currently working software engineer from Lambda, who knows other people who succeeded at Lambda and other bootcamps.
The TA thing, a TA doesn't teach, a TA pretty much grades/code reviews. They answered questions. (I did this while I was hunting for a job).
They also don't count that towards placement.
I have an IS degree, but some other people I know succeed with pretty much anything you can think of. I don't have enough of a sample size to know if we're all just exceptions or not.
Man, in college I designed the curriculum for, led 7 other TAs, graded and lectured the introductory CS course with 300+ students for two semesters. Clearly I should have told them I was the teacher (Ha!) and should have been paid more than 23/hr but nope my title was Head TA while the professor, who admittedly I hold in high regard supervised to make sure things didn't go off the rails. Honestly it was a great learning experience but yeah sometimes I think about that and laugh to myself.
I've worked with and hired a bunch of fantastic bootcamp grads without STEM degrees. There are plenty of them out there.
My own brother is one such story, and within 5 years in the industry, he became a manager and now runs engineering at a small startup. He did have programming familiarity before his bootcamp, which helped him make the most of the bootcamp, but zero prior formal training or professional experience.
That said, my brother also reported that the majority of his class didn't seem to be really on top of the material, and I wouldn't doubt that that's typical.
A friend of mine hired 5 bootcamp grads and said they had no backgound in programming/CS. He said 4 worked out well and the 5th ended up taking an internship across town.
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.
Yep, that's also because: "Earlier this year researchers at the London School of Economics released a paper titled, “Why Do People Stay Poor?” that illustrated how the lack of initial wealth (and not motivation or talent) is what keeps people in poverty. The researchers tested this by randomly allocating wealth (i.e. livestock) to female villagers in Bangladesh and then waited to see how that wealth transfer would affect their future finances. As their paper states:
[We] find that, if the program pushes individuals above a threshold level of initial assets, then they escape poverty, but, if it does not, they slide back into poverty…Our findings imply that large one-off transfers that enable people to take on more productive occupations can help alleviate persistent poverty.
Their paper clearly illustrates that many poor people stay poor not because of their talent/motivation, but because they are in low-paying jobs that they must work to survive."
In that case the issue was that he had to stop working to take care of his mother. In most civilized countries, his mother would have sufficient help from government healthcare.
> In most civilized countries, his mother would have sufficient help from government healthcare.
I am in New Zealand, which is fairly civilised, and I think your statement is mostly wrong.
Firstly, I have seen people get some government help, but it is rarely enough. Even with government help and sharing the load with siblings you may still need to help your parents full time.
Secondly, many people choose to look after their parents because they want to, or sometimes they don’t trust that others will give them the same quality of care. Even with high quality private care, I have seen plenty of children dedicate a lot of time to their parents (similarly friends looking after sick friends).
For some children it is acceptable for them to hand parents over to aged care, provided by the state. Many other children choose instead to do as much as they can to help their parents, often because they have experience of the systems and see the reality of overburdened elderly care.
When infirm people have nobody else to help them except government services, their care is sometimes of low quality, although still expensive for the economy to provide. A mature economy with many elderly perhaps doesn’t have enough people to provide the number of dedicated hours needed to support all of their infirm? I did a quick search and it looks like New Zealand spends about 1% of GDP on long term aged health care. That seems surprisingly low to me - although I didn’t look at how much other countries spend. https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=crown+expenditure+%22aged%...
Depending on how sick she was there are such programs in every state. If she needed round the clock care like it sounds, she was sick enough most likely.
He also could probably have declared bankruptcy early and been able to focus more on learning useful skills instead of killing himself trying to pay bills he never could. That is what bankruptcy is for.
Guess again my friend. Ate old canned food for a very long time while my parents declared bankruptcy as a kid - twice - so we at least had a roof over our head, and wore the same two shirts for years too. My Mom finished a 4 year degree several years afterwards that helped us pull out of the economic collapse of the aerospace industry in the area that had trapped us - and was studying late in the night to do it. While working a very demanding full time job too.
There are methods to avoid being destroyed by situations like this, but some never try or don’t bother to even figure it out. Doesn’t mean it still isn’t hard work, and stressful as hell, but it is there to stop the destruction. Folks have to look and try though.
Would you prefer the sob story of the time I had a partner go literally nuts (though she managed to dodged the psych eval for nearly 5 months until THAT got proven) due to COVID related stress and her own negligent actions and their consequences, and then file a series of crazy (and later proved perjury) accusations that locked me out of most of my finances, my home, and all but the property I was able to put on my back with roughly an hours notice - while I ended up single parenting two kids - all for no apparent reason?
Shit sucks sometimes. It's often hard or nearly impossible to cope. Sometimes the terribleness comes from those you loved the most, or least expected it from. Sometimes it comes from a literal random stranger. Life isn't fair, and there is no guarantee - and fundamentally cannot be - that things work out for anyone, no matter how right or wrong their actions.
Sometimes this kills someone directly. Sometimes it just wears them down, sometimes someone can take a direct hit to the face that would kill most others and just smile.
Often the bigger part of the damage or ongoing problems stem from our own inability to face reality, what is going on, and make use of the tools we do have and what we have around us to actually make things better - but that is a problem no one can fix but us. Ultimately, we end up with the consequences of this, deserved or not. There is no magic bullet to solve this either, just hard and uncomfortable work.
There are tools however, and our current society provides a LOT of them. I fully recognize how hard it is to use them during hard times. Probably more than 99% of the posters here. But pretending they don't exist or aren't available is BS as well. Pretending that they don't exist and that is why society is unfair and fucked up because of this is also just wrong and corrosive to society - and people even actually using these tools.
How many people read these posts and actually think there IS no other option and they're permanently fucked, and so never actually take the actions they can to make it better - or even take drastically worse actions that just compound the problem?
A lot more than anyone wants to think about, I can assure you.
Bankruptcy exists. I've seen many people use it (including one close friend) and everyone came out fine at the end. Was it embarrassing for them? Yes. Was it fun? No.
I've always worked my ass off and saved money to avoid the risk, and still barely survived, as I saw how unfun it was as a child and felt many of the effects first hand. But it worked for them to do it, and I knew I had the option if it went even further south.
The whole point of bankruptcy is to get the creditors off your back so you can actually get your life back on track again - like learn a useful skill, or get a new job despite the market being screwed, or not go homeless, or build back a functional life after crippling medical issues and/or debt.
Is it guaranteed that said person will do so? No - there is no way to even attempt to give such a guarantee.
Is it a useful tool someone can use to do so? Yes, you bet.
Thanks for the story. The most brutal thing for me about reporting this story was each individual human horror-show. It's such a serious thing to be responsible for attempting to transform the lives of people who need it so desperately. It is what's most noble about Lambda's mission, to me.
Does any country do a decent job of retraining 70 year old men for developer positions? This does not need to be a high priority for a society if the 70 year old can afford a roof of their head and a meal.
I don't think that's the issue. The issue is that the United States provides such a poor safety net for those with health issues that one person's failing health destroys the economic potential of one or more people around them.
From a sheer utilitarian perspective, healthcare and safety nets are positive ROI. Imagine the job-producing startups that don't exist because "how do you pay for insurance?"
I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next generation.
Long term care is needed by a lot of folks over the age of 65 (~70% of adults age 65 will require at least partial long term care).
Even "reasonably cheap" care (in my experience, roughly the same quality as living in a college dorm, with a roommate and a meal plan) can easily run 10k/month - or 120k a year.
Of those needing long term care (roughly half of all folks): Men will need that care for an average of ~2 years, women nearly 4 years. 20% will need that care for 5 years or longer.
I watched my parents spend all of their inheritance covering long term care costs for their parents (Alzheimers is a bitch). Once the inheritance was gone, they worked longer than they would have preferred to continue covering those costs (my mother only retired this year when my grandmother died of covid - as horrendous as it sounds, it was almost a blessing).
My personal take is that "single family homes" and "private healthcare" are a literal fucking disaster for long term wealth inequality. That policy combination takes a lot of middle class families and leaves them poor.
* - I personally don't think it's an accident at all, I think it's very, very intentional.
> I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next generation.
...
> * - I personally don't think it's an accident at all, I think it's very, very intentional.
Its extremely intentional wealth stealing, and it's even worse than just lost generational wealth transfer. Filial responsibility laws mean that your illness and long-term care are your children's financial burden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws .
In the worst cases, people estranged from their parents for decades end up bankrupted. Depending on what state your grandmother lived in - your mother may have been on the hook even if she hadn't chosen to keep working to care for her mom.[1]
The idea that paying for elderly parents' expensive (intentionally or accidentally) care is a choice only applies to people in less than half of the states. These laws make the only choice "pay the provider directly now" or "pay the provider costs and late fees, etc via the courts". So anyone who wants to claim that the people who care for their parents are chosing to do so is claiming wrong - if your parent spends their last days in one of 26 states, the parent is chosing what your wealth is used for.
[1] I hope that didn't come across as suggesting your mom was only making a financial choice, or that she didn't make her choice out of love. I'm sorry you lost your grandmother and I hope your mom enjoys her retirement.
To be fair, long-term care is not just an opportunity to accidentally (from the perspective of the holder, not the system) get rid of one’s accumulated wealth, it is often the motivation for intentionally doing so prematurely, in order to qualify for Medicaid (which pays for the majority of long-term care in the US.) OTOH, for people who don’t have the knowledge or professional advice to do this (which, of course, correlates strongly with having more wealth to start with), it is a trap for accidental wealth drain rather than intentional redistribution, so the poor get generationally poorer, while the better off are also better able to protect generational wealth, both benefiting from programs for the medically indigent.
Every dollar spent on the elderly who had their whole life to prepare is a dollar not spent on a child growing up in poverty who has not yet had a chance.
Families should take care of their own. If nobody is willing to do that for you, you probably aren't deserving.
Well, except it isn’t right? We can and do budget them separately.
Might be more fair to say ‘every tomahawk missle fired randomly at a target at the Middle East is an entire middle class families lifetime income down the tubes’.
> my mother only retired this year when my grandmother died of covid - as horrendous as it sounds, it was almost a blessing
I can only imagine the hardships your family endured for this sentence to come out. I'm glad things are working out for you guys and I'm sorry for your loss.
> I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next generation.
That's not true, the money isn't just lost. The money is passed to the children of the person who extracts the money from the sick people. It's by design.
The money isn't passed on intact though. At the end of the day we pour a huge proportion of our real production - human hours of labour - into prolonging the lives of people who are barely remembering or experiencing anything.
My partners grandmother in Sydney moved into a care home earlier this year as she nears the end of her life. She had to pay over $500,000 upfront which gives her 10 years of care there, and then its a pro-rated amount is refunded upon death.
I can't imagine there are too many people in this world with half a million dollars ready to go.
This isn't just a US thing. For example, even though healthcare is nominally free at the point of use here in the UK, that doesn't cover long-term care for the elderly - you will have to pay privately for that out of your wealth to companies of varying degress of sleaziness until you have no more left, at which point the government will hopefully consider picking up the bill. Our current conservative goverment is planning on capping this and it seems fairly controversial.
I was agreeing with everything up until the last paragraph. If you had an inheritance to pass on you were already in the wealthy class; letting the rich spend everything they can and more on end of life care reduces wealth inequality (though it's a very poor allocation of society's production IMO).
In a whole lot of cases dying is, whether we like it or not "I/we/We[0] don't want to pay for it anymore". I have the experience of pulling the plug on my dad, not for financial reasons, but because it was very clear that he was going to die anyways and it wasn't worth the emotional energy to keep him around (luckily for us, everyone important had time to say their goodbyes and several annoying people had said their goodbyes too [1]). But it also brought into focus to me that we COULD have spent/forced the system to spend millions of dollars in extraordinary resources to keep him alive.
Medical technology is quite advanced these days. Advanced != free. And there's a thing where the longer you try to prolong someone's life the more progressively expensive it becomes, not just from a "price of care" perspective but an "[externalized] cost of care" perspective. Is it worth X carbon dioxide emissions to keep a person on a "level-III dialysis machine"? Is it worth X acres of rainforest to extract an anticancer drug to keep someone's cancer at bay?
Anyways the political divide, in the US, between the left's clueless utopianism and the right's underhanded support of market-distorting profitmongers, has become so farcical that it's impossible to question if humans should have "a general right to have their life extended" even if there are actual, difficult questions to go around.
[0] capital We, as in "the state"
[1] if you ever have the experience of being by the bedside of someone who is dying (n=2 for me), you will see people who come to visit, and have so much pathos, I suspect largely due to their own hangups about death. To be at your best in your role, you will want to shoo them away as quickly as possible.
> The only reason I see expenses really causing massive debt is if you choose to accept/request medical procedures you can't pay for
Have you ever been to a US hospital? They don’t have a menu where you browse treatments and prices. You get your treatment and then later on you get a massive bill
That’s all putting aside the fact that a society allowing people to suffer from treatable illnesses is completely unnecessary and cruel considering that providing free care to everyone is something many countries do successfully
That's false. America has probably the most advanced healthcare in the world. Almost every new treatment is invented and made available there. Other countries don't provide that cutting edge stuff for free, they simply don't provide it at all. I live in New Zealand which has free healthcare but we sometimes hear about people pressuring the government to pay for some expensive new drug, or a dying person using crowdfunding to pay for what the government won't, or complaining they have to spend their own money flying to America for private treatment because no doctor in New Zealand is capable of that special thing. But those are the exceptions that get into the news. Mostly people just die when it's too expensive. Our standard for "treatable illnesses" is lower than the reality of what technology can do.
At the extreme end of diminishing returns, I'd guess that most deaths of elderly people in hospital are preventable because machines to perform the function of failed heart, lungs, kidneys, GI tract, etc. exist. But it's expensive, and countries with socialized healthcare don't pay for it for everyone because they don't have infinite money. My dad died this way when his lungs filled with fluid while in hospital.
Excuse me. It was this "a society allowing people to suffer from treatable illnesses is completely unnecessary and cruel considering that providing free care to everyone is something many countries do successfully"
I'm saying no country provides free healthcare for all treatable illnesses. And not providing it is necessary because the cost would be too great.
not always. you obviously don't get to choose if you're unconscious and someone calls an ambulance for you. or if you get a concussion or injure yourself while intoxicated, you might not be able to fully consent to being taken to the hospital. even DNRs are not always respected.
A friend of mine has terminal cancer and is in a place like this - DNR’s pasted everywhere as the worst fear he has is he’ll get rescucitated and be even worse off.
My thought was around those lines: 60/70 year olds shouldn't be struggling to get retrained. They should be able to live the rest of their lives in retirement. Society should take care of their elders. That's where I would start a UBI program if I could.
Sure, if anyone wants to use their time to learn something new that would be a plus for them.
Well, we sort of do. It's called social security. Now, you could argue that social security by itself only supports a pretty spartan lifestyle. But any UBI proposal is probably even less money.
Your social security benefits are calculated based on your 35 highest income years; which includes 0 income years. The guy quit in 2001 in his 40s-50s, so he may only have 20 years of income for SSA benefits.
That said, the formula is a political choice just as the UBI benefits are a political choice. We could give everyone the same SSA benefits regardless of prior income and index the amounts to age instead. UBI and SSA could be the same administration with lower amounts for younger people and higher amounts for retirees.
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.
JS is a small language when you consider the core of constructs which are in use today. I'd ballpark JS to be around 80-120 "constructs", which will differ based on how you divide semantic and conceptual units of learning. I'd ballpark Go to be around 80-120 as well.
A junior developer who is just learning how to code will not deal with all of JS historical baggage; they will deal with historical JS when joining a large historical codebase. A junior developer will also not be dealing with the different quirks arising from different browser runtimes. These are concerns for businesses who already have products.
But a Student does not encounter these things while learning and writing greenfield apps. Otherwise we are advocating for a student to learn an additional "learning" language. That sounds ideal for a 4 year university program.
Except they will actually deal with all of it. First question I get is usually "what is var" followed by "when do I use arrow functions and when do I use normal functions" shortly followed by "why does this code work with a normal function but not with an arrow function" or "why does my code using classes and arrow functions not work on [ancient browser some family member has for some reason]?". I'll also get numerous questions about whether it is a good practice to do things like `x++` where `x` is a string because they noticed that it happens to work and legitimately want to know if this is good practice / by design (oof). Don't even get me started on the "equality in js" discussion.
The key problem with js is the relationship between objects and functions is extremely confusing. You end up having to explain associative arrays, and spend 30+ minutes doing some hand-waving to even begin to describe what an object actually is in JavaScript. Then they get it. Contrast that with something like Java or even Rust where, despite the other complexities, it's pretty clear what the data is and how it is stored.
That sounds like a pedagogy problem, not a language problem. From my experience [1], students learn JS just fine as a first language, as long as the learning process is structured well. Every practical language has its quirks, and no one learns a programming language by learning all the quirks at one time. You can be productive in JS without understanding all of the quirks, and then build up to that later.
When you're teaching, you should be enabling the student to do one more thing that they couldn't do before. If you're spending 30+ minutes trying to explain what an object is, you're trying to do way too much. You don't need to have a 100% complete and correct understanding of Javascript's object model to use objects.
> Contrast that with something like Java or even Rust where, despite the other complexities, it's pretty clear what the data is and how it is stored.
That's nonsense. Particularly with Rust, now you're deep in the weeds of pointers, stack vs heap vs other segments, and borrow checking rules.
[1] helped design a JS class at Stanford for first-time programmers. Also designed an intro Rust class.
You have to deal with every idiosyncrasy as soon as you begin using external dependencies (and even many standard browser features), because there is no standard convention at any one time, much less over time. There is no fixed paradigm, no common way of doing things, and so the student must first understand how each library frames the world differently, and then work out how to composite those worlds into anything approaching coherence.
Learning an additional, "learning language", be it a real language like Pascal or an entirely conceptual/theoretical language like pseudocode or flowchart is the only way to become a programmer.
Programming is a very particular and abstract way to look at performing a task and most people need to be eased into it, trained to think like a computer.
This ideea that you can take a shoe salesman, make them "proficient" at JavaScript, and let them loose in the job market is a bit strange. It might work for a very limited number of people with an knack for it, but most people I've seen will approach the task as some sort of incantation of magic formulas that make the computer work. When the complexity of the task exceeds what can be achieved with magic formulas, they give up in frustration.
Yes, javascript has some quirks. But most bootcamps are trying to get their students from "zero to employable developer" in a very short amount of time, and "employable entry-level developer" is almost always synonymous with "employable entry-level web developer". Given that mandate, you basically have to teach people the basics of web applications, which means talking about what happens on the client, which means javascript. And at that point, it's pretty reasonable to not spend your limited time teaching them a whole other language, especially because Node is extremely popular at the kinds of places your students are likely to work.
Also, most languages have quirks. What are you going to teach them? Python, which also has almost 30 years of baggage? Java, which requires you to spend significantly more time to produce basic functionality? Haskell, so they can gloat about the power of purity and monads on Hacker News?
I understand that javascript might not be the ideal intro language in theory. But I think it probably is the best one in the bootcamp specific use case.
Better yet would be Ruby. It's much more beginner friendly and is a thoroughly consistent OO language—i.e., everything is an object, including numbers and strings.
Ruby's also got a much better web dev story, which is good for junior devs (without ML and/or infrastructure backgrounds) who are looking to enter the market. After learning Ruby, either JS or Java could be a great 2nd language.
I certainly don't think Ruby is indefensible. I think it's possible to get a lot done with Ruby, and I think that's very valuable for new developers who need to learn a lot in a very limited amount of time. But I don't think that addresses the elephant in the room: junior web developers have to deal with the frontend, and that means javascript. So why waste (very limited time) teaching them a second language too?
> It's much more beginner friendly and is a thoroughly consistent OO language—i.e., everything is an object, including numbers and strings.
This sort of thing occurs to you and me and makes sense because we have a broader understanding of software engineering. In practice, I just don't think "everything is an object" means much to someone who's a month into a bootcamp.
My perspective comes from having found Ruby a lot easier as a (mostly) beginner after having mostly just used Flash than I found JavaScript 2 years later when I decided to move to the front-end. Since that time, JavaScript has become considerably more complex as new features have been added and its ecosystem has grown.
IMO learning very beginner-friendly language like Ruby to a low-intermediate level first actually speeds up the process of getting to an employable level with a more difficult language like JS.
I drool over the curriculums at bootcamps that use Ruby (like Lambda School and Ironclad). Alas, the one I mentor in does everything in js/react with a little bit of python sprinkled in.
I don't think a bootcamp is going to be able to teach you to be "good at" javascript (or any other language). Think back to when you'd been programming for 1 or 2 months. I'd wager there were lots of things that didn't totally make sense and some magic here and there that you didn't fully understand. It takes time - more time than a bootcamp has - to teach that deeper understanding which allows you to be "good." A bootcamp teaches you to be functional.
I agree with this. It seems like they should start with python or even java to learn the basics in a relatively straightforward environment, but one that also implements a lot of constructs in a fairly standard way. They also both have well-documented and large standard libraries. I feel like they should spend a bit of time on that, and then switch to JS, which is relevant for so many jobs these days.
It's niche, but I really think F# is the best language to learn first. Not all of F#, but the basics of let, records, tuples, recursion... All that's required is FSI (the interactive interpreter). You can even fetch dependencies from Nuget inside a script, so there's less setup than Node or Python.
Learning these esoteric languages seems like the opposite of what you want to do if your goal is to create employable engineers in as little time as possible.
I think intuition suggests that but in practice it would be extremely effective. Almost every student I've encountered ends up doing it the long way anyway when the short way doesn't work for them.
Python and Java are probably just as bad as Javascript. I started with Javascript (and self taught) and never had many issues. Javascript is very easy to get running and play around.
With Java you will spend a huge amount of time on pointless ceremony that can seem important to a beginner but is really pedantic enforcement of programming preferences from the Java designers (everything is a class for example).
With Python you have a pretty easy language but the dependency management situation is a disaster. Python in a Google Colab notebook where everything is pre-installed could be good.
I agree that Java has a lot of silly boilerplate, but I don't see that as a huge hurdle. Most people will use an IDE that populates it for you. Keep in mind this is for a complete beginner.
Dependency management with either Java or Python is PITA IMO, but my idea would be to avoid dependencies during this initial phase of learning the basics.
Python seems to be the goto for intro programming courses at a lot of universities today. I assume that bootcamps are more focused on Javascript because front-end wbdev is probably more marketable than Python in isolation.
Yeah honestly pure Java is a real joy. Other people's Java, and in particular anything involving dependencies is where Java falls apart and becomes ridiculously overly verbose. Too bad people don't write Java like I did in college I guess lol? I really don't get what motivates people to write 30 observer classes, etc. Good Java can be so clean...
Python dependency management is quite adequate for teaching - all you need to know is how to pip-install packages, really. The real headaches don't show up until you have a large app with lots of dependencies.
The other thing about Python is that, because it's already so popular for teaching, it has an ecosystem of tools around that. E.g. it has turtle graphics in the standard library (!), which is a very good way to explain loops, recursion etc for visual learners. There's also IDEs like https://thonny.org/ that visualize program execution step-by-step.
My experience is quite different: I used to love to teach introductory courses using JS. Using an omnipresent and familiar tool like the browser as the IDE and the super-powerful debug system integrated on it is a big plus for newbies.
Also, the language has clear defects, but they irritate much more the experienced folks than the rookies (that are not so surprised when encountering inconsistencies).
Oh, and I have also trained many people using Java, and I initiated my dev career with Java 0.99 (or 0.98?). Most of my courses started with the sentence "let me tell you a joke: public static void main(String[] args)" :)
I tried to teach myself Java 1.1 when I was a preteen and I gave up after not being able to get Hello World to compile. If you actually want to understand the incantation without any programming context, there are so many constructs to unpack in that little program.
They run into enough problems with objectness just learning map / filter / reduce. I've seen so many angry / frustrated students trying to use a for each loop to iterate over an Array only to find that although this works in most languages, in js these just loop over the fucking KEYS of the object (which now opens up the discussion about how `obj[1]` is not a key but `obj['hey']` is a key and the differences therein.
I wonder if there would be a market for a "stricter mode" version of JavaScript that simply does not allow you to use the legacy features that are so quirky.
Eg just disallow for...in to be used at all (but allow for...of)
No iterating over objects except via eg Object.entries
No inheriting objects from other objects (ie no prototypal inheritance)
No var
No anonymous functions (ie only named function declarations or lambda/fat-arrow expressions, to avoid `this` binding gotchas)
Etc
I think the only real big blocker to a thing like this is that it'd need tooling (eg a transpiler that injects error throws at appropriate places), and tooling is another big hairy thing that makes JS less approachable for beginners.
> I wonder if there would be a market for a "stricter mode" version of JavaScript that simply does not allow you to use the legacy features that are so quirky.
It's almost like we could use a better frontend language. Too bad there isn't some magical universal assembly language supported by all major browsers we could use as a launchpad for such a thing ;)
these should be expert mode only features that have to be unlocked as opposed to default. So easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Kinda fun if you've been doing it for a while though.
JavaScript is a totally reasonable first language, considering it's unavoidable in web dev. As a former teacher, I think you might consider the way your own context might color your messaging to your students, and how their context might be completely different. They don't need to understand JavaScript, in all its layers and quirks. They just need to get simple things done to begin to develop an intuition for the platform.
"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)."
I think the bigger issue is with dishonesty in numbers. They're advertising a different set of numbers to students, and it does not seem like they're being very transparent with the process
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.
I very much doubt it's exclusively "natural ability" (whatever that means exactly. I suspect that most people who are really motivated to finish and can set aside the time to do so can get the certificate even if they don't have the whatever to become really good developers.
The whatever you refer to is natural ability. Two people from a bootcamp turning out to be immediately useful developers says more about the people than the bootcamp which is what the original point was about.
Maybe it doesn't apply at the bootcamp level. But there are certainly things I could be very motivated to learn but I'm pretty sure I'd really struggle with serious math/physics even if I put a lot effort in.
> 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.
From what I've seen, I agree about some of the grads being fantastic - the types who could have been extremely successful in a traditional college CS path if they had chosen. However, these are few and far between, the exception to the rule. Most (again, from what I can tell) really struggle, and don't have what it takes to succeed in this field (be it lack of genuine interest, focus, curiosity in technology - whatever). Add to this the fact that every company has had the "only hire the best; hiring is the most important thing in the world" mantra beat into their heads, and suddenly all of these would-be developers are far from employable. I routinely see and hear of entry level dev jobs (at small mediocre tech startups) getting over a thousand applications per role, and they reject all of them.
Some of the grads are fantastic, but not because of bootcamps. They would probably succeed only through self-teaching if they wanted. The school isn't doing them any favors besides adding a little standardized badge on their resume.
I guess traditional colleges are the same way, right? A degree is like an informal union card that says "Hey this person can sit for 4 years and take tests."
For me this was very true, yes. Though a lot of it was just the organizing of curated topics I wouldn't have known to pick up. These days you can get all of that on github though (i.e. the open source computer science education)
> "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.
I don't think I've ever encountered a student lacking the intelligence needed to succeed (I find that to largely be a myth after mentoring hundreds of students... literally anyone can code) -- it's always external factors, like too many jobs, kids, not enough motivation, etc., that get in the way.
I think a lot of complaints would come from students that did succeed, whether by having previous programming experience or having the drive to overcome Lambda's shortcomings.
That's certainly the case for me - I landed a job after Lambda as a backend engineer, and I am/was extremely upset by Lambda's continuous deceptive language and degradation of their program
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.
I will say, the formalism mainly helps to fight off imposter syndrome. I was the same programmer I was before and after my CS degree, the difference being with the degree I had a chip on my shoulder, and that helped significantly.
But you probably need some basic aptitude and you need a huge amount of self-motivation
Could not agree more. When I was 14 years old my friends would go out to the mall to hang out. I would sit at home working on the modem routines for my BBS program.
If I didn't get paid to work in IT, I would be doing it for free.
Or you can just keep making small projects. I got to 100k without a degree this way. I made these projects because I enjoy programming. I can't say any of my learning has been structured.
Even now I'll show off my projects during interviews. The rare times this backfires I know that company would have sucked anyway.
> But you probably need some basic aptitude and you need a huge amount of self-motivation.
You need this to be successful at anything. My cynical take is most people aren't, and see programing as some get rich quick scheme. If they did have these qualities they for the most part would already be successful
> 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?
It's much worse, though. If you fail out of college, you can still transfer many of your credits years later to another institution, and simply having "some college" on your resume is enough to get your foot in the door at a lot of places. Having "some bootcamp" is not going to have the same effect (in some cases some college plays better than having graduated from a bootcamp, even), plus the debt you have is not subsidized by the federal government in any way.
"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?
Because they have minimal admissions filter and constantly tell students not to give up, to fight imposter syndrome, student testimonials, "this is the toughest thing you'll ever do but it's so worth it."
College is gated by GPA and standardized test scores. You can quibble over the effectiveness and wisdom of this specific gate, but the upside is that mediocre students aren't going to spend a year and $30,000 convincing themselves they're going to major in CS at MIT. At Lambda, students quit their jobs, and take months out of their lives, only to find out 4 months later that programming isn't for them.
It almost seems as if there should be a book or a website the gist of which is: "If you can't and don't want to plug through the concepts and problems here, you're wasting your money to go to a bootcamp."
Heck, there are "intro" (OK, some of them aren't really) MOOC classes that, while more theoretical in some cases, should give you a pretty good idea if this is something you're really willing to devote a lot of time and money to.
> College is gated by GPA and standardized test scores
I recently learned this is increasingly no longer true. Many top institutions have made standardized test scores optional in recent years, and we're a few years away from it becoming normal to not even take the SATs and get into multiple ivy league schools as a top student.
> 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?
because this is the standard they advertise to and represent as the capability of their learning platform and their teachers?
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.
It is often worth it in the short term to trick sources. But it has consequences for the individual doing the tricking, over the long term. And it has negative externalities for reporters as a whole. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but it's a decision that comes with a tradeoff.
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).
>However in the strict sense of math, there is a requirement there.
As someone who tutored first year MBAs at one point...
My observation in general was that most people could at least muddle through most classes, even if they were at best mediocre students. But some subset of students pretty much froze at anything beyond the most basic arithmetic--and then probably only because they had calculators.
Whether you call it aptitude or just a phobia about math, it's there.
I even had project groups of generally strong students. But, still, as soon as things got into more complicated spreadsheets, operations research sort of topics, etc., I usually ended up doing more than my share.
Over the years there have been a number of "My first year at business school" sort of books and the common theme in all of them I think is "It was the math that got me."
I always find it funny that MBAs struggle with math and that so many MBAs aren't actually that good at excel. It seems like it is a core tenant of success of the program. I fully understand that business isn't strictly math and there are so many other dimensions of importance. However in its purest form, it is mathematical.
Then again I guess you could always buy talent to shore up your insecurities.
Expert Excel proficiency is mostly useful in data heavy roles such as finance, which is just one subset of MBAs. For other roles, it's useful to be able to calculate simple sums/averages/vlookups but going beyond that is outside of their required skillset
I've done big spreadsheets over the years in product management and other roles. But they've never been especially complicated--certainly not in the stereotypical complex models sense.
Honestly, anyone who goes into the corporate world and, outside of pure creative roles, thinks they never will have to deal with big spreadsheets associated with budgets, sales forecasts, and the like is going to be very disappointed. But that doesn't mean most people need to deal with anything that's complex mathematically.
No but they do need to be able to be comfortable with mathematics and need to be able to make sure their models are correct. Which I would argue is not always the case.
This is a fascinating take. I consider all the advanced math that is needed for a CS degree unnecessary gate keeping. I took several years of calculus to graduate, and while I still grok the concepts somewhat, I by no means mastered any of it.
I don't think knowing any specific mathematics is necessary for CS, but having the capacity to learn mathematics is, and most people who have that capacity end up with a degree somewhere in the science umbrella. You don't need calculus specifically, but you need the ability to abstract, to form rules and express precisely where they apply and where they do not.
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.
Wish someone told me before I got $300,000 into debt that my liberal arts degree wasn't going to help me get employment. My university was certainly not up front about that. And if they had been honest about the fact that the degree was worth fuckall in the job market I would have not wasted my money there.
I definitely agree, I do think uni degrees are severely over priced and don’t prepare people for jobs as much as people think. I have an oceanography degree that just collects dust in my parent’s attic.
But that in itself doesn’t mean what Lambda did was any better. If anything, they both need serious reforms.
Bankruptcy law should somehow apply to school loans after 7 years. Bankruptcy puts some of the onus of bad, ill-advised loans on the lender. Bankrupcy law partially aligns lender goals with borrower goals, as they then have a vested interest in your success.
The only people to who can afford to go to school to broaden their education without a clear job benefit are those born rich. In other words, the people who used to go to college pre 1970s.
> The only people to who can afford to go to school to broaden their education without a clear job benefit are those born rich.
I respectfully disagree.
I've spent an enormous amount of time inside universities (as both a student and employed as an engineer). The vast majority of students have no clear job benefit at the end of their degree.
Most students are studying something with no obvious job correlation. The largest schools at most second/third rung universities in the western world are humanities (which I'm not knocking, but the employment rate for these degrees into related roles is abysmal).
Honestly, it's really sad to see. I've spoken with countless third year humanities/law students that are completely lost and have no idea what to do as graduation approaches (about 20% of law graduates at my last uni went on to practice law). Oh, and they're crippled with debt (in both Australia and the US).
In my experience, the worse off the student, the more likely they were to study something with poor career outcomes (one of the worst offenders was the bachelor of business, which was a popular choice for students hoping to escape the lower/middle class but had atrocious outcomes). I chalked this up to fewer educated role models when they were growing up.
HN is fairly skewed towards tech. The tech-related courses (CS, EE, etc) have great employment prospects, but they're the outlier.
> Honestly, it's really sad to see. I've spoken with countless third year humanities/law students that are completely lost and have no idea what to do as graduation approaches (about 20% of law graduates at my last uni went on to practice law). Oh, and they're crippled with debt (in both Australia and the US).
> In my experience, the worse off the student, the more likely they were to study something with poor career outcomes (one of the worst offenders was the bachelor of business, which was a popular choice for students hoping to escape the lower/middle class but had atrocious outcomes). I chalked this up to fewer educated role models when they were growing up.
Grandparent said these people can't afford to go to school; I don't think what you've said contradicts that.
I think we completely agree. Unless you have a clear job benefit (like studying CS) you should only go to college unless you're already rich and it doesn't matter.
Respectfully, this is nonsense. Employers still very much prefer people with college degrees for many roles, even if the degree itself isn’t 100% relevant to the job.
A four year degree is better than nothing. But its much worse than a few years work experience in your career field.
Obviously there's a huge exception for technical college degrees like CS, science, etc which are worth a ton. This applies to degrees in business, liberal arts, etc.
Sure there are rich people that go to school for shits and giggles.
But “job benefit” isn’t exactly the same as “job placement”. I went back to school for improve my own CS fundamentals but not to immediately get a job. And many people do the same (go back to school for a promotion or for a raise).
And since those people exist, comparing job placement rates won’t tell you much since the data isn’t comparable.
Are you talking about just people in the CS program or all university programs? My first pass through college was in oceanography and I definitely didn't treat it as a bootcamp. I had no idea what my job prospects would be like after graduation. I just knew I liked the ocean.
In terms of CS, I'm sure most of them are going for a job. But the fact that those who aren't isn't 0%, it makes it difficult to compare.
Also, the reasons for people not graduating college and not graduating from a 3-6 month bootcamp will likely differ as well. 4 years is a long time. There are many reasons why someone might drop out. So again, comparing graduation rates and job placement rates between uni and bootcamp won't really tell you much useful data, especially if you're trying to compare which one prepares students better.
And just to be clear, I'm not saying Uni is better or defending it. I have my own with college [1]. But I see too many people trying to deflect criticism from bootcamps when those criticisms are very well justified.
> But the fact that those who aren't isn't 0%, it makes it difficult to compare.
It is irrelevant for the other 99%, so it doesn’t make it any harder to compare it.
> Also, the reasons for people not graduating college and not graduating from a 3-6 month bootcamp will likely differ as well. 4 years is a long time. >There are many reasons why someone might drop out. So again, comparing graduation rates and job placement rates between uni and bootcamp won't really tell you much useful data, especially if you're trying to compare which one prepares students better.
Sure, the comparison shouldn’t be that simplistic.
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.
I'm sympathetic to that kind of view, but it's not quite as simple as that. It's legal to ask job applicants for their SAT scores (which are directly comparable to IQ tests), but most employers don't.
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 think you would probably need to sell a "first look" privilege to prospective employers. The program at UT required volunteers from various administrative departments to spend time supporting it, and the primary reason they did so was to get a peek at who they wanted to hire, ahead of competition (from other departments). Of course, this would only work in times of labor shortage for good programmers, but that is most of the time.
No, it's for people who are legal to work for UT, in fact. While in the program, you are an employee (albeit with a lower salary than after you complete it). They ask that you commit to working for UT for 3 years at least. It's meant to fill UT's need for developers for their administrative systems.
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).
I loved electronics and had self taught myself before Uni, but the university material was mostly theory and maths, and I was put off the career for life. (Note: I had no trouble with the mathematics).
Other negative values:
Much of what was taught was useless knowledge. Some of it was harmful (the pet theories of wacko lecturers).
Anything useful was still rote learning with zero reality.
It is all channeled towards exams of well defined problems with correct answers - harmful at the meta level.
Note that Canterbury University engineering school is well respected in New Zealand.
I happily believed in the schooling system for the first two years (a simple continuation of high school), but the final year of uni then became an insane grind after I realised how pointless the material was (I am more academically inclined, so it took me a while to learn my stupidity). I still wanted to finish the degree - possibly due to sunk cost fallacy - although the piece of paper got me my first software job.
Opportunity cost of 3 years of life is insanely huge (I didn’t really get anything long term out of university socially: the first two years were fun at the time). It is normally a four year degree, but I skipped the first year (no academic consequences, although the decision probably had social repercussions due to my young age compared with majority of classmates).
I sadly still see the same issues happen with university these days: I have seen a nurse (University degree) and a early childhood teacher (University degree) get “taught” the most insane useless shit. The degrees cost years of life, lots of money, and a heavy cost to their egos (it is an extremely evil system at times: compulsory arselicking etcetera).
I'm also a kiwi, also went to UC and also did engineering (Mech) :). I dropped out though.
The rote learning and pointlessness of the material were the biggest things I hated as well. 3 years is definitely a long time. Though something I realized after I left uni is that the value doesn't come from the education really, it comes from all the events and opportunities the uni affords you access to and the social component.
> It is all channeled towards exams of well defined problems with correct answers - harmful at the meta level
Absolutely agree with this as well. I can see why you thought uni had negative value. I think it destroys the skills you need to tackle real-world problems, which is why new grads tend to be seen as useless.
It's really curious to see someone else with a similar POV. I haven't met many people in NZ who think like this, or at least they haven't admitted it to me.
My guess is that when you have a degree you're more likely to want to believe it was worth it, whereas I have no such qualms. Though in saying that my best friend who also did eng said he thought the degree was pointless.
Certainly other graduates from my year have said they thought it was worthwhile - but I always wondered whether their opinion is rooted in sunk cost psychology.
I know two fantastic makers that have no higher education, yet they should have been mechanical engineers due to their skills. One was dyslexic, and both would not handle the academic structure, yet it was a waste to see that their talents were never used properly.
Mechanical engineering seems like a dark art to me!
I hope that you found a niche…
I wish I had been smart enough to quit my degree early. Some of the most savvy people I know well, quit school early because it was constricting them.
I was lucky to fall into software which is really easy and financially it has been astonishing. Apple ][ at school and home, writing 6502 assembler as a teenager, helped immensely.
Students graded students papers.
Racism.
Unending trolling on Slack.
Peers panicking as they realize the program was not "finished". (ie: We were paying beta testers)
Being roped in to the web dev program when I didn't want to be a dev (This happened after the UX program was shut down).
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 think Lambda is an unusually bad bootcamp owing to their financialization strategy and also lack of prior educational experience in their leadership. I think there are good bootcamps, but the well is being poisoned a bit here.
Wouldn't Caleb Hicks, one of their founders, qualify as having education experience? https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebhicks/ -- I mean, it looks mostly like biz/corporate education stuff, and dev training experience seems to be narrowly focused but I guess it's not nothing.
I've been following these stories for a while and it seems like a lot of the big players are ridiculously predatory and are providing a catastrophically bad service. I'd like to ask if there are any that you think are actually doing a good job?
One in particular I'm curious about is Hackbright.
I think Hackbright is doing well, enough so that I recommended that a friend attend recently (and she did). I would look closely at the reporting from each, and interview former students. I think prospective students go along too easily with marketing. A friend and former bootcamp operator told me that students ought to think of picking a school much more like buying a house than picking the best air purifier off of Wirecutter or whatever. I think this is true.
I saw a really silly tweet one of their former execs made and then just started gathering information about them for fun. I tried to get a friend who was a writer to do the story, but she eventually told me to fuck off and do it myself. It took a little bit of convincing myself that such a thing it was possible, but it was a very enjoyable journey.
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!
> How are you supposed to learn from someone who's never executed in the real world is beyond me.
As the old saw says, those who can do, those can't teach. And this is sadly particularly prevalent in IT, because a competent SWE will make a lot more grinding out code at a FAANG than teaching at a boot camp.
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 graduated from a bootcamp 7 years ago and even back then it was becoming clear that despite admissions clear preference for people that would be successful regardless, there were those in the group that would struggle to find work.
A large portion of my cohort came from top tier universities and a good chunk of them with degrees in Engineering, CS, or Math. Those folks did well and found jobs relatively easily. Career switching folks that had tech exposure through product or UX experience also did well. Folks that struggled a bit seemed to come from good but not great schools and with a major/work experience in a non-technical field.
Working together day to day I started getting this impression and then I saw it play out in hiring. The top tier folks either got jobs almost immediately or held out a few months to land at a FAANG type company. The middle of the pack seemed to find jobs at around the 3 month mark and the bottom group took as long as 6 months.
There isn't this huge pool of students from very good schools with technical degrees that allows these camps to scale up their enrollment while maintaining their initial success
I've interviewed a few candidates in a similar situation to your partner. My impression is that the bootcamps had very little to do with their success. I would put it more down to personal drive and possibly the programming STEM grads tend to get exposed to.
It's interesting that you call this having "very little to do with" the success. It's a philosophical argument, I guess. If there's boulder at the top of a hill and I give it a little nudge so it rolls all the way to the bottom - did I have very little to do with the boulder rolling down, since gravity did most of the work? Or did I play the most important role?
Even if it's true that selection bias is huge and the best qualified people going into a bootcamp are the best performers coming out, that doesn't necessarily mean the bootcamp wasn't useful. These people could have otherwise gone their whole lives always being one small nudge away from becoming a great programmer, but would have never realized it without the right conditions. If a bootcamp simply creates those conditions for them to make it happen for themselves, that still seems important.
Right, I agree. I think that's the problem. Misattributing initial successes to the program, and not the people you filtered in, meant it became progressively harder to achieve the same placement rates year over year.
I imagine the above coupled with investor pressure and your own hype / marketing makes for a situation like Lambda School.
This was for an intern program we run for individuals with non-traditional backgrounds (self taught, degrees in non-CS subjects etc), so I don't imagine it having much impact. We were looking primarily at the coding test and the candidate's Github profile.
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.
not weird at all if you know Jason's style. he is very biased towards supporting founders as that is his business. he's not there to be neutral. and i believe he's had some bad runs with some journos.
but once they're a clear fraud i expect (hope?) Jason to concede completely.
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.
> The problem with any education is how do you figure out the actual value added?
Answer: with a randomised controlled trial. That is, the school randomly rejects a number of applicants who meet the enrolment criteria, then it follows up after 5 years to see if the accepted students are significantly better off than the rejected candidates (eg. in terms of income).
Austen Allred, the CEO of Lambda School, has already floated such an idea: "I’d love to eventually do an impact study that statistically shows how much more attendees of Lambda School make over the course of their lifetimes." https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1433260773040693257
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.
> one single thing that makes traditional university education succesful is aptitude and drive.
I think it's more accurate to say that high ranked universities try to pick people who will succeed. That can be through intelligence and drive but it can also be through the backing of an ultra-rich relative (if someone will buy the school a building to get you into your college of choice you're probably going to do fine professionally).
That aside, I think your point is largely correct. I know someone founded one of the older bootcamps and in the early days it was fairly easy to choose only smart people, often with degrees from top schools ironically. Paired with the dearth of junior candidates job placement was 99% and pretty easy.
Acceptance standards have had to drop dramatically as the number of bootcamps has increased and the backlog of smart people who'd always wanted to get into tech has been wiped out.
> 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.
It's worth noting that Lamda school actually does use an industry-standard "IQ test" [0], although it seems the cutoff is quite low (23 out of 50 whereas the median score according to Criteria Corp is 24).
Bootcamp grads (every one I've ever met) are often highly motivated and good autodidacts. Perhaps the incentive structure of something like Galvanize (née Hack Reactor) are better for weeding out the low performers -- you don't make it through those programs by not working 12h days/6.5 days/week.
I can't speak to the quality of the people who are attending these bootcamp programs (I wouldn't at all be surprised that most of them aren't "successful" for a variety of reasons) but as far as traditional university education being "successful", there are tons of university graduates who have little to show for it except a piece of paper and a load of student debt. A lot of kids today go to university because they're told it's what they're supposed to do, and coming out of it with a degree doesn't require nearly as much as it used to.
I agree with what you're saying. Traditional education is ripe for disruption, but this is clearly not the model that will do that. I imagine that there are high quality students that come out of this bootcamps but how consistently can they produce a good outcome for both the students and the prospective employers?
I think the tech industry needs to realize that their talent needs can't be solved this way. We need a more proactive and consistent system to identify potential and educate students. I think VC money creates incentives that impact quality, so for starters we should be thinking of these businesses as real non-profit organizations. Not wannabe mega tech corps.
I honestly think these things are somewhat overrated. If you want to work at Google right out of school, maybe they matter more (particularly credentialism.) But I got my first three tech jobs simply by applying on the website, including one at a well-regarded startup. I don't have a CS degree, didn't have connections, and have never networked in my life.
I think what actually mattered was laddering up from a sorta-crappy place to a less-crappy place to an actually-good place, and consciously filling in gaps in my skills, especially those relevant for interviewing. When I interviewed at the well-regarded startup, for some reason someone asked me to implement merge sort (lol!) Well, fortunately I had skimmed the algorithm on the plane over, on the off chance someone asked me.
I could definitely get an interview at a FAANG at this point, because their recruiters reach out to me. As to whether I could get the job, I think it would mostly depend on my luck, skills, and preparation.
yeah but you found your way out via tech, which is a very exceptional case (I did the same thing, after spending almost two decades not-in-tech). And anyways GP said:
> one single thing that makes traditional university education successful
Probably is "external credentialism", if there were a single thing. Think of the largest employer in the US (federal government). Credentials are CRAZY important for positions in that org.
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 we judged colleges by the same standards, I doubt they'd come off better. Normal colleges are fishing expeditions to land as many students as possible for as cheaply as possible and burden students with inescapable debt. Students have to pay even if they don't graduate or get a good job. 4-year graduation rates are below 50%. After 6 years, only 62% of college students have gotten a 4-year degree. The rest are stuck with debt that not even bankruptcy can forgive.
I don't know much about Lambda School, but my guess is that it does what colleges do, but faster and with incentives better aligned. College is more about distinguishing people than training them. (If education is actually about training, then why is >60% of the wage benefit of education from the credential rather than the years or credits earned?[1]) Someone with a college degree has shown they are reasonably intelligent and can obey instructions to complete boring tasks over long periods of time. This means they're probably a useful employee. I think Lambda School (and similar outfits) distinguish people more quickly than college and try to train them better.
To give people some idea of how bad education is: I learned computer science at an ABET-accredited college. The vast majority of the career skills I developed were from learning on my own, not from my coursework. Nowhere in my classes was there any discussion of source control. I had to teach my classmates how to use Subversion.
So often we forget that almost all education is terrible. We're only jarred out of status quo bias when a new type of school comes along.
Source control is not in the domain of computer science. You're thinking of software engineering. Many CS grads become software engineers (myself included) and we apply the concepts that we learn from CS in our jobs.
CS teaches us:
- How computers work (assembly, compilers)
- Logic and math (automata theory, set theory, numerical analysis)
- How to make computers do what we want (algorithms, data structures, performance)
If they taught you how to use subversion, that data might be useless by the time you graduate. Hopefully, the other stuff they taught you will make you able to better understand source control.
> Source control is not in the domain of computer science.
Yep. Its not.
And the fact that modern day computer science institutions do not teach it, is a huge failing on the part of these programs, and is something that they should be strongly criticized for.
People go in to CS programs, believing that they are going to be taught basic skills like that, and they are tricked by these unstated lies.
But, if we really want to keep with this "cs"/software engineer distinction, then fine. Lets stop lying to students, and lets, as a society, attempt to convince people to go into software engineering more, because that is what most of these students actually want.
And lets relegate "computer science" to a much less prestigious, and much more "esoteric" field of study, that is looked down upon, in comparison to what students actually want, which is to learn software engineering.
But, unfortunately, modern day "computer science" is currently held up as the "prestigious" field of study, when it actually does not deserve that prestige. It deserves the ridicule, that modern day academics currently put on "software engineering" or "information systems", that are currently looked down upon as the fields of study that people go into, if they can't hack it in CS.
> we apply the concepts that we learn from CS in our jobs.
> that data might be useless by the time you graduate.
I am not sure where this myth comes from, that software engineering is just about some specific language, or tool.
Learning about the "concepts" of source control, or documentation, or working with a team, or writing readable code, or designing good APIs, are things that have little to do with CS, but goes beyond just "learn this specific tool".
Algorithms, and math, while can sometimes be useful, are still only one very small part of what it means to be a software engineer.
I agree that colleges suffer from the same perverse incentives. That is why transparency in outcomes reporting is so important, and why fraudulent reporting is so dangerous.
edit: oh, you're geoff greer. I emailed you a couple times about floobits when I was still running coderpad
> 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%.
Having majored in English Literature at an Ivy, let me just say, 30% is a pretty damn good industry placement rate. That said, I'm sure the large majority of those people could have done just as well through self-study and $1-2k worth of MOOCs
It's an interesting point, not just the placement rate but the graduation rate for medical schools is very high (barring a few last-chance, offshore type places if I understand correctly).
I never did it but have watched the process from a few different viewpoints. My impression is that the gatekeeping on the entry side is pretty strong (not just exam results, good schools may have multiple interviews before letting you in) but they also have ton of resources available to help you if you are bogged down. This latter part is helped by high tuition.
As for the vetting, as far as I can see they are fine with a bunch of false negatives, which results in more homogeneity than may be desired. It doesn't seem to be particularly empirical.
I think placements rates are just a way to game data. I'm imagining two schools, one that accepts everyone that applies, and one that filters the bottom half out before acceptance. After graduation, the first school has a 50% placement rate, and the second has a 100%. Which one is better?
Sure we can all pretend that "everyone can do it" but... everyone can't. Placement rates as a metric are just deciding when to filter the low performers out.
Most CS programs do not have 99% placement. There are a few reasons
1. Some people who graduate with CS degrees can't write good code. It is shocking how little you can learn while still graduating.
2. Some college graduates are lack the social/organizational skills for office work
3. Industry has a limited appetite for junior engineers because they're often a net drain on the company for the first 6-12 months and once they become productive can usually get a pay bump by switching jobs.
Many new grads have exaggerated expectations and refuse to consider or accept "lower" than working in big tech.
Related to this, there are also the new grads that have some extremely niche role that they want to fill. I recall from a bit ago a new grad on reddit that wanted to do machine learning to save the whales while traveling on a research ship. Coming to the realization that most jobs aren't in the "safe the world" category was something of a shock / disillusionment for them.
At least traditionally, many new grads have refused to consider other geographic areas. The "I want to do software development, but I am not willing to move out of {local area}." Some of this may be changing with remote jobs being more feasible - though there may still be restrictions on "you must reside within {some state} to qualify for WFH". This may be changing a bit, for some companies... but I still suspect that some companies are still going to require a "you may need to come into the office occasionally with a 24h notice."
To point 3, even with the "they are a net drain and they job hop soon" there's also the "we need to add more capacity in the mid and senior levels before we add additional juniors to these teams." There are a lot of places where it's "here's a new junior, there's the code - go for it" because the mid and senior devs don't have the capacity to mentor them.
I also suspect there is a common thought process of new grads that the quantity of applications is more important than the quality of the application -- sending out hundreds of applications even if there significant mismatches between the resume and the job posting that could be trivially corrected.
> I also suspect there is a common thought process of new grads that the quantity of applications is more important than the quality of the application -- sending out hundreds of applications even if there significant mismatches between the resume and the job posting that could be trivially corrected.
In fairness to new grads, the minimum requirements on job posting are often wildly out of line with what the job requires and what the employer will accept. I still meet plenty of junior engineers getting their first gig by applying to jobs that say 2+ years of experience when they have 0.
The 99% placement of medical schools is not a "troll", no. There is no reason it could not apply to CS.
Also note that most of the points made in contention would apply just as well to medical schools and medical school graduates. For instance, there are plenty of unsocialized medical school graduates - they are still called doctors. But if they studied STEM, they're supposedly "too bad to deserve a job". Weird.
I'm leaning more towards there being an oversupply of STEM graduates.
I'd flip that around: there's a huge undersupply of medicine graduates, because the medical establishment very deliberately limits the number of students who are accepted. And while that does ensure that it's very easy for a doctor to find work, there are huge costs - huge competition for admissions, excessive working hours (with correspondingly high rates of burnout and suicide), routine interpersonal toxicity, spiralling prices for medical care that damage the rest of society.
It's not just lambda. There's another bootcamp, lets call it crap college, which effectively asks their ~~customers~~, sorry, _students_ to work 10+ hours a day 6-7 days a week for months.
If you fail or withdraw, you have to pay back prorated tuition at the rate of several hundred dollars per day you were there. There is no grace period, if you get three days in and decide it's not for you then you owe them almost a thousand dollars.
Ever worse: their instructional material is very much lacking rigor, the degree of guidance they provide is far lower than you'd get at a community college (which would also be a lot cheaper), and the whole vibe of the community borders on cult-like toxic positivity (any criticism of the company will get you kicked out).
It's very close to predatory. They lure in disadvantaged people with promises of vastly improving their lives, but I'm betting a substantial percentage of them leave with thousands in debt and virtually nothing to show for it. And the best part? If you're dismissed or withdraw that nice easy-to-pay income share agreement goes away and you just owe them thousands effective immediately regardless of your financial situation.
It's not, I just don't want to name them for reasons that should be obvious. There may or may not be enough info in my post to figure out what I'm talking about, you'll have to use your best judgement.
I was at Lambda, graduated, got a job, and have been working since. Interesting to see I'm in the minority. I watched a lot of change happen. The classes ballooned in size, they kept rearranging the curriculum. At one point the curriculum (broken into thirds) had the 2nd and 3rd bits flipped. Then a forth bit was added on. I actually agreed with that change, as it the extra 3 months that were added on were just about finding a job, a task students were silently doing anyway.
Did the TL/PM/TA thing for a bit too. There were clearly people in it that were struggling. They started to have the ability to drop backwards a single week of course. That decision was reversed as it was kind of crazy to have people in between cohorts.
By the time I was done I don't think the UI program had anyone graduate from it. I was interviewed by lawyer at one point who was working on behalf of someone in that program. I am unsure of the quality of the program but it doesn't seem good.
Most of the people I saw who were doing well were going faster then the curriculum. The alumni program was sorta hard to keep track of after the slacks split, a lot of people never made the transition.
I know a lot of people who were successful after bootcamps, Lambda and otherwise. That may just be survivorship bias. I think one of the things that may also influence is when you went into the program. If you were going because you heard about it on hackernews when it was brand new, it was a different experience then when you had people coming in from everywhere.
I have worked at many bootcamp-style educational programs.
Teaching in a bootcamp-style environment is a team endeavor. Recent graduates can be a part of that mix.
Generally, it makes sense to hire some of the instructor pool out of recent graduates. It is often difficult to find instructors at all. The recent graduates know the curriculum. It also helps those recent graduates develop a deeper understanding of the material and extend their job searching window. It can be a form of peer learning that some students respond well to.
There are also definite limitations. Primarily, the recent graduates might not have great teaching skills, knowledge outside of the curriculum, and knowledge of real-world applications.
I get the impression that the business model for these bootcamps is largely the modeled after the one used in startup funding, where the bulk of the money will be made on the top 5-10% of the class.
There's also likely some element of grabbing mind-share while they work to automate the process (plus, gathering data on who make profitable students). Eliminating the instructor will allow N to grow much higher than 150 per course and reduce costs dramatically.
I wonder why? I learned most of what I learned in university from student group, and sophomores teach freshmen there. I learned as a freshman and taught as a sophomore. It is normal.
The methodology they use to calculate the placement rate is clearly misleading, and given that methodology, the 2019 placement numbers are rather mediocre. They shouldn’t be tricking students into making major life decisions based on misleading statistics.
On the other hand, some of the arguments in the article are silly. Tech companies drastically cut back on entry level hiring in 2020, and when this happens the non conventional pipelines tend to be the first to go. I wouldn’t extrapolate out this decline as a permanent issue beyond the pandemic. Additionally, the article expresses skepticism that expanding student enrollment at the expense of placement would hamper profitability - common sense is that there will be some variable costs that scale proportionally with student enrollment, and as such the path to profitability would be to improve placement rates. Perhaps most egregiously, the article talks about the high opportunity cost for students investing 9-12 months in lambda school and the immediately after that switches to attacking lambda school for shortening its class lengths. A curious juxtaposition. Frankly, this is a good example of incentive alignment.
Finally, there is the ridiculousness of the graduate at the end who doesn’t want to find a designer job because that would entail making income share payments. Not only is that cutting off your nose to spite your face, but it’s rather odd to feel you didn’t get your money’s worth from a service operating at a significant loss. I guess taxpayer funded K-12 and community college education has made a lot of people accustomed to being insulated from the true cost of education.
FWIW, I greatly appreciate when founders go to these lengths but this happens over and over again. It does not feel significant anymore and rings hollow.
Similar experience with college degree program. Was being taught table layout in web course up to and beyond 2012. The key learnings needed to be employable were really discovered in work internship and through trial and error.
I'm curious about the future of Lambda School. Apparently, the co-founders have been lying about the numbers for years like there's no tomorrow, but the money still came in.
It's pretty clear that the business is not sustainable nor does it have much hope of becoming profitable even in the short term.In addition, the school's reputation is tarnishing, and there have also been a few clashes with the institutions that must provide the certifications necessary for the school to operate.
The co-founders, particularly Allred, between the constant lies, problems with reporters, and personalities that many psychiatrists would call delusional do not bode well.Even the casual observer would easily notice his bizarre statements, the furious backpedaling observed over and over, the constant distractions that can be inferred from his almost pathological tweeting about anything but what concerns his position as CEO of a company that is making promises to people who are often in need.
You could say that these visionary leaders are what is needed to disrupt entrenched industries, and that the fight with the authorities are the result of the status quo trying to hold the line, and that some lies are nothing more than making the future, present. I just don't see it for Lambda School.
Yeah, this has been one of the most disappointing things for me. No way his shtick has fooled all of them.
Pg in particular I would've expected more rigor from, but maybe that's naivete, or the inevitable awkwardness that comes from him living both in the world of high epistemic standards (his essays) and zero epistemic standards with rampant dishonesty (startup/VC culture). To me, the latter undermines the former, but I also am not a rich thought leader.
In my very honest opinion, pg's essays, with some brilliant exceptions, are at the level of analysis that would be considered exceptional for a middle school student, average for a high school student, and "why are you wasting my time with platitudes" for a grad student.
But when I published my essays, I have 5 readers including my mother, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Funny how the pg was rooting for him by calling Allred "relentlessly resourceful" while it was clear even to naive ears and eyes that it was the lies that were relentless and the resources were mostly talking a great game, but with no results to back it up.
I've been coding since I was a wee bairn (well, 21, really). I was introduced to programming, in 1982-3, during a tech school course. I don't really consider the Heathkit calculator I built and programmed in the 1970s to be "real" programming.
Mostly self-taught. I'm smarter than the average bear, and pick things up, fairly well, but I've also taken somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 bootcamps, seminars, and college classes.
Not one single one of them (after my tech school, which was actually quite vocationally-based) was particularly useful for immediate use in the real world. I think one or two of the project management ones were in the same zip code, and the Apple DU (dating myself) courses were relatively practical, but they were all "training wheels" classes.
What has been my real education, has been writing code to ship. Everything I write, I write as "ship" code. Even my "throwaway" projects and experiments.
Having a clear end goal, and becoming habituated to finishing all my work, has been incredibly valuable. Solving my own problems, doing my own research, not "kicking the can down the road," and releasing with full tests, documentation, and support, have been great teachers.
People seem to like the work I do.
Bootcamps are nice, but they only light the fuse.
I don't think I was ever qualified to write ship code after any one of my classes. In many cases, I already knew how to ship, and just wanted to learn about different directions. In the last year or so, I've taken a whole bunch of short courses on new Apple tech. I probably won't use what I learned for months, but I like to keep the axle greased.
It's been my experience that there is knowledge that can only be taught in high school for some subjects. Not because the information is inherently specific to high schoolers but because high school is the only place that allows for the leisurely-enough pace to teach the knowledge.
For example, I learned Pascal as a first language. Outside of high school, no one has the time to learn a dead language for the few cool ideas it has but in high school, it provides indispensable background for a lot of concepts that come later (e.g. BEGIN/END being written out to teach you how much that sucks so that you understand why we use {} in every other language, the := operator making far more sense than the = operator, and other little tidbits).
The same logic applies (for me) to Latin, cooking classes, and Calculus. Ironically, I find that music classes have become so subsumed by the struggle to justify their funding that HS music brushes off non-essential skills just as shamelessly as university music does.
Lots of problems with Lambda, especially the way they teach.
I learned a lot. Faster and better than I could on my own. I only stopped because I fell very ill.
Better than college.
If Austen was more truthful and transparent and moved a little slower, they'd be number one in the space. But you can't move quick when taking people's lives and time. They're not as flexible as software.
This is exactly why I started building https://qvault.io over a year ago. Boot camps are full of shit, they aren't teaching all they need to. We need an alternative to college that isn't expensive and based on exaggerations and lies.
If you have been remotely involved in mentoring aspiring engineers, and especially if you did it at the nonprofit level, the data and student feedback out of lambda was looking obviously bad as of 1-2 years ago. If you threw a test rock into a alumni or currently attending code school student forum, bad lambda stories always came up.
What’s so distasteful about this is a lot of the code school community closed ranks around Lambda, refused to acknowledge really absurd student experiences and bad employment rates, and at worst still partnered with it. My guess is this is because admitting a place as polished as Lambda had a problem leads to questions about other schools out there.
When you top it off with the insane ISAs Lambda wanted, that school and its defenders put themselves in an extremely ethically dubious position.
I'm a Lambda School data science graduate that's currently looking for a job, have been doing plenty of leetcode problems and DS&A studying recently. Resume & contact info is available on my profile if your company has any openings or if you just want to chat.
I liked this article a lot because it provided many perspectives. So here's mine, as a Lambda grad. Mileage may vary.
For smart poor folks, Lambda School is a pure good.
I come from a blue collar background, I have no college or university degree, and enough debt to make liberal arts student blush. Before Lambda I was able to slowly chip away at that debt by working outside from the literal dawn to dusk, Monday through Saturday, rain, shine, snow. This was horrible both for my body and my family. We decided to try Lambda and it worked. I'm gainfully employed as a developer for a large company, we have health insurance, and I have double digit hours to spend with my family. Sounds like a fairy tale straight outta Austen's book I know. But I tell you this as background, not as the reason why Lambda's good.
The reason I was willing to take the risk at all is because of the ISA. There is no way under my previous circumstances I would have done anything like taking 9 months of work to study without a walk away free card. Before attending Lambda I read every bad review I could find, parsed the complaints, cross-referenced the news articles and comments, and decided "good enough". Worst case scenario I'd waste a few months learning enough to play around with and go back to back breaking labor. Debt-free. But what about being owing them money for a dev career that they didn't deliver?
If I had a dev career, Lambda earned my money, because I sure didn't have one before. Your case may be very different, if you're a great auto-didact, forget Lambda, you can do anything you set your mind to all alone and with full freedom. But I'm not. I know I procrastinate, I can get demotivated, I can get sidetracked, I overplan, I underplan. So I chose Lambda, let them handle the schedule, the planning, and the social proof. More importantly, there was only upside. Of course if someone is already highly compentent dev, Lambda makes no sense, at least not as currently structured. But even a competent dev could benefit from the career services, I certainly did.
Lambda has plenty of room to improve, but as a safeish ladder out of lower income drudgery and into skilled modern work it's good enough.
Having worked in a similar space/company, there are a few fundamental flaws in the business model that make me very bearish on companies like Lambda:
1/ Taking VC money requires hyper growth. That’s fine if your product is software where the marginal product gets better over time. In their model, you get the early adopter students, who are talented/motivated and juice up the placement stats. But after some critical mass, the marginal student is not as talented or as motivated. It pushes the company to lower its bar and erodes the overall experience for everyone. Same thing happened to General Assembly.
2/ Iterating your business model and making tweaks to the product is fine when you’re dealing with software. It doesn’t go well when you’re dealing with students. People inherently don’t like change. They have feelings and don’t like being lied to. Sure, some people will drink the typical rah-rah startup Koolaid, but over time, most people will see right through it and will assume that management is either incompetent or lying (or both). It’s especially bad when companies use the “do things that don’t scale” PG motto. That’s fine in software but in education you die through death by a thousand cuts when your unit economics don’t work and you need to fix them in a way that deteriorates the student experience.
3/ ISA’s, like communism, sound nice in theory but don’t work at scale and in practice. They’re essentially unsecured student debt. Even student debt — which has long arms and can garnish wages for nonpayment has recently taken a hit from loan forgiveness. ISA’s have none of those protections. They’re also tied to a student’s performance and career luck — which has many factors outside the quality of education. Student debt doesn’t care how motivated you are or how unlucky you are — the security holder must get paid. In ISA’s the security holder is stuck with an IOU that may never get paid.
Education sorely needs reform but I don’t think Lambda is the way. Entrepreneurs also need to think about it a bit differently than how normal startups are built. The software model doesn’t translate well.
There are so many of these and they are so flawed, yet again and again its been clear to me that I would have maybe gotten a job at this point if I had just signed up for one and stomached the debt. These days I just wonder how feasible it would be to just... make one up and say that I am a graduate.
I'd just need to mock up a relatively fancy website, some copy, and a good name, and then put on my resume that I am a graduate.
The best way to get your foot in the door is by actually getting your foot in the door. I had great success working with a staffing company and others who have followed my advice also became full-time employees. You'll be a contractor or vendor for a bit but you'll meet the right teams and even get a chance to sample the culture before you make the move in.
There are some that are run by accredited brick-and-mortar colleges. I don't specifically know how good they are, but that's where I would start looking.
They're almost all cases of the university lending its name and occasionally space to companies that provide the curriculum, instructors and examination. Not a lot different from any other bootcamp except there's less incentive to have quality anything because people trust the university brandname.
I've actually been off and on programming for a few years and have done my tour in tutorial hell on Udemy. Just thought maybe a bootcamp would give me experience programming with a team like you would at a job. I also have a unique opportunity next year where I will have 6 months off paid, which I plan to spend programming full time. Thought a bootcamp may be a good way to spend that time.
You might wanna check c0d3[0] or fullstackopen[1], they are both free and self paced, c0d3 is opensource and has a nice small community and some mentors/students/engineers always ready to help on Discord. Once you finish the curriculum, you get in engineering team and start contributing back and gain some real world experience.
"Lambda School placed only 30% of its 2020 graduates in qualifying jobs during the first half of 2020. This figure is in stark contrast to the 74% placement rate it advertised for its 2019 graduates"
It's almost as if something happened in 2020 that reduced the number of open positions available...
> It's almost as if something happened in 2020 that reduced the number of open positions available...
Did it? My impression has been that software dev jobs have exploded (or maybe continued to explode) during COVID. Maybe there was a bit of a slowdown in the first half of 2020?
I always got a lot of pressure from certain well meaning SV business types to hire from bootcamps and always struggled to find folks - suppose it depends on the industry but "learn engineering fast" isn't really a thing that works.
Go figure. how is this a surprise to anyone . Not just lambda but any of these coding academies, boot camps, etc. It's an open secret that these companies vastly inflate their success rates.
I'm glad I came across this as I was considering whether or not a boot camp would make sense for me. I'm not turned off against it, but this is a good data point for me to consider.
Structure, guidance, accountability, connections. At least theoretically.
It's wonderful that so much material is free, but it's an overwhelming amount of information for the uninitiated. Some people can self-motivate and self-teach starting from zero. Some cannot. Some would just prefer a formal curriculum and instructor. Nothing wrong with that.
And the best bootcamps have a direct relationship into companies for internships and junior dev positions.
Unfortunately as bootcamp hype has exploded, many bootcamps do not offer these things and are of dubious value.
structure. assuming it costs 50k to develop curriculum and 1000 ppl take it price becomes 50 per person. more people take it, price if it (theoretically) has to move towards 0.
guidance. this one I can understand. having person always available to help out when something unexpected happens, which btw happens constantly is extremely helpful. this is def value added.
accountability. this one I'm not sure what you mean. meaning I invest 10k now I really have to make it work. yeah, unfortunately people tend to value expensive things more than free.
connections. yes, this is perhaps biggest selling point, the idea that they will place the student, or at the very least help significantly.
hmmm... I wonder if there is a way to quantify that. is it really ~ 1k/week to do all of that?
bootcamp grad here (different bootcamp - Fullstack Academy in NYC). i completed freecodecamp before doing my bootcamp. did not feel job ready, did not have any leads on jobs, barely made it thru freecodecamp copying and pasting code that kinda sorta worked.
let me put it this way. at the end of my bootcamp they had a "hiring day". ~20 employers came by for ~40 students, including Google. I ended up getting a job with the very first hiring manager I sat down with that day, for 160k base.
granted, i'm abnormal, and we had "failures" too, but i have many friends whose career change was eased because the bootcamp had taken care to build quality relationships with employers.
one more example. one time my computer just borked. create react app (or whatever we were doing that day) just refused to run. I had no idea but something in my $PATH was corrupted somehow. i was unable to do anything, and asking for help online wouldve been very futile. instead, i raised my hand, and my instructor (hi Cassio!) came over, showed me how to debug, and had me back up and running in 5 mins so I could continue learning.
Anyone else think using the placement rate from the first half of 2020 is a bit cherry picked? That's right when covid hit and hiring froze eveywhere. Yes it picked back up by the end of the year, but in April 2020 I can only assume that the demand for bootcamp graduates was at its lowest. Bluechip companies like Airbnb were reneging on offers to ivy league candidates. It was a unique period in time.
>The school recently sent him a letter demanding his banking information so that it could track direct deposits from a job. If he doesn't comply, it threatened to charge him his full tuition of $30,000 regardless of whether he gets a job.
How disgusting. He should probably tell them no. Even if they wrote some non sense allowing this in the income share agreement, let them go to court.
I've never met a successful boot camp grad who didn't already have a four-year degree.
This is a very complicated problem, because you really do have tons of desperate people who are willing to sign their lives away for a shot at getting ahead.
$50,000 is an extremely low threshold, so if someone adds a few extra shifts working at Best Buy lambda school can then leech their meager income?
I'd argue the social experience of traditional college is easily a part of its cost. If you're coming from a bad background you'll surround yourself better people than you met back home.
It's also much easier to get a generic office job with a bachelor's in art history than it is with a ux certificate.
After factoring in all these huge fees and other hidden costs, traditional college is a better deal, and the degree is actuality valid credential, instead of a certificate, which is useless in the eyes of most employers. Plus, colleges have tons of financial aid with far less punitive repayment conditions or upfront costs.
Anecdotal: I went to an "expensive fancy" private college and I was lucky enough to have parents who knew how to advocate for financial aid.
In the end I ended up with +40k in scholarships as a mediocre high school student, plus a bunch of state grants.
I graduated with <30k of debt, which I paid off aggressively with my programmer job.
I like college. There is a right way to do it as an average student:
- Two years of cheap community college to get the chaff out of the way
- Two years in a better school for the higher level classes.
You can't think of it is a party or 'summer camp' which is an image which is sold to a lot of young people. You are there to learn a skill, improve yourself, and graduate into a career.
Income share agreements are just disingenuous loans, eventually most people are going to get to $50,000 a year even if it has nothing to do with their education. At least a loan is upfront about what you're going to pay, I sure wouldn't give my bank account information to some sketchy company.
* their student's spouse's alimony, other court awards, pensions, disability payments, etc.
Agreeing to payment is not the same as agreeing to financial surveillance.
If Lambda School believes one of their students is not living up to their income sharing agreement, then they should simply ask the student. If they have a reason to disbelieve a specific student, then they can go to court.
"Let me see all info on regular deposits into your bank account because I'm too lazy and unprofitable to do this in a way that's not creepy and abusive" is NOT reasonable.
It's not the income share agreement per se. It's the request for his banking info. They weren't asking for a routing and account number, they were asking for enough access to track direct deposits.
There's no way in hell I'm ever giving that sort of banking access to an employer, let alone an educational institution. For starters, I share a bank account with my wife and her earnings are none of their god damn business.
I did Dev Bootcamp in NYC in 2015, during what was probably the golden age for these bootcamps. I had a very very good experience, as did about 80% of the people who went through it at that time. The program was hemorrhaging money and was shut down in 2017.
The cost was about 12k for 9 weeks onsite in a big office they rented in downtown Manhattan. Every 3 weeks they had a new cohort, with about 15 students. You could repeat a 3 week section up to 2 times for no extra cost. I got an airbnb in Brooklyn and took the train in. The curriculum was focused on Ruby on Rails, with Javascript in the last 3 weeks.
We had about 5 or so instructors who had real working experience as web developers (so about 1 instructor to every 10 people or so). The instructors were all in their 30s or 40s and were passionate about teaching and had a decent amount of industry experience. They were all sick of doing engineering and enjoyed teaching so were basically taking a break from engineering jobs. We also had a counselor, two administrators, the head of the program, a full time recruiter, and a yoga teacher who came in three times a week.
If you didn't make it through the program for whatever reason, they would refund whatever time you had remaining. If you didn't make it through the first 3 weeks they would refund you 100%. About 1/5 of the people were clearly not cut out for it, about 2/5ths were capable but didn't have much aptitude for coding, and the other 2/5ths learned stuff very fast.
The 4/5ths all managed to get entry level jobs eventually. The people on the low end of that 4/5ths sometimes fizzled out pretty quickly or ended up with support jobs. I know some of them who ended up having pretty good careers as support engineers, making over 100k within a couple of years I am guessing. We all felt sorry for the 1/5th of the people who were just not cut out for it at all. Some of them left but occasionally one would graduate which was a shame because they really had no chance of being successful. There were also people who were not very good but managed to get entry level coding jobs, but I think it was a struggle for them and they eventually left the industry afaik.
Everyone had to really hustle for an entry level job but it was definitely doable. I came out being able to create full stack apps, knew how to build a front end with Angular (very poorly obviously but still) and with a decent enough understanding of how Javascript worked.
The bootcamp had a decent network. It took me about 2 months to get a job making 75k, which I got through a friend at the bootcamp. I managed to get interviews at about 6 or so places leading up to that, but had no idea what I was doing on those interviews. Most of the interviews I think I got from the recruiter at the bootcamp, including one at Bloomberg which would have netted me a pretty big starting salary. About a month into my job my boss remarked to me that I probably would have taken far less than 75k and we laughed about it.
One year later I was making 140k, and today I am making about 70% more than that so yeah, pretty good ROI. I felt like I learned about as much as possible as I could have in this short period. I kept learning stuff afterwards until getting a job, and continued to be interested in learning for years.
I am sure there is still a good business model here. The price I paid seemed like a lot at the time but in retrospect it was absurdly low. I make as much as a doctor now. The race to the bottom some of these businesses are engaging in seems like an awful approach because it is a zero sum game making it into the industry. The rewards are such that if you could get people there with a decent success rate the value of the program would be a lot higher than 12 or even 30k.
The profitability slide with the cute animal pictures is a pretty good summary of everything that's disgusting about startup culture. Allred is clearly a huge piece of shit & YC should be ashamed of having funded this scam that preys on some of the most desperate, credulous, and vulnerable populations. Not that other bootcamps are better - and definitely not that most universities are better, either. Most are as bad or worse
I've had to hire for a few developer positions over the past ~6 months, and I was honestly shocked by how many cases of, "Have never coded in my life, but I am enrolled in Bootcamp X, and look to complete the coursework soon!" there were.
Often, you find cases of people who claim to be "software engineers" and list working at the Bootcamp company on their resume. You also get a number of "instructors" who apply for senior roles, which I find interesting.
I guess, overall, I'm not opposed to hiring someone who attended a school like this, I am just not in any way impressed by seeing it on someone's resume. For a junior role, I think it can make sense, but for anything more senior, it's become a bit frustrating to deal with these (and the contractors who pretend like they're interested in full time work until the last second).
It's high time we as a society rejected this nonsensical idea that you can teach anyone anything. Not everyone is suited to learn programming at a professional level; certainly not by cramming in x weeks at some bootcamp. For most students I suspect these are effectively scams. Not unlike college these days...
just change your bank account, withdraw your money. worse case, get new ID , or try to get a judge to suspend it. tons of ways to evade a civil garnishment. never keep much $ in your bank account. If lambda ripped you off, no need for you to keep having to pay for your mistake.
Lambda School was great for me. You get out of it what you put into it. Why are there never stories like these about specific university programs with higher opportunity cost and financial cost?
