Lambda School can't catch a break from upset students
reddit.comThe program-wide changes that angered students back at the end of September are still having effect all over social media...
I was a student and was affected by the changes. I'll clarify here for anyone that wants the details...
Prior to the changes, small groups of students in every cohort was led by a TL. This TL was a student further ahead in the program, probably in part-time if they were a TL for full-time.
The TL had many responsibilities. They would attend lecture with their group of students, conduct 1:1 everyday with each of their students for 15 minutes, grading their work and giving them feedback. They would lead a stand-up at the end of the day with their group, reviewing whatever was relevant, and every morning before lecture they would meet with the instructor and acted as an intermediary to the instructor, relaying important information such as how well the students were doing, what they were struggling on, etc. TLs also supposedly acted as project leaders in build weeks, but I did not get to experience that.
Everyday, our assignments were graded by a TL on a 3-star scale. Our "sprint challenge" at the end of the week was also graded by the TL, which would force a student to retake the challenge if they got at least one question wrong.
Fast forward to when Lambda announced they were removing TLs, adding student mentorship, self-assessment, and groups called "track teams". The school also reduced from 9 months to 6 months (probably to pump us out quicker. From what I've witnessed, the shortened curriculum has done students no favors).
Most students were upset at the assembly announcing these changes, and pointed out the myriad of obvious flaws to the student mentorship program. Lambda claimed that the change was to improve "consistency" in the program, but students kept publicly speculating whether this was a financial move (Lambda admitted 3 months later that is WAS motivated by costs, after ignoring student speculation).
No more attendance was taken, as well, which left the biggest accountability hole. My first student mentor wasn't great, and ended up ghosting me after a week. I was ghosted by my second mentor as well. And by no means was this an uncommon occurrence.
Track-teams, which replaced stand-ups, were now student-led, with the "leader" position rotated every week. The groups were now made of students of different cohorts, and the prompts we had to awkwardly read over during the meeting were mostly soft-skills. Very few people enjoyed this, and because Lambda was not taking attendance, most people did not go. This negatively affected build-weeks, though, since your track team is your build team. Build-weeks were supposed to give students experience with working in groups. But because Lambda was not keeping its students accountable, I ended up working with just one other person in both build-weeks, when it should have been 4 or 5.
Now the grading was the sketchiest part about all this. Lambda had just switched to using Google Canvas. The canvas was broken. The school had obviously not either tested or fully realized it, but it should not have been deployed. Students were now submitting all assignments and sprint challenges through canvas, and the only grade we got was whether we turned it in or not... So there was a period of confusion (at least in my cohort) where we kept asking around HOW and WHEN our work would be looked at and graded... Nobody really knew, this includes staff and "student-success". Then it became obvious that nobody was looking at or grading our work. We now "self-assessed" ourselves and determined whether or not we thought we were ready for the next unit. Heck, I couldn't even get the answer bank to the sprint challenges. I asked the Data Science program director myself at the time, and he just said "stay-tuned for updates on feedback".
I know that Lambda has now implemented an auto-grader, but it came too late for me. I was in that hole post-changes where Lambda seemed not to know what the hell it was doing, and graduated after.
There was even a week where I tested whether or not Lambda cared if I was submitting anything at all by NOT submitting anything. And... crickets. No more accountability.
There were even form submissions where a student could select "I want to be contacted by student-success or an instructor". Those form submissions didn't work, I tried them every week, and I sent feedback and personally DMed people complaining about this. Lambda School said the changes were to give students more 1:1 time with instructors... but there was no (working) process implemented to have this come true.
Students all across the board were and are still really upset. Some student posted a poll asking whether or not students liked the changes. Overwhelmingly, students answered NO, but soon after the poll was deleted by the CEO Austen. He's deleted quite a few negative posts on the Lambda subreddit, too. I'm obviously no fan of his, after he described the changes Lambda made as "small changes in schedule" when [this post](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017) blew up on hackernews.
The school really has a major problem with transparency and holding trust with students. I left the program unhappy with what I got from it, and I can say the same about my peers. If someone in real life asks me about the program and whether or not I recommend it, it's a solid no from me.
Here are a couple more recent links relevant to Lambda School:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA8obAJa414&t=500s
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lvi6mz/lamb...
Sad tale. I went to a competitor of theirs, Holberton School, and also left with a bad taste in my mouth (whole other story). I would recommend others try Lambda, which in retrospect seemed like a better choice. It sounds like the quality has really degraded since then (this was 2018).
I can’t help but think this is related to chasing venture returns. College needs to be “disrupted”, but there’s not necessarily a way to do this that creates the type of leverage of a SaaS company. I recall seeing Austen on here once boasting about how he’d raised upwards of $70m, and my first thought was that I hope this doesn’t destroy them... now they’re at $122m
> I went to a competitor of theirs, Holberton School, and also left with a bad taste in my mouth (whole other story)
Please tell
> It sounds like the quality has really degraded since then (this was 2018).
I'm skeptical of bootcamps. Lambda has "student TAs" that are basically three months ahead of the students they coach. Contrast this to a real school where your TAs are, at worse, undergrads who completed the course and were personally selected by the professor in charge.
That and, from what I've seen, a lot of bootcamps are light on theory and are more focused on rote. A lot of "graduates" will have a "portfolio" but if you go peek at the code from multiple students of the same batch you'll see that it's basically the same project 30+ students did. Same structure, same lines. What I would expect out of a first year CS lab assignment.
> College needs to be “disrupted”, but there’s not necessarily a way to do this that creates the type of leverage of a SaaS company.
It's a policy issue. Having easy access to (non defaultable) students loans created an amenities arm race.
Maybe they can turn it around? Idk. They certainly couldn't improve things quick enough when I was there. The most unfortunate thing is that Lambda is walking away with a tainted reputation.
Certainly the most unfortunate thing is that students committed thousands of hours to a business that knowingly lied to them about the value of their program?
You're absolutely right.
All bootcamps are a sham. They make lots of promises, but end up just churning out candidates who can barely reason about the material that was foisted upon them in rapid-fire succession.
I don't see bootcamp experience as being useful for a hiring metric. You can get the same exact results by independently studying yourself, and save yourself the stress and money. You're better off finding peers/mentors to talk to through programming meetups/conferences.
I completely disagree. I went to Hack Reactor in 2013 and the ROI was fantastic.
I really leveled up my JavaScript and coding skills in general and ended up dramatically increasing my earning power. I was hired about a week after graduating and just the signing bonus paid most my tuition.
If I ever see a similar kind of school for the next skill I want to build, I'll probably enroll.
That said, I've heard some of the Lambda School claims and don't believe they're honest. Vincent Woo did some solid reporting on Lambda.
I don't disagree that some of these bootcamps teach some knowledge and lead to jobs afterwards. But what you're really paying for is networking. Even junior development work requires a fairly robust set of knowledge, that isn't going to be grokked within 6 weeks or even 3 months (unless they were already familiar with computing/unix etc). That model only works for companies that are willing to onboard -very- green junior developers and mentor them long-term.
You can accomplish the same thing by following courses/books online, making a handful of projects on github to show interviewers, and networking at conferences/meetups. That's how I landed my first part-time job with programming, and then my first full-time job.
People learn differently. Not everybody can learn on their own, especially not when encountering something like programming.
I went to a bootcamp and the network isn't what I paid for. The network hasn't given me much at all. I had a mix of previous self-learning experience, and decided to do a bootcamp to get more serious about it. It was definitely beneficial and the investment paid of 5x within two years.
> But what you're really paying for is networking.
When I went, there was no network. Nobody had ever graduated from the school yet.
Nearly 100% of what I got from the school was hard skills.
I disagree. Many bootcamps overpromise/underdeliver. Some are fantastic:
I went to Turing a few years ago. With the benefit of hindsight, I'm happy to claim that a Turing grad will be able to be competitive with most CS grads in a a junior position. In a lot of ways they will be more prepared.
I also disagree that you can get the same education on your own. Good bootcamps have an incredibly short feedback loop, and there are actual professionals in the loop. You simply won't get daily feedback about best practices, code reviews, git training, etc. from an experienced professional if all you do is watch youtube and read books.
I think boot camps are useful to programmers who are good self starters and want some credential to signal to hirers that they have some training.
I started coding in the 90s and learned solely from books, friends, web sites. I was lucky to get a job without a degree or anything on paper to show that I could do what I was doing.
I did some certifications and doubled my salary in a year. It was funny to me that they didn’t teach that much to make me 2x productive, but it fit into my org’s salary band structure because now I had some certs.
I think the challenge is that it sucks for people who need more help and actual experience. Now that so many people are taking them, the signaling is less useful.
I was in a part-time Lambda School cohort caught in the middle of the significant changes made at the end of 2020.
It very much felt like a bait-and-switch.
The experience prior to the changes was what I paid for.
The experience after the changes wasn’t what I paid for.
Lambda School’s pivot in this instance was way too big, way too fast, and way too poorly planned/executed.
My experience went from having excellent Team Leaders(TLs) who graded my work, compulsory attendance, excellent Build Week TL and team members to an involuntary Mentor who ghosted me, a Track Team that never attended meetings, a Build Week with zero support, no attendance verification, no grading, and no response from Lambda School after consistent and repeated requests for support.
It was a shocking difference in experience before/after.
I get that Lambda School isn’t a bank, insurance company, hospital, or traditional school/university where massive risk results in massive risk aversion.
But it’s no longer a “move fast, break things” MVP either.
I went from being a strong vocal advocate for Lambda School to seriously questioning its business model.
I do sincerely hope Lambda School’s program evolves in a positive direction for student outcomes.
But in my experience and opinion, the Lambda School value proposition has taken a significant hit.
I’m currently awaiting refund.
Wasn't Lambda School already exposed as a sham years ago? How are people still signing up for this? https://hn.algolia.com/?q=lambda+school
Yep. Plenty of controversy surrounding it, and I knew that coming in as a student. The reality is, is that I had a really good experience during the first month of the school (the "free-trial" period, where you can back out of your ISA if you want) and decided to stick with it.
This is just a link to a subreddit with infrequent posts. Not worthy of a post here
The point is that for all posts spanning back to 5+ months ago, the entire comment section is filled with students sharing their story and trying to stop other people from enrolling at the school. I'm not sure your post about the $100 dollar toothbrush was worthy of a post here, either.
I feel like this is a problem of not being about to please everyone. Someone will always complain about something. I'm sure there's a flip-side to this post of people finding a huge amount of success from Lambda School (that are less likely to post about their positive experience).
I don't disagree that Lambda School may have problems but they're still young and have a lot to improve. Just from my personal anecdote but I've worked with people from bootcamps (notably Hack Reactor), and they've been fantastic so I believe that they're (bootcamps) definitely capable of educating people for success.
Well, a LOT of students were unhappy about the changes. Truth is not a lot of students post about their experience on social media, and of those that are unhappy with the school dare not post under their real name. We’re job-seeking with the school on our resume, after all.