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Fast Crimes at Lambda School

• nerdovo 2y ago
  [dead]
• garcia3252 2y ago
  [flagged]
• gnabgib 2y ago
  Discussion (762 points, 62 days ago, 366 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067939
• ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • gfourfour 2y ago
    Acting like Elon Musk is cringe for a lot of reasons but I don’t think it’s that out of pocket for a startup founder to admire him, even if all he did was SpaceX he would have an incredible legacy and story
    • ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
      Oh of course. I think folks are misunderstanding that I somehow dislike Musk. I do not. SpaceX and Tesla are bigger companies than Apple and Microsoft. What I dislike is, other grown men trying to "act" like him and fawning over him.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• breadsniffer01 2y ago
  Stop the SV gifting. Fast, Rabbit, Lambda School, etc. These fraudsters should get punished for false advertising.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• paulpauper 2y ago
  Not surprising at all.. as it's said "if something is too good to be true it probably is" Coding is hard, and there is no evidence to suggest it's getting easier , such as dealing with the integration of the front-end with the back-end, or having to deal with libraries and cloud environments and everything else that goes into it. The belief that average people can be turned into proficient coders in months is ludicrous.
  • jarsin 2y ago
    Haven't you heard the latest craze? Executives that wonder how the cloud works when there are no clouds in the sky don't need us anymore. They will fire up good old chatGPT and put together million line code systems easy.
• gatinsama 2y ago
  The model is broken. Too many people want to learn to code, not everyone can do it well. The only way would be to filter many candidates going in, but the negative press would be huge. So you end up with huge cohorts of people who can't code, and you have to make the money back somehow. Good teachers need to know how to code well, and those are expensive too. And, let's face it, the internet is full of great material to learn to code for free. If you are not motivated enough to learn by your own, all the time, I don't see how a bootcamp will give you anything.
  • paulpauper 2y ago
    I think it's worse than not doing it well. It's more like struggling at the basics. The incentives of these camps favor quantity over quality.
    • giraffe_lady 2y ago
      Programming is really not as hard as you're making it out to be. I've taught it to beginners both children and adults and they struggle but they all learn it. Professional software development is quite difficult, but programming is only a portion of why. And even then, software dev is only like the second or third most technically difficult job I've had. Any welder or marine upholsterer or nurse or whatever has about as intellectually demanding a job as we do.
      • paulpauper 2y ago
        Are you doing it one on one or in a classroom setting? In former, I imagine the success rates would be higher.
        • giraffe_lady 2y ago
          It was a code school. Not lambda but a comparable curriculum & setting.
      • vunderba 2y ago
• paulpauper 2y ago
  On the surface, this is another window into the 2010's tech bubble, a period where mediocre people could raise ludicrous money amid a venture capitalist echo chamber fueled by low-interest rates. But what makes this any worse than Juicero, Clinkle, or Humane? Why does this rise to the level of Theranos? It has been a bubble now for 13 years. I disagree here. Maybe it's just the new normal? Comparisons between now the the '90s do not hold up. Tech companies today are much bigger, but also generating huge profits, unlike the 90s bubble, in which tech companies were much less profitable or unprofitable relative to valuations. lol "people could raise ludicrous money" What? Where? Funding rounds are much smaller, more competitive, and more selective today compared to in the 90s. Hardly anyone except for a few lucky people (like the founders of Coinbase or Dropbox) are getting rich overnight anymore, unlike in the 90s. Founders are being offered table scraps worth of funding compared to the generous, multi-million-dollar funding rounds that were common in the 90s. This is made worse by the fact that running a tech company is more expensive than ever in terms of the complexity of the product (interactive apps are waaaayyy harder to develop than a static html store) and marketing (everything is so expensive and saturated compared to the 90s. Ads are obscenely expensive today and full of click/viewer fraud and worthless, inflated metrics.) and labor costs (coders are much better paid today compared to the 90s relative to inflation).
  • lispisok 2y ago
    Just because the dotcom bubble was more ludicrous doesnt mean there wasnt another bubble
  • gatinsama 2y ago
    In general, running a tech company is harder (more complex) than running other kinds of companies but offers significant rewards if you can do it well. The new normal (from the invention of the internet on) would be that tech companies are more competitive, pay better, and have higher risk.
  • busterarm 2y ago
    People really forget what it was truly like in the 90s. If you could breathe and knew how to turn a computer on, you could get a job in tech. The hiring was that desperate and that easy. The fundraising was that easy too. Everyone just assumed that you even knew what a computer was that you could figure the rest out. That all changed with the Russian ruble crisis, which hit finance first late in '98 and then took another year for its effects to start hitting the tech industry hard. By 2001 the game was up and it really took until the 2010s to turn around. Actually in the late 00s and early 2010s it was actually really gross and sort of like crypto. I remember a lot of smooth talking dudes around NY who were raising all kinds of VC money and doing _nothing_ with it but finding shady ways to spend it on themselves/drugs. The money was free and the accountability was absent. That era really didn't last more than about 3-5 years.
• busterarm 2y ago
  AppAcademy started with and still does ISAs and has been fairly successful. There have been situations where they've deemed certain participants greater risk and NOT offered them ISAs and asked for upfront payment, but I believe their success has largely been a result of aggressive candidate filtering all the way up to 1/3 of the way through the program after its started. I have first hand experience with their program, albeit 10 years ago, but I would largely say that almost no one who completed the program with me actually needed it and its benefits are largely a forcing function to get you to build a portfolio in a short amount of time and have a peer group to rely on. Everyone from my cohort is still working in industry today if they want to and all seem to be doing well.
  • DetroitThrow 2y ago
    It's awesome to hear that there are more scrupulous alternatives. You say everyone is working in industry - if in a %, you mean to say like 100% of those who graduated with you work(ed) in tech afterwards, right?
    • busterarm 2y ago
      Our cohort was 23. 2 people basically scammed AppAcademy by not finding a job for two years but did find jobs after that and didn't have to pay their ISA. Everyone else did find jobs within about 3 months. All but three have moved into senior roles. Of those three, one prefers just being an IC and two moved into product management. I don't know how things are lately but given sentiment I hear about hiring from bootcamps, I imagine they haven't been able to hold up the high numbers that they had in their first few years. Would love to hear otherwise though. I still think the program is expensive for what it is, but I don't regret it at all. My only regret was that I chose between changing careers and putting all my money in crypto at the time...back when Bitcoin was still in double digits. If I'd chosen differently I would be rich beyond my wildest dreams.
      • tyre 2y ago
        Feels like not finding a job for two years isn’t really winning, unless the terms of the ISA were insane. Lost income for two years as a software developer, experience towards higher seniority and income, building a resume and portfolio…I don’t know, that seems like a losing scam for the scammers.
• forgot_user1234 2y ago
  I have been through lambda. It was the force of nature that turned my life on the right path. It was the best decision I ever made This wouldn’t have been possible without Austen.
  • DetroitThrow 2y ago
    I'm glad to hear that it was a positive experience for you! Do you think you know what % of your peers ended up working in tech off the top of your head?
    • swyx 2y ago
      just to level set, i myself went thru a normal (non lambda school, but still highly rated) bootcamp in 2017 (some of which were ISAs, the rest regular tuition), and about 30% of my classmates went back to their past jobs and careers. i'm sure about 20-30% of the rest are in tech but in unhappy situations. but for the remaining 30-50% of us it was a lifechanger. i wish that people would not throw out the baby with the bathwater when changing careers and reskilling people is an inherently messy process that obviously the bootcamp cannot totally control even if were run perfectly, which lambda definitely was not. it just turns off a lot of people like me who actually could potentially change their lives for the better if they were presented simple facts without the extremes of hype or hyperbole. p.s. for sibling comment - yes it is -normal- for good students to be offered another term as TAs for the next class. this was considered an honor and actually was fairly competitive and i think helped them be really good by the time they got into the job search. TAs are TAs, all colleges have them; they do not replace full instructors, but some of them are worth their weight in gold due to their student empathy.
      • rideontime 2y ago
        Lambda/Austen certainly were capable of controlling whether or not they lied to prospective students about their job placement statistics.
      • goat_whisperer 2y ago
        "TAs are TAs, all colleges have them; they do not replace full instructors, but some of them are worth their weight in gold due to their student empathy." Lol. TAs in colleges are graduate students. They aren't undergraduates who can't find a job.
• dustincoates 2y ago
  I'm convinced that Lambda School was shady, and I'm not debating that, but some of this seems over the top. ISAs as indentured servitude? The shadowy negotiating a company's validation "behind closed doors?" (Where else are you supposed to do it.) The criticism of Lambda School can stand on its own without wading into the extreme hyperbole.
  • virissimo 2y ago
    I did a year of computer science, but ended up going to App Academy with an ISA, because I couldn't really afford another couple of years. If ISAs are indentured servitude, but are still better than going to university, then what does that say about universities?
    • llamaimperative 2y ago
      Perhaps your second premise isn't true...?
    • doubloon 2y ago
      it says that Universities should be free.
      • thaumasiotes 2y ago
        That's solving the wrong problem; sucking away years of someone's life for minor benefits doesn't become a good deal by being free.
    • ertian 2y ago
      For real, if you applied the same level of scrutiny and the same kind of aggressive rhetoric to universities, the result would be a devastating critique. I think the same is true of other 'disruptive' companies that people love to hate (Uber, AirBnB, etc). We uncritically accept the status quo, and at the same time compare all upstarts against some platonic ideal of what we imagine could exist.
      • deleted 2y ago
• duxup 2y ago
  Is this just easier to SEE in a bootcamp type scenario? How many people got the traditional education route, rack up even MORE debt, still don't end up doing the thing / end up where they want to be? Is this maybe an easy to see problem that is part of a larger education problem none the less? Full disclosure: I'm the product of a boot camp. Changed careers and learned to code after age 40. It worked out great for me, but yeah I was in camp with a lot of people who shouldn't have been / it was a waste of time / money for them. I have to wonder as jobs and careers change, having faster ways to retool seems all but required. At the same time I think those efforts will be hit and miss, and I'm not sure there's a solution to that. (That doesn't excuse any of the scummy nature of some of the storytelling around bootcamps, but honestly I've worked with university interns and they seem to tell each other their own stories about how much they'll be making and it's interesting how that hype sort of builds.)
  • Aurornis 2y ago
    > Is this just easier to SEE in a bootcamp type scenario? You can certainly find universities that charge high prices, deliver a poor education, don’t have their act together, and leave students with a lot of debt and little to show for it. The difference in this case was that Lambda School was pushed on everyone as the superior bootcamp. It was supposed to be a top-tier bootcamp. One of the best. Famous people like Paul Graham touted it constantly on Twitter and even wrote an essay defending the Lambda School founder when the first criticisms started gaining momentum. > Is this maybe an easy to see problem that is part of a larger education problem none the less? Trying to reduce all education options to the same level removes the nuance that makes this story what it is. Of course you can find bad education experiences in many forms, but it’s also easy to discover that Stanford has an excellent CS program while some private no-name for-profit university has no reputation. In this case, the most reputable bootcamp that was being touted by industry titans as the superior education option turned out to be one of the worst. That’s the story.
  • SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    The article claims that their true placement rate was below 30%. Even for a graduate program in an oversaturated field - and I’m very comfortable describing such programs as scams themselves - that would be kinda low.
• imzadi 2y ago
  I've posted about my Lambda experience in another thread. I started Lambda School in 2019. I was in one of their first part-time evening cohorts. The original program length was 9 months. I went into the program with a lot of prior programming experience as a hobbyist and MUD programmer, but no professional experience. I had been trying to get a programming job for over a decade without success. I hoped it would help me build a portfolio and network of peers. At that time, I was working in a helpdesk role that I had had for about 5 years. It was a call center job, so I didn't have a lot of control over my schedule, but was able to arrange to keep my schedule for the nine months of the program. About 3 months into the program, they completely changed the structure of the program, which doubled the length to 18 months. I completed the core curriculum and the capstone project. Throughout the program they kept promising to connect us with career counselors, but kept pushing it back. First it would be after we were halfway through the core curriculum, then when we finished the core curriculum, then when we started the capstone project, then when we finished it. I never once got to speak with any kind of career professional. The closest we got was a peer reviewed resume. After the capstone project, we started a "computer science" module, which was supposed to be the end of the course. I did a few weeks of the computer science module, but couldn't continue when my shift changed, since this was outside of the original nine months. I tried to make arrangements to finish the module on my own time, but they wouldn't allow this. The only option I was given was to withdraw from the program. By the time I had finished, the reputation for Lambda was already tanking. I tried sending out resumes, but I couldn't get any traction at all. I did Triplebyte and passed, but only got one interview from that process and it didn't lead to a job. Meanwhile, I got a pay bump that put me over the 50k. Lambda came after me for the ISA, since I had a job in tech. It didn't matter that it was the same job I had had for 5 years before starting their program. I went to a lawyer and was told that the contract required arbitration in New York City, which would be too expensive to bother with, so I just paid the ISA. I later went through a different bootcamp on scholarship and did end up getting a SWE job after that, but was laid off in 2022 when our project was discontinued and am back on the helpdesk. Guess I was never meant to be a programmer lol.
  • cko 2y ago
    You passed a Triplebyte interview? I heard they ask FAANG level leetcode or harder. That plus going through two boot amps plus SWE job experience looks like high market value to me.
• rideontime 2y ago
  Austen seems to finally have given up on trying spin every story about him that reaches HN, no posts in the last 9 months.[0] A sure sign of the dismal state of things at Lambda/Bloom. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=austenallred https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=austenallred
  • swyx 2y ago
    or months and months of defending your reputation can wear you down. have a little empathy for the flawed human on the other side of the screen.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • rideontime 2y ago
      Did you read the linked article? I'm struggling to empathize with this fraud, especially after listening to the interview mentioned.
      • swyx 2y ago
        skimmed it. was a fan of @fulligin since before he became a citizen journalist and have followed it closely, i didnt really see much new info here in my browse thru. i'm not saying to empathize WITH THE FRAUD lol, just responding to GP about why austen stopped answering qtns. yes he fucked up, now give the guy a chance to build Bloom into something legit instead of constantly reading the most negative take into simple things like stopping his hn activity as "A sure sign of the dismal state of things at Lambda/Bloom."
        • wk_end 2y ago
          > now give the guy a chance to build Bloom into something legit That'd be the (perhaps too) generous thing to do, but there's no evidence at this point that he has any interest in doing that. You said that he "fucked up", but there's zero reason to believe that the past tense and not the continuous present is appropriate here. To my knowledge, he's never offered an apology, an acknowledgement of wrongdoing - either in his predatory business model or his mendacious self-promotion - or a promise to do better. The last word we have from Mr. Allred is that he believes that everyone who criticizes him is a "hater" who's just too stupid to appreciate his genius. The message of turning the other cheek is beautiful, but perhaps a little impractical to those of us who aren't totally Christ-like all the time, and - in the context of a conversation discussing clear wrongdoing - a little banal. We're not single-handedly going to stop him from doing whatever he wants with Bloom but we should say, very loudly, that until further evidence arises his history implies that he's not to be trusted and advise everyone within a hundred yards of him to be wary.
• OhMeadhbh 2y ago
  Back in the late 80s / early 90s, I taught non-traditional students coming in through state-funded retraining programs at UT Arlington Continuing Education and Texas State Technical Institute (now TSTC) in Waco. The idea was "here are a bunch of laid-off manufacturing workers who want to retrain as SOMETHING with high-tech." The most popular courses were of the very short "here's how to do some things with Unix" variety: how to log-in, how to do simple admin, how to exit vi, how to edit a file with emacs, Make for the perplexed, etc. I did teach a 6 week C++ course. Mostly attended by CS students at the local college. Back in the day we didn't teach kids how to code in a CS cirriculum. They were expected to just pick it up themselves. Six weeks really isn't enough to teach how to be good at C++. I spent a fair amount of time reading Papert and Piaget, trying to develop a theory on how people learn and how to best teach "programming" concepts. I've yet to see ANYONE (myself included) do an excellent job teaching the kind of programming employers want. I saw another comment here about how "programming" is simple, but teaching architecture and putting things together is hard. I would mostly agree with that. But... there are some techniques that are better than others. My experience w/ Lambda School was they tried to hire me as an instructor way back when. I talked to them briefly about pedagogy and their approach to modeling learning and how they were going to measure improvements in their cirriculum. I got blank looks. They kept harping about how they were going to iterate, but without the slightest idea how they were going to improve between iterations. I quietly walked out the door never to return (moving to Seattle to work for Amazon instead.) It looks like I made the right call.
  • DANmode 2y ago
    Could you say more, or even link, to proper methodologies for measuring iterations of your curriculum? I'm a very amateur teacher, but have received great feedback on my "teaching style", which I've refined based on two things: how often I get puzzled looks during a technique, how often I get thanked for using a specific technique. I'm curious what this looks like in the big leagues - how this "scales". Thanks for your time.
    • heymijo 2y ago
      Hi DANmode, I'm obviously not OP, but I am a teacher who has gained a broad understanding of the field from practice and research. One thing about feedback this is counterintuitive is that, students are generally very bad at understanding what actually helps them learn. When I say learn I mean gain a conceptual understanding and procedural fluency in whatever they are learning that sticks with an ability to appropriately transfer that knowledge beyond the context they've seen it in. So unfortunately when a student says "that was great!" research has found that to be negatively correlated with learning. If you want to delve into a study that talks about this and what effective teaching looks like in the long-term I really recommend this study done at the US Air Force Academy [0]. It is the closest thing I have seen to a gold standard study in education where a lot of research is dubious at best: Look at what Carrell and West handed us with this study: - 7 year study at the US Air Force Academy - 10,534 students - 421 faculty members - 30 core courses, all standardized (math, science, social science, humanities, and engineering) - Random assignment of students to professors in initial course and follow-on courses [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/653808 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/653808 I've got an email in my profile if you want to discuss!
• davidw 2y ago
  I have this sense that the world of tech needs the pendulum to swing back a bit towards geeky hacker types who are in it for the love of building cool things, tinkering, exploring and all that. There is a bit too much of the "bro" side of things - hustlebros and techbros and VC bros and that culture. Where are my people at these days?
  • borski 2y ago
    Building things. Those geeks don’t market well. Never did. There’s a reason Woz needed Jobs. There is just a lot more noise than signal now.
    • davidw 2y ago
      To build a successful company, you need both, clearly, but it's a balance. And not everything needs to be a successful company. Some things are just for the fun of it. And sometimes those things turn into companies in unexpected ways.
  • giraffe_lady 2y ago
    That sort of environment is an artifact of a new technical domain, not unique to programming or because of any characteristics unique to it. At different times for example it was typical for a doctor, architect, or pilot to be an informally educated enthusiast. As programming has matured into a broadly relevant and economically important domain, the dynamics of who does it and how they learn it change, as it also did in those other fields. You can lament the change but it's never coming back.
    • davidw 2y ago
      You can be a professional software developer without all the 'bro' stuff. And there's certainly still space for people who are curious and intrinsically motivated if you think about the whole pie growing rather than just being cut up differently.
  • zenlikethat 2y ago
    Give it another two years of high interest rates washing people out into non-tech sales, finance, trades, whatever... but there are plenty out there, the bros are just far louder.
• kevbin 2y ago
  This article needs an editor the way that Austen Allred needs a conscience.
• gnicholas 2y ago
  The comparison of Lambda and YC is appealing on its surface, but then you realize that YC has uncapped upside on its winners, and this is why it works. Lambda has a capped upside on each participant, so it's important that its median graduate be successful. No number of insanely successful graduates can make up for the median being unsuccessful. Kind of surprised that PG made the comment he did, which seems naive in this regard.
• salamo 2y ago
  It's really too bad. Higher ed needs disruption. The problem is, a responsibly-run university is a slow/medium growth enterprise, not an overnight unicorn. The Vanderbilts and Carnegies of today could do a major public service if they wanted to. Use their names and hire the best researchers in their respective fields and pay them well.
  • mistrial9 2y ago
    this is happening in great numbers .. behind closed doors, private benefit, legal NDAs, in the case of AI also closely tied to nationalist entities in uniforms. What could go wrong?
  • TrackerFF 2y ago
    Higher education works fine in other countries, where it is heavily subsidized by the government. But, I guess, for many people in the US - they want any solution other than that.
    • VirusNewbie 2y ago
      Why do you think higher education is not subsidized by the government? You can look at how much money universities receive. Do you think Universities are incapable of education people for less money?
    • philwelch 2y ago
      Higher education in the US is heavily subsidized by the government, but the administration just grows to consume all of those subsidies. Almost none of the US’s problems are the result of not throwing enough taxpayer money at the problem. We throw as much taxpayer money at problems as any other country in the world.
      • doubloon 2y ago
        The US version of "subsidized by the government" is that the government guarantees gigantic piles of money to be loaned to 18 year olds and then says they have to pay it back. This tends to attract an enormous amount of non-education related work like loan servicing companies, bloated school administration, etc. Now schools mission is not just to educate it is to get a piece of that huge loan pie. It creates perverse incentives like universities competing on how fancy their dorms are or whatever meanwhile they are trying to drive down all costs like turning full time professors into part time employees who have to get second jobs to make ends meet. Kids become just loan delivery mechanisms to administration. What a subsidy would be is just... giving the money directly to the schools. Like is done with high school.
• lopkeny12ko 2y ago
  I don't understand the controversy. Sure, you might not like ISAs, but that's not the point. You signed an agreement. The agreement itself is not illegal. If you don't like it, why did you sign it? Like, what's the expectation here? That you should be able to get a coding education for free? Even if you got a job unrelated to programming, how does that excuse you from needing to pay for tuition for courses you already completed?
  • jph00 2y ago
    In the article it's shown that the CEO stated that you only have to pay if you make $50k+ as a software engineer. According to the article, they have not had court victories to support their claims.
    • lopkeny12ko 2y ago
      When I was doing my undergrad, the university published statistics saying something to the tune of "the average engineering graduate goes on to earn a $60k salary at their first job." If only I knew at the time I could have simply taken the university to court because my starting salary out of school was $55k.
      • Spivak 2y ago
        If paying your student loans was contingent on you making $60k, you made $55k, and they came knocking at your door demanding money yes I do think you have grounds to sue and not pay them. I don't care one iota about the legal minutiae that says they're technically allowed to collect, it is blatantly obvious what the students thought they were signing and so it's really hard to argue "no actually they agreed to <this other thing>." If you present paperwork that you say is the legalese version of the agreement you discussed, have the other party sign it on that basis, and then it isn't that is the lowest hanging fruit of contracts that should be thrown out.
  • ganoushoreilly 2y ago
    I think you can also make an argument that data provided to entice you into the loan turned out to be misrepresented at best, or a full out lie at worst. I do agree with accountability on debts you sign up for, including student loans.
• golergka 2y ago
  My girlfriend leads a placement department at AI bootcamp, helps graduates find jobs. Some of them are over 50, they're often from completely unrelated industries with zero coding experience. It takes a lot of effort, interviews, and unpaid internships as well — so I really fail to understand why Lambda School's internship program got this enormous amount of backlash. But in the end people who persevere and go through the grind usually land the jobs, and I think that on average the bootcamp pays off.
• mrroryflint 2y ago
  I find it interesting there is no major mention of the failed Europe/Africa expansion. It was a great program that launched my career as well as many others - but God behind the scenes was insanity.
• kbigdelysh 2y ago
  I was one of the coding instructors at Make School which was similar to Lambda School and was bankrupt couple years ago. Our major issue? It was damn hard to find enough students for our school who were talented enough to understand computer science and had enough grit to finish the program and get a job. Why? Because those students were already absorbed by the established traditional universities.
  • parpfish 2y ago
    I have a similar view and am skeptical of bootcamp claims that they can get anybody a job with X weeks of training. I'm reminded of the ending of Ratatouille when the critic figures out that the motto "Anyone can cook" means "Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere". I'm personally biased, but I feel like one bootcamp program that got this right (for a while) was Insight Data Science. For a few years at the start of the 'data boom' there was a market inefficiency where tech needed more people that understood stats and ML and there were a ton of STEM postdocs that wanted to leave academia. The program worked because it wasn't really about teaching any new skills, it was mostly about being able to market the skills you have in a different sector. But after a few years, the market corrected itself and there was no shortage of data/stats people in tech anymore and there were enough resources for those academics to manage the transition on their own. I don't know if the program still exists, but if they do I'm not sure what they could do now to make themselves relevant.
    • btown 2y ago
      Apparently when the pandemic hit Insight pivoted into a remote model with ISAs, then stopped accepting new cohorts. https://www.teamblind.com/post/Insight-data-science-scam-during-Covid-19-KDBtGD4O https://www.teamblind.com/post/Insight-data-science-scam-dur... https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/s/sdKVWBP2GJ https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/s/sdKVWBP2GJ
      • parpfish 2y ago
        Not surprised that they didn’t make it, but it’s too bad that had to do that bit of a heel turn right at the end
• ec109685 2y ago
  Not sure about other states, but California has super low cost junior colleges with CS classes. It seems like the Austen’s of the world would advise people to start there and see how they do rather than jump into a $50k commitment. The other baffling thing about Lambda was that companies had to pay Lambda to recruit their students.
  • phillipcarter 2y ago
    Yep. Here's how it breaks down for the CC I attended. https://www.cuesta.edu/student/resources/cashier/cost_of_attendance.html https://www.cuesta.edu/student/resources/cashier/cost_of_att... Additionally, at Cuesta the first month of bus rides is free, and the bus tickets themselves can be purchased at ~50 bucks a month. It's not too hard to find some roommates in town and get some cheap rent, too. In return, you can get a curriculum that closely follows that of Cal Poly (often with teachers who teach at both institutions!), and a fairly successful transfer program. Of course once you get into the university the costs are much higher, but you don't have mandatory dorms anymore, but you did two years on the cheap, and when you combine financial aid, scholarships, and federal student loans it's not ridiculous to have $20k or less in debt by the time you graduate. With a decent job in tech, that can be paid off in under a year. Unfortunately, the job market is really tough right now for fresh grads, so that last part is where this falls apart, but I'd wager it's relatively easier for someone with a proper four-year degree than someone with a bootcamp credential.
• localfirst 2y ago
  > Lambda School targeted single mothers, the disabled, reformed convicts, and people struggling with serious medical problems. They lost tens of thousands of dollars, some lost years of their lives, on a broken, predatory program. Seeing a huge wave of ponzified educational courses being pushed by influencers and famous people that results in financial ruin. 1%ers, 10x engineers, these are ALL caricatures that is created by course sellers to instill the belief that the participant NEEDS to purchase it. If I was to create a society based on principles, the founders of Lambda School, should be behind bars.
• elawler24 2y ago
  VC incentives are the real problem here. I was a mentor at another bootcamp and also the founder of a high-skill developer marketplace in 2017. A valuation of $1B for this business is crazy. Investors were simply underwriting students paying for trade school, there's no tangible tech innovation. Like Theranos, WeWork, and FTX - it's the story of a darling founder who has to justify an unrealistic valuation in a frothy market. They're living in an echo chamber where fraudulent behavior goes unquestioned because everyone wants the upside. Salaries are based on scarcity. High-skill software engineers were rare at one point, because there weren’t many of them with experience or training. Programs like Lambda School increased the number of people who know how to code while decreasing quality, resulting in fewer unfilled jobs and lower compensation. And again, where is the innovation? In the sketchy ISA? There's a fine line between the “fake it till you make it” ethos in Silicon Valley and fraudulent behavior that materially hurts investors and consumers. He clearly crossed the line by publicly and repeatedly lying, but he was also incentivized and encouraged to build a hyper-scale business on the backs of people lacking expertise in the job marketplace. I believe teaching people how to code is a good thing. But it's not a venture-scale business, and never should have been valued as such. A sketchy financial instrument doesn't equal innovation.
  • ilamont 2y ago
    Like Theranos, WeWork, and FTX - it's the story of a darling founder who has to justify an unrealistic valuation in a frothy market. The other issue for all of the examples you cited (and Lambda) is an-almost complete failure for the VCs and accelerators and other gatekeepers to effectively carry out due diligence. I say "almost" because in the case of Theranos, some investors did pass, according to the documentary and WSJ reporting. And there may be others that passed on Lambda and WeWork that will never come to light. But FTX - the transcript of the Sequoia internal chat supposedly vetting SBF is laughably amateur and shows the mindset that allows VCs to be duped by pattern matching and specific personality types (Ivy dropout, MIT mad scientist, charismatic new age genius, etc.): > That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.” > Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out. > “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner. > “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another. > “YES!!!” exclaimed a third (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128504)
• tptacek 2y ago
  I share the same feelings, directionally, as the author --- though I don't believe DoorDash was somehow bad for the world, but: Lambda School was on-par with an average code bootcamp. Students got a taste of programming, but when it came to getting hired, neither the training nor credentials held a candle to a college degree Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break. Lambda seems to have been real bad in the aggregate, but I'm wary of people leveraging that scary story as a vector for restoring college credentialism. Plenty of esteemed colleges have comparable track records, and deserve comparable stories. Let's skip the math, physics, and other code-free classes give you a foundational understanding of computers [...] Yes, let's, please. Programmers in the main connect form fields to SQL columns. Calc II is a hazing ritual that supports an elite credential structure, not foundational knowledge for the practice. In reality, one iOS instructor had just graduated from a competing boot camp before getting hired, having never spent a day in the industry. The head of the data science program was Austen's brother, Ryan, whose only experience was another bootcamp and internship. Again: real bad. Lambda: not good. But the author knows full well who teaches a lot of university courses, and that's not a great story either.
  • vunderba 2y ago
    No, let's decidedly not. If you have a disinclination towards purportedly difficult academia such as higher math, you're more than welcome to apply to some kind of a new major, we can call it "software development" where you can fritter away your mortality with impressive courses such as "flexing on others the CSS way" and "Mongo, the SQL to relational databases.", but there are those of us who study computer science with an emphasis on transcendent learning, and not the frontend framework flavor of the day. Computer science is a STEM discipline, not a trade.
    • tptacek 2y ago
      Software development is a trade, not a STEM discipline.
• bitwize 2y ago
  I'm reminded of a company I've crossed paths with in the past. It's the same people each time, but when they get found out they tear down the old company and erect a new one with the same business model under a new name. At first it was called Unbounded Solutions, then it was called BrighterBrain, and now it's called EnhanceIT. Their whole deal is, they will offer you a "free" crash course in mobile development (or whatever the new hotness du jour is, these days I'm sure they have AI offerings). I believe the course lasts two months, after which they will prepare a fake résumé for you, apply for contract positions in your name, and have call-center people in India do the phone interviews on your behalf, pretending to be you. You are also coached in how to lie about your experience for the in-person interview. You are obligated to work for two years at wherever they place you (could be one place or many places, I guess). If you do not agree to all of this, you will be assessed a $20,000 charge for your "free" training and billed for such. The principal in all three companies is Vikram Thadani. He's been running this scam in some form or another since the early 2010s. Their current site: https://www.enhanceit.com https://www.enhanceit.com Old blog post about someone who got skeeved out applying to work for them when they were BrighterBrain: https://web.archive.org/web/20150308193650/http://shifttohappy.com/2014/06/20/integrity/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150308193650/http://shifttohap... More recent Reddit post about the same shit going on under the EnhanceIT name: https://www.reddit.com/r/careerguidance/comments/v63p2t/enhance_it_has_anyone_heard_or_worked_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/careerguidance/comments/v63p2t/enha...
  • soneca 2y ago
    Hey, I mentioned you in my comment elsewhere on this post. Checked your recent comments and found you here. You were right in 2019, despite being downvoted. Good call. Congrats https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774532
    • bitwize 2y ago
      No worries m8, fwiw I HATE being right about this sort of thing. Unbounded/BrighterBrain/EnhanceIT probably sprang to mind when I read that comment of yours way back when, hence my response. For anybody out there, if you want to gain coding skills but cannot or do not wish to do a four-year degree program, community colleges in the USA can help close that skill gap for a price much more reasonable than a boot camp. Consider those, or state universities, and potentially save yourself a whole lot of trouble getting caught in a costly trap.
• pxeger1 2y ago
  The government student loan system in England effectively uses an income sharing agreement: with the most recent version, you pay 9% of your income over £25,000/year and if you haven’t finished paying it back within 40 years, it gets forgiven. This scheme doesn’t pay for itself though. (it costs the government money).
  • Suppafly 2y ago
    >This scheme doesn’t pay for itself though. (it costs the government money). That's ok though. Any civilized country is generally OK with spending taxes to educate people.
  • rahimnathwani 2y ago
    Imagine you go and work for a hedge fund straight out of university, have a great year, and earn £1m. Does the government get 9% of that? Or is it capped at the outstanding loan amount? If the latter, and someone earning $1m pays the same as someone evening $500k, it doesn't seem like an income share agreement.
    • golergka 2y ago
      I suspect the government gets much more than that, because it also taxes it.
      • rahimnathwani 2y ago
        Of course, but this isn't relevant to the consideration of whether UK student loans being are equivalent to an income share agreement. If the point were relevant, then we might as well consider government spending on K-12 schooling the same way. But general taxation is obviously not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the extra money someone pays in return for the government supporting their degree.
    • valzam 2y ago
      In Australia you have a loan balance based on your degree etc and pay it back with a similar % of income. I assume in the UK it's the same, if you earn 1mio you will probably not have to pay 9% (or do but can claim it back) and be done with any student loans.
• soneca 2y ago
  I wonder if Paul Graham regrets investing in and defending Austen for such a long time. I only made a comment long time ago that Lambda School sounded like a good idea to me and I regret how fool I was. Edit: btw, bitwise, you were right in 2019, despite your response to my comment being downvoted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774532
  • 2452wertert34 2y ago
    to be fair it really is a good idea it's a good contender against universities and there are handful of companies in other countries that have the same model the core differentiator and the sole reason those companies are still alive? they don't have a fucking austen as ceo lol the first mover advantage he got ended up being his achilles heel
• networked 2y ago
  The HN comment originally made by 'austenallred in https://www.sandofsky.com/content/images/2024/05/image-13.png https://www.sandofsky.com/content/images/2024/05/image-13.pn... is still available at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774 but is now by user '_pecl. The ownership of the comment changed between July 3, 2019 and January 31, 2020 according to https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774 https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/i.... I guess the author realized it reflected badly on him and contacted HN to anonymize the comment. Edit: This is not to suggest 'austenallred received special treatment.
  • DangLovesAusten 2y ago
    Dang just banned my other account because I questioned if the comment was really just Austen using his network of burners. pretty obvious the HN people are in cohoots with their precious Austen and don't want to see his terrible reputation tarnished even more
    • dang 2y ago
      No idea which account you're referring to but I certainly haven't banned anyone for that reason. In fact I just restored your other comments in this thread.
      • joshmanders 2y ago
        It's insane to read all the vile abuse thrown at you because people are angry at Silicon Valley big wigs and your absolute composure over it. You're a beast, dang, and I highly respect you for it.
        • dang 2y ago
          That's nice of you to say! It's been quite a decade of operant conditioning.
  • DangFksAusten 2y ago
• fudged71 2y ago
  Around the time that Lambda school was trending I joined a company that is providing large scale process re-engineering to Universities. At the time I was optimistic that Lambda would succeed. I’m fairly confident now that the cumulative student journey improvement, work allocation, cross-faculty collaboration, beurocracy-reduction, and general efficiencies we have delivered to a stable large post-secondary institution across all faculties is going to make a larger and longer lasting positive improvement to more students and people’s lives than what Lambda achieved. (With fewer people, less funding, etc)
• light_triad 2y ago
  There’s clearly a need to disrupt expensive colleges and some type of pay later arrangement is a good idea, but there’s some difficulties every ed startup will face: - schools need to be selective to keep the quality of the student body high so they persevere to finish the program and succeed - getting students hired in a competitive field is a very high bar that is much higher compared to most schools - software is a difficult field with high frustration and a steep learning curve Lambda was open to everyone, in a tough field, with a high bar for success. Alternatives might be possible in less competitive fields
• DangLovesAusten 2y ago
  [flagged]
• hintymad 2y ago
  In a way software engineers should feel relieved a bit that we can not mass produce well trained software engineers yet, even for entry-level roles. Of course, there are many exceptional individuals who benefited from code camps, but I'm talking about statistical results. For good for worse, one's ability to make it in software industry still has some correlation with how successful they are in "hardcore" trainings, like college-level maths and computer science.
• VirusNewbie 2y ago
  I'd take this more seriously if it didn't come across like there was a political agenda. To say something like "The defunding of public colleges" is egregious. It's just factually wrong. Colleges haven't been defunded. In fact college funding has gone up in many states. It's that tuition has risen more than the funding has gone up. Also, no mention of thousands of people saddled with debt from many public colleges teaching CS or IT or whatever? That's not a scam either???
• seoulmetro 2y ago
  Not sure why the writer attacks his "sock puppet", it's not a sock puppet, his wording actually obscures but does not lie. He is in that discord, with other students. If you think he's trying to hide on that account, and that's all your evidence, then you're just being emotional. Don't trust anyone you meet on the internet as they may be the CEO.
  • kcatskcolbdi 2y ago
    "I and many other former students" My grasp of English isn't without flaws, but that seems to be a pretty direct lie unless he was also a former student at Lambda School.
    • seoulmetro 2y ago
      No. It is commonly assumed as "I and other [group]" means that you are part of the group, but not always. It could mean you and other group share the same situation. "I and other dads, had to wait for the train." are you a Dad? Most likely based on general use, but what if you were just the tour guide for the dads.
      • kcatskcolbdi 2y ago
        Then you would say "I and a group of dads". "I and other dads" directly states that you are part of a group (dads).
        • seoulmetro 2y ago
          No it doesn't. It can. "I and a group of dads" creates disassociation where there may be more association to the group than their status as dads.
          • School-Cotton 2y ago
            > No it doesn't. What? Yes it does. To any native English speaker, “I and other X” means you’re part of X, always.
• enahs-sf 2y ago
  Absolutely eviscerating. Also I see this guy on some investor updates I get so I assume if he’s got enough cash to be an accredited investor he took a few chips off the table at some point.
• hintymad 2y ago
  > Students got a taste of programming, but when it came to getting hired, neither the training nor credentials held a candle to a college degree. Yet Lambda School regularly compared itself to college in its marketing, promising, "The depth of a 4-year degree, the practicality of a bootcamp." I thought people in the US already knew that part of the value of a college is accreditation. Some people would fail in a rigorous 4-year program. Some courses are like grand filters: it does not mean much if one excels first-year calculus, but it is a strong signal that one's talent or discipline is in question if the person fails the first-year calculus. So, statistically, companies get a pretty good signal, at a relatively low cost, on how good a college graduate is.
  • kccqzy 2y ago
    Most introductory courses in a college curriculum are meant to be grand filters. The "Introduction to Computer Science" course is supposed to filter out students who don't have the grit or mental acuity to further their study of computer science. If a student fails at that course, it's a strong hint for the student to consider a different major. That's actually the beauty of college: it's possible to cram four years' worth of courses into a tighter timeline, but if you don't you leave enough room to explore the introductory courses of different fields and declare major on one that is truly interesting to you.
  • dieselgate 2y ago
    Interesting point to bring up accreditation. It’s not relevant for software engineering far as I know but for Professional Engineering licensure an individual must attend an accredited school.
• shove 2y ago
  Honestly flabbergasted this is still on the front page considering what I’ve seen happen to criticism of the YC universe
• cod1r 2y ago
  What's funny is that I thought bloomtech had some relation to bloomberg and I also thought this austen allred guy was a big deal. I randomly DM'd him on twitter in 2022 thinking it was some superstar tech guy and he actually replied back; XD. Now that I know more about him...yea...I'm going to stay away.
• shawndrost 2y ago
  (Note: I was a founder at a coding bootcamp, Hack Reactor.) I don't think an author who understands the domain would write like this. Even if we spot that Lambda was a tire fire that needed to die, the author's outrage doesn't square with realities on the ground in other sectors of postsecondary education, especially in programs that serve lower-income students. I wouldn't launch a general defense of Lambda/Allred but I think the following notes from a practitioner might be interesting. Postsecondary employment stats are inaccurate across the board and intrinsically hard. In the real world I am mostly only aware of job stats that could be called "fake", and those which are not published. Hiring stats are surprisingly tough to get right and I would wager that the majority of public job stats would be called fake by the man on the street. For example, if you've seen a law school employment statistic, it probably includes (as "hired") all the people who work in another field, or who work part time, or who work on a "contract", etc. As a domain expert I can tell you there is no easy way to legislate this number's production (or outlaw the use of such stats) in a way that generates the outcomes you want, or which vindicates and villainizes the correct schools. Some state regulators make it illegal to publish or market job placement statistics; other state regulators make it mandatory! California's BPPE (for eg) posts them all publicly and a brief review will confirm that there are obvious incorrect filings which the regulator publishes without challenge. Accredited higher ed generally does not have direct state or federal regulatory oversight or rules on hiring stats. My personal opinion is that publishing and marketing hiring stats is good, actually -- even in an imperfect regime, which is the only way to do it -- but my broader point is that well-intended regulatory bodies haven't figured this out yet, and in any case the numbers are all wrong in the same ways that are cited here in shocked tones. Also would you be shocked if your local community college had reported 10% in-field employment? Note that "graduation" and "enrollment" are equally squiggly and intrinsically a part of the same statistic. Sizable portions of debtholders are (or appear) surprised, unhappy, and/or obviously cheated by profit-taking lenders. I think a lot of us are frustrated that students are faced with impossible choices about debt. Many would say "public payment is the only moral system" but that argument isn't clearly stated here. (As an aside, publicly-funded higher ed tends to exclude poor students, both under the status quo and under proposals for publicly-funded higher ed. This is accomplished through insidious rationing of four-year and graduate institutions, and weak services for working students. Working-class Bachelors' students are routed to University of Phoenix and get $100k+ of debt instead of subsidized in-state tuition.) Putting aside the public funding dream, student debt is how we fund schools today, and vanilla debt has the same issues as ISAs (which are a type of debt). I can't speak to Lambda's ISA structure or administration but I have some general comments about ISAs. An ISA is a newfangled kind of debt that is legally restricted from being very different from debt. (It's basically a vanilla debt, bundled with an insurance product that pays if the alum earns less than $X, and costs extra if the alum earns more than $Y. The insurance can't legally carry high fees, so it can't refund many grads, and complicated administration and adverse incentives also cost a lot. In practice there will be winners and losers vs vanilla debt.) ISAs and conventional debt can be designed well or poorly, and explained well or poorly, but the author is outraged about things which happen abundantly in all these circumstances. I signed college debt paperwork; I griped about the parts I had understood, and the parts I hadn't understood; profit-seeking firms bought and sold my debt and tossed me about on their careless seas. I can personally report that informed low-income students generally love ISAs (the debt-plus-downside-insurance product), and usually dislike vanilla debt, and for this reason I like ISAs at least as much as vanilla debt. Schools that serve lower-income students are disproportionately judged negatively by middle-class audiences, often with malign motives and/or malign emergent outcomes. Depending on how you lawyer the details, you could say that 90% of community college students waste time and money and never see any benefit. (And they're in a government-subsidized program and only paying a minority of true costs!) I would find that kind of lawyering to be holistically untrue, but I don't think normal people have grounded intuitions about what is normal and OK, and how that is influenced by class and income, part-time vs full-time, accredited vs unaccredited, etc. Many people aren't aware that there is more demand for BA/BS programs than there are subsidized schools -- doubly so if the student is working and lower-class -- and this is the normal audience for for-profit universities. The world's best institution for this audience would have bad employment stats, as compared to a bad b-tier state school, and as compared to middle-class attitudes about predation. Are lower-income students better served if we pass laws against low-success programs, or institute price caps, etc? I observe that schools which serve poor students appear dirty and compromised in myriad ways, even when they are operating at the top or the middle of curve in terms of execution. This shows up in employment stats, in student complaints about debt (rich kids just pay), in employee morale and pay grade, etc. Again, this is true of great schools that serve a vulnerable audience. (Not saying that's the case here. I honestly don't know where Lambda is on the curve, and I honestly don't know which Universities of Phoenix should be shut down. And I'm a domain expert!) In conclusion: If this author were an all-powerful regulator, what % of postsecondary programs for low-income students would get shut down? (After examining the facts.) Would this benefit low-income students? I honestly don't know and there are no simple answers, but even if I assume that Lamda is an outlier that needs to die, I don't think an author who understands the landscape would write like this.
• gloosx 2y ago
  I was working in a YC startup which was part of this gold rush. At first I was very impressed with an infinite money glitch they discovered. Just find desperate people who lost their jobs during the pandemic, promise them a new job, collect their phones and emails and start spamming hard, using salespeople named "coaches" and engaging them into a gamified funnel. In the end, sell them idea of taking a loan (or ISA if no bank will give you a loan cause of your credit history) and get part of that loan as an enrolment fee. All of that set-up in the spirit of a charity organisation of course, helping people to "start a new life". The application was initially made by founders who finished a similar bootcamp as well. Terrible software decisions and randomly assembled tech stack included. Then hiring junior guys to clean up after bootcampers, middle level guys to clean up after fired junior guys, and lastly senior guys (my company) to write some code which actually works. After application was finally working they got XXX millions of VC funding, and started hiring everything they can, then firing, hiring, firing and so on, we all got fired eventually and I dont even know what's happening there now, but I remember it was a big mess. Founders are former bank's people, loans are still their bread even after getting into IT. They were totally convinced they are the next unicorn, but just "one talented growth-hacker" away from it, always looking for that hacker but never found him i guess.