Thread by @jlgelinas

I’ve been internalizing a lot of the anxiety and stress from the recent Verge reporting on Lambda School, which I am currently enrolled in full time. It’s been doubled down by seeing tech role models— @dhh, @abramov, @ossia, even @isosteph all dog pile on with their shots.
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I don’t want to take platform away from dissatisfied students in the UX cohort or in general. Everyone has the right to tell their story, and to have it amplified by others in the public sphere.
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Give feedback, cause a scene, withdraw, ask for your ISA to be canceled if you think you have grounds. Dissatisfied students are within their rights.
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But this “I knew Lambda School was a scam all along” self-congratulatory me-tooism can just take a fucking seat. Seriously. There are only two major complaints a dissatisfied Lambda Student could make about their experience:
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1) The opportunity cost of their time (7 to 9 months) was wasted or 2) They “would have succeeded without LS anyway” so Lambda School doesn’t “deserve” to collect on the ISA (since Lambda School only gets to collect IF YOU SUCCEED and are making OVER 50K in the field).
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Is it bad if a student feels that way? Yes, it is bad. Lambda School should take note and keep making the program better. But education is the monumental work of literally improving the human condition. Are some people bound to be dissatisfied no matter what happens? Also yes.
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The farce here is that the deal Lambda School offered is somehow bad or fraudulent. It’s actually an incredible deal. The other farce is that the legacy education system could/would provide what LS offers on better, cheaper, or more favorable terms for students.
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Question #1: are a student’s 7-9 months full-time effort (40 hrs/ week) wasted at Lambda School? Do we tear the school down and throw the baby out with the bathwater? Well what exactly is Lambda School? This. That’s it.
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That’s a heat map of GitHub activity since ending my active duty military career and starting Lambda School in August of 2019. The near daily light squares are the course curriculum, bite size chunks of new programming concepts and skills.
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The monthly surges of dark squares are build weeks— teaming up with developers in different stages of the curriculum or different disciplines for one week to build an entire full stack application from scratch against a product specification.
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The 8-week block of dark green squares? Lambda Labs. After students polish off their core curriculum and have 4x build weeks under their belt, they launch an 8 week product cycle
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There’s no more lectures, no more assignments. Just a product backlog, a development team, a stakeholder, and a product/engineering manager to keep you on track. 8 straight weeks of iterative development, segmented into sprints, toward a product goal.
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Does that seem like a waste of time for an apprentice software developer, data scientist, or designer? It’s not. It’s literally the most effective use of time possible. You work full time doing exactly what your future career will require you to do. Build software with teams.
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Can you teach yourself? Sure. Will you learn more, faster, and have more real software in production at the end of 6 months of self-teaching? I really, really doubt it.
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The value prop of education was never the BOOKS. You don't go to school for the library. It’s the entire superstructure that is supposed to amplify and accelerate the learning process, which Lambda School has in spades.
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At Lambda School, there’s a Labs cohort finishing their 8-week capstone projects every. single. month. Here’s my Labs cohort’s demo day video:
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That’s 20 new pieces of software that didn’t exist before it was willed into existence by teams of web developers, mobile developers, data scientists, and designers. I knew my team killed it. I was stunned on demo day to find out that EVERYONE killed it.
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Well gee, that’s great, a bunch of students shipped really high quality products after putting in 1,000 to 1,500 hours learning to code. It sure sounds like you are employable, but are the skills Lambda teaches you good enough to hack it in the “real world”? _
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I’ve applied to exactly one job since starting Lambda School, and this is what the senior engineer had to say upon reviewing my code challenge:
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Now, your mileage may vary. I’ve got four kids so I spent my time in Lambda School coding like my life depended on it, because well, four other peoples’ lives do.
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I’ve also been pumping the software developer network in my hometown since the day I left the Army and moved back home, because well, I’m not moving these kids AGAIN (which was the original impetus for hanging it up with the Army).
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My only serious time spent coding prior to Lambda School was a Udacity course I knocked out on nights & weekends during my last few deployments with the Army. Lambda has simply been the most effective and efficient use of my time possible as I go through a career transition.
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So we’ve debunked farce #1: Lambda School is not a “waste of time.” Farce #2: The legacy education system is somehow going to give you more efficient and effective training, at a better price, faster, or on more favorable terms for disadvantaged students.
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Like I’m laughing so hard at the notion it’s hard to type this out. The legacy education system is predicated on the “bachelor’s degree bundle” where you grind out “Tue and Thu at 10AM” lectures on 5 misc. topics at the cost of $X,000 to $X0,000/ semester for 4 years.
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All of this will eventually add up to “The Stamp of Employment Approval” and MAYBE some real skills developed under the guidance of talented practitioners… if you’re extremely lucky, and went out of you way to seek those opportunities/mentors out.
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But the “learn relevant skills that get you a job” part of the adventure is entirely optional, and in the backseat to the mandatory “keep paying us for credit hours because you need 120+ of them to graduate, otherwise you just leave with debt & regrets” part of the adventure.
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This isn’t to knock the idea of college degrees, “well rounded” students, or the leagues of dedicated educators running 4-year institutions. 18-22 year olds with no family obligations have a low opportunity cost of their time— why not? Go for it. The market clearly exists.
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But for folks with kids? Taking care of their parents? Who need to work? You’re not buying a car and paying tuition on a summer job’s wages like the good ol’ days.
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The frightening truth? The 4-year degree system in the U.S. has become just a thin veneer over the hereditary passing down of wealth and status. [independent.co.uk/news/science/m…]
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Fraternity brothers make 36% more over their lifetime, but have a GPA 0.25 points lower than the average student. [cnbc.com/2017/10/09/joi…]. The point is to keep the plebes out.
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At this point kids who actually elevate their social and economic status are almost an accidental artifact of the system. Squeak through on an academic scholarship, outstanding test scores, NCAA scholarship, or military benefits and you CAN legitimately change your stars.
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But for the average student not enrolled in a top 10 or 20 degree program within the U.S.? At today’s tuition prices? MAYBE break even on the cost of the education & 4 years lost productivity, and you’re still probably looking at a decade+ of real debt servitude.
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This isn’t to discourage anyone who chose that path, or discount anyone who successfully traveled that path. But this is somehow supposed to be a BETTER deal for students? And 9 months of honing the exact skills and practices you’re hoping to be hired for is a “scam”? Please.
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Don’t get me wrong. It works for some folks. A lot of folks. But it DOESN’T work for a lot MORE folks, and anyone who is moving the needle on how we package and finance educational opportunities is doing the lord’s work for our children and our children’s children.
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And lets clarify: @LambdaSchool doesn’t leave you with 30k of debt, regardless of the quality of your experience. It leaves you with a contractual obligation to pay them a portion of your income IF and ONLY IF you are making over 50k in the field.
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You have to clear 88k/ year over your first 24 months in the field to actually repay 30k. Only making 60k for those first 24 months as a junior engineer outside of major metros? Your ISA disappears after repaying $20,400. Never break 50k annualized income? Never pay a dime.
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Compare that to even just $30k of student loan debt. It’s real debt. Which means it has interest. That compounds. And it’s federally guaranteed debt. Which means it never goes away, even when you declare bankruptcy. Just ask my dad.
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After a decade serving in the Marines, he attended the University of Michigan on his G.I. Bill. He graduated in 1991, two years after I was born. The first college educated person in my extended family.
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Even better, he got a job at the University as a sysadmin on their nascent student email servers (of course that was not the field of his degree lol).
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We had a good fourteen year run in the middle class. I had the benefit of growing up in the Ann Arbor Public School system, which alone was enough to change my stars.
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But then life happens. A death in the family, a struggle with mental health, layoffs at the University, back against a wall trying to figure out how to make old skills relevant in a rapidly changing technology environment… all just in time for the global financial crisis.
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My dad fell like a meteor back down through the social strata. After a decade he finally bounced off the bottom and made his way back into the working class. Makes $14/hour or so driving handicap lift vans. Most stable he’s been in a long time, and we’re grateful for it.
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But when they repo’d our cars, foreclosed on the family home, took all the cash left in the accounts… what did they leave? His student loans of course.
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He’s 62 now, might start drawing social security in a few years. Still sends out his monthly payment for those loans. Owes more now than he did when the wheels starting coming off the bus back in ’04.
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The point of this overly personal story? My dad is the canary in the coal mine. Working class, on the verge of drawing social security, and stil paying student loans? Reader, he graduated in ’91.
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Imagine what’s going to happen to this generation, paying literally 3x the tuition he paid back then. $1.4 trillion in student debt. The whole system is going to shudder under the weight of the injustice… and then collapse.
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What’s the world going to look like in the aftermath? I hear everyone chanting for student loan forgiveness and K-16 education for all. I’m not against the idea, but the post-9/11 G.I. Bill has given us a controlled experiments for the law of unintended consequences.
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When you infuse 4-yr institutions with federal $$ and drop the opportunity cost to zero for not attending, it’s not all good news. Some benefit, but a lot of people spend time and money pursuing bad programs with no career outcomes because “it’s what everyone else is doing.”
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America needs more than just federal money funding college education— it needs a paradigm shift on what education IS, and what educated people DO.
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Everyone doesn’t necessarily need to grind out 120 credit hours to be an “important person with a lucrative career,” but people are chasing each other like lemmings over the cliff in pursuit of that myth.
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America needs to stop stigmatizing vocational training. America needs to stop deluding youth into taking $X0,000 in loans out against degrees with dubious or nonexistant career outcomes. America needs to stop shackling our young adults to decades of student loan repayment.
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Whether it’s Lambda School or not, SOMEONE is going to move the needle on that paradigm shift and be picking up the pieces when this all finally falls apart, and we should be cheerleading the people in the arena who are actually tackling that gargantuan task.
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Re-normalizing education to be 1+ years of apprenticeship is good. Re-financializing education to be income share agreement where the educational institution shoulders more risk than the student is good.
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Lambda is a good deal. If they fail, it won’t be because “it was a scam all along.” It will be because they opened up the war for the future of higher education on too many fronts at the same time. But thank god someone is actually fighting. You know who've I've got money on.
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