Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
I&#x27;ve had a fair amount of experience with coding boot camps having have helped several friends and coworkers apply, get accepted, attend, and complete bootcamps across various cities and institutions.<p>The idea of bootcamps is fantastic, they allow people that may have not been exposed to computer science to get up to speed on technology and transition careers.<p>However, there are several problems. First and foremost, while 3-6-9 months are great when you are going from zero knowledge, the challenge is that isn&#x27;t enough time to really be a junior developer unless you have prior experience. So you will need to continue to augment your education after graduation to ensure that you get a well paying job.<p>Most people attending bootcamps are doing so after college and later in life, which means even though some bootcamps are cheaper than attending a semester or a full year of college they are still quite expensive because the students are not &quot;students&quot; in that they are usually adults and need to figure out how to pay for school, attend classes, while effectively receiving zero income.<p>And applying for loans is much more complex because this isn&#x27;t the same as taking out student debt for college.<p>The second issue is that all of these bootcamps say that they are for beginners with zero knowledge, but looking over their curriculums that simply isn&#x27;t the case. Software engineering has gotten much more complex over the past decade. When I first started fumbling around with it myself I could just write some PHP or Perl code, and get up and running quickly. Today you need to know about github, javascript libraries, frameworks, and the typical &quot;Hello World&quot; application isn&#x27;t a direct route.<p>Most of these schools don&#x27;t realize that their first students are already exposed to these concepts, but later students aren&#x27;t so they don&#x27;t really adjust their curriculum.<p>With lambda in particular it also is a bit confusing because the school is online. Which should mean that you are able to provide the service for a lower cost, but they are charging the same amount as in person physically attended schools.<p>There are a lot of deceptive practices in the industry, lambda isn&#x27;t alone, such as taking recent grads and giving them low paying jobs as TA (teacher assistants) so that they can provide help to students at a lower cost while also allowing the school to claim that they have higher placement.<p>The curriculums are really dependent on a per school basis, but I have seen a bunch of stuff that simply doesn&#x27;t make sense and makes it more challenging for students.<p>One school had students do a group project, which wouldn&#x27;t count as part of their final for the first &quot;mod&quot; of the school. However they continued to teach things that you need for the final which would be a personal project. If you got assigned to a bad team you would be working much slower and not able to keep up and then your final which has nothing to do with a group determines whether you proceed or repeat the course (they charge you to repeat). Also it&#x27;s important to note that 50% of the students didn&#x27;t pass the first mod, which means you have a 50% chance of being on a slow team that would hamper your learning. Their advice was that it is important to learn to pair, and I agree, but when you get to your first job you are pairing with people that have experience, not where your partner has a 50% chance of failing out.<p>I firmly believe that bootcamps and providing secondary education choices are essential and if done correctly can really begin to combat the monopoly that colleges hold over education, but it&#x27;s a challenging mission.<p>With education there are student loans that you can take out and I think that is essential to get this going in the US because it is simply impossible for most people to not have any income and still pay for schooling for even 6 months, much less a longer period of time.<p>The other challenge is that you really need to have 3 terms. Beginner, intermediate, advanced. Each student can then apply based on skill set to determine where they place and students can move from one to the next, with each section being 4-5 months. If you did 15 months of education you would be much better off than what the school provides. It&#x27;s great to get from zero to one in terms of knowledge, but students are still left far from having skills that are immediately beneficial to employers.<p>There&#x27;s definitely more work that needs to be done.<p>As for Lambda itself, when you look at how other coding bootcamps have fared financially it doesn&#x27;t paint a rosy picture. It&#x27;s a challenging space to operate and the VC style returns simply aren&#x27;t there. If you want to offer an online only education that is fantastic but you have places like codecademy that do that and also do not charge you $30k for the privilege of basically accessing information that is online for free.<p>The challenge with coding is that it really is much easier to get going when you have someone you can ask questions from, so helping to improve that aspect of it while providing it online at a low cost is really the challenge.