Austen is very very good at finding public criticism and responding to it. In contrast, in Lambda's slack, every criticism is automatically taken to private PM, to get it out of the way as soon as possible and to immediately shutdown any ensuing conversation. (A few times, when that didn't work, they turned off comments altogether.)
Lambda's strategy is to PRETEND to be responsive to feedback, to say a lot of pretty words and act concerned, while actually ignoring all of it.
For example, they created a student survey to see how students felt about removing the majority of paid teachers (team leads) and forcing us to be mentors instead. One of the first questions?
"Do you agree that leadership is an important part of being a successful programmer?" (approximately)
The rest of the survey was the same. They weren't interested in getting feedback. They were interested in pretending to listen to feedback.
Austen is minimizing student frustration in this comment, acting like people are grumbling about minor changes. He's ignoring the many many people who have written out long, articulate, arguments about how the changes damaged their education and removed the value of Lambda for them.
He also acts like he didn't delete every post in the Lambda subreddit that offered criticism over the last three months, without any response.
False honesty in threads like this is how Lambda gets away with being dishonest.
In Lambda slack, dissent is shut down immediately by "student success" staff directing you to DMs. Or an individual zoom chat, which is friendly and seemingly receptive to feedback, but ultimately pointless. A student-created poll with 90+ votes was posted after the changes went live, and it was taken down immediately, along with all feedback, to be replaced by their byzantine "More Transparent" survey system, conveniently delayed to be issued on a Friday evening, that could be twisted into yet another glowing report on the exciting new changes.
Lambda has plenty of real feedback and criticism (constructive and otherwise) and they have no interest in it. They make a very convincing show of listening and having meaningful discussions, but look at the form of the substantive changes. They've completely gutted their successful learning structure to replace it with something cheaper, and hide the damage in their reporting. But they're still "iterating" so we'll see, right?
My key criticisms: 1. Waves arms This, all of this. The dishonesty. 2. Removing TLs. The accountability and required meeting every day really made the difference between this and self-study. TLs were holding the program together. 3. Instituting self grading with no human evaluation, even for end-of-module tests. You can join "code review" group calls but it's voluntary, there's no one checking your work at the end of the section. 4. Cutting the curriculum (there is no python instruction) Opting into the "extended curriculum" just means you repeat the same thing twice.
If you're considering joining, also be aware that he deletes comments and tweets, and is the moderator of the subreddit. From what I've seen, the style is to allow the dissent, maybe even engage, and then quietly delete it later after things have blown over. What you see online may be curated even if it seems like it's outside the purview of Lambda official channels.
I don’t have a horse in this fight, but the above is a generalization of what’s called Push Polling: polling in a way to change opinions and get a desired outcome, rather than to actually gather pre-existing opinions.
Some students see it as one more thing distracting them from
writing more code, and believe the only thing that will
determine their career success is ability to write code (as you
all know, ability to write code is necessary but not
sufficient to success as an engineer).
I can teach dev lifecycle to a junior, and often need to because every business I've worked at as a lead has a totally different model. I can coach them on inter-team dynamics (and often have to). I can help them with culture fit to a point (if they're willing). What I can't do is teach them to be able to reason and write code and do the engineering work I hired them for.
From the Reddit post (and from other reviews), it sounds like the students are not performing well and sinking without learning this core skill -- most didn't understand enough to code in JS, for instance. This seems like a pretty dire failure in the part of the program itself.
Do you plan on at least giving these students a chance to retake prior units without further charging them for knowledge you should have already taught them?
> Do you plan on at least giving these students a chance to retake prior units without further charging them for knowledge you should have already taught them?
Students are actually strongly encouraged to retake units at no additional cost in order to move on to the next level, and in some instances we require it.
This is actually where some of the greatest frustration comes. It would be easy to close our eyes and wave people along but we have to say at times, “You’re not quite there yet, let’s keep working at it.” That’s not what students want to hear.
I hear that this is good feedback, but looking at sugarwater's response that seemingly matches up w/ the original critique, maybe the current situation falls short of what you're trying to do, Austen?
These may be outliers, but from my perspective, the frustrations seem valid.
I laud you being willing to teach a junior dev but I just find so many places are not open to hiring juniors at all.
Excuse me if I'm missing the obvious, but why can't you teach them that? Seems like it'd be right up your alley.
While the time spent teaching a blank slate how to be an engineer might benefit the person, it is literally throwing money away from the perspective of the company because it's not what I was hired to do.
But it is worth paying more attention to the frustrated students feedback. The OP one is about lack of team leaders and having “mentors” that are qualified just by having two more months of online classes than them. And it is not the first time a similar issue arises. Lambda School seems to always be justifying mistakes after some disgruntled student testimonial gets some traction.
My personal unsolicited advice: listen more to your students ahead of time and not employers. Employers are full of bullshit. They have a huge list of qualities that they want to see in a candidate, then go on to hire someone that is not at all like that, but the hiring manager liked (for whatever subjective reasons). It seems to be a wrong step to follow employers gospel and go against students expectations. You say that you know more about what students want and need than themselves. I doubt that. Give what students want: confidence that they learned something useful and, moreover, confidence that they can continue to learn about UX/software development through their career. That confidence in their knowledge will earn them jobs, not employers with no skin in the game telling you want they ideally want.
Don’t patronize your students. When you do, it feels from the outside that you are taking shortcuts to people’s education in favor of short term market share growth.
This seems like a bad frame to look at the situation from. We don’t know what we don’t know, and don’t always actually know what we want.
When I went to university there was a ton that I didn’t know. It took me at least a semester to get accustomed to how the institution ran.
If my university responded only to what I wanted and “needed” then I would be quite worried about the education they are serving.
Also optimizing for employer preferences seems to make sense you know... if you’re focused as a vocational style institute?
There can never be too many reminders to listen to student feedback. Thank you!
The complaints i have seen around mentors in this thread and those linked are not that they don't see the user of a mentor/mentee program, but conversely that their mentor was not qualified or good at it. That's very different, they like the mentor/mentee program in theory, they don't think it's well executed.
Anyway, with 2000 students enrolled, it's possible that some groups/courses/teams/classes/whatever you call them are worse than others. We may only hear from those in the worst. But then the question is, how do you find out about these "failing" teams quickly, and how do you correct them, so those students still get the quality you aspire for. It's kind of too late after they've had months of a bad experience, they won't get those months back, of their lives, or of your program. What systems are in place to do that; what systems might be possible?
Because the other disturbing thing in linked threads is students who tried to contact you to say the teachers/lessons/other devices weren't up to your standards, and could not get an ear.
This post tells me all I ever needed to know about lambda. Clearly an irresponsible organisation more focused on image than value and with no respect for their supposed students.
Lambda School made 2 promises to students when I joined. 1. They promised that students would always have access to the most up to date curriculum that was offered. This is no longer true. 2. They promised a network that connected students to alumni in an ever expanding community. They started separating alumni from the student workspace in Slack months ago. That community doesn't exist.
These are the 2 most fundamental promises that Lambda School made to students and it has broken both. Add to this incompetence or indifference the damaging changes that have been made to the curriculum and no one can reasonably accept the same price tag, $30K, for the diminished service, unaccountable support and lower quality curriculum product.
Students aren't the only population at Lambda School who are unhappy with these changes that Allred claims, "some of the changes that a subset of students did not like are unquestionably for their benefit". If this is true why is Lambda School losing or in the process of losing key instructors further degrading the quality of the product.
Lambda School can no longer rely on student referrals for driving growth in enrollment. Lambda School current and future instructor departures will continue the downward spiral. Allred seems to believe he can will the bleeding to stop. A bit of humility and self awareness would be a better path for him to consider over his protestations. Those on the inside at Lambda School recognize his words as nonsense.
First and foremost, as others pointed, is the growth plans. Education is hard to scale -- good educators deliver fantastic results; a very smart person droning on along a prewritten material adds no value. I doubt there is a way to quickly figure out how good a teacher a new hire is -- it will be clear after a semester or two, but not before. Thus good education needs long-term staff and careful hiring; both hard to scale.
> changes that a subset of students did not like are unquestionably for their benefit
Ouch. OUCH! Anytime someone is claiming that they do something for your benefit against your will, look for other motives. It is perfectly OK to limit options -- it is your business and you do not have infinite flexibility. But claiming it is good for the students rings hollow. Sorry. "We are tracking your web purchases to better serve you" (annoying advertisements).
In your example the teacher is arguing to convince you, the final decision maker, that something is long term worthwhile even if near term unpleasant (and most adults who sign up for a class will usually listen to the teacher). The original example is closer to the teacher locking the door and saying "you will not leave until you show me that you learned X". Which is a very different setup that, even if fruitful, few adults will find palatable. My 2c.
> We have just north of 2,000 students and ~180 full-time staff members, the majority of which are student-facing.
2000/180 = 12 students per staff member. This seems high and "student-facing" is padding the numbers. "Customer Success" people are technically student-facing but not instructors, and number of instructors per student is the most important number that matters for quality
> This student’s frustration comes from a series of changes we made simultaneously
Do not make changes to ongoing cohorts
> Some students see it as one more thing distracting them from writing more code, and believe the only thing that will determine their career success is ability to write code
Isn't this something a school would be able to educate on? Why not introduce group projects (maybe you already have them)?
It is very, very high.
I’d have to dig to find the exact numbers but about 90 are directly involved in instruction, project management, etc. Not including student support.
> Do not make changes to ongoing cohorts
We really try to avoid doing so, but in some instances it is impossible.
> Isn't this something a school would be able to educate on? Why not introduce group projects (maybe you already have them)?
We do have group projects and do try to educate here. Students will come back a year after being hired and say, “Wow, I thought x was a waste of time but it was extraordinarily useful” all the time.
You sold students something you can't implement. Apologize and offer a full refund.
Students can be with Lambda for as long as 2+ years. Everything being frozen in time would be to their great detriment.
These are not the changes OP is complaining about. Your responses kind of strike me as misdirection.
Don't pull Bill Clinton [1].
When enough people complain you made changes that are material and detrimental.
[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1998/09/bill-clinton-and...
The only times we can’t do that (and that’s happened maybe 1-2 times in the history of Lambda School) is when it’s a change to teams of students that run across multiple cohorts.
For what it’s worth, major changes in curriculum do lead to refunds at schools. There have been two examples in my education where mid-year I had a graduate level class need to be rescheduled from a night class due to a professor’s illness. Both were fully refunded when I couldn’t fit the class into my work schedule. That seems to be pretty analogous here, and I wasn’t charged a percent based on how many weeks I attended the class before the change. I was just refunded the total amount of the course because I wouldn’t be able to gain its value. It wasn’t even a difficult process to get the refund, unlike the weeks of trying to get support it seems like the person in this situation attempted.
I think I would place ‘elevated’ expectations for refunds on a founder due to the elevated risk of trying a Startup’s unproven, expensive, and risky education model. I don’t think the expectations are ‘elevated’ but I also think your baseline for doing good for students shouldn’t be ‘it’s only as bad as I perceive the alternatives.’ I think we should strive to do better.
But frankly, if the only thing you took out of this post is that the ISA structure is poor, without considering how you have all the power to set and enforce terms in your contract, I don't think I have much else I can say to try and help you. I think there are a lot of ways you can improve Lambda School to make it better for the people attending. And they don't involve deleting Reddit threads of criticism.
Edit: s/selling/securitizing
You are incorrect in your understanding of how ISA financing works. Our interests and incentives remain aligned.
Interesting, I didn't know this. I thought you just sold the ISA outright, which would retain some of the incentive but weaken it quite a bit. It's great to hear that that's not happening.
I found https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-isa-... discussing this in more detail. Seems like everyone complaining about Lambda School ISA financing should just read that...
It's still completely aligned, we just fast-forward some of the cash so we don't have to raise endless amounts of VC.
As a student, I can confirm this is a lie. And you know it is because we have told you in Slack, we've told you on Twitter, we've told you on Reddit, and now you have to read about it on Hacker News.
One thing that jumps out at me is that students who have only just gone through the course themselves may not make the best mentors. They top x% percent probably make excellent mentors, but they rest still don't really know what they're doing themselves. You may want to actually build in some kind of assessment here and have mentoring as a "high performance track" (ideally with this being something the high-performing students can put on their resumes). I've seen this done very successfully in traditional schools (for children).
All of this after saying things are suboptimally distributed.
Austen, you constantly snake your way out of accountability and admitting bad things come from your school. Why don’t you just man up and fix the problems and take a hit to your profit margin? Don’t get into education if it’s a money grab, you dumb schmuck.
This is disappointing, of course. We have 180+ people working really, really hard to make Lambda School the best experience it can be. At times we’ll fall short, and, as another poster pointed out, the margin for error is just razor thin; thousands of happy and successful students can be out there, but it’s the ones who don’t make it or have a good experience that cause us to lose sleep (and make it to the top of HN).
We take our responsibility in that regard very seriously; students come to us to change their lives and do something really, really difficult, and anything we do affects people in a very profound way.
To the parent’s point, in this particular instance I don’t think this student's frustrations are the result of too much growth or lack of resources per student. We haven’t really grown over the past year or so, and the school is still very well resourced. We have just north of 2,000 students and ~180 full-time staff members, the majority of which are student-facing. Those may be suboptimally distributed (they are, and always will be to some degree) but a cheap education as a result of aggressive cost cutting this is not. As such, the solution is much less exciting than “need to spend more money” or “need to grow more slowly.”
This student’s frustration comes from a series of changes we made simultaneously (something we avoid doing when we can). Some of these changes worked very well. Some did not. And this is the tricky part: some of the changes that a subset of students did not like are unquestionably for their benefit. So we’re working through those changes as well as debates around the trade-offs around, “Do we want our students to love us or be successful?”
The specifics of what students didn’t like: The first is a mentor/mentee program we set up within the school. Employers tell us literally every day they want students who truly understand the development and release cycle, and work on teams. We created a mentor/mentee program where every student has a chance to do that, and the result of that program so clearly creates better outcomes that employers ask specifically for students who have done that.
Some students love it. Some students see it as one more thing distracting them from writing more code, and believe the only thing that will determine their career success is ability to write code (as you all know, ability to write code is necessary but not sufficient to success as an engineer). We’re digging into the details of how and why it fails when it does. I don’t yet know what we’ll do there but the solution is likely more quiet and subtle iteration to the student experience.
The other change was our slowly winding down of the Team Lead program. We used to have a program where we would hire some students on short contracts to serve as something akin to TAs. Sometimes this worked very well, often times it didn’t work well, and the experience was brittle and unreliable, so we shifted that budget back into full-time roles. Doing so has revealed gaps that TLs were plugging that should have never existed (the majority of which should have been solved by software and not people from the get-go.)
So, Lambda School is not yet perfect and likely never will be. We’re properly resourced and not growing too quickly. We’re trying out best to make everyone we admit happy and successful. Turns out that’s extraordinarily difficult to do, and we’re doing the best we can, and I’m always open to any feedback on what we can or should do better.