sugarwater

It's in the third month of the curriculum, after primarily only working with Google Colab in the previous two.

Keep in mind that a majority of the students have never seen or touched a command-line, and trying to install various tools resulted in a lot of errors for a lot of students, troubleshooted by TLs that were only students 2+ months ahead.

Can agree with you 100% about Unit 3 in the data science track.

I know a few of my peers that walked out without even setting up their local development (because they were on windows and there was little help or instruction for students with windows).

But I'm glad you got something good out of CS and Labs. I'd describe CS as neutral for me... It was just grinding CodeSignal. Labs was extremely disorganized and suffered from a lack of leadership and its sudden shortened length (from 2 months to 1 month).

Above minimum, I believe. Last I heard the fellowship pays ~$15/hour

Thanks! Nobody's ever told me that about my writing! My email is open if anyone wants to chat, to anyone that sees this :-)

As a student that experienced the changes you were talking about... Before the TLs were removed, my code was vetted by my TL (and she was a good one, thank goodness), but after the changes, not a single person vetted it. I could probably have sent DMs to various people to get some sort of code review, but as a standard process, it wasn't available anymore.

As a Data Science student that just recently graduated from the program, it prepares you for a data analyst position, at best.... which essentially means any job where your primary role is to wrangle data.

I graduated at the end of February and am still job searching.

In the meantime I have a part time job and working through the MIT Computer Science OCW

It's worth mentioning the the CEO Austen had a post on here (now deleted) proclaiming to have creating a bot army via stealing people's pictures on Instagram.

I would qualify that as "underhanded"

As a student that went through the program, I question if their incentives were aligned.

During the middle of my enrollment at the program (Sept 2020), the school suddenly dropped all notion of grading, code review, and attendance, let alone the length of the program. It remained this way for 3 months, 50% of the length of the program.

This is a broad description of the changes, but I want to emphasize that the changes were terrible, _many_ students complained, and the school essentially whistled with fingers in their ears.

Very much blind leading the blind leading the blind from my experience at the school

After Lambda School completely removed code review, grading, attendance, TLs when I was enrolled... I just couldn't see how the incentives were aligned anymore. There was no one looking at my assignments, my assessments, my projects and telling me what I got wrong and how I could do better.

Those choices made by Lambda only hurt students' learning and therefore chances to get a job. And when students complained, the school addressed the complaints but barely made a change.

You'd be better taken care of if you got hired by Amazon in a non-tech role and then applied to this program. What Amazon provides to employees who sign up:

"Applicants accepted into the tuition-free program receive a stipend to cover living costs and a subsidy to maintain their benefits plan."

That being said, as a former student of lambda, I do not recommend the program, at least the Data Science track. The controversial reputation Lambda has received over the internet and social media is well-deserved.

As a former student, I can't recommend Lambda. I am speaking to their quality of curriculum and lack of transparency towards their students. I hope from working with Amazon there'll be some quality assurance.

Well, a LOT of students were unhappy about the changes. Truth is not a lot of students post about their experience on social media, and of those that are unhappy with the school dare not post under their real name. We’re job-seeking with the school on our resume, after all.

The point is that for all posts spanning back to 5+ months ago, the entire comment section is filled with students sharing their story and trying to stop other people from enrolling at the school. I'm not sure your post about the $100 dollar toothbrush was worthy of a post here, either.

You're absolutely right.

Here are a couple more recent links relevant to Lambda School:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA8obAJa414&t=500s

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lvi6mz/lamb...

https://twitter.com/namssus/status/1339037833386930177?s=20

Maybe they can turn it around? Idk. They certainly couldn't improve things quick enough when I was there. The most unfortunate thing is that Lambda is walking away with a tainted reputation.

Yep. Plenty of controversy surrounding it, and I knew that coming in as a student. The reality is, is that I had a really good experience during the first month of the school (the "free-trial" period, where you can back out of your ISA if you want) and decided to stick with it.

Students all across the board were and are still really upset. Some student posted a poll asking whether or not students liked the changes. Overwhelmingly, students answered NO, but soon after the poll was deleted by the CEO Austen. He's deleted quite a few negative posts on the Lambda subreddit, too. I'm obviously no fan of his, after he described the changes Lambda made as "small changes in schedule" when [this post](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017) blew up on hackernews.

The school really has a major problem with transparency and holding trust with students. I left the program unhappy with what I got from it, and I can say the same about my peers. If someone in real life asks me about the program and whether or not I recommend it, it's a solid no from me.

I know that Lambda has now implemented an auto-grader, but it came too late for me. I was in that hole post-changes where Lambda seemed not to know what the hell it was doing, and graduated after.

There was even a week where I tested whether or not Lambda cared if I was submitting anything at all by NOT submitting anything. And... crickets. No more accountability.

There were even form submissions where a student could select "I want to be contacted by student-success or an instructor". Those form submissions didn't work, I tried them every week, and I sent feedback and personally DMed people complaining about this. Lambda School said the changes were to give students more 1:1 time with instructors... but there was no (working) process implemented to have this come true.

No more attendance was taken, as well, which left the biggest accountability hole. My first student mentor wasn't great, and ended up ghosting me after a week. I was ghosted by my second mentor as well. And by no means was this an uncommon occurrence.

Track-teams, which replaced stand-ups, were now student-led, with the "leader" position rotated every week. The groups were now made of students of different cohorts, and the prompts we had to awkwardly read over during the meeting were mostly soft-skills. Very few people enjoyed this, and because Lambda was not taking attendance, most people did not go. This negatively affected build-weeks, though, since your track team is your build team. Build-weeks were supposed to give students experience with working in groups. But because Lambda was not keeping its students accountable, I ended up working with just one other person in both build-weeks, when it should have been 4 or 5.

Now the grading was the sketchiest part about all this. Lambda had just switched to using Google Canvas. The canvas was broken. The school had obviously not either tested or fully realized it, but it should not have been deployed. Students were now submitting all assignments and sprint challenges through canvas, and the only grade we got was whether we turned it in or not... So there was a period of confusion (at least in my cohort) where we kept asking around HOW and WHEN our work would be looked at and graded... Nobody really knew, this includes staff and "student-success". Then it became obvious that nobody was looking at or grading our work. We now "self-assessed" ourselves and determined whether or not we thought we were ready for the next unit. Heck, I couldn't even get the answer bank to the sprint challenges. I asked the Data Science program director myself at the time, and he just said "stay-tuned for updates on feedback".

The program-wide changes that angered students back at the end of September are still having effect all over social media...

I was a student and was affected by the changes. I'll clarify here for anyone that wants the details...

Prior to the changes, small groups of students in every cohort was led by a TL. This TL was a student further ahead in the program, probably in part-time if they were a TL for full-time.

The TL had many responsibilities. They would attend lecture with their group of students, conduct 1:1 everyday with each of their students for 15 minutes, grading their work and giving them feedback. They would lead a stand-up at the end of the day with their group, reviewing whatever was relevant, and every morning before lecture they would meet with the instructor and acted as an intermediary to the instructor, relaying important information such as how well the students were doing, what they were struggling on, etc. TLs also supposedly acted as project leaders in build weeks, but I did not get to experience that.

Everyday, our assignments were graded by a TL on a 3-star scale. Our "sprint challenge" at the end of the week was also graded by the TL, which would force a student to retake the challenge if they got at least one question wrong.

Fast forward to when Lambda announced they were removing TLs, adding student mentorship, self-assessment, and groups called "track teams". The school also reduced from 9 months to 6 months (probably to pump us out quicker. From what I've witnessed, the shortened curriculum has done students no favors).

Most students were upset at the assembly announcing these changes, and pointed out the myriad of obvious flaws to the student mentorship program. Lambda claimed that the change was to improve "consistency" in the program, but students kept publicly speculating whether this was a financial move (Lambda admitted 3 months later that is WAS motivated by costs, after ignoring student speculation).

I do not.

I cannot wrap my head around how removing daily code reviews on assignments and assessments is an "improvement". Since these changes, I've seen many classmates continue onto the next unit that I _know_ should have flexed.

Students have an incentive to complete the program as quick as possible, because our end goal is a high-paying job. Since any grading was thrown out the window for months, students have gotten no objective feedback, and they are in control of flexing now, Lambda is going to graduate many underqualified students.

I believe there is going to be another surge of extremely unhappy and vocal system when this group graduates and begins to search for jobs, because there are many reasons to blame Lambda.

The changes Lambda implemented are broken. Attendance is no longer taken, resulting in fewer people going to lecture/participating in projects. Track teams are a waste of time and many students don't even participate because nobody is taking attendance. The mentor/mentee program is broken, because there continues to be many cases of unhelpful/unresponsive/underqualified mentors and mentees.

It's not an outlier of an experience. My cohort really did go through 2 units with no one looking at our assessments and assignments, and we determined whether or not we passed onto the next unit. It was an organizational mess.

"Small" is really exaggerating the changes. Schedule is just a small part of it. But while we're talking about schedule, many parents that are students at Lambda School struggled hard with the increase of meetings after the changes were implemented.

Couldn't agree more. In fact, most students will look for outside resources because Lambda's resources are poor. In fact, one of my instructors shares a PDF of Grokking Algorithms to his students because the school's CS content is lacking.

PG should enroll and try the program himself before he offers any praise.