Lambda School — Update 4/27/2021
I have been meaning to write an update on Lambda School. First, I want to be clear. While I am highly critical of Lambda School, I am also more critical of the university system, and I am critical of employers demanding a college degree that supersedes knowledge, and practical application. Or my favorite, demanding 2+ years of education for a Jr. level position.
Here is my Lambda School update. I am super frustrated. I have confronted Lambda School on numerous occasions regarding various things as they came up in an effort to start a dialog, and begin fixing things. I have emailed, and messaged multiple people in leadership (including Austen, CEO, and Caleb, President). These messages fell immediately on deaf ears.
Here are the issues (in order of critical to least):
- Reasonable Accommodations
This one actually makes me angry. The lack of professionalism, and the complete lack of regard for people who are spending 17–30k on your product and you cannot have a sick day, or a sick weekend?
What is the story? I was scheduled for my second dose of the COVID 19 vaccine, and if you have dealt with this you know it is, or was, next to impossible to reschedule the appointment. I reached out to Lambda staff, a TA for the unit that I was in explaining the situation, and asking for accommodations. “Do what you can and we can try and figure it out.”
NO! Absolutely not! If someone asks for reasonable accommodations they are granted, immediately without questions. What is a reasonable request? asking for a 3 hour time period the following week once the symptoms wore off. That’s it. Does not seem to difficult right?
- Respect.
Wow, so there are two that make me so angry I just want to scream. I am not a small child, I am not new to the world of education (part of my last job was curriculum development, with more stringent requirements than Lambda has to contend with). I expect, as I should be able to that I am treated with respect at all times. This apparently is not on Lambda School’s radar. One of their Student Success Coordinators has been beyond unprofessional as I use the Flex, or retake, mechanism. (Which in part stemmed from the situation above).
On this point I am going to take some time to make sure that this is extremely clear as I will be sharing this directly to Lambda School.
- It is hard to admit failure. It is 1000% one of the hardest things for me. I am a competitive person that works way too hard to be the best at everything I can possibly be good at. It is a harsh blow to hit a wall and admit I need help or defeat. To get crap for admitting that and handling the situation like an adult is pretty bad. I notified the unit’s student success coordinator (see above for how that went), notified what is called front desk which is the ticketing system, and I notified the TA, and the instructor. I also reached out to a couple of peers who I knew were considering it and talked about working together to get on top of things.
- Having anyone in a seeming position of authority ignore issues, ghost you, and then try to argue with you is beyond gross. It is unprofessional, and generally shows a lack of understanding, empathy, and effectiveness in a role. That is what I have endured with my unit’s student success coordinator. Do not blow me off, and then act shocked when you get called out. You deserved that, and your superior should nail you to the wall for how you acted.
- Outside Contractors
This one is frustrating, but in part understandable. Here is the understanding. Lambda School is working to expand their reach to get more people through their program to continue to keep the lights on and even expand their program. To do so they have actually cut staff that were, in my opinion critical, and replaced their position with an outside vendor who offers services, and student led mentoring, and team standups.
Here are the problems:
CodeGrade:
This is system that you feed Jest tests into the automatically grade assignments (or the tests, which at Lambda is called a Sprint Challenge). Off the bat this system is annoying to set up and can actually take upwards of 30 minutes at times to get locked in so that it works. These Sprint Challenges are timed. You have 3 hours (theoretically) to complete them. There was not an expansion of time on these when this was added to the system, which means if you run into issues you are liable to fail on virtue of time (if it was something that they actually monitored, but we will get to accountability in a bit).
To add insult to injury it does not render correctly in the LMS page that it is in. It is an Iframe and generally is hard to read any feedback, or the test results themselves. Mentioning the tests they do not all get fired automatically, so this sudo automatic system may not grade your assignment until someone comes along and finalizes the result.
Now part of this was to add more feedback to students. Sadly this is a bit of a farce as I have not seen feedback for a sprint for over a month for a sprint, including a final grade.
Conclusion: this system is defunct and needs to be removed and/or either replaced, or a new mechanism put into the flow to replace it.
Web Core Interview:
Again this is administered by another bootcamp (which seems to mainly be in South Africa). Region is only slightly important here. The idea of passing an interview to proceed is pretty cool honestly. It is fairly stress inducing, and there are no real study materials give, just a very vague rubric that gives some insight into what is coming. That would be my first issue here.
My second issue is that the person conducting the interview was very hard to understand, which is not a huge surprise, which was fine. I spent 2 years in LA, and ran into partial language barriers for the entire time due to my job. I was ok suffering through that, however, the interviewer continued to get more and more rude as time progressed showing how utterly bored he was, and showing more and more frustration at me asking him (politely) to repeat himself.
Now, before I continue I want to make it clear. This is required in order to proceed from Unit 4 (Node) to CS (Computer Science). Not completing, or not scoring high enough will result in being forced to retake the interview, or the unit.
My Web Core Interview was lost. I will let that sink in. My critical, must complete before progressing interview was lost. 100% lost. From my understanding I am the last person with an outstanding interview, but a number of others interviewed by the same person had theirs lost initially as well.
The irony here is that Lambda School has alum that are actively looking for jobs, they have students in Labs actively making software, and have any number of people that could be employed to do the work that they are outsourcing. They could hire students to create custom solutions that fit into the current framework to ensure better functionality, and fix issues such as language barriers. It would also help to have the interviews be targeted more directly to Lambda School instead of just general knowledge of “x” topic.
- Resources & Support
Let’s talk about support, and help. TAs are around, but generally they are not super approachable. My current cohort is one of the last with TLs, and SLs who sit in the help channel for a bit of time (which is kind of hard to pinpoint since it has historically been random times).
Initially this was a HUGE selling point to me. I would have a TL go through my code, walk me through mistakes, and help me clean up my code a bit, and theoretically they would be there throughout my entire journey at Lambda, unless they got a job elsewhere. This was scrapped for the Mentor/Mentee & Track Team programs, and as such there was a MASSIVE drop in students in my cohort (we started with 105 in the zooms initially, now less than 30 attend lectures). That is people flexing the unit, quitting Lambda School, going on hiatus, or being kicked out of Lambda for not getting the materials. Also keep in mind that 105 & the 30 include TLS & a TA, if not additional staff.
I am going to digress here. I am one of those people that will spotlight issues, but also try to offer suggestions to fix it. I have done so for years, and have actually gotten hired for jobs specifically because of that quality. I offered my time repeatedly, I offered ideas, and suggestions repeatedly. Why? In part because I am locked into an ISA that is going to result in me giving lambda 17–30k. The other side of it is this: Just like the students that go to Harvard, or MIT or Yale I want the school that I go to, to project an air of competence, success, and for employers to think that they produce elite alum. That makes the endorsement from an organization worth the money.
I joined Lambda for only a few things:
CS
Labs
LambdaX
Endorsement
For that I justified a potential spend of 17–30k. If I could break into the industry, and get a solid job then within 5 years it was justified, more so if I got a placement due to Lambda School. But I want to be clear. There is better curriculum, and more in depth curriculum elsewhere for far less. Period. Full Stop. Eventually I will end up going through and ranking some of them, and sharing my list of Udemy courses, and instructors that are top notch.
Let’s dive back into Lambda.
- Curriculum
Overall I feel like the first unit is fairly good, it is not as in depth as you can get from just a HTML or JavaScript course, but it touches on all of the hot buttons for the most part. BUT! things like DOM manipulation, Components, and Async are spread out in other units, this is kind of a miss. Why? Because JS is critical for the ENTIRE curriculum, and learning how to use async, or DOM manipulation should happen WITH the initial JavaScript portion of the curriculum. My opinion.
Additionally, and I have bounced this one around for a bit. I think that it would have been far more beneficial for Lambda Students if instead of a front end framework that kind of warps HTML/CSS and pairs them with JS in what amounts to almost a new language for some diving into Node.js & SQL would have been more viable. It would have increased the amount of time working pure JS for an additional couple of months (part time program) instead of diving into React.
Now, in an ideal world Lambda would go from JS straight into TypeScript. This is a huge miss, and they do not include it because of time. Which if we are being honest would be 1–2 weeks, and then you could do the rest of the core 4 units using TypeScript, which is a critical demand for a ton of employers right now. Even adding this as an optional unit, or a video series that you have time to work on that would increase total time for the program it would be highly appreciated by a ton of people.
In addition to some potential misses on content, lets talk about what they have done flat out wrong. Lambda tries to use excessively clever language throughout a number of assignments to be confusing, or to make the assignment more difficult. Instead of beating around the bush curriculum should be concise, and to the point.
Another point that was wrong was how they teach Classes & Hooks for React (unit 2/3). For some reason, that completely eludes me, they teach hooks, which basically hides the inner workings first. Which is also less commonly used in a real world setting considering that hooks came onto the scene in like 2019. Instead most employers are still using classes, and lifecycle methods. This was a HUGE issue for a number of people that left my cohort, in fact that was the reason that 2 people flat out left Lambda. It is very confusing considering that during unit 3 when teaching app level state management they teach Redux first, and Context API second. Which is the order that you would expect them to teach it since it was a ton of boiler plate, but a clearer view of the functionality.
Unit 4 was kind of odd for me. It was arguably the best instructor that I had throughout the program (Unit 1 was a pretty awesome instructor too…), and yet I flexed the unit because of content. Which was ironic since I was already building out APIs with Mongoose, and Mongo, and in process of learning GraphQL.
Here I think my biggest criticism is the length of time that is allotted, and that there is SO MUCH more to learn on all of the topics. There was next to no talk about the fact that node could create, read, update, and delete documents that are stored locally, or how to build out a package for NPM, or any real conversation about the different use cases of Mongo vs SQL, or Graph API vs REST(ful)
Now lets talk about just flat misses that could be avoided with minimal effort. Lets reward students who do grasp content, and are looking for additional content to consume. They could introduce advance topics, additional information or just more resources for any number of topics throughout the program, but instead they keep it simple. Which in part is good, but for those of us that (for the most part) were ahead of the curve we want more. They could create additional content using the LMS (canvas) or drop videos that were prerecorded on slack. Or simply have the instructor have optional lectures to teach additional, or more in depth views of content. None of that is a thing. Additionally, they could ask students if they have the time and want to be a part of that media creation, instead this is not a thing.
- Transparency & Approachability
None. Literally none. You want to talk about the issues at Lambda? Don’t bother. They have feedback forms. Are they reviewed? Students really don’t have a clue. Are there zoom discussions with students (a suggestion I had)? Nope. Not that I have been aware of.
Are staff who are borderline abusive required to set up a meeting with their superior to clear the air? Nope. Which is large reason why I am writing this, and publishing it publicly.
I want to be clear. I sincerely think that there are those that actually care at Lambda School, who are passionate about creating a new medium for education. I think there are those that push hard to make history in their own way. Sadly, I think that there are a ton of misses at the student facing level. I think that there are knee jerk reactions to things, and I think things like the mentor/mentee programs were pushed out too quickly, and with little to no real accountability.
I think that people like Austen Allred & Caleb Hicks do care about the student outcomes, and they do celebrate the success of the students, but I think that there is a chasm between the leadership, or even the staff themselves due to the online aspect that is not being bridged appropriately. I think that this disconnect, and the lack of follow up will be a huge detriment to this organization. It is not my responsibility to fix Lambda School. It is not my responsibility to offer suggestions, and feedback, yet I have done just that, and here I am publicly saying that in my view that has been ignored.
There are a ton of people who feel the way I do but they are terrified to say anything lest they be kicked out of the program for speaking up, and still be locked into their ISA. There are people who tend to suffer more anxiety, or be more introverted. I clearly am not one of those people, yet even as I write this I will be waiting for the next few weeks to see if I lose my ability to continue at Lambda School, or if I will get kicked out, and still be locked into an ISA.
Lambda Team:
This is how people feel. This is what we have been talking about, and trying to get through to you, but you seemingly do not listen to it! You say you take our feedback and work on things, and yet you have yet to do so on some CRITICAL issues. You can talk an amazing talk, but at the end of the day your downfall will be that your actions do NOT back it up. It is time for you to take a look around and realize that you are creating a toxic environment for some, and your staff are blowing off issues that should be addressed in a timely fashion.
You try to dodge bad press, and bad evaluations from students, but you fail to accept responsibility for the issues that do exist, and are taking away from the culture and experience of Lambda School.
Lambda School could be great, but it starts with you. When you are open to letting students start building their own culture feel free to reach out.
Balls in your court.
