<story><title>Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/lambda-school-promised-lucrative-tech-coding-career-low-job-placement-2021-10</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shakezula</author><text>Interestingly enough, all of these comments could have been said about my experience at $BOOTCAMP that I attended and then was later hired at as a mentor.&lt;p&gt;The degradation of quality from the removal of human presence is a common narrative, and the students react to it so much more than management ever realizes.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; at no point did I feel like Lambda at its top level prioritized student wellbeing over PR, costs, or metrics to be sold to investors.&lt;p&gt;This is exactly how I would describe it. $BOOTCAMP was around for a few years, was purchased by private equity, immediately doubled it&amp;#x27;s prices, gutted the mentoring team, and &amp;quot;revamped&amp;quot; the curriculum, which really meant they were just pushing everything to video learning.&lt;p&gt;They have made some minor curriculum improvements as of late, but they have a long way to go to get back to what the program was when it was just starting out - which was ironically much higher quality in my opinion.</text></item><item><author>bwing</author><text>I was at Lambda when they announced the switch from 9 to 6 months and the elimination of paid team leaders. The feedback was universally negative. In a channel for open student discussion, Austen Allred deleted a poll from Slack because of how lopsided the reaction was. He explained the deletion by saying the poll was &amp;quot;misleading.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Students then got a survey &amp;quot;explaining&amp;quot; why the change was actually a good thing by asking questions such as &amp;quot;Do you understand why companies value mentoring experience?&amp;quot; Not just failing to reveal the truth (these were cost-cutting measures), but not even taking the effort to come up with a convincing lie.&lt;p&gt;It was destabilizing: Austen&amp;#x27;s twitter account would read ambitious, hyperoptimistic; meanwhile, drastic changes would be made within the program with vague rationales (&amp;quot;after speaking with hiring managers, we&amp;#x27;ve made these changes...&amp;quot;), and probing further simply got deflections or gaslighting surveys.&lt;p&gt;There were a ton of good people in the program, and I learned a lot there. But fundamentally there needs to be trust between institution and student when you&amp;#x27;re asking people to make this level of time and financial commitment. And at no point did I feel like Lambda at its top level prioritized student wellbeing over PR, costs, or metrics to be sold to investors.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>edgefield</author><text>Every time I’ve seen a company bought by private equity, it spells the beginning of the end. The strategy always seems to milk every last drop of cash from the business, without any long term sustainable plan. As an anecdotal case, I visited Sea World over the summer and half the concessions and shows were closed. It was still expensive and crowded and and there were service bottlenecks everywhere. Long lines for a bottle of water. Midday I said to myself, I bet this place was bought out by private equity. I looked up Sea World’s ownership structure when I got home and low and behold, private equity is involved.</text></comment>
<story><title>Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/lambda-school-promised-lucrative-tech-coding-career-low-job-placement-2021-10</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shakezula</author><text>Interestingly enough, all of these comments could have been said about my experience at $BOOTCAMP that I attended and then was later hired at as a mentor.&lt;p&gt;The degradation of quality from the removal of human presence is a common narrative, and the students react to it so much more than management ever realizes.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; at no point did I feel like Lambda at its top level prioritized student wellbeing over PR, costs, or metrics to be sold to investors.&lt;p&gt;This is exactly how I would describe it. $BOOTCAMP was around for a few years, was purchased by private equity, immediately doubled it&amp;#x27;s prices, gutted the mentoring team, and &amp;quot;revamped&amp;quot; the curriculum, which really meant they were just pushing everything to video learning.&lt;p&gt;They have made some minor curriculum improvements as of late, but they have a long way to go to get back to what the program was when it was just starting out - which was ironically much higher quality in my opinion.</text></item><item><author>bwing</author><text>I was at Lambda when they announced the switch from 9 to 6 months and the elimination of paid team leaders. The feedback was universally negative. In a channel for open student discussion, Austen Allred deleted a poll from Slack because of how lopsided the reaction was. He explained the deletion by saying the poll was &amp;quot;misleading.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Students then got a survey &amp;quot;explaining&amp;quot; why the change was actually a good thing by asking questions such as &amp;quot;Do you understand why companies value mentoring experience?&amp;quot; Not just failing to reveal the truth (these were cost-cutting measures), but not even taking the effort to come up with a convincing lie.&lt;p&gt;It was destabilizing: Austen&amp;#x27;s twitter account would read ambitious, hyperoptimistic; meanwhile, drastic changes would be made within the program with vague rationales (&amp;quot;after speaking with hiring managers, we&amp;#x27;ve made these changes...&amp;quot;), and probing further simply got deflections or gaslighting surveys.&lt;p&gt;There were a ton of good people in the program, and I learned a lot there. But fundamentally there needs to be trust between institution and student when you&amp;#x27;re asking people to make this level of time and financial commitment. And at no point did I feel like Lambda at its top level prioritized student wellbeing over PR, costs, or metrics to be sold to investors.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>afsafsaf</author><text>Just going to add a positive anecdotal example since most of this thread is negative. I finished App Academy back in 2015 and 6 years later, most of my friends are a top tier software companies. In general our cohort did well, although there were definitely people who did not succeed. The experience was truly life changing for some of the folks.&lt;p&gt;I do agree that I&amp;#x27;ve seen a LOT of bootcamps try to &amp;quot;scale&amp;quot; out their programs by removing human teachers and using video&amp;#x2F;written content or by increasing student to teacher ratios. I&amp;#x27;m curious if the experience I had still holds today at any bootcamps or if the drive to &amp;quot;scale&amp;quot; has messed up the industry</text></comment>