It started with misaligned expectations. We worked with a lot of hiring partners to create a UX curriculum that would be easiest to jump into a first UX career from, and it was clear in doing that research that a research-first perspective with less emphasis on design is what would get students hired faster in a field that can be notoriously difficult to break into (relative to software engineering). We hired experts in that aspect of UX design, which can be terribly broad.
Partway through the data started to show that half of the class was pretty happy and about half was not. Usually it’s not split like that - there’s always an outlier student or two but not half totally happy and half frustrated, so we started to dig in.
Two things happened:
1. We realized half of the students were expecting a design-heavy experience, and we hadn’t communicated well enough what to expect. There were pieces on design, but you wouldn’t come out of this curriculum as a UI designer, and students were expecting that.
2. We decided to try and help those students who wanted the UI emphasis, hired more folks, and started creating curriculum in a pretty rushed manner to help them reach their goals. In retrospect that was a huge mistake; there simply wasn’t enough time to build a full design-heavy curriculum in flight, and the students who wanted design-heavy curriculum were very disappointed.
That cohort was (rightly) frustrated because we tried to do too much too late. I recognized that was a risk going into those curriculum changes, but took on the risk because the most important thing is making students successful and happy. In retrospect it was the wrong call.
I wish like hell that I could go back and make everything perfect for that cohort of students; there are about 20 of them and I’ve spent time one on one with every one. We brought in more people to work with them one on one and that curriculum is much better now, but understandably 5 or 6 students in that cohort had lost their faith in our ability to deliver and opted to leave the program. Of course, we cancelled their ISAs; we lost a ton of money training these students and they don’t owe us anything, but that’s the right thing to do. We promise an awesome experience and in this instance didn’t deliver. We tried to do too much in too short a timeframe and missed the mark.
This was not a magnanimous gesture. You fought with the students for months, when it was clear things weren't working. It wasn't until the story blew up in the media that you agreed to cancel the ISAs.
And then to be released from their ISAs, you demanded students sign a contract agreeing not to sue Lambda School.
I’ve heard similar statements many times from bootcamps and it’s never sat well with me. It’s one of the major contributing factors that drove me away from working at a bootcamp.
While nothing is wrong about stating this, I’ve always thought student first. When a bootcamp fails its student(s) in this manner, money is lost. That is nothing relative to what the student loses - time, money, effort, and relationships. If there’s one common thread I’ve seen from the students I’ve taught, it’s that they all sacrifice a lot to try and change their lives.
What hurts the most when the system fails these students is that sometimes, they can’t just go back to what they were doing before. That’s why messaging around expectations [from both sides] needs to be crystal clear. This attention to detail is paramount in a bootcamp, but it often meets opposition with the business model and/or the “move fast and break things” mindset of a startup delivering a product [curriculum].
That I’m still reading stuff like this so many years after bootcamps have become established makes me lose faith that things will really change for the better.
* being graded by a student 2 months ahead
* being taught by someone hiding under a sheet
* being paired with a student who hadn't been participating in the curriculum
It seems like there was more going wrong for this student than just a curriculum change.
There’s also an instructor in every cohort, so your TA (we call them TLs) is more of a first line of defense. We brought in the strongest design students to be TAs which is why they weren’t very much further in the curriculum - in fact they actually had a different curriculum. An exception to the rule caused by curriculum change.
*being taught by someone under a sheet
We brought in contractors to help teach the new curriculum, and one hadn’t adjusted the light in his room for video conferencing and couldn’t see the screen for sunlight, so... improvised. Normally there are weeks of practice lessons and training, so this also the result of a rush.
Anyone who has worked in the industry knows that most software projects fail for human reasons, not technical ones.
Like, who was going to be opening up Photoshop or In Design or Figma or whatever? Who was going to be slicing designs into HTML/CSS? Who was going to be implementing interactive prototypes and putting them in front of users? Who was responsible for ensuring that communication between the UX side and the technical side was happening effectively?
Who were the product and project managers (in title or de facto) and were they clear that this was their job?
In your interview with Vincent Woo, you said that "reviews were fine" for the UX cohort and then they suddenly fell off the cliff once labs began. This story more or less explains why: the students were strung along (intentionally or not) with the promise that it was labs that matters.
Once in labs, they find out: https://twitter.com/watsonwaswrite/status/123090468067232154...
If that was the promise, why wouldn't LS move heaven and Earth to make sure that labs was a home run? Why wouldn't LS ensure every student in the group project was crystal clear on expectations? Why wouldn't LS do a dry run version of the capstone project across cohorts to control for unanticipated group dynamics? Ensure that everyone in the web and UX cohorts has worked with at least 5-10 different people cross-functionally before capstone time?
And fine, maybe you "call an audible" — lord knows we had to do that at DBC. But why then wouldn't you then bring in 5-10 experienced project managers to facilitate things, communicate everything to everyone, and explain that this is what needs to happen to make the capstone a success for everyone?
Shouldn't asking and answering these questions before admitting a single student be table stakes?
The whole project seems half-baked from start to finish and this outcome 100% predictable.
Look at Dustin Myers and how he responds to criticism: https://twitter.com/dustint314/status/1156423191645917184
Look at Trevor McKendrick (Chief of Staff) and how he responds to criticism: https://twitter.com/TrevMcKendrick/status/108285421890879488...
Look at all of Austen's interactions on Twitter to students and how he gaslights them: https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1213711252175740928
Look at Ben Nelson (cofounder) and see how he only interacts with positive testimonials and discount negative ones: https://twitter.com/sunjieming/likes
Look at Ryan Holdaway and see how he only interacts with positive testimonials and discounts negative ones: https://twitter.com/Ryan_Holdaway/likes
Look at Ryan Hamblin - same thing: https://twitter.com/RyanleeHamblin/likes
There's a clear pattern here. These are key people in staff who should be listening and responding with empathy to the horrifying student stories throughout Lambda. All negative dissent is squashed by dividing and siloing students. They are made to think their issues with the "school" are due to some personal deficiency.
It is no wonder that negative student accounts rarely get amplified or even created. I was personally scared to write negative reviews for fear of being admonished by their "Student Success" team. There's been rumors circling of students removed from Slack after they complained about the quality of education. Leadership and key members of staff are all complicit.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/02/lambda-schools-j...
Did you not read the scathing letter? If you want to address these issues - why don't you publicly post the letter and address every single damning issue highlighted if you are so confident? There were things outlined outside of just "bad instruction" and "misaligned expectations". Do better.
[0] https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-01-08-online-coding-school...
You can set aside the issue of ISAs or anything about this woman.
This poor of a product from Lambda is indefensible. A consumer or enterprise software startup can get away beginning with an ineffective MVP and iterating. A school offering an educational opportunity has a much higher floor to responsibly operate. This person shows that Lambda is operating well below that floor.
Even if the students will never activate the repayment clauses of their ISAs Lambda has failed them. Silicon Valley seems to think that what it can't measure doesn't matter. But Lambda School, by pitching itself as a way for anyone to be a part of the tech boom gets up a person's hopes and then completely and utterly fails to deliver on its promise. That is on top of the opportunity cost of attending a school that fails to deliver anything close to the education advertised.
Still, though, I've noticed the ISAs create some nuanced perverse things happening that are specific to Lambda - students attracted to the value prop are often much lower income (Lambda cited $22K average starting salary amongst their students) than the average bootcamp student. If Lambda fails them, these students may leave in worse financial prospects than they started with no safety net.
The ISA also kicks in at 40% when you're only 4 weeks into a 40 week curriculum. After that point, it's very hard to leave due to sunk cost fallacy, and you are roped along wasting time, hoping for them to get their stuff together. I wish I and others left well before.
Thanks for adding your insight and experience to this thread.
HN asks that as discussions intensify, we get more thoughtful and substantive.
I'll do my best to follow that norm as well as to converse with you, with Paul Graham's "How to Disagree" in mind [0].
I'm not quite sure how your response fits into Paul's disagreement hierarchy with my original post in mind, but it doesn't seem to get at the meat of what I said.
I do realize universities offer philosophy degrees. They certainly aren't STEM degrees that have set career paths outside of academia, however I would say that "useless" is too strong a descriptor.
For one, I bet we could both look and find a number of successful people in the startup world that HN encompasses who have philosophy degrees and are doing interesting things within companies (eg they have successful financial careers).
Second, there could be a solid argument that philosophy teaches a useful way of thinking.
Third, if we want to move the goal posts of this discussion to universities, I could go on for quite awhile about ineffective practices and ways they set students up to fail as well. My main concern is the students. Seeing students at any level from early childhood to university and beyond taken advantage/set up to fail/screwed over/bamboozled gets me fired up.
BTW, I checked out your webpage and enjoy the Spartan nature of it. The "end of page" is a nice touch I haven't seen before.
First off, philosophy is an interesting subject in its own right. You're probably not going to get a good job in it. However nobody goes into philosphy thinking they're going to become a millionaire.
The issue in this thread is that lambda school isn't as described. Tricking people is very different than teaching people some esoteric stuff they know upfront is kind of useless pragmatically
I was very wrong. The ISA incentive appears to be nothing to the VC/startup incentive to Show! Massive! Growth! as you chase ever-larger chunks of money. Somehow we've gone from "move fast and break things" (which is not a terrible slogan to encourage experimentation on non-consequential things) to "move fast and break people" (which horrifies me).
I hope this doesn't make people discard the ISA idea altogether because of a bad implementation that is unrelated to the ISA itself.
When talking about student debt forgiveness, I think it's too extremely. We can make it milder like forgiving interest or converting it to some sort of a capped ISA. This is a much less controversial idea than forgiving the whole debt that I'm not sure I agree with.
I think of education as like roads, policing, and courts. It's fundamental societal infrastructure. Because the benefits are widespread and diffuse, charging directly for it is difficult. As with primary and secondary education, I think it's ultimately easier to just pay for it as a society and get it back in taxes later.
That exists: https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/repayment/plans/income-d...
Unfortunately, there's still a fundamental broken feedback loop here: the people purchasing an education are definitionally unqualified to evaluate it. I don't see a way to fix that without significant regulation, which unfortunately acts as a brake on evolution of both program content and educational methods.
We all know UX is extremely important to the success of any startup, but quantifying it is a different story. Designers can’t even agree on their own responsibilities and what to call themselves, with job titles and responsibilities I’ve seen at many companies having 0 correlation to the next.
Any great UX/product/service/interaction/blah blah designer I’ve worked with is a former graphic designer with great taste, who over the years learned how to build usable software by working on tons of software products and spending tons of time with users.
It’s not exactly something that lends itself to the bootcamp model. It makes much more sense in an apprentice model.
If it makes her feel any better, I’m certain 90% of schools teaching multi-year “UX” design programs would not have done a better job. At least she doesn’t have to go into debt this way.
I agree 100%. I've been in the UX field for about 6 years, and if there's one thing I've noticed, it's intense fragmentation when it comes to that actual job title. What's the difference between them? I couldn't tell you as at each job my responsibilities were basically the same.
Also, one of the biggest issues that I have with UX bootcamps is that there's a lot of emphasis placed on making the portfolio look visually appealing, but when you get into it there's not always a lot of substance. Same goes for a lot of work on Dribbble that's tagged as "UX" or "UX/UI".
We tried to build in design-heavy curriculum partway through when we realized how misaligned those expectations were, but couldn’t do an effective job in such a short time frame, so those students just got more frustrated.
It’s totally fair, we should have done a better job communicating and shouldn’t have tried to call an audible at the last minute to fix everything.
Why do you feel that this is an under appreciated topic?
Half the point of school is to get students to first fail in a low-stakes way.
Groups need time to develop. Any change in a group will cause it to storm before re-norming.
The higher the stakes the more critical it is to navigate storming effectively. You "learn by doing", i.e., by getting students to storm 50 times before the the stakes are high.
Students should not have to pay the price for someone else's crash course in learning design.
https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/?s=bootcamp
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fhashtagcausea...
and Lambda School fits into many of the described.
