[tc7]

Isn't the incentive here to choose the most buzzwordy and low-barrier-to-entry technologies, and spend just enough time/effort to get the students through an interview so the bootcamp can get paid?

Incentives are hard in this space. Not sure how for-profit companies who get paid by students can ever be exactly incentivized to focus on honest evaluation and strong fundamentals.

Maybe the FAANG companies should start/fund a bootcamp, but then you'd have to be selective, and you'd end up with something totally different... :/

[austenallred]

The long-term incentives are to create a brand of students that are so good people come to us and say, “We love Lambda School grads; I want to hire 50 Lambda School grads next year.”

[quaunaut]

As much as I've been very skeptical of Lambda School in the past, it's worth noting that their incentive structure seems aligned well. 17% of your first 2 years salary is a huge number, but it depends on you getting a good job and keeping it for 2 years. Otherwise they have to invest more time into you.

[austenallred]

*17% for two years, capped at $30k total.

But yes you’re correct.

[nathan_f77]

> Isn't the incentive here to choose the most buzzwordy and low-barrier-to-entry technologies, and spend just enough time/effort to get the students through an interview so the bootcamp can get paid?

This reminds me of some recent comments about the iPhone XS performance for the Speedometer 2.0 JavaScript benchmark [1]. The comment was something like "Apple just optimized their processor to beat benchmarks." In reality, the benchmark uses the TodoMVC project to run through dozens of real-world JavaScript frameworks. So even if Apple was just optimizing for some benchmarks, they've also improved the performance of real-world applications that use React and Ember.js.

Lambda School might be teaching some "buzzwordy" programming languages and frameworks, and the students might learn just enough to pass technical coding interviews and get a job, and they might have just enough experience to start contributing code and working on features that bring in more paying customers (or raise more VC funding), and they can ramp up quickly enough to not get fired. And those customers/VCs give money to the company, so the company can pay the employee, who gives some of the money to Lambda. This seems like a good "benchmark" to optimize for.

[1] https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1043277162676072449?lang=en

[tc7]

True, and good points!

Lambda itself may be fine, I can't judge it specifically (and appreciate Austen engaging :)).

That said, I agree that if they come in with "enough experience to start contributing code [etc]", that's a good benchmark!

But for the school to be successful, they don't really _need_ to go that far, which is my point about incentives: They just need them to look good enough on paper to get in the door, and know just enough that someone will take a chance on some percent of them, and rely on the fact that firing is hard -- in this model, their 'incentive' is to just churn out as many grads as possible, with the nicest resumes possible.

After writing that, though, I think I'm being more cynical than needed, prob based on some sub-par bootcamp grad interview experiences. I hope Lambda is really committed to good education, and I wish them the best, it's a worthy ambition and a hard problem.

[austenallred]

> They just need them to look good enough on paper to get in the door, and know just enough that someone will take a chance on some percent of them, and rely on the fact that firing is hard

It seems that would be a very bad idea long-term.