[rficcaglia]

I have hired several coding school grads - not Lambda but very similar. I’ve seen these employees plateau and have recommended they consider going back to a traditional degree program to power the next phase of their career.

I agree the current university system is not effective for everyone, but economic potential flattens out quickly for tradespeople, which fits the “coders” job description. Most rock star coders I know in SV who have remained coders are making roughly the same now as they were in 2001, adjusted for inflation. Which means their purchasing power has dropped significantly. Meanwhile those I know who have a liberal arts degree + an MBA or JD have steadily increased their purchasing power. They made much less initially, but steadily and reliably accumulated experience that is highly valued in the market as a function of time. Will the best React or Angular coder grad today command 10x their salary in 10 years?

Also SF Bay Area is notoriously age biased against older “doers”. Good luck finding a coder job in a GV startup if you are over 35 at a salary commensurate with your experience.

I agree a 4 year degree is insufficient, but I would argue it is a necessary foundation on which to layer on even more education. A career is a marathon, not a sprint. And it should be about more than how fast one can achieve high score.

Overall though, I agree there is a niche for this. This has been done for other verticals, particularly in nursing. So it should work great for a very specific population and a very specific market need.

But I don’t see it as being a fix to “optimizing human capital” over a lifetime. (I’m not sure education should be about optimizing anything.) I see it as a short term win-win until companies do in fact automate away 99% of coding, and for the under 30 student in an economy that is overheated, in a country that doesn’t provide a quality public education to alll its kids.

I’ll be a buyer until the market cools and more candidates flood in, but I’ll continue to recommend they enter a degree program.

[austenallred]

I agree with your points on code bootcamps; I think you should check out Lambda School’s curriculum and see how vastly different it is from code bootcamps, which are essentially 8 weeks of “learn how to build your first app”, 4 weeks of “now build your first app” then “now go get a job!” (Curriculum is here: https://learn.lambdaschool.com/syllabus/cs-fsw)

Hour for hour Lambda School is about 75% the length of the core track of a CS degree + homework (we’re now almost 8 months, not including required precourse work: ~1500 hours). We also teach what we consider the requisite CS fundamentals (for example architecture, operating systems, system calls/processes). Students write a lot of C, etc.

We started Lambda School specifically because we didn’t feel right sending folks to code bootcamps where tbey’ll plateau because they lack fundamentals.

Try interviewing a student or two: we’ve had employers come to us saying, “Well we need Java engineers with a CS degree” that have now come back with requests to hire 50 students. Email [e-mail] and I’ll happily set it up (goes for all of HN).