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dgerard@awful.systems

Fast Crimes at Lambda School - eat shit Austen (www.sandofsky.com)

submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

The reason Lambda School's hiring rates dropped should be obvious to anyone who spends time around bootcamps, or education in general. Lambda School tried to scale up. Staff warned about a downward trajectory back in 2018, in an internal memo that said, “Placement to date has been manual and one-off, which isn’t possible to scale.” That was back when they were training a few hundred students a year, and at their peak, they trained 2,700 students.

This is hubris beyond my comprehension.

I completed my BSc. (3y programme) and MSc. (2y programme) in Computer Science at University of Warsaw. It's a really good programme, by far the best CS programme in all of Poland, university in the capital (largest city as well). Publicly funded, but very successful in research, so our staff has many ERC grants which pay out a lot, so it's probably one of the better funded ones as well. Population of Poland is about that of California.

Yearly, less than 200 students are enrolled for the BSc at UW. On MSc. this is about 100. So you give lectures to around 150 students in the biggest courses. A single class or lab is led by a TA for 15-20 students. In person.

I'm not saying any of this to be elitist or some shit, but just comprehend the scale we're talking about here. This is the cohort size that is manageable by institutions that know how to do this, have experience, staff, and funding. The bottleneck in this system is staff - you simply cannot have more students without hiring more than the couple dozen professors already there.

When you say "they scaled up" I though we're talking they were enrolling dozens and scaled to a couple hundred. 2700 students per year is the scale of the absolute largest universities in Europe, backed by both public funds and institutional investors. How the fuck do you expect to give anyone any education at that scale with online classes and no TAs? That's insanity. Like, "I'm going to build a spaceship in my garage with a box of nails and $100" level of insanity. What do those people think education even looks like?

[–] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 14 points 4 months ago

One of the things that happened during the Great Low Interest Rates Decades is that it seems like anyone who fit a certain profile (millennial white guy with american citizenship, a computer, and at least a modicum of what passes for charm among the nerd elite) could convince both VCs and the US government that there was tons of money in disrupting the delivery of some legacy sector of society. Sometimes they were correct (eg. buying stuff without going to a retail establishment), sometimes it seems like they should have been correct and yet somehow have failed to make money anyway (Uber), mostly they were comical (Juicero). But the ones that are the most excruciating are all the places where you really, really can't frictionlessly deliver at scale, because large-scale human intervention is necessary: education, health care, customer service.

The promise of the American tech boom is massive online delivery without people. Employers hate their employees, and government is always willing to be told that doing without employees is industrial progress.

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