Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

While I find Lambda’s incessant twitter evangelizing as annoying as the next guy, I’m not sure any article I’ve seen is painting a realistic picture about Lambda.

Media outlets have incentives to either paint you as the second coming of Christ or as Satan. It appears Lambda, for a while, actually succeeded at convincing journalists they were the former.

After a while, people get bored with that though. The incentives that drive clicks flip. Suddenly Lambda is now Satan. Burn it down! Downvote all sympathizers!

Here’s the reality: all models for education can work for certain people in certain instances. Lambda is definitely the best choice for some people. But no single company is going to solve something like “education” or “healthcare” because they are political institutions tied to the power dynamics that determine how society is arranged. You cannot brute force this without gaining influence over government itself.

This is not as simple as disrupting where people buy their shampoo or where they see ads.

There are always two sides to every story, but when you have outright fraudulent claims I don't think you can say that the article is simply painting the school as "Satan"

If you stated that you have an 86% placement record and in reality it is 50%, that is a pretty large discrepancy. If the original 86% placement was from the first 70-ish students and now you are over 2500 students, that seems a bit fraudulent.

If placement rates aren't critical to you getting students, then you can say it is 50% publicly and see if that affects your enrollment numbers or not. Otherwise, it would stand to reason that stating a higher placement rate gets you more students.

Also, this isn't run a a non-profit organization, its a for-profit enterprise. So they have a financial incentive to get more students because that equates to more value for them.

Cherry picking a strong cohort and using it to create a narrative is the same thing as cherry picking a weak cohort and doing the opposite.

This is my point. Journalists are picking a narrative first, then seeking out facts to justify that position.

When they thought lambda was going to fix education they were more than happy to report the 86% number without any research. Now that lambda is “evil” they look for the lowest number they can find.

I’m sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.

The other wasn't a weak cohort. It was the most recent data.

Also if you were an institution interested in disclosing information fairly you would simply list all cohorts and let the consumer decide.

But they aren't doing that and instead claim a single number.

By the way, having had recent experiences with a number of bootcamps through friends I would say that the 50% number anecdotally is accurate. That's also not taking in to account the drop out rate. If you look at people starting the bootcamp to placement it would be even lower.

If you have 465,000 customers and you want to round that up to 500k - ok, not exactly true, but whether you have 465k or 500k isn't going to change my decision about using your product.

Telling me you place 80% of your students and actually placing 50% is a big deal. 80% means I have a 4 out of 5 chance of being successful. 50% means I have a 1 out of 2 chance of being successful. Those odds are very different and certainly part of the marketing push to get people to sign up.

Maybe that’s true im general, but the facts are very consistent - Lambda repeatedly misrepresented them while attracting lots of positive attention. This is what a free press helps correct.

> After a while, people get bored with that though. The incentives that drive clicks flip. Suddenly Lambda is now Satan. Burn it down! Downvote all sympathizers!

What this means is that bullshitting works until it doesn't.

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