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Lambda Fellows

lambdaschool.com

74 pointsjeremylevy110 comments

As a hiring manager, this program seemed pretty sketchy from a legal perspective. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that interns need to be paid for their work if they're working on projects that have some commercial interest attached.

Austen DMed me about this on twitter a while back (presumably in search of pilot organizations to work with Fellows), and my response was this:

> I am reasonably sure that’s not legal if they’re working on “real” client work since at that point, the company would be the primary beneficiary of that person labor. The DoL fact sheet doesn’t make it entirely clear (https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/whdf...), but HLR’s article about Glatt v Fox Searchlight Pictures, Inc summarizes it well (https://harvardlawreview.org/2016/02/glatt-v-fox-searchlight...).

I know there are some Lambda folks around in this thread. Have you done any legal vetting or anything along those lines? I like the idea, and I think it's worthwhile, but I'm not interested if it means putting the company at risk.

I’m not sure about the US, but in the UK you would have to be legally paid for this work.

It's illegal in NY, at least. I don't know about other states.

Illegal in all states. This arrangement fails several of the prongs of the Fair Labor Standards Act's "primary beneficiary test", particularly the "conducted without entitlement to a paid job" test, as the "fellowship" is clearly being undertaken with the hope of receiving a full-time job.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...

> he "conducted without entitlement to a paid job" test, as the "fellowship" is clearly being undertaken with the hope of receiving a full-time job.

"A hope of X" and "entitlement to X" are not the same thing. I tend to agree that this is likely illegal, but it seems to have been very carefully crafted to have at least a superficially-plausible argument for compatibility with the primary beneficiary test. I don't think it was done in ignorance of the law, but a careful and deliberate attempt to hack around it.

Isn't this the new playbook for startups? Break the law but acquire enough resources to change the law. Then lobby like there is no tomorrow in an attempt to change the laws again to stifle your competition?

> I like the idea, and I think it's worthwhile

I can't think of any reasonable person who will accept 4 weeks of unpaid work and be treated as a trial product on top of that.

Sorry, just to be clear: I like the idea of pairing new devs with experienced devs in an apprenticeship-like role, especially since the software industry tends to lean pretty heavily toward the weird "You need experience for this entry-level job" thing (especially for stable jobs with larger organizations).

I'm not so convinced of a 4 week internship trial thing when it's structured like this though.

They basically are using this as the final exam of the school, in place of working on a project with peers.

That would mean the final exam is optional - and most students will not take it (at least until the fellows program gains more traction to take on more students).

This is _not_ the final exam. Your comment is uninformed.

Yeah, it sounds like you're just going to end up wasting the senior engineer's time hand-holding the intern for 4 weeks while they learn an existing codebase, and then they go off on their merry little way. The concept is interesting, but 4 weeks just really isn't enough time to get a new-hire up to speed to be very helpful with software in most corporate settings.

Try it and see ;-)

I think a ton of reasonable people would do that. Getting a job as a developer is reasonably difficult without connections or experience in the field. Many of us have degrees or years of being a geek before we get our first job. I think that leads to success but it's not a necessary pre-requisite.

I see people coming out of bootcamps from non-glamorous backgrounds who take months to find a job or eventually give up. If companies can explore this talent pool with lower risk, I'd think they could identify some significant potential

A take-it home project with 1 week maximum allows for that with some amount to be paid to the person. Many respected companies do it that way if not whiteboard interviews.

Lambda already takes a cut out of these student's future salaries.

Sorry, I don't agree. The way this is advertised is gross.

A 1 week take home project doesn't give experience, doesn't test how well the student works with others, doesn't showcase communication skills, etc.

There is a LOT more to development than coding

> There is a LOT more to development than coding

Agreed. Many companies already have paid work hours for hiring. I just listed those examples because those seems to be more common than work days ATM and isn't most employment in US at will unlike EU and developed parts of the world?

I understand the company will still have some cost to that but why should individuals be worked for free to offset that?

The alternative isn't that these people get paid, the alternative is that they continue to get their resumes screened and either remain unemployed or go back to the undesirable field they were in pre-bootcamp.

That's the reality for many people. This can help those people- although I agree that it won't help anybody who's qualified to field an offer right off the bat.

I don't think the OP disagrees, but the keyword here is "unpaid", let alone the opportunity cost for working at a potentially bad-fit company for a month.

Just compare the value proposition to something like college. People will sacrifice quite a lot to get into the career they want to be in- and it's very often worth while.

I won't make the argument that this is preferable to fielding and accepting an offer immediately, because obviously it isn't. However, this is preferable to going unemployed for months on end or giving up and going back to unskilled work- which is the reality for many folks right now.

You can’t? What if there is a measurable economical advantage for you? If you’re super inexperienced these four weeks unpaid internship might be way more valuable long term than four weeks sitting on a couch writing job applications with a near-empty CV.

That's definitely the way our students see it.

May be hard for many who have secure tech careers to empathize with how difficult it is to break into a new industry and what a leg up this experience gives them.

People with secure tech careers in hard-to-break-into-industries get those careers by being able to work for little-to-no-pay due to their privileged upbringing.

This isn't sour grapes, I am one of those people. This program is exactly the sort of thing I would have taken advantage of because I could.

Hooking your students up with companies is a good thing, but companies should expect to compensate people for labor, even for a trial period when it's on the scale of an entire month.

This isn't in Lambda School's direct power to solve, but the real issue here is companies are entirely unwilling to properly mentor new cohorts of engineers. You're expected to graduate from college/trade school a rockstar and start your new job landing PRs in time for the daily deploy. It's bad for the profession.

I would've loved this as a new university grad. I remember lamenting that nothing like this seemed to exist at the time.

Q: What kind of reasonable person would spend 4 YEARS doing work and PAYING between $10k - $35k a year (on average) for the privilege of doing so? And get 0 support for finding a job afterwards?

A: US college student.

Keep that in mind when you complain about 4 weeks of unpaid work with a high chance of getting a highly paid job afterwards.

"High chance" because obviously Lambda will stop working with companies who see it as a free labor program.

sigh something is wrong here and I can't pinpoint exactly what.

I can - it's that secondary education has issues that are getting worst faster than they are being solved.

I am unaware of any colleges that don't have a career services office that help students get jobs and internships during and post-graduation. Even community colleges have these things. Though, like Lambda School, they can be of questionable quality.

Additionally, Lambda School is specifically to focus on getting a job. Getting a job can be one outcome of college, but it's not necessarily the specific focus. For that, a comparison to a trade school might be more on point, where the specific focus is to learn a trade and then get people a job in that trade afterwards. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be Lambda School to Barbers College.

Based on reading the Lambda School income sharing agreements, I suspect the student is already obligated to repay a substantial some. As a terminal phase of the program, the student would be pretty much “all in” financially when seeking a fellowship.

There’s selection bias as well because coding boot camps have a strong appeal to the desperate in their careers and better viability for students with independent means (since Federal Financial Aid and conventional scholarships tend not to be available).

Psychologically there’s a lot of sunk cost with deferred payment to influence decision making.

One quick point: Fellows is first and foremost designed for our students. We started by looking at our Labs program, which was 8 weeks long, and thinking about how we could make it better. Labs is a simulation, and a good one!, but will always be simulated. The incredible value for students of Fellows it that it's a "real world learning experience." We now think the 1-2 punch is Labs + Fellows.

> Have you done any legal vetting or anything along those lines? I like the idea, and I think it's worthwhile, but I'm not interested if it means putting the company at risk.

Yes, absolutely! We've taken the legal side of this very seriously since we realize it has the potential to be interpreted as "free labor."

In general, we do not encourage students to take unpaid internships. And if a student has the opportunity to take a paid position elsewhere, we recommend they do that.

As I mentioned in another response, our North Star for this program is an unparalleled learning experience for Lambda graduates. There are a few steps we've taken to ensure that it is a valuable learning opportunity for students:

1. We heavily qualify the companies we allow to host Lambda Fellows and require that they have a dedicated mentor in place, a meaningful project for the student to work on, a functioning team for the student to be a part of, and hold them accountable to provide and foster a positive learning environment. Companies who fail to meet these expectations, at any point, have had their Fellows removed.

2. As part of the qualification process for companies, we require that they have an open role for a junior developer that would be a qualified placement that the Lambda Fellow can apply for at the end of the Fellowship.

3. We remove the interview process for the students participating as Fellows and deploy them straight to the host company.

You're exactly right: the law basically asks "who is the primary beneficiary of that person's labor?" This was designed from the ground up as part of the educational journey of Lambda, and we've designed Fellows such that the student is the primary beneficiary of each step of that journey.

I don't think this answered the OP's question. I get that you're arguing that the student is the primary beneficiary of the free labor they are giving to the company - but I'd be suspicious that a court would allow this interpretation.

At worst this allows for negative cost labor where an employee pays/borrows money in order to provide value to an employer.

To the direct question - do you provide appropriate indemnity clauses protecting employers should the legality of the arrangement be called into question?

Wasn't trying to dodge the question!

I'm not sure, but email me and I'll check with legal: jess.martin@lambdaschool.com

You say:

> Yes, absolutely! We've taken the legal side of this very seriously since we realize it has the potential to be interpreted as "free labor

Your copy reads:

> Add talented software engineers to your team for a 4 week trial at no cost for your company.

That page is targeted at the value proposition for the company, not the student.

There are legit benefits to the company, in addition to the major benefits to the student.

I would urge you to drop this program both for ethical and legal reasons.

Unpaid internships are deeply unethical and unjust. Not just because everyone deserves to be paid, but more importantly, because they cause massive social inequality. Students who are well-off can afford to take unpaid internships. They get many opportunities riding on their wealth, resulting in students who are not well-off, who cannot afford to work for free, missing out.

Programs like these cause massive social inequality. They are how the old boys network continues to live.

Also, you totally need a labor lawyer. That page clearly shows that lambdaschool fails the test for an unpaid internship. Not only are you exposing yourself to a lawsuit, you are exposing anyone who participates in this program too. And this page will be used as an exhibit that the program is not about training, it is about displacing existing work onto students.

We all know what you're trying to do. Get experience for you students. As a fellow educator, I appreciate that and also understand how hard it is to arrange. But this is not the way.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting that this program (as it's currently structured) wouldn't be beneficial to the student. There's no substitute for real experience working with a real team on real projects with real clients.

I appreciate the level of qualification that you're doing -- I think that definitely protects against (at least to some extent) predatory/exploitative behavior and it's great that that process is part of the program from day one.

That said: if a company is getting free (or negative cost) labor for real commercial work that they would otherwise have to pay a substantial amount of money for, there is a clear, material benefit to the company. If this program were ever considered in court, I suspect that it would boil down to figuring out what the ratio of benefits is (is it 20% company and 80% student, vice versa, or closer to 50/50?) and that's a really risky proposition to consider.

From my standpoint, the thing that would make this program essentially risk-free is a requirement to pay at least the minimum wage for whatever jurisdiction the company is operating in. That may significantly reduce the number of companies that can/will utilize this program, but it sends a very clear message: Lambda grads are worth paying for, even in an apprenticeship role. Another model would be to have the grad work as a contractor for a flat, predetermined fee on a project identified and scoped at the beginning of the engagement.

Additionally, rather than selling this as a mentoring/apprenticeship/internship program, you could consider selling it to employers as a _hiring_ program. For instance, something along these lines:

* Work with a Lambda grad for 4 weeks * Employer does all of the vetting steps you mentioned before and pays $x/hour * At the end of the 4 weeks, employer is obligated to hire the grad, try a different grad, or close the role req for x days (or something like that -- maybe if n grads don't work out, waive this requirement or something)

Structured like that, it changes the _hiring_ process in the same way that Lambda is trying to change the education process. Best case, I'd be looking at $1600 for the cost of acquisition of a new employee. We have a fairly rigorous interview/hiring process. I'm not sure exactly how much it costs, but the amount of time and attention required from various members of the team is certainly above $1600, so this would be a bargain for me.

This was very helpful, Cameron, thanks!

> Additionally, rather than selling this as a mentoring/apprenticeship/internship program, you could consider selling it to employers as a _hiring_ program.

They do: "Add talented software engineers to your team for a 4 week trial at no cost for your company.", "We’ll help you onboard and deploy a talented software engineer or data scientist to your team for 4 weeks at no cost. At the end of the fellowship, you can hire your fellow with no recruiting fees."

Of course, the more convincingly they do this, the more it undermines their argument that it is a legal unpaid internship and not a violation of the primary beneficiary test, constituting wage theft under federal (and, separately, most state) labor law.

In the Netherlands unpaid internships are fine, as long as the main goal is the learning experience. Why would this be illegal if both parties benefit? Exploitation doesn’t strike me as super likely here, as it’s rather easy to get out and it’s easy to fire abusive employers.

That's encouraging to hear that the Netherlands has an allowance for unpaid work when the goal is the learning experience. It's really clear to us at Lambda that the best way to _learn_ to do a thing is to do the _real_ thing, but US Labor Laws can make it difficult to have students doing real work that would provide the best learning experience, which is kinda self-defeating.

> but US Labor Laws can make it difficult to have students doing real work that would provide the best learning experience

No, they don't.

They make it difficult to not pay people at least the minimum wage for doing real work, whether or not they are students.

> No, they don't.

I would encourage you to look into this more - specifically respecting that there is a massive difference between _real world_ experience and the experience a school can _simulate_.

I could refer to literally hundreds of cases where US Labor Laws inhibited students learning experiences in this regard.

There is already a history of unpaid internships being abused in the USA, as they became the only way for people to enter an industry - entry-level labor became completely saturated by unpaid internships.

This causes a whole host of problems. One is that it acts as a filter for people who can afford to spend 1-2 years being an unpaid intern. For a high status industry, this prevents swathes of people who don't have the support networks to afford being unpaid.

The other is that, once this becomes an industry standard, entry level labor being so cheap incentivizes bad labor practices. Why hire a senior level talent when we can hire someone to manage 6 unpaid interns? Why promote this person when we can pay them literally nothing?

I am not a lawyer.

In the US, to qualify as an internship the student’s educational institution must meet certain standards. Internships meeting this standard may be unpaid. Student teachers are an ordinary example that happens at scale.

The legal strategy here seems to include calling the students “fellows.” Presumably, Lambda School does not meet the educational criteria necessary to provide interns. There’s probably enough fog around “fellow” that retained council applying ask-forgiveness-not-permission would write a memo to cover the forgiveness asking phase not improbable in the future given the similarities between the way this quacks and the unpaid internships Lambda School presumably does not qualify to offer.

> In the US, to qualify as an internship the student’s educational institution must meet certain standards. Internships meeting this standard may be unpaid. Student teachers are an ordinary example that happens at scale.

Student teachers almost entirely fall into the rule that "unpaid internships for public sector and non-profit charitable organizations, where the intern volunteers without expectation of compensation, are generally permissible."'

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...

Other than plausibly displacing ordinary workers, student teacher internships tend to meet the ordinary requirements as well. The standard that Lambda School would struggle with is "academic credit."

Take a look at the links I posted. The deciding factor isn't whether or not both parties benefit, but who is the _primary_ beneficiary of the internship. The line is more of a large grey area in the middle, and the consequences for misinterpreting the specifics of an arrangement can mean pretty large financial penalties for a company (wage theft can mean treble damages in some jurisdictions. At a minimum, that's 3x the local minimum wage, but I think I remember reading about a case where a judge determined the fair wage for an employee based on the fair market rate, so damages could have been 3x what's normally paid for somebody in a given position).

Not for long.

The EU is finally on the path to banning unpaid internships. https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/european-parl...

In the next few weeks the Council will likely separately adopt a rule that will shortly ban unpaid internships too.

So this is all coming to an end thankfully!

Interesting. I’m obviously not against paying interns money, but this might have the obvious unintended consequence of less available internships. We’ll have to see.

If your company has the bandwidth to create, manage, and mentor not-real-client-work, surely you have the resources to pay interns.

This screams desperation.

Just looking at the "testimonies" on the page we read: "She knew how to work with React and Git right away, which is more than I can say for most students coming out of University."

Takes about 3 hours of reading to any grad from any decent CS program to figure out git. If you understand graphs then you'll grok git pretty fast.

Is the market so over-saturated that they have to offer the 4 month trial period?

I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0].

It's no better than some diploma mills but any state school with half a decent curriculum sounds better than this.

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

> Takes about 3 hours of reading to any grad from any decent CS program to figure out git. If you understand graphs then you'll grok git pretty fast.

Not all engineers are CS grads. Not all engineers _need_ to be CS grads. Git is a great tool, but it can also be pretty complicated if you have to go off the beaten path.

> Is the market so over-saturated that they have to offer the 4 month trial period?

*week

And IMO, it's not a question of saturation. It's a question of credibility. You, for instance, are (presumably) skeptical of whether or not Lambda grads would be able to pull their weight on a team. Spending 4 weeks working directly with a Lambda grad seems like a pretty good way to either prove or disprove your hypothesis.

> I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students.

Skepticism is healthy, however I object to the idea that one needs to be an expert to teach. Even if you're just a _little_ better at something than someone else, there's no reason that you can't teach someone what you know.

Of course, that breaks down if you _pretend_ to be an expert at the thing that you're teaching. It takes some humility, I guess.

> It's no better than some diploma mills but any state school with half a decent curriculum sounds better than this.

AFAIK, very few schools have an applied software engineering program that adequately prepares grads for doing real work on a real team. That's something that really can only come from experience.

Having hired multiple new grads, my biggest problem was that they'd go down the rabbit hole of computing theory rather than focusing on solving the problem at hand in a practical way. IMO, applied software engineering education is pretty lacking across the board and bootcamps are a good place to experiment with new approaches. Even if Lambda and other bootcamps aren't necessarily the perfect solution, they're an attempt at a new solution to a hard problem.

> Not all engineers are CS grads. Not all engineers _need_ to be CS grads. Git is a great tool, but it can also be pretty complicated if you have to go off the beaten path.

I expect someone that calls himself an engineer to be able to get git, nevertheless.

> And IMO, it's not a question of saturation. It's a question of credibility. You, for instance, are (presumably) skeptical of whether or not Lambda grads would be able to pull their weight on a team. Spending 4 weeks working directly with a Lambda grad seems like a pretty good way to either prove or disprove your hypothesis.

> Skepticism is healthy, however I object to the idea that one needs to be an expert to teach. Even if you're just a _little_ better at something than someone else, there's no reason that you can't teach someone what you know.

> AFAIK, very few schools have an applied software engineering program that adequately prepares grads for doing real work on a real team. That's something that really can only come from experience.

My issue with bootcamps is that they teach "tricks" and not fundamentals. Someone with the fundamentals can easily adapt to another tech stack/codebase. But someone who simply learned whatever framework through rote won't. When you look at the "final projects" these bootcamps often get their grads to code, you'll pretty much get N identical github repo of that batch. But sure, if a dev shop measures performance by the number of Jira tickets a new hire can fix then yeah, getting someone from Lambda who learned that exact framework through rote might give you a good signal after 4 weeks while your college hire is still figuring out how the toolchain and lib work. But my bet is that the college hire will outperform the bootcamp grad in the long run.

I think the only way to prepare new grads to real work is to blend-in semester-long assignments and projects into the coursework. That and select students that can learn fast.

Lambda school is a sham. They have students teaching students and it's like the blind leading the blind. Absolute chaos and since the student to teacher ratio is so high, it's almost impossible to get a decent education through them.

I realize it's a YCombinator portfolio company, but it's run like a pyramid scheme.

For people who want more information a pretty substantial article was written about Lamda school by Vincent Woo: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

I do think Austen's heart is in the right place but they just don't have the resources to do it right.

Maybe his heart is in the right place but his mouth isn’t. He comes across as a complete charlatan in the article

He comes off that way because he is. He's a regular poster here on anything lambda related. His twitter was pretty vile as well.

Pretty much every single code school I have looked into (I have not looked into Lambda School specifically) hires students that cannot find jobs as teachers to be able to tout "96% employment rate post graduation". This is obviously an awful pattern, in that the students that might be good teachers (and/or good programmers) actually get placed, leaving only the students that cannot find placement to teach the next class.

This is definitely part of the issue I think. My friend who attended with no previous programming experience said that they were correcting the Team Leads and Section Leads regularly.

Yeah, I have had close friends go through code schools and it is kind of frustrating to hear them talk about their experiences. They get stuck, their instructor can't help, and ultimately they just kind of move on without understanding the subject matter. Then, three months later, they can't find a job after dumping their savings and quitting their previous careers.

I went to a college with a coop program. This sorta seems to be similar but much shorter. But at least I was paid for that.

I also graduated Lambda School (I'm no longer in their slack). I can see how this is pitched internally to students. There used to be a large project that was the last thing you did before you graduated. It was always a bit of a mess, as most school group projects are. This is replacing that, and I assume the students are pitched that these companies could potentially hire them afterwards.

The Lambda curriculum is rather rapidly iterated upon, or at least was while I was a student. This can be good, as it lets them do things like add React Hooks relatively soon after they came out. It can also make things inconsistent, I went through one of the programs that also taught C, which was taken out at some point. I also notice they have the length of the program as 6 months again after having previously moved to 9 months. The last three were job hunting from what I can tell, it personally took me 4 to find something.

This actually looks similar to what the current company I work at did with me. I got hired and they paid me for 2 months to work on fake projects in their code base with all the other new hires. I assume this was super helpful for techleads as it means the person who's starting on their team has at least a passing familiarity with the code base and languages used. Pretty much everyone who entered with me had to learn PHP, and 95% of them were bootcamp grads (of the remainder only one had previously worked software, and the others were fresh out of college) But this is super expensive to do the way the company I work for is doing it and I can't see many wanting to.

If anyone is considering know my least favorite thing about Lambda was the way the ISA works. The 17% is calculated pretax, but charged posttax.

PS Hi Austin

Does LambdaSchool think the thing holding back their developers is that companies cannot onboard new developers?

While many small companies do not pay much attention to onboarding, I'm not sure that this is the actual stumbling block.

I think the bigger problem LambaSchool graduates who've talked to me say is that LambdaSchool's poor reputation and haphazard leadership have left the value of their schooling in question, and that puts them at a material disadvantage compared to people with a traditional college degree. This is a variant of the problem that Udacity and co face: companies recruiting have reservations about that type of education and view it as a risky hire.

AFAIK (it predates my time with Udacity substantially) Udacity discontinued their active placement programs, and generally when they do that (again, I have no special knowledge) it happens because it was neither working nor cost effective.

I think LambdaSchool would be better served using its resources to improve the reputation of its graduates by actually highlighting their work and functioning like a more traditional university; sponsoring open source work and research and showing their graduates and produce such work. Universities get famous and reputable off the back of work like this.

They might also consider not being such shady actors, with a long history of tax disputes and illegal operation. It doesn't matter if state and federal rules are unjust; what matters here is that companies (especially smaller ones) need to maintain the appearance of managing risk. An association with LambdaSchool damages that.

Full disclosure: I don't like the leadership of LS at all. But I have a lot of compassion and respect for the individuals that have taken their destiny into their own hands and learned the trade through any means necessary. I think folks that emerge from these processes are often better members of the workforce than traditionally educated people; because of the tight selection filter (only very talented and motivated people can pass through these processes and succeed, therefore you're selecting from an inherently more dedicated and energetic candidate pool).

> (only very talented and motivated people can pass through these processes and succeed, therefore you're selecting from an inherently more dedicated and energetic candidate pool)

Unfortunately having interviewed a bunch of folks from these programs, I find that to be false the vast majority of the time, from this program especially. I've interviewed probably 5-6 LS folks and over 10 folks from a large program in NYC (you can guess which one) and every time the program has given them an incredibly oversold sense of skill level. They were unequivocally not prepared for the job they were interviewing for but were adamant that they were. I'm guessing they're given interview coaching where they're coached to guide the interviewer towards things that are positive for them (projects they did in the program for example) and away from things that they're not prepared for (such as questions actually relevant to the position). I had one candidate straight up tell me that they were more senior than our senior developers because they spent a year or whatever "living and breathing this stuff everyday, all day" whereas our senior devs wasted their time at college and probably have the same amount of "real practical experience" as this program grad did even though they'd been working there for 3-5 years. Maybe that's gotten better over the past couple of years since I've interviewed regularly, but for a while it was a huge problem where they were ill prepared and then had this massive entitlement about it. I'm guessing that's how the programs were sold to them: finish it and you'll waltz into a six figure job.

That's not universal in these bootcamps/programs, though. I've interviewed a few Turing School folks that are awesome. I've interviewed folks from several smaller programs from all over whose names escape me (a Seattle-based one, one in the midwest...can't remember others) that have been fantastic.

I just _wish_ all of these programs were great at preparing folks and self-filtering on the backside, but unfortunately, I think many of them take their money (or hold out their hand when/if they get hired), pass the people through no matter what, and fill their heads with the idea that they're now prepared and deserve a job.

You're coached to be confident through interviewing. Advice like "apply for anything saying up to five years of experience required". Combine that with a lot of grads who aren't experienced in interviewing can lead to that sort of issue. The biggest thing I'd look for is side projects. The people doing side projects were generally the one who were keeping up, and actually had an interest.

I think Lambda was also a lot more selective towards the beginning (when there were like 12 people in a class) vs now where I think the class size is in the lower three figure range?

> I had one candidate straight up tell me that they were more senior than our senior developers because they spent a year or whatever "living and breathing this stuff everyday, all day" whereas our senior devs wasted their time at college and probably have the same amount of "real practical experience" as this program grad did even though they'd been working there for 3-5 years.

Unbelievable

This 'school' was the final marker for me for the 'programmer bubble'.

I remember back in the aughts when the rhetoric wasn't 'l2code' it was 'learn graphic design' in a few weeks and be a highly paid graphic artist working for the biggest most famous companies making the best money!

Really there was never anything special about any of it, it just seemed a daunting task. The more people realized this the more the job market was flooded until the .com bubble burst. Which was a good thing, really.

Here we have the same thing again. The things I remember most from last bubble that match with this are for-profit 'technical colleges' with 'degrees' but they arent really because they're un-accredited. Now they just call them coding boot camps, but I see no difference.

It all smells like taking advantage of the most desperate of people in the worst spots who want nothing more than to genuinely improve their lives.

I believe ITT Tech and Hallmark eventually got sued over the same stuff- lying about job placement ratios, constant teacher turnover, constant ripoff and high pressure tactics stories.

Also fanny packs are back again, so why not for profit pretend schools?

All we do is visit the same crimes to each other.

Truly innovative, outside the box, hacker thinking. If Uber and Lyft can violate labor laws, why shouldn’t everyone?

I can’t wait for the next innovation. Maybe Big Tech will give people free room and board (and no pay) in exchange for multi year contracts. Maybe Lambda School can set up a market where companies can sell these contacts to each other.

Don’t worry privileged developers. I’m sure this will never affect you. Traditionally in the US we only enslave minorities.

Um, is that 4 weeks unpaid? Is this even legal?

If it is unpaid for the student, and the end “customer” is a for-profit business, even if it is characterized as part of a course of study, it seems very likely illegal, though the program seems to be structured in a way intended to provide an argument (though IMO a rather superficial, pretextual one) that it does not require payment under the applicable federal rules [0].

[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...

If it isn't it should be.

It is not. It's virtually impossible to hire an intern without paying them -- the company would have to show that the intern learned a skill, and that the company saw no benefit, at all.

So.. I'm a little confused on how this is different from a college with a co-op programme (at least in that, students get paid) - and moreover I genuinely am a bit turned off by the fact that the "fellowship" is unpaid. That really kind of makes no sense to me - it's emphasised elsewhere on this thread by Lambda staff that the fellows will be able to contribute to the company. However, they are not being paid. Like, I'm unable to wrap my head around this - it's a fundamental rule of economics - you render a service for someone and you get paid in return..

The Ada Academy in Seattle is free AND offers a Paid internship and their site says 78% of interns receive full-time offers from their company. If they can do it, why can't Lambda?

Ada Academy is a nonprofit endeavor sponsored by a 501(c)3 charity that takes donations to support the academy.

Lambda School is a for-profit business enterprise.

The companies hosting an intern pay Ada Academy a fee. Those fees support their program, including the stipend they pay students while they're in the classroom and internship parts of the program.

Hey, folks. One of the creators of the Lambda Fellows program here.

We were trying to crack several problems with Fellows:

- The current hiring process in our industry is broken. Interviews represent a point-in-time measurement of someone's talent when you should be "hiring for slope", it introduces bias, and it's time-consuming and costly. It also unnecessarily punishes Junior engineers.

- The best learning experience for a Lambda engineer is real work. We've done our best to design an educational program that simulates real work, but it's still just a simulation. "If you want to learn how to do a thing, the best way is to do that thing."

- 1-to-1 mentorship from a more experienced developer is a powerful learning too, but it's rare. It best occurs within the context of a shared work product where comments are not abstract and squishy but focused and tactical.

- Despite placing over 1,000 Lambda engineers at top companies around the industry, there remains skepticism about their ability to be productive and ship software.

We think Lambda Fellows is the best of both worlds: it's an unparalleled learning experience for Lambda grads (real work + mentorship) while providing companies with an accelerated onramp to experience junior talent on their team while allowing them to give back to develop the next generation of software engineers.

I'll hang out here for the next hour or so. Feel free to ask any questions you might have.

First off, I think any innovation in the tech hiring space is good, so glad to see new models being tested. Couple questions:

1.) How do you discourage companies from intentionally using these fellows to do "grunt" work? Given that these are only 4 week projects, for a lot of complex projects, that isn't enough time to ramp up even a senior engineer to deliver a finished working product in that time.

2.) One of the huge barriers to this kind of "contract" work is the potential for a whole bunch of unmaintained code to be written. A big reason that smaller companies don't have interns is because of the time suck in terms of ramp up and long term maintainability of the code. How will this program deal with these issues?

> How do you discourage companies from intentionally using these fellows to do "grunt" work?

Great question! A couple of ways:

- First off, we talk to them. We qualify every company through a conversation with the mentor, looking at the project the engineer will be working on, and assessing their onboarding process. It becomes pretty obvious when people just want "free work." We don't place Fellows at those companies.

- Our North Star for this program is delivering an amazing educational experience for the Fellow. Everything else is secondary. If a company is getting real work done that's valuable to them, that's great, as long as they're delivering on the educational experience for the Fellow. We have pulled Fellows off of projects where the company is not delivering on their end of the bargain.

- Finally, as you mentioned in your question "that isn't enough time to ramp up even a senior engineer to deliver a finished working product in that time." The 4 week timeframe naturally limits the usefulness for "free work." A company would have to be pretty desperate to try to get significant stuff shipped via rotating Fellows through. And companies like that would be found out pretty quickly via the above two points.

> A big reason that smaller companies don't have interns is because of the time suck in terms of ramp up and long term maintainability of the code.

Again, great point. Internships are not great, not because they _can't_ be great, but (I believe) because they haven't been thoughtfully designed to deliver valuable work, which it turns out, is also a superior learning experience.

Let's take your two points in order:

1. "the time suck in terms of ramp up" - We saw this as a problem from the start as well. To combat this, we built out a Mentor's Guide(https://www.notion.so/lambdaschool/Lambda-Fellows-Program-4c...) with checklists and docs that streamline the onboarding process. We've placed 40 Fellows at different companies over the past 8 weeks, and we see our average Fellow get their dev env set up by EOD 1, their first ticket pushed to prod by EOD 3, and a WIP pull request opened with the first part of their project by day 5 of week 1. It's amazing to see how quickly you can get to productive work with just a little intentional design.

2. "long term maintainability of the code" - This is exactly why we pair each of our Fellows with a single, dedicated Mentor at the host company. The Mentor is responsible for reviewing the Fellow's code, giving feedback, helping them get unblocked, guiding them towards the right type of solution, etc. This is not "hire some interns and stick them in a corner working on something semi-interesting." It's simultaneously a more involved process for the company, while also being more focused and valuable.

I hope that helps clear some things up!

Does Lambda School collect a percentage of the Fellow’s wages? Do these Fellows sign a contract with Lambda School? What is the model by which Lambda School makes money from this?

By getting Fellows jobs.

Lambda School gets paid nothing by the host company and students, as always, don't pay us until they get a job making over $50,000.

> "as always, don't pay us until they get a job making over $50,000"

Can you elaborate on this? How do these students pay Lambda School after they've reached > $50,000 (is that $50,000 annual, cumulative, something else?). Once the indentured student reaches this income threshold, what does the compensation to Lambda School look like? Is it a percentage of the student's annual wages? How long does the student remain indebted to Lambda School? Are they required to sign a contract for a minimum term?

Sure! This page does a good job of explaining the ISA: https://lambdaschool.com/isa

It's also worth mentioning that Lambda School has sold (or "financed") many of these ISAs to investors, so Lambda gets paid in advance of the student getting paid (even if it's technically a line of credit).

It's a nice idea to align the incentives of the school and student, but the current implementation doesn't do that if the school sells/finances ISAs so that they get paid before the student does.

Thats not exactly how this works, financially speaking.

TL:DR the more successful Lambda is with placement, the more they get paid per ISA ("financed" or not). Incentives remain aligned, even if they get paid before the student does.

>It's a nice idea to align the incentives of the school and student, but the current implementation doesn't do that if the school sells/finances ISAs

But the current implementation _does_ do that.

Debt is always "scored" before being sold off - which factors in to how much the debt ends up being sold for.

In this case, the scoring depends on how much gets paid back per ISA, which is subsequently determined by the placement success. Here's a couple of ways this _could_ happen:

  • If the overall placement % goes up - so more debt (ISA's) is actually paid vs not paid (b/c conditions aren't met)
  • If the avg. salary per placement increases - so more $ is actually paid per ISA (with respect to the $30k cap)

If Lambda can show success in placement, meaning more return is made on each ISA, then the ISA's will be "scored" higher.

As to whether or not they are sold upfront - thats a nonfactor to me. If Lambda doesn't do its job training and placing people, they don't make money. Either way this still holds true.

Also, all the financing could be happening and student STILL will "not pay any upfront tuition" and "won't pay until they are earning $50k" or more a year - as Lambda advertises.

The Income Sharing Agreements are here

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wLgwpPYcY5-UsuO0akE3lvVsLlR...

And here

https://leif.org/api/products/5b5b8bd0e59b743f9a086ed9/pdf

Per the Lambda School website.

Yikes!

"Your Income Share under this Agreement is 17.00%, subject to adjustment for underreporting or overreporting of Earned Income, as described herein."

I think developers need to strongly consider organizing...

This whole page has people talking about "is this legal" and yet this legitimate legal expectation of reporting your income accurately is being questioned?

Interesting.

I am not seeing the benefit of this vs. a traditional internship. If there is someone is pitched as a potential hire, I have higher expectations vs. someone who is pitched as an intern. I know we will need to train up interns - that is the whole point. But to fill an open role on the team, these folks will be compared with every other applicant, and odds are we will choose someone who we know can hit the ground running and contribute.

The term "Fellow" also reminds me of the title given to the top engineers in large established companies - it implies they are the cream of the crop from the entire industry, not a recent bootcamp grad.

In short, I'd just call this an internship to avoid setting incorrect expectations.

Thanks for the feedback!

A couple of thoughts:

- We actually want someone evaluated as a potential hire, not an intern. We expect our Fellows to be ready for real work, and the Fellows experience is the measure of whether they are or not.

- We went with "Fellows" instead of "intern" because the program is designed very differently than an internship and we found ourselves often saying to companies "it's like an internship, except for X, Y, and Z." Was helpful to just change the title. But I hear ya on the "Fellow" sounding potentially more senior.

I'll pass along your feedback to our marketing team, re: naming.

> We went with "Fellows" instead of "intern" because the program is designed very differently than an internship

Superficially, it is a lot more like an educational internship (unpaid work experience incorporated as part of an academic program) than an education fellowship (a scholarship, funded internally by an educational institution or externally by some other entity, that pays for graduate study, sometimes tied to work [0].)

I can't see anything in the description of the program that makes it not within the understood scope of the term "internship".

[0] e.g., https://www.assembly.ca.gov/fellowship

Like many shady businesses they thought by changing the definitions of words they could get away with blatantly illegal shenanigans.

These are very much unpaid internships that are obviously intended to be a free trial for labor. An internship is learning, not being thrust into a role as a trial. All to bump their bullshit placement numbers.

I've often wondered how far a company would have to.go before YC officially distanced themselves, I guess I'll have to keep waiting.

Internships period should be abolished. Is there a name for a law where 'anything a company can get away with it will'. Or even 'never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to profit-seeking'

So far I haven't seen X, Y and Z articulated clearly. (what distinguishes "Fellows" from unpaid interns) Everything on the page linked by this post sounds like a typical internship or coop.

Step 1. Farm out < one-month contract jobs Step 2. Profit

Step 3: LambdaSchool stops working with your company.

How is this company still allowed to pollute Hacker News and not treated as a low key fraudulent org? Other than the fact that the founder takes eighteen adderall prior to each post and defends any comment critical of Lambda School?

It's a YC company and you're on news.ycombinator.com.

Submissions about YC companies don't inherently get an algorithmic boost on HN. (although the high ranking of this submission is IMO unexpected)

Understood. However, I think that the fact that it's a YC company makes it relevant for this site, which is why it's "still allowed to pollute Hacker News".

It’s still a tech sector story. I for one wish to be remain informed of latter-day indentured servitude thriving on a pedagogical Ponzi scheme. No matter how much it makes my skin crawl.

This is awesome. I can't wait until the number of programming literate people grows beyond the current ~ 10 million. Would be a nice world.

I completely agree. I can't wait to see what they will build!

Right now, software is still incredibly undervalued for what is possible long-term. We also need to make software _easier to make and maintain_, but "programming literate people" will reinvent the world over the next 50 years.

> Right now, software is still incredibly undervalued for what is possible long-term.

That's why you increase saturation and undervalue it even more?

I’ll play devils advocate. The industry is saturated. The world doesn’t need more programmers, the world needs better programmers.

Programming literate doesn't mean you work in the industry. It means you can work anywhere with the possibility to automate parts of yourself.

The intent of Lambda School (and how they make their money) is to train engineers for tech jobs.

If the quality of students from Lambda is low relative to the industry, that's a problem for both the student and the school.

I've long believed that most programming jobs should be taught in an apprenticeship format - these bootcamps, overpriced CS programs, etc. just don't compare to the learning that happens when you sit with an experienced developer and start to solve real problems. Lambda School seems to be a for profit organization that is primarily interested in making money, and this "Fellows" program is just an extension of that.

We're also bought in on the apprenticeship model. This program represents an attempt to make the learning journey more apprenticeship-focused.

Our incentives are totally aligned with the student. If we don't do a good job of preparing them to succeed as a dev, we go out of business.

In a true apprenticeship, the apprentice makes wages while learning the craft/trade - and the apprentice doesn't pay the organization that they apprentice under or through... An apprenticeship where the apprentice is required to pay 17% of their wages to the organization that merely coordinated the apprenticeship represents a continuation of the elite amassing wealth, while the working class are expected to pick up more and more of the tab.

No your incentives couldn't be more mal-aligned from students and you have had this explained to you many times every time your pyramid scheme shows up on hn.

You sell their ISAs as has also been discussed on every HN post about your 'school'. You steal almost 1/5 of a graduate's yearly income.

You can put lipstick on that pig all you want, you can call it a duck, but its still a pig with lipstick.

To quote snazz further up:

>It's also worth mentioning that Lambda School has sold (or "financed") many of these ISAs to investors, so Lambda gets paid in advance of the student getting paid (even if it's technically a line of credit).

>It's a nice idea to align the incentives of the school and student, but the current implementation doesn't do that if the school sells/finances ISAs so that they get paid before the student does.

edit- spelling

To quote my response to snazz's quote further up:

> Thats not exactly how this works, financially speaking.

> TL:DR the more successful Lambda is with placement, the more they get paid per ISA ("financed" or not). Incentives remain aligned, even if they get paid before the student does.

> Debt is always "scored" before being sold off - which factors in to how much the debt ends up being sold for.

> In this case, the scoring depends on how much gets paid back per ISA, which is subsequently determined by the placement success. Here's a couple of ways this _could_ happen:

> • If the overall placement % goes up - so more debt (ISA's) is actually paid vs not paid (b/c conditions aren't met)

> • If the avg. salary per placement increases - so more $ is actually paid per ISA (with respect to the $30k cap)

> If Lambda can show success in placement, meaning more return is made on each ISA, then the ISA's will be "scored" higher.

> As to whether or not they are sold upfront - thats a nonfactor to me. If Lambda doesn't do its job training and placing people, they don't make money. Either way this still holds true.

> Also, all the financing could be happening and student STILL will "not pay any upfront tuition" and "won't pay until they are earning $50k" or more a year - as Lambda advertises.

I think the reason you _think_ this is a scam is that you _want_ it to be a scam. Perhaps to give you something to talk about on HN? I really don't know what your motives are.

I imagine that if you spent some time talking to the actual customers, you would find out that this is providing opportunities to those who are not given them through college or an upfront bootcamp.

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