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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

Did lambda school have any sort of assessment before accepting students? This really resonates with my observations. The people who got the most out of software bootcamps were those that had tinkered with video game modding, WordPress, etc. and had done some self-learning of coding before going to a bootcamp. In other words, people who knew they liked hacking on tech and had a basic ability to code. They approached the bootcamp with the mindset that they already knew they had technical interest and ability, and wanted direction on building marketable skills.

Do you think greater selectivity applicants would increase the success rate? I had thought the ISA model would incentivize this, but when I learned lambda was selling ISAs that seemed like it removed this incentive.

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This is generally true but not always. As you can imagine we have loads of data on this.

If you only selected students who had been tinkering with writing code for 10 years certainly you'd be successful in doing so, but you'd also eliminate ~90% of those who we have seen become software engineers.

The only way we've found that does it well is to have people actually start writing code and see if they enjoy it. That's why we now have multiple free classes, have a free dropout period once you're in the school, and even have a three-week free trial of the school itself.

The notion that financing ISAs removed the incentives isn't really accurate.

First, most of the time ISAs are financed it's in the form of a loan you have to pay back with interest with an ISA and its repayments as collateral, or it's a sale to a neutral SPV with recourse in the case repayments don't hit a certain threshold.

In the rare instance (we've never done that) schools have been able to sell ISAs full stop, it's been at extreme discounts or based on discounted predicted likelihoods of future revenue, and if those ISAs don't repay the buyers bail and the school trying to sell them is out of business.

Edit: It's too late to edit my comment, but I noticed an error we have sold ISAs with minimal recourse not at enrollment, but at the point of _graduation_; we would sell half at an extreme discount at graduation (based on likelihood of being hired) and keep half on our books.

They had a prebootcamp with a free course that taught the basics. Some people cheat through that though and didn't quite process that... you can't really pull that off through the whole program?

I totally saw people who had never coded before succeed, I'm not sure I could pick out in an interview who would do well and who wouldn't. It's a marathon not a sprint.

For the selectivity thing... I'm really not sure. The selling ISAs thing was a bit weird when I learned about. I honestly kinda wonder about the actuarial calcs of it all.

Honestly I was a little surprised at the cheating too. I think I was a little naive in the beginning that if you actually wanted a job you would understand that you would have to be able to write code. But some folks are in a school mentality that if you get a grade/diploma you're good, regardless of whether you understand the things required to go into that.

Having tried a number of different ways to do admissions, I can assure you doing interviews is possibly the worst.

As far as ISAs go, it all comes out in the wash. If you create a pool of ISAs and students don't get hired you may have more ISAs but the average ISA is worth less, so the only thing that matters is whether each individual student gets hired. There's no financial wizardry that can let you sell $1 for $2 in the long-run.

Yeah that's fair enough. I don't think the people cheating ever got far enough to actually effect job stats. It was pretty easy to sus out who actually knew enough to keep going. I don't fault Lambda for that, it's just the reality of any educational goal line.

For the interview thing, that's just what you were doing at the time. At the rate you were iterating, I'm sure that there's a better process now.

> I don't think the people cheating ever got far enough to actually effect job stats.

Yeah, some do a remarkably good job of cheating and would get into hiring stats for sure, but I think we've almost entirely cut that out now.

Funny how some people think that "programming though Stack Overflow" will keep working after you progress to a certain level

School mentality (and I might add: grifter mentality as well)

I’m Senior Staff and still have to use Stack Overflow regularly!

Sure, not a problem. Most programmers do, probably.

However, I've seen students use Stack Overflow and other resources as a source of "program stamps":

- They enter their problem in an Internet search engine.

- Click on the first result with code in it.

- "Stamp it" on their own code: I.e., copy/paste it.

- Using editor/compiler, find any issues by trial and error and fix them so the editor/compiler doesn't complain anymore.

They might try a simple example or two to see if it works. And that's it.

There's not much reflection on their final solution, or on the bits they copy/paste. They don't seem to understand their solution, nor care about that or their problem solving process. They put in effort, they expect a passing grade.

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