Lambda School imho is one of the most interesting companies at the moment.
Many many have tried to tackle the challenges of education & its dynamics & how long-term all of it is and how short-term the typical strategic horizons and business models are.
Super excited about their journey ahead. This is one of these efforts that in this moment already have massive impact and down the road their impact can be difficult to even grasp and imagine when you think of it.
They teach html -> react in 1 month which is a bit doubtful in itself, but then they spend 1 month on C, OS's, and system calls!
Whatever knowledge, if any, people will acquire at the end is almost certainly going to be extremely shallow. Perhaps no better than reading intro sections of Wikipedia articles yourself over say 4 months instead of 1.
Before joining Lambda School you are required to do our pre-course work, which includes the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We then cover those topics again at a more advanced level once you begin the course, but a lot of time then is spent on making sure HTML is semantic, using preprocessors and mixins, responsive design, manipulating the DOM with vanilla JS, that kind of thing, so you understand what is happening under the hood. Then we dive into the “finer points” of JS for a while (ha), then React. So the front-end portion alone, including the precourse work, is longer than most code bootcamps. Then we get into backend in JS, then start writing “more advanced code” in Python.
By the time we’re writing C you’re already very comfortable with JS and pretty comfortable with Python, so we can ramp up the learning curve a bit. Bear in mind it’s all day every day with no context switching whatsoever; you’d be surprised what you can learn at that speed with people there on-demand to guide you and answer questions.
Hour for hour Lambda School’s full coursework is about 1500 hours; about 75% of the time you’d spend on the core track of a CS degree. Of course, our intentions are very different and much less theoretical/lower level. Our goal is for you to write great code at a great company, so we dive into theory where necessary and appropriate.
Of course, the most important part of Lambda School is that somewhere along the way you’ve learned how to learn. And when your new job says, “Alright our stack is Elixir and Phoenix” you don’t say “Um but I only know JS” you say, “Alright, link me to the docs.” There’s no way we could teach you everything you need to know and use, we really just give you the foundation that lets you continue to learn while being paid to do so.
This part has always kind of worried me. It feels like indentured servitude a bit. People will end up paying too much or be on the hook for more than they can afford because they are desperate now
It aligns their incentives with yours. You know they really do want you to find a high paying job. Thats not something that can be said of most educational programs.
Many many have tried to tackle the challenges of education & its dynamics & how long-term all of it is and how short-term the typical strategic horizons and business models are.
Super excited about their journey ahead. This is one of these efforts that in this moment already have massive impact and down the road their impact can be difficult to even grasp and imagine when you think of it.