Very based:
With all the damning evidence, the story was ready. Most reporters would now email their subjects for comment, but Woo elevated the story to performance art. He asked Austen for a recorded interview, without revealing its nature. Austen, lulled into a false sense of security by tech press puff pieces, agreed. What followed was the most riveting hour of tech journalism I’ve ever heard.
The premiere venture capitalists of our time, drawing from near infinity riches during ZIRP, and the most innovative thing they have is student loan debt racket but faster.
Did YC seriously think because a growth hacker was in charge, you could value a private school like its an overinflated tech company? PG going mask off to endorse slavery (sorry, “trying out a worker”) for a hack like Austen is so many levels of brainworm capitalism, how has Silicon Valley not sunk into the ocean.
It gets even worse when you add YC’s claim that it doesn’t “fund ideas” but rather “fund people.” They didn’t find Austen (a shit person) because he had a good idea (he didn’t). They funded Austen (a shit person) because they liked him (a shit person).
Did YC seriously think because a growth hacker was in charge, you could value a private school like its an overinflated tech company?
Yes. The answer is always “yes”.
FML I just caught it on the screenshot of the “iOS Development” course offered by Lambda
BLOCKCHAIN! Those bozos had to squeeze 4yrs of CS education into 6-12 months but they found ample room to teach about BLOCKCHAIN! There’s literally nothing in that curricullum about datrabases, but they somehow fit BLOCKCHAIN.
Also “Hash Tables and Blockchain” is like having a physics module called “Gravity and Juiceros”
Gravity and Juiceros
Gravity is what allows a cinder block to replace tour Jucero.
Thanks for reminding me about Jucero.
I started reading the part with students wondering how to afford a lawyer and I was like, wait, isn’t that specifically what a class-action is supposed to allieviate?
Because students signed away their rights to a class action lawsuit as part of their enrollment agreement…
HOW THE FUCK IS THIS LEGAL. HOW IS THE USA A REAL PLACE WHERE PEOPLE LIVE. WHAT THE FUCK.
Im reading the article and im baffled. In a way which comes back to your ‘HOW IS THE USA A REAL PLACE’ thing.
I’m at the ‘try out an engineer for four weeks’ part, and am I missing something? Isn’t this normal with jobs? That there is a month of tryout period? Are they just bragging about it being unpaid? How is that impressive? (It isn’t like it is free for the hiring company anyway even if they don’t have to pay the first month, programming famously being a non-stacking process where training and managing people into a new team is quite costly, vs hiring more people to lay bricks, a process where you can just hire more people if you want it to go faster).
Isn’t this normal with jobs? That there is a month of tryout period?
I have never found this to be normal with jobs, no. But in the US, most employment is at-will, so you can be fired without cause at any time.
(I’ve encountered probation windows where benefits don’t kick in for 3-6 months, and that’s hideous in a country without single payer health care, but never a tryout period.)
Yeah I can’t find the proper dutch word for it in my mind (and even then I would need to find a translation) but the concept of ‘you can be let go/quit in the first month without any notice’ seems to me to be a normal thing (which at-will fits into, but also probation periods etc), like I doubt it is a thing at higher end jobs, and it is more of a hire a McDonalds tillworker (which is not to say this is unskilled work btw, there certainly is a difference in quality of somebody doing that work for a month vs years).
So for me the only real benefit of this offer seemed to me the price. Which is just such a weird thing to compete on with tech workers. (And I would think that the businesses interested in this offer would also be of lesser quality). To me the whole action just signals ‘our students are mostly of low quality, here is a sieve to filter out the good ones’. Which is why I was baffled.
When he isn’t promoting the company and attacking critics, he shares his love of capitalism, free markets, and his favorite billionaire.
This is before the “favourite billionaire” is mentioned by name, and
- You immediatelly know who that is. I could’ve bet my life-savings on the name coming up.
- If you have such a thing as a “favourite billionaire” you have erred in your ways and need to rethink your life.
Awful people facing justice
You love to see it
Congrats to ‘become a programmer motherfucker’ outliving (and giving better ‘coding’ education) than the lamba school.
And all that without series A,B, or C!
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?
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.
