First, and foremost, I want to make this absolutely clear. I am not going to just bash on any organization. If they do something egregious potentially, but that is certainly not what this is. This is a learning, and growing opportunity for an organization that could go from decent to amazing. To evolve, and fix shortcomings to create a powerful, and dynamic environment for people to learn software engineering.
In August 2020 I joined Lambda Schools Part Time program, and we will be specifically focused on the part time program, and the changes that have happened there, which in turn affect the full time Web Development program.
I am currently finishing Unit 4 of the school's core curriculum which includes node, and SQL, specifically SQLite3 & PostgreSQL.
I want to make sure that I state that I have worked pretty hard to try and promote positive change, and attempt to get Lambda to fix some of the issues that I will be addressing, including talking to one of the student communication staff, and a number of people inside of the student success team. Including asking for facetime with the leadership, and the curriculum team to have a conversation, and to attempt to establish a student forum via zoom to discuss how the students feel things are going from their end. Instead, there are feedback forms, and slack (that is censored when it comes to anything anti-Lambda)
Unit 1 of Lambda School was pretty awesome. There were a few points where I wanted to pitch my mouse and keyboard, but then that comes with learning anything complex and new. I think honestly my only feedback for my time in unit 1 is that removing LESS from the equation, or CSS Pre-Processors in general was a miss that could have been rectified.
When brought up to Austen Allred, it was removed to decrease the overall duration of the program. This was a miss regardless. I think both students & employers alike would have been far more understanding if the duration was longer, but with more substance.
I am going to assume that the duration issue is due to the financial side of Lambda School. The more students they can crank out in the shortest amount of time the better for Lambda School because then they see a return on investment, and can have more cash on hand for more programs, or to sustain the existing programs.
After I went through unit 1 of Lambda school it changed in a few key ways. First TLs & SLs were removed. Team Leads & Section Leads held standups, held students accountable, and did code review on assignments, and ended up grading those assignments.
The standups were, in my opinion, a critical component to how successful students were because someone with less experience and knowledge than the instructors were sharing their knowledge, and sharing struggles that they had, and how they overcame the issues that they went through.
TLs & SLs have not been replaced, and are not going to be, pretty clearly for the expense. I think that this is a big theme to look at throughout this episode.
Another huge change, that on one end made sense, but on another was absolutely mindless was the removal of build week for the Unit 1 cohorts after my original cohort. They instead take the career-based curriculum, and condense it into 2 part-time weeks for part-time, and 1 week for full time.
The reason this kind of makes sense is that the first build week was purely HTML & CSS. You created a basic marketing page with a few additional pages and then sat around listening to the rest of your build team struggle for the remainder of the build week (which is 2 weeks for part-time). The Build teams were randomly assigned from students from every unit, and we were assigned a TL to keep things organized, and hold people accountable, and be a source of information if we got stuck. Again, TLs were removed from the program.