You assign precourse work that rejects 98% of applicants. That helps select students with existing experience, sometimes even STEM degrees.
According to the example contract on their site, their income share agreements last up to seven years. Even if they fail to teach a student anything, the student can spend years studying on their own (or even get a degree), and still owe money.
>You assign precourse work that rejects 98% of applicants.
I think a good model for this is the Insight Fellowship. By selecting mostly STEM Ph.D. graduates, the pool of students already has some relevant background/foundation. The focus can then be on the tools and methods for applying DS in a corporate/business setting, which is actually relevant for jobs.
Insight grads, in my experience, have been a notorious joke. Nothing has diminished my respect for a PhD from a top-tier institution more than the people I have worked with coming out of that program.
Interesting, I've had the opposite experience. One of the best managers I've ever reported to and worked with came from the project. I've also worked with a few good engineers and scientists from there, too.
I suppose this is a reminder of The Law of Small Numbers and sample size importance!
if you have a STEM degree, what value can you derive from short introductory classes on linear algebra, Python and relational databases?
Countless truly excellent and free/cheap resources on these topics exist and you don't have to give a way a significant percentage of your yearly salary.
I think the value is similar to the value of a personal trainer. There's no rocket science involved in maintaining fitness, but many people find value in the added accountability and planning support.
serious question: Why isn't there a service "personal trainer for coding"? Not so much for juniors looking to get into the industry, but... I'm sure there's a continuous pipeline of high-value people who would pay $$$ to keep them accountable to doing say three coding exercises a week while they are getting ready to switch jobs or are between jobs.
Perhaps because one of the "three virtues of great programmers" is hubris - which Larry Wall optimistically defined as "The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about." but which also/really means "Excessive pride or self-confidence."
I suspect many/most coders think a "personal trainer for coding" is a great idea - for other people (especially their idiot co workers). But they obviously don't need one themselves, and would never need to pay for new...
Hubris drives you to re-build things you shouldn't... which is how you learn why they work the way they do. And maybe to try things you "shouldn't", which end up working out OK fairly often.
This actually exists. I would link to a specific example, but it's run by an individual and I'd feel weird doing that. "Software coaching" might be a useful keyword?
There are programming tutors on wyzant and other services. I suspect a lot of people learning to code who already have a coding friend/person in their life do this informally.
I really like the idea of a talented tutor helping with subjects I struggle with. Even if it costs thousands of dollars this can be a great investment. The offer would have to be focused, customized and beyond the basics. Given the materials that are out there (MIT open courseware comes to mind) it is really beyond me why people spend so much.
You can procrastinate away your entire life with "someday I'll surely take advantages of all the free resources on X that are out there and finally learn X and maybe even shift careers!"
Just think of all the things you never bother to learn despite having a latent interest even though you can open a new Youtube.com tab right now and fire away. It's hard to start, and then it's overwhelming when you do, and then you feel like a failure when you don't stick with it.
Isn't it worth quite a lot to snap out of it and finally do it? It doesn't surprise me that people find this to be worth thousands of dollars. When you consider how fatally expensive it is to procrastinate your goals forever, maybe these schools are a bargain.
This is literally me, although today I finally found the motivation to actually put together two of the parts I 3d printed a while ago. Maybe some day I'll finish the robot.
I've thought about the Lambda School model, sure the funding model is good, however the problem is what that funding is being used for. If you could work on the material on your own and hire a TA paid by the hour to grade your assignments, give feedback and provide assistance, basically only pay for the services that you actually need then the cost for a degree would go down massively.
What Lambda School is trying to do right now is just fish for good students and hope they graduate as quickly as possible so they can collect as many ISAs as possible for as little cost as possible.
Exactly. Some people need a structured environment to get that kind of work done at a decent pace. It also helps to have feedback from a teacher, just like a personal trainer helps you with form.
I have seen another approach (also with STEM PhDs), where it isn't an income share, but rather that the incubator gets a referral fee if the student is hired--similar to a recruiter. Now, why do this? The math behind most of data science is rather basic for a number of PhD physicists--I would say the greatest weakness on the math front is that many will know probability, but not Bayesian statistics. However, the level of coding will be mixed with many not knowing about source control and a number coding in say Matlab rather than Python. Now, some have said that people can learn this on their own, which comes to the next reason. Physics graduate students and postdocs can put in extreme hours and their supervisors can expect those hours. 100+ hour weeks happen (especially for experimentalists--a number enter industry and it takes readjustment to figure out what to do with spare time). By formally leaving and joining an incubator, they give themselves space/time to learn--it's also a pretty intentional act where they have to decide that they are leaving the field (which can be psychologically difficult). The next is job interviews--the typical physicist has no idea what a data science interview will be like and coaching will help them a lot. Finally, there is networking, where the incubator may have connections with hiring managers where they can at least get people into interviews. I have seen people do either the incubator route or the DIY route and for those who have gone with the incubator (where they don't pay and the business model isn't a percentage of their salary coming from their pocket, but rather a recruiting fee going to the incubator from the company they get a job at), then they seem fairly satisfied with their experience.
Exactly this. The only Bootcamp grass I know that were successful in their post grad jobs were already developers but with a different skill set. The entire concept of turning non technical people into developers is a farce.
According to the example contract on their site, their income share agreements last up to seven years. Even if they fail to teach a student anything, the student can spend years studying on their own (or even get a degree), and still owe money.