I'm not sure. But what's definitely true is that it's WAY harder as an adult.

Most self-taught programmers I know (including myself) learned to program as children/teenagers. Learning at that age is easier -- if not biologically, then at the very least because you have tons of free time.

The few I know who self-taught programming but didn't learn as youth already had really strong backgrounds in mathematics or physics, and leaned heavily on the skills that studying those fields teaches you.

That isn't really a valid argument here though because Lambda School is a full-time program to my understanding, so it's expected you somehow have 8 hours a day to put into it.

Lambda School has a 9 month program that takes a 17% cut of your salary for the first 24 months of employment with a cap at $30,000. Which many students in software will hit, especially in high COL areas.

It's worth noting that this is more expensive than many/most universities, which charge less than $30,000 per year (9 months of instruction) even at the sticker price (which no one actually pays).

In fact, I wonder whether bootcamps are even cheaper than the full cost of university. The average student loan debt upon graduation for all US university students is $29,400 (again, for four years of college education with access to both applied and fundamental courses across many different majors vs. a 9 month boot camp focused on a particular skill set).

To be concrete: by taking out a loan for what lambda school costs, you could double major in both nursing and CS at a state U for about the same amount of post-graduation debt as you would have at bootcamps. Or CS and Econ. Or CS and Accounting. Or CS and Mechanical Engineering. In states that still invest in higher ed, you'll end up paying less (even with interest) than you'd pay lambda school.

There's a natural experiment on this question at Purdue, where there's an apples-for-apples comparison and loans are almost always cheaper than the income sharing agreement.

To me, these income sharing agreements and bootcamps seem like not great deals when you look at instruction time per dollar. And also when you look at the longitudinal durability of the skill-set that's being taught. They have a place in the market for sure, but they aren't the panacea to expensive education. They're not even cost-competitive.

They're just a different point in the design space of educational programs that extract as much of the added value of their product as possible.

I always have the impression that this perception that Lambda's model is not good always come from people in more comfortable positions that are not even close to the reality of who actually applies for Lambda.

I am from Brazil and did the career change two years ago, so there wasn't actually the option to do Lambda School for me. But it would be a no-brainer for me at the time and I am pretty sure I would be much better in my career now if I had done it (in knowledge and earnings).

4 years of college? Not an option for me. USD15k upfront for a regular bootcamp? Not an option for me. Take a loan with the risk of having to pay with a big chance of not getting a good job soon enough? Too risky for me (and in Brazil the high interest rates make it a ridiculous thought, but even with US rates it is too risky).

My path was self-taught through freeCodeCamp.org (awesome project!!!) and reading tutorials and documentation. I was able to get a frontend jr position, but I can tell that I was lacking a lot of knowledge/skills when I started (git, tests, agile process, design patterns, clean code, to name a few).

Now I am moving to LA and I am failing every remote technical interview because I lack the specific skills needed for being hired in the US.

Lambda School 9 no-upfront full-time months with close mentorship and teamwork, plus the alignment to help get me a job seems like a "too good to be true" option for me; not a "tricking naive laypeople who don't know better into paying their high price" that all "skeptical" commenters I have ever read in HN seems to think

It is not simply about sticker price.

It is about _risk_. You as the individual burden all the risk if you take a loan (or not) and pay upfront.

Here, even if your analysis is correct that you pay more, you must adjust it for risk. In finance this is your risk-adjusted return, but the same concept applies here.

Well, you know what they say about if something sounds too good to be true.

A student will have spent about 2,000 hours in Lambda School by graduation - the equivalent of ~4 university semesters, because we go all day every day and don’t take breaks.

And comparing the amount of debt vs the total possible cost doesn’t make for an accurate comparison either.

Also note that by the time a Lambda School student is at year four, if we want to factor in the opportunity cost of time, a Lambda School student has paid Lambda School back and has three years of earnings/work experience.

If you’re using time as the comparison: Would you rather have a degree and $24k in debt or three years of Lambda School, have paid the school off, and have earned an additional $250k?

If you enroll in 15 credit hours at a university, that means 15 hours in a classroom plus 15-30 hours of assignments and labs. (1 credit hour = 1 hour class + 1-2 hours outside class, on average, per week).

That is full-time.

CS may be somewhat different.

Many schools are also only in session between half and three-quarters of the year.

My universty/department's policy is to provide 2 hours of work per credit hour, and the students certainly claim to be spending even more than that! (The truth is likely somewhere in the middle.)

Good point about not being in session year round. It is fairly common to either take summer courses or to do an internship though, which I strongly encourage my students to do! Personally, I took summer courses every year of undergrad and did 5 internships in grad school.

As a university student, I respectfully disagree.

Also if you get through a few semesters at an accredited university and decide you hate it those credits will generally transfer somewhere else. The same is not true of unaccredited programs.

Unless, of course, you date someone of the "wrong" race or gender, convert to the "wrong" religion, join the "wrong" political group, or do anything else that your parents don't like. Then you'll have to pay sticker price, because your parents didn't submit all the forms the college required them to.

It's a priceless feature that every student would value differently... maybe that's worth a few thousand more?

This is a pretty common situation for people looking to pick up a trade skill to get out of the unskilled labor market, or for people looking to transition into a more desirable field of work.

if that's your metric, universities lose out wildly to all of the free education available online.

> It's worth noting that this is more expensive than many/most universities, which charge less than $30,000 per year

also a meaningless comparison; a freshman year of school alone doesn't get you anything.

Exactly. We also have no idea how these kind of income sharing agreements will work out long term at scale for the company. No idea what the cost of long term recovery will be. Personally I doubt these kind of income sharing agreements will be enforceable long term.

I don't think this is helpful.

Being able to either ignore or put up with office politics might be a pathology, but it's a pathology that is required in most well-paying work environments. Passing subjective judgement on it isn't helpful unless you're a) a high-level executive with the ability to drive culture changes; or b) able to provide examples of work environments that better conform to OP's preferred social interactions (which I do in my original post).

If you can't find a way to play the game without emotional investment, then perhaps look for jobs in lower-paying sectors where you're less likely to encounter ambition and bullshit.

For example, have you looked for development jobs in the nonprofit and/or public sectors?

Nonprofit/gov't work in general can attract bad personalities, but IME the software development shops within those organizations tend to have very few of the types of people you want to avoid. The pay/prestige is low enough relative to other development work that you mostly get "true believers".

Universities (software development departments, not research groups!) are also typically nice laid back work environments.

Medium-sized non-software companies with small development groups (5-10 people) can also be good.

However, do realize that in all of those situations you are trading standups and TPS reports for daily interactions with non-technical end users, which come with their own set of frustrations.

I really don't agree that non -profits or government are where to go if you don't want to have to deal with inane business bs. In my experience selling in to both for the last year they're both chock full of forms and meetings for the sake of forms and meetings. Just people going through the motions of what they think business is without the talent to do it properly nor the genuine need or market mechanisms to punish /reward those running things effectively. Tons of politicking and busy work creation.

The most straight forward business people to deal with are the highest ranking in the most overtly profit oriented businesses. They want to make a buck, you want to make a buck, you have simple common ground to build on when interacting.

You do mention "ambition" though which OP doesn't. So maybe you, them, and me all have different ideas of what shit people to work with are. I do think that OP is likely to get "corporate crap and ritualed" to death in any of the non profit businesses I've seen the internals of though.

I do second universities though. I have a developer friend who works for one and it sounds like exactly what OP wants. He's mostly left to his own devices working on tickets.

If you consider moving back to industry after some time in nonprofit/gov't, I think many in dotcoms will tend to assume you're not good, even if you've been doing similar or harder work as you would've in a dotcom. Because who would've turned down dotcom kind of money (fair enough), and the chance to have impact (questionable logic, to people saving lives and liberty), and the chance to work with the best people who are them (now it's getting circular). Most of their data points are from people who chose dotcoms, they see lots of gov't/nonprofit-related dumbness in the news, and we all have prejudices about things we don't know.

If you're not coming from another dotcom, besides your skill/aptitude being suspect, you're also probably being judged with suspicion in some exclusionary (and questionable) idea of "culture fit". It's not just women and some other underrepresented socioeconomic groups who can be marginalized on this basis.

BTW, if OP thinks they have an unusually low tolerance for BS, I'd like to suggest two possibilities: (1) maybe they really do have an exceptionally low tolerance, and pursuing what they are asking for is a top priority; or (2) maybe they're reacting to some bad experience that's not representative of industry as a whole, and they'd find a more representative culture to be tolerable, and a better environment in which to learn to work within reasonable levels of BS.

(Regarding #2 above, I'm sympathetic. I quit a prestigious job at a place I really wanted to be, which led to an aversion to one particular bit of "BS" that I'd previously tolerated, but which foreshadowed untenable problems. I've turned this particular thing into a cultural litmus test for the prospective employer, which has caused me to turn down a lot of opportunities that probably would've been fine, after the initial BS. OP's situation might be similar: not wanting to get burned again, and being very cautious, to the point that they're ruling out too many opportunities.)

I have had the good luck to work for managers who handle the bureaucracy and I talk to other devs as needed and submit code

E.g., CS PhD have plentiful $200K+ job opportunities after graduation and a relatively labor-friendly faculty market. Meanwhile, many mathematics PhDs postdoc into their 40s.

I would hire both. If you want to do anything serious in the space, you need the resources to hire a well-rounded team. Maybe in five years this won't be true, but at the moment this is a space where technological capabilities are driving policy making decisions.

I had to choose one, the answer depends on if this is a soldier or a general.

If it's a soldier ($ or $$ salary), I would choose a CS PhD who has demonstrated an interest and aptitude for learning about policy. There are a lot of opportunities for that person to learn about policy including part-time fellowships with think tanks and federal agencies, sometimes even embedded in a lawmaker's staff. Conversely, taking a policy person and getting them to the point where they can adequately process the fire hose of AI fairness/safety/explainability research is going to require a lot more effort.

If it's a general ($$$ or $$$$ salary), I would choose whoever I could manage to hire that has the most influence in whatever agency or legislature is most relevant to the policies I want to push.

But again, especially for soldiers, it's a false choice, and if you find yourself in a situation where you have to make this choice then you need to focus on fundraising instead of your first hire...

> if the tech bubble bursts, computer science may even be riskier than a humanities degree, which gives graduates a broader set of knowledge.

How do humanities degrees provide "broader knowledge" than CS degrees? Different, sure, but broader?

Good CS degrees are not coding bootcamps. CS students take a lot of mathematics and logic-heavy courses and can easily pivot from programming to jobs in insurance, finance, accounting, education, project management, and even law.

Good CS degrees also require a lot of technical writing, which opens up all of the stuff that's usually associated with humanities degrees.

Bad CS degrees exist. But then, so do bad English departments.

This also ignores the fact that a lot of CS students are taking courses in English/poli sci/History/etc, but very few humanities students are taking CS courses. E.g., I didn't have a major or minor in any of the above fields, but I took upper-division courses in the English, Relgiion, poli sci, and history departments. However, I only ever encountered one non-STEM major in CS courses beyond CS 101.

I don't really understand why people act like humanities majors are "well rounded" compared to science or engineering majors - it seems like the absolute opposite. To confirm this, just pick a respectable college and read the degree requirements for students in different majors (I don't mean elite colleges, there are hundreds of colleges that meet this standard).

I do agree that non-STEM degrees should have stronger math requirements. But K-12 math education in the US is such a disaster that the universities wouldn't stand a chance if they wanted to do it.

This depends on the type of institution. Liberal arts and most honors colleges at large universities have small class sizes with high-quality instruction for their gen-ed humanities.

> You are extremely likely to be put on the spot and made to defend a subjective position you've taken.

This is also true in (good) mathematics and computer science programs, where you'll need to learn how to communicate well to technical audiences and defend all manner of subjective positions.

Also, something similar is true for the transferability of humanities skills! The writing skills you develop in humanities courses do not directly transfer to technical writing. Learning to write well for any audience will teach you a lot about good writing, but your random English major will probably be completely useless when it comes to writing proofs, design/requirements documents, technical documentation, or especially useful comments in their code. And if I had a dollar for ever business person with a humanities background who made an ass out of themselves in a technical meeting because they have no idea how to communicate with a technical audience about a technical subject... ;-)

> In math, and to some extent engineering or science, you can often reason your way through if you get stuck, or else there are simple procedures you can rote memorize.

I disagree. Your observation about lower vs. upper division courses is as true for STEM as it is for humanities courses. There's a lot of subjectivity/taste involved in upper-division courses, especially any proof-based or project-based course!

> But K-12 math education in the US is such a disaster that the universities wouldn't stand a chance if they wanted to do it.

That's a big problem. It's also a chicken-and-egg problem. Our elementary and middle school teachers are often innumerate, which makes it hard to prepare students for HS (where the quality is often still bad despite subject-area qualifications), which in turn creates problems for gen ed STEM at universities.

I'm a CS/Engineering grad that had some of those, and my colleagues in other STEM degrees had requirements that weren't dissimilar from what you describe. We were required to take classes in philosophy (with emphasis on ethics), history, as well as required to take some electives that could be in all sorts of areas, some in other scientific areas, others in arts, theatre, music. Effectively, it was required of us to at least be cognizant of the goings-on in other fields, even if just the conversational basics.

As for colleagues of mine in humanities degrees, most of them didn't see a single STEM class, and if they did, they were very superficial one-semester courses on Excel spreadsheeting, LaTeX, or very basic physics/probability mathematics, which were effectively a rehashing of high school, but with easier exams.

I echo your sentiment, maybe at some point in the distant past, STEM degrees were isolated in their own bubble and only had very theoretical classes, but I don't know anyone who experienced that, and that's most certainly not been a reality for the past couple of decades.

Bullshit!

The authors wrote an article entitled "Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?"

That's the title of the piece. Not "some possibly generalizable observations about the behavior of 15 year olds"

Sure, the paper's contents contain the massive CAVEAT EMPTORs, but that's exactly how bullshit works in academic writing.

Bold titles, sweeping statements in introductions and conclusions. But enough profuse caveats sprinkled around that you can always say to anyone who takes a closer look "no see I mentioned exactly what I meant on page N"...