Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of React Roundup. This week,
on our panel, we have Lucas Heish, Hello for everyone, nat Or
Davitt Hello, Hello, I'm Charles max Wood from dev chat dot TV.
This week we have a special guest and that's Ben Nelson. Ben, do
you want to say Hi, Hi, Good morning everyone. Now you're from
Lambda School, which is kind of an interesting thing that we're going to talk
about here in a minute. Are there other things that people should know about
you? So? Yeah, I was a software engineer from Utah and uh
yeah, I left the ski and get up in the mountains and but now
I'm living out here on the Bay Area. Yeah, Utah. I don't
know about people from Utah. Awesome. Well, let's jump right in and
talk a little bit about LAMBA School. I kind of want to make this
a little bit broader discussion about boot camps and people getting into code, but
I think explaining what Lamba School is and how you guys operate is probably going
to inform the discussion fairly well. So do you want to just kind of
give us an elevator pitch for LAMB to school and explain why you operate the
way you do. Yeah. So I was a lead instructor head of code
boot Camp part time one for a while. You know, it was dead
Mountain and Utah out of their program, and you know they were doing some
things right, but you know, part time program it's hard to get people
up to speed, you know, in three months, and you know,
just kind of the boot camp space in general is trying to address the problem
of you know, adults trying to get re educated. And then you know,
and then there's just companies need more engineers and boot camps some of them
are are you know, are pretty good, and a lot of them,
you know, not so much. And we kind of worked backwards from a
boot camp. I thought, okay, like where are the deficiencies and what's
really the sweet spot between you know, like a four year you know,
full on CS degree and you know, in a three month boot camp.
And that's where we kind of settled on LAMB to school. So with LAMBA
School, that's thirty weeks long, so seven months instead of your typical three
month model. And then we also go deeper into computer science fundamentals, so
it's quite a few more hours, go a lot more in depth. The
students get exposure to multiple stacks, So we tried to make this more more
in depth, more intense. But because it's thirty weeks long, you know,
that's a more expensive course to run. It's difficult to charge more upfront
for that. So what we did is we came up with this income Shore
Agreement model. And what this does is it our students. They don't pay
upfront, they pay once they're employed. And it's great too because it's it
aligns our incentives with our students. It makes it so people that otherwise wouldn't
have an opportunity to attend a program like this. You know, they don't
need to put a deposit down, they don't need any upfront money. They
just need to be willing to work hard. And we made it online so
it's live, structured online and have students all over the United States and we're
launching in the United Kingdom at the end of the year. Awesome. That's
really cool. I don't want you to bad mouth dev Mountain or anything,
but it seems like they follow the traditional boot camp model and that works for
some folks. But yeah, I don't know if I completely follow what the
real issues were, other than maybe that it was part time for the students
you were working with, and that makes it really hard to really focus in
and get where you need to go to get a job. Yeah, like
three months part time. That's it's just really hard if you don't have you
know, some type of a technical background coming into it. And you know,
we did see quite a bit of success, you know, students that
would come through, but it was a grind, it was it was really
really hard for the students. But yeah, it's there. You know.
The full time program is you know, is much more doable. You mentioned
that it's online. Is it only online or is there also like an in
person part of the Yeah, so we're one hundred percent online. We started
to we wanted to be online first. Our company is remote first as well.
We decided just to own it. This is something that probably wouldn't have
been possible, i mean four or five years ago, but now with Slack
and zoom like, we slack and zoom like that's that's our classroom. And
yeah, it makes it. It helps with recruiting too, so we're able
to find great instructors that you maybe don't want to live in the Bay Area
anymore, want to be able to actually own a house, so they move
back home, and you know, we're able to find a lot of good
instructors that way. So that's pretty interesting. I follow Austin all Read,
and I guess that you work closely with him. I'm sure, but he's
he's like really really good at being in the social scene. I guess you
would say, I don't really know to how to explain it. He seems
to do a really good job of getting the word out. And I know
that I've seen him mention that you were a part of YC when twenty seventeen,
Is that right? Yep, yeah, summer seventeen. So like how
long was Lamba School around before that? And how has that affected Lamba School?
Yeah, so Austin all Right on Twitter, Yeah, he's my co
founder, absolutely brilliant when it comes to like you know, Twitter and social
media. I mean, you would not believe how much value like Twitter has
brought to our company, just like with recruiting and you know, finding investors
and just like positive pr I mean, it's been amazing. But yeah,
so Austin and I know we both grew up in a you know, the
same kind of smaller town at Utah. Anyway, he was out in the
Bay Area working at land Up and you know, I've been working at Dedva
Mountain and he had started up this online school teaching functional programming. That's where
Lambda School came from. It was just like some my little paid class,
kind of like a you to me model, and then his co founder at
the time bailed. But they, you know, Austin's a brilliant marketer and
had several thousand people signed up for a free class that they had going and
needed somebody to teach it. So reached out to me, and you know
and kind of at the drop of a hat, I was able to jump
in and teach this Python class that they were doing. And yeah, so
we were both working full time jobs as a software engineer. He was working
you know, Atlenda doing growth marketing and and just on the side, we
built up this This following we get up to over ten thousand students and these
just totally free classes we were doing in the evenings, and yeah, and
then we started doing some paid classes, some paid upfront classes, and using
those, you know, that pool of ten thousand and students that we had,
we were able to get some of them to come in and pay upfront
for some different classes. That we did, and and you know, got
enough revenue, were able to bootstrap it. I was able to quit my
job go full time on it. And you know, we both had always
wanted to do Y Combinator. I mean, you know, they're they're the
experts when it comes to starting a new company. And so as we're going
through the application process, you know, something we were thinking about was,
you know, how does this scale like what we're doing right now? How
do we take this from just like a normal boot camp, and how do
we make it special and unique? And you know, one of the things
is online just because we can, we can scale better and and with technology
now we can provide a you know, a great experience. You know,
it could be comparable to being in a classroom and in many ways better.
And then the other thing was in conversations with these thousands of people we had
in the free classes, trying to get them to sign up for our paid
ones. You know, there were so many people that wanted to do it,
they just couldn't afford it, and debt was just way too much risk,
you know, to take that debt on and if it doesn't work out,
they're stuck with debt and That's where we came into this idea of an
income shore agreement where we could you know, increase top of funnel and then
also it would expand and you know allow us to help a lot of people
that wouldn't didn't have these opportunities otherwise. And so those were like the main
ideas that we pitched when we went into Y Combinator and said, hey,
we're going to do this online because we're flipping the payment model, we can
make the course longer, be more of a premium offering and fill it,
you know, hit kind of a sweet spot between a boot camp and a
CS degree, and then we'll use an income shore agreement that you know,
incentivizes the school to really perform well for the students. And yeah, we
were I think we were kind of on the bubble. They interviewed us,
I think twice as many times as they typically interview you know, A candidate
brought us in a bunch, decided to bike. That's so we got in
and it was a great experience. That's really cool. Yeah, you mentioned
the scalability and it's kind of like when I think of Why Combinator, I
think of them investing in companies that have the potential to scale, you know,
but I don't know if that's always the case or if that's just my
perception is wrong. But this doesn't seem to fit in that category. But
now that I didn't know you were online only actually, so now that I
know that, that kind of makes a little more sense. But also it
doesn't do you Do you all have any other like plans for the company other
than kind of being a school. Yeah, so we're starting with software.
You know. The internal analogy that we like to use is, you know,
Amazon started with books because that was the easy first thing to start with,
but then eventually we want to branch out and teach lots of different topics.
So you know, so so tech is the is the clear first step
because there's a proven market there on both sides. Then you know, nursing
is something that we're looking at. There's there's a few others as well.
Interesting. I kind of want to dive back into just getting people into programming
and things like that. I mean, what's your placement rate for people?
Yeah? So right now, you know, it fluctuates, and one of
the nice things about having our our models you know, incentivized, is that
it you know, like we don't get paid if our students don't get jobs,
and so, you know, so and we launch it in the very
beginning too, we made the decision to launch a new class every month,
so our classes started overlapping pretty quickly, and what that allowed us to do
is to quickly iterate. So our first class, you know, first couple
of classes, you know, it was like like eighty three percent was you
know, it was the very first one. And then you know, we
had the sum that were in like the mid sixties seventies, and so that's
kind of where it's fluctuating. That the goal, the main like objective that
our company is focused on right now for you know, for this next quarter.
The big push is you know, is ninety percent hired in ninety days,
you know, and that's it's a bit of a moonshot. And if
you look at the sir like cr R like reporting for most like for the
boot camps that do report there, you know a lot of them like hack
Reactor, you know, they're they're sitting in the mid sixties. So it's
something that we hired a full time business development guy who's out there, and
you know, we have some companies that have you know that are starting to
come back for repeat hire. So you have a couple of companies that have
hired you know, once hired eight, once hired seven. You know.
So it's you know, initially there's there's a little bit of a stigma that
we have to fight against in our brand. And it doesn't have any weight
because you know, boot camp grads to an ex have been seen as like
with some companies, you know, they kind of look down a little better
the nails up at boot camp grads and and you know, we get kind
of lumped into that same category. And you know, and not all boot
camps are the same, and so I don't want to you know, pay
in the entire industry, as you know, is a part. It's just
there's a there's a wide very like wide scale of quality there and so you
know, but now we're now we're beginning to position ourselves as you know,
on the top end of that, we're getting repeat hires from companies and you
know, strong NPS scores. So yeah, Ben, one question, So
this is a new education model, right, and I think that this boot
camps they sell that they are much more like hands on right. One thing,
one thing that we complain A lot from about universities is that they're very
like disconnected from the real world, from the real working world a lot of
the time. Right, you go to a university course and like the teachers
are not in the market, Like it's disconnected. Right, you leave the
university and you say, like, oh, I'm really not prepared to just
have like a piece of paper. A lot of this is off course as
a cartoonistic version of but it's a real thing. So how can you make
sure when you are teaching a lot of people, how can you make sure
that your course is going to like be relevant for the years to come.
Yeah, you know, sometimes like investors will ask us, like, you
know, how do your graduates compare to CUS grads? And you know,
we we can't compete on the four years of depth you know that a lot
of them get and you know, and we can't teach the same the same
depth and you know, operating systems and all that. Like we can do
a little bit, but really where our strength is. You know, we
don't have tenured track research PhDs teaching our classes. You know, all of
our instructors are senior level to you know, to VP level engineers at their
previous companies that have been working hands on for you know, I think the
least experienced one probably has like seven years of work experience, so it's you
know, so they're all experienced software engineers that have actually done it and they've
used these things in practice, so that really informs it. But yeah,
as far as like keeping up to date with the community, I mean that's
something that we recruit for. We make sure that the instructors that we hire
are you know, that are passionate involved, the types of people that you
know, we're contributing the open source projects, the types of people who are
going to meetups and you know, and we pay for them to go to
conferences and you know, we really want them to be on the cutting edge
and cliche term. But but yeah, that's you know that that is actually
one of the areas where we feel that we can't compete, you know,
with CS degrees is that we give you know, a seven months thirty weeks
actually comes out to about one year of college hour wise of focused training on
relevant skills. Like we work from the job backwards instead of necessarily starting from
like a pure like first principles, bottom up type of approach. Yeah,
I think you've got a major disadvantage there hiring these people out of the industry,
because you know, oh my gosh, you know these these tenured PhDs,
you know, they have absolutely no idea what it's like to work in
the industry. I mean, it's insane. I got my four year degree
in computer engineering, and I can tell you that I had a grand total
of two professors who had worked out in the industry. Two. Yeah,
that's crazy. I mean it was ridiculous, right, And it's a fairly
well known university here, and they do put out good CS grads, and
you know, I was in the engineering department, so I got to split
my time between electoral engineering and computer science. But still, I mean,
I don't know, I tend to see less and less value in the four
year degree. I mean, it shows that you have a certain level of
discipline, you probably know the theory better than people who are going through the
boot camps. But I mean it's insane that they put people through four years
and then they get out there and they still have to go through a whole
bunch of on the job training before they can actually be really useful to the
companies. Irom, Yeah, exactly. You know, and ever university is
different. Like you look at MIT, you know, and they're a lot
more you know, hands on, and they're coming out, you know and
doing multi hagathons things like that. But like you know, when I was
studying CS in college too, I mean my one adjunct professor was the best
professor I had, you know, as he was an engineer, you know
that they brought him to teach. Yeah, it's it's definitely a mixed bag,
you know, with when it comes to universities and trying to stick to
a static four year model. Like I'm not sure that you know, that
makes makes a lot of sense. I'm not going to you know, totally.
I don't want to say this, but like I don't want to like,
you know, shoot down the whole, like you know, higher education,
Like you know, that's not bad. And getting his degree is like
a mark that you know that you do know some basics and you know how
to work hard. But but yeah, maybe it's interesting because, like you
know, the four year degree is spread across so many different job titles and
so many different professions. Every profession is different, and when you look at
like each one, can you really in twenty eighteen, lump everyone together and
a set amount of time for a set amount of skills, Like, it
just doesn't really kind of make sense. I think we're going along again with
like a model that was created a long time ago. That's kind of just
in people's heads. It's kind of the normal thing to do, and that's
just kind of what they're used to doing. But I think one of the
reasons that we're seeing that computer science is harder to keep up with is just
because everything changes so fast, and what we're doing in the real world.
They might not change. The theory behind everything might not change, but the
actual implementation and the abstractions that we work with and the languages, and then
to get something new into a computer science program at a typical university, it's
a very bureaucratic process. So but by the time something gets in there,
it's outdated anyway, you know. And what you're talking about natter. It's
funny because I think a lot of the computer science fundamentals don't change that quickly.
But I mean, ten years ago, this iPhone was a brand new
thing, right, you know, And now we're talking about AR and VR,
we're talking about IoT, We've got a zillion different devices that you can
write software for. I mean, you can write it for a thermostat and
a coffee maker. I mean it's crazy, and so so I think that's
where we're seeing these things change, is that, Yeah, the fundamentals of
good software are generally applicable everywhere, but I mean they're just they're not teaching
you at that level. And yeah, like you said, you know,
by the time they get around to talking about it even you know, I
think some universities finally have like a web development class. Hello, it's not
the nineties anymore, you know. But at the same time, I mean,
you know, yeah, you get a lot of the fundamentals. You
spend a lot of time in those classes. Of course, I also spend
a ton of time screwing around in college. But you know, it's just
interesting. And I wonder a little bit, too, though, if my
bias comes out of the fact that I see boot camp grads. Most of
them were pretty motivated to even get involved in one in the first place,
And so I wonder if you get a different caliber of people, you know,
where it's not a twenty year old who's expected to show up at the
university and come out of it four to six years later. Yeah, it
took me six years to get my four year degree, you know, versus
you know people who are like, look, I need I need a change,
and they're going in and they're really motivated to make a career out of
it. So I don't know. I mean, I think I have some
bias here, especially since I don't feel like my degree really prepared me for
what I wound up doing. You know. The flip side is is that
there is value and for some people they need kind of the regimented process that
you go through at a university. Yeah. Well, and fortunately for you
too, you know, being in Utah, you know, you probably didn't
have much student loan dad, if any, you know when you finished college,
and and I didn't have a lot. Yeah, and why is that?
Well, yeah, I don't know anything about Utah and all this cool.
This sounds pretty cool. Yeah. So I went to a church run
university and the tuition was comparatively low, to the to the point where I
could work part time at the university and pay my tuition most semesters. And
then I also was on the student council for the College of Engineering my senior
year, and that was half tuition, so you know, I found ways
to make it work. But I graduated with like four five branding student own
debts all my take on this part. I'm also not a CS graduate,
right, so I don't stop studying. Like sometimes we say that maybe CS
degrees are not very important things like that, and it sometimes it sounds like
you are against knowledge, But like the fundamentals the theory, it's not that,
Like I don't stop studying. I study every day. But I believe
that the order of putting EU into the workplace first and the fundamentals coming after,
Like I think that's an order that I think makes more sense. Most
of those fundamentals, you're just like they're just thrown at you when you're like
nineteen twenty years old. You don't know, like you don't know why why
those things are for After like one, two, three years working with the
database, and then you start making questions, then you start to let me
understand this a little bit, like oh, now I see like one year
working with like Docker and then you're like, oh, how does os like
actually works? I think this is a much richer knowledge in the end of
the day, Like when you put the practice before the theory. That means
that usually you see you feel the problems before actually looking at the solutions.
You know, are throwing like a bunch of solutions, and then you go
to the world you find some problems, try to apply some of that.
So I like this order of putting people like to work work knowledge go there
like this is web dev. You're learning JavaScript, react and stuff, and
then after you are working for one year is like how does this GPU thing?
I'm doing? Csays like what is a GPU? And then you start
for that. I think that it's Uh, every time I learned theory after
like understanding what problem I'm actually trying to solve what problem? Did like generate
that theory? I think I learned much better than the other way. Yeah,
I think that's fair. I mean I took operating systems classes, and
yeah, I know how the operating system works because of that, or at
least parts of it where I just never used it in my web development career.
So that's fair. And the universities are where they're doing a lot of
the research that informs the field going forward, so there are definitely things to
be said about that. Yeah, like so something that like, So that's
that's exactly what we focus on a land to school, Like we start with
you know, we start with a script, but then they learn front end
web development, so they're you know, they're they're working on things that are
interactive, that are visual, and that is that is so much easier for
a new student to get into and enjoy. And then you know, and
then we teach big O and data structures you know, three months later,
you know, once they've you know, got in and the understand it and
they're not confused about you know, like you know, the all the different
syntax and you know, and stuff like that, and it definitely works a
lot, you know, a lot better for our students work with that model,
you know. And the other thing to look at. Something that you
know, I like to tell people is is if somebody were to come through
and do the seven month Flama School program and you know, and then let's
say it takes them, you know, five months to get a job,
you know, and that's that's like below average you know, for five months.
But so they come to the program, they get into a job,
and then we add on three years of work experience. So now you know,
take that student after that four year period, compare them to a CS
degree. You know, I have three years of paid experience. You know,
you didn't have any student loan debt, and I mean you had your
income. Sure, that's all paid off and done by then, you know,
And they compare that to someone who's just now finishing with a CS degree.
Maybe you didn't get the same social experiences and all that, and maybe
so maybe this isn't appropriate for an eighteen year old, if that's what you're
looking to get out of it, But for an adult who's trying to get
into a new career. I mean it's you know, you're miles ahead.
Oh yeah, that's completely that's a completely interesting take on this. I haven't
really thought of it that way, but when you put it in, when
you frame it that way, and it's actually absolutely true, that's kind of
what is going to happen. You're right, that's there's no comparison, especially
taking into consideration in the student lene that that people have these days. Yeah,
I mean we've kind of been talking about college degree versus boot camp,
and you know, and I've kind of been negative about the college degree,
but I think I think it does have a place. I want to change
tactics a little bit though, and I want to talk a little bit more
about just people coming into the field. So who do you see applying to
the boot camps? I mean, is it generally you know, twenty somethings
that decided not to go to college and then it's like, you know what,
I don't want to be an auto mechanic or something. Or maybe they
did get in a great degree and figured out they didn't want to be an
accountant or a lawyer. Or are you seeing people that are a little bit
older, you know, that have already had a career, or retirees that
are trying to have a second career. I mean, who are you seeing
come at you? Yeah, so it's a mixed bag. So we see
a little bit of everything. It's pretty concentrated around people who got into their
career like they've been working for you know, five ten years, they don't
like what they're doing and you know, and they want to switch. So
you know, you get you know, smart people that you know, maybe
they're doing construction and they don't like doing that anymore and they want to get
into offer engineering, you know, they you know, or there's people who
you know, they studied finance in college. And you know, and they
hate their life now, you know, and you know, working a finance
job, and so you want to switch it. Like you get some of
that, you know, but yeah, we get we get some college students
you know that come and do this, you know, instead of college or
well, they'll what often happens is they'll take a semester off to our course
and then they never go back because then they're employed. Interesting seeing that happen
a couple of times. But yeah, it's it's more definitely more adult,
you know, retraining, and eventually our marketing focus and I think will shift
to uh, you know, trying to to leave more students away from you
know, from universities more that demographic. But but the nice thing though about
older people who have families who you know, like work in their construction job.
You know, they you know, they're desperate and and they you know,
are hungry, and they're willing to work hard and you know, extremely
motivated. You know, we had this guy recently who you know, twenty
thousand dollars is you know what he was making. You know, he comes
through the line of school program, you know, nine months later he's making
it was like eighty five k and you know, we just nem we're talking
to him and he was just you know, crying how and saying how his
daughter could have her own bedroom now, you know, and it was just
it's just really cool to see this this upward mobility that we're facilitating for a
lot of these people that you know, that don't have a strong or just
you know, didn't make the right career choices early on. And you know,
so we get a lot of that people that are you know a little
further on it, that want to shift and do something better. That makes
sense. How many students are you able to take on every however long it
takes people to get through your program. Yeah, So our philosophy is,
I mean, so you look at Stanford, Mit, Harvard, you know,
Berkeley nir CS programs. That's a lot of the value comes from the
gating and the filtering, and so they get this positive selection bias where they
have you know, all the top students that apply, they skim the top
off that and you know, and so some of the value comes from from
you know, closing that gate. You know, we don't want to operate
in that capacity, so we set a ibar and a high standard and then
we're willing to take everyone who can reach that. Because we're online, we
don't have to buy new buildings. We just have to hire new teachers.
And so if we have an extra large class that's coming up, we'll divide
it out into sections, make sure we have another teacher that's hired you know,
higher additional tas, et cetera. So we can be flexible on the
staffing. But really it's like we set a standard and then we try to
get as many people above that high standard as possible. Will be like as
Stanford said, everybody with you know, a thirty act you know, and
a three point a GPA can come now, and then we'll just make room,
you know, like like without sacrificing quality, you know, but but
you know, adapt to to make sure that endrom can get in. So
that's more of our aproaches. We spend a lot of time and money training
people before the course to get them to where they can meet our standards to
enter. Right now, we we only accept about five percent of applicants just
because we do have pretty high standards and most people just get bored of it
or you know, or give up before they before they reach that point.
Because it's it's a lot of work. It's kind of like the first cuss
in college. It's it's kind of like that amount of work and difficulty before
you can get in, you know, and that may change going forward,
but that's that's our approach right now. That makes sense. I wonder a
little bit what the differences are between like a fully online boot camp like yours
versus you know, dev Mountain where they actually show up to a building and
sit in the desk and have in person instruction. Do you think there's some
trade offs there? Yeah, there's pros and cons for sure. You know.
So there's you know, a creative energy that you experience, you know
when you're in the same room with people that you know that's really hard to
duplicate online, you know. And yeah, yeah that you know, there's
some of that magic that you know that you miss out on. But in
some ways, you know, by doing it online, I mean there's a
lot of really convenient things that we can do. You know, lectures are
you know, it's easy to record lectures and content and so students can go
back and review everything because it's online, you know, they have access to
a to a larger community, you know, that they're that they're baked into,
you know, right from the very beginning, and so you know,
so so they get a lot of positive interactions that way. But yeah,
you know, there are some trade off. There's a lot of efficiencies that
we gain, you know, from doing it online. But yeah, there
is some stuff that you miss. But I think overalls technology improves I think
the cons will be minimized. But yeah, I'm kind of curious about the
curriculum. I know that you say you focus on kind of what companies are
hiring for, but is there just a set curriculum that everyone kind of uses
every semester or whatever kind of however you group your students. I'm not sure
if you do that by semester, but like, how do you come up
with that curriculum and how often is that curriculum revamped? And I'm also kind
of curious what you are teaching right now too. Yeah, so right now
we're teaching full stack web development, iOS development, Android development, data science,
and UX design And so those are those are the five different courses that
we have. Those are all separate courses. Yeah, all separate courses with
different faculties. And yeah, so we work backwards from hiring partners. So
for example, I mean this is something like this week, we have a
lot of hiring partners that are willing to very interested in well committing to hiring
a significant number of our graduates if we can spin up Java portion of the
course. And so now we're looking at you know, a Java track you
know that will fit in with like the full stack Web development course, and
you know, we try to keep them, you know, a pulse on
on, you know, what's what's happening, and you know what needs to
be taught. So right now with our full stack web course, it's full
stake JavaScript initially, you know, so we teach React, we do reducts,
you know, the twenty tools to go along with that, you know,
and then node express on the back end, that's the first thing.
And then uh, and then we do teach Mango. But then we you
know, so that's that's kind of you know, standard boot camp fare.
Then after that we move in and we teach Python Postgress and uh, you
know, to teach a different back end because that's something that there's a lot
of different You're not going to see a ton of variation on the front end.
I mean, okay, like maybe view or react, you know,
or maybe like it's an older angular thing, but like that's a little more
consistent. But on the back end, like there's just pretty wide, you
know, flavors of languages that you can encounter, and so we try to
give them a totally different, you know stack, so they're exposed to something
is very different. Yeah, and then and then it's and then we go
through a CS fundamentals after that, and so computer architecture and operating systems and
you know, data structures and algorithms and networking even you know, they learned
CE at that point and so they they dabble on that to give them some
more technical depth. Also heavily project focused, so when they finish up with
that, they're working on team like projects and so by the end of the
course, it's they have five or six hosted projects that they've worked on collaboratively
and that's and that's really where everything gets solidified, and that's what helps get
their foot in the door with with hiring partners. So with LAMB, the
school kind of paying the way for them to kind of get in there,
and then after they graduate, they pay their way. What happens when someone
like starts and they drop out, are they accountable for that? And how
do you kind of vet people to kind of get the type of people that
wouldn't drop out. Yeah, So when we first got started, the thing
that people thought would kill us as drop out rates, you know, that
was the first big hurdle we had to overcome, you know, And initially
we had pretty high drop rates. I mean we had you know, like
forty percent you know in one of our classes. And just because it's hard
and you can close your computer and walk away two different things we're doing.
We use a master based progression system now, so if a student, if
they don't master, like if they don't score eighty percent or higher on a
week, then then they repeat that week. And so then the idea is
that nobody finishes the course unless they have mastered and like badged on every single
topic that we teach. And this makes it so students that normally would get
overwhelmed and get behind, they get a repeat a few times maybe on something
that they struggle with, and students love it, you know. And that's
so now our dropout rate is now below ten percent, but I mean five
percent for some of our classes. But yeah, so with the actual income
Store agreement. In those terms, they have like a grace period in the
beginning where they can drop out, you know, for no penalty. I
think it recently changed. I don't. It's like two to four weeks or
something like that. Initially after that, for every week they stay on,
they would owe a pro rated amount stayed on for two months, they know,
like part of the Income Sure agreement, not the full amount. Once
they've been going full time for for over fifteen weeks, then then they're bound
at the entire Income Sure agreement if they drop out. I mean it's they're
only paying if they are making fifty thousand dollars or more, you know,
in a job that relates to the skills we taught. So I mean a
lot of people that do drop out, they're going back to their construction job
or something like that. So it's you know, so they're they're not going
to be on the hook anyway. But yeah, so where do people get
stuck then? I mean, at what point do people drop out or you
know that they start reducs. It changes and and uh that's something that we
look at. I mean, like maybe we have an instructor you know that
isn't doing a good job. So like we had you know, an instructor
that we let go, you know, and and the impact on that week,
you know, you can see the you know, the drop out rate
bump up a little bit, you know, compared to normal or maybe there's
a certain lesson, you know, So like reducs is one that we had
to like, you know, really look at and figure out how to simply
react as well. Like the first they hit react because going just from like
JavaScript basing on CSS right and to react, it's pretty steep for somebody coming
from from zero, and so that's something we had to like simplify, spread
it out over a few more days, you know, take a few things
out and like move to later in the course and like react, redecks.
Those are some some gatekeepers. And by the time we got to the really
hard stuff at the end of the course like that, they were like,
you know, battle proven by that point and willing to stick it out because
it's it's a different type of model too, because it's it's full time,
all day, you know, focused on this stuff, and so it's,
uh, you know, it's it's pretty intense and it gets a little overwhelming
to keep up with them. So we have to you know, provide a
lot of emotional support and coach our students. Yeah. I found this subject
really interesting actually because like I live in Mississippi and i've actually I started a
cutting school here about five years ago called Code South Lapse and I ran up
for about two and a half for three years, and it never really went
anywhere. But we did JavaScript, the PHP we did I think we did
Angular one back then, and we did a little bit of React Native towards
the end when it was just coming out. And we never really were able
to kind of get the number of people to come. And we even did
free classes and we would still only have like three or four people. And
I think the problem was that we were in Mississippi, first of all,
and there just aren't that many people here that were solved opportunity in and I
guess, but also, you know, scaling it is not an easy thing
to do. Like if you're in New York or San Francisco, you might
have quite a few people to kind of pick from a pool of people there.
But the fact that you're virtual kind of is a really really interesting take.
And I assume that you all kind of had to overcome a lot of
or solve a lot of new challenges that hadn't been solved before. I guess.
I know a lot of companies have attempted to do kind of like virtual
online classroom training, but when you're working with this type of you know,
when you're working with computer science and programming, a lot of the answers that
I've been able to get that have been like from working directly with someone.
So I'm kind of curious, like what big hurdles that you've had to overcome
to kind of fone tune that the training model or the actual teaching model to
kind of get people to the point where they were able to learn and interact
with the instructors without overwhelming the instructors. It's a totally different type of experience,
and there was a lot of a lot of experimentation that we had to
do. And yeah, and I mean it's, uh, you know,
one big problem after another, you know, and that's that's our life right
now, you know, starting in business. But you know, like yeah,
like so drop out rates that was one of the big ones. And
yeah, okay, so I mean the very first big problem was growth and
you know, how do we get people in seats? Can we prove that
we can you know, find demand for this, and you know that's the
very first problem that needed to be solved. And you know the way that
we did it was you know, through social media, you know, so
we would the guy who runs free code camp was really nice. He let
us post for our free our free courses and a lot of their groups.
So we had a lot of people that signed up for that to you know,
to get our free content. The uh you know Reddit, uh,
you know, it can be hit it can be kind of a pretty vicious
group in there. But but the learned Programming subreddit, you know, we
we posted a lot of our of our free courses in there and we're able
to get a lot of people centered from there. So like it was like
finding the right online communities that matched and like overlap with what we were doing.
And you know, that helps us get people in seats, and then
the income Sure agreement helps us get them to commit to you know, potentially
paying us at some point with the drop out rates. One of the big
things that we had to had to worry about was the thing that solved that
is the accountability. But then's we you know, kind of suck when it
comes to you know, self discipline, and you know, and there's that
like you know entropy, you know, towards towards laziness. That's you know
that it's inherent and everyone in And so we had to bake in a lot
of mechanisms to to really help people stay on task and be focused when they're
alone at the computer and command tee and enter and they're on Netflix, you
know, and so we have so we have to like take attendance. You
know, we create all their assignments. They're meeting with thas you know throughout
the day. So we have a lot of thas. We keep them you
know, really tight ratio on that so they can you know, more hands
on help there. And then we block in you know, face to face
time where they're supposed to be in there see you know, at beginning,
middle, end of day, you know, things like that to you know,
help them stay there and you know, and and then yeah, with
the tight like attendance tracking, so like if they miss a class, you
know, or miss part of the day, we have a student success person
who like reaches out and was like, hey, like you know, ore,
you know class, we didn't have know that you were going to be
gone, like just so they feel that that they're noticed, and then you
know, facilitating a positive community. Like those have been the big things.
The next big one that we're working on now is just you know, proving
to employers that are graduates are worth hiring. And we're seeing a lot of
moments in there and a lot of positive signals and and that's so that's like
the new the new, not the new, but that's the next like big
thing that you know that we're we're in the middle of right now is you
know, showing that the Alanda School graduate is worth hiring and that they can
be a good software engineer. So I know some of your instructors. I
met an instructor named Luis Yeah Provo at Framework Summit. I don't know what
course he teaches, but he was really nice. And then Andrew Madison teaches
your iOS one of your iOS courses, and I know he used to work
for dev Mountain YEP, and he's one of our panelists on our iOS development
show on dev chat dot TV. How do you find these folks? How
do you go about And it seems like you have some ties heer to Utah
because both those guys live here in Utah, But yeah, how do you
find your instructors? How do you qualify him? Yeah, I mean,
you know, a lot of it's been through our network, you know,
in the early days. But then yeah, like the Hacker news, you
know who's hiring, you know, just job housing is Twitter. It's like
Austin's Twitter. We get a lot of you know, job applications that come
through, like tweeting open positions through that. We started out being for the
Utah based I mean about twenty five percent of our company is based out of
Utah just because so so Caleb Hicks, who was also over the iOS program
that in so the iOS program, you know that that was pretty incredible.
It dead mountain and they had amazing results and you know, and was doing
really well. And several of them, you know I have moved on and
there now they're working for us. The nice thing is, you know,
we're remote, so like we have engineers that are just off in the boonies.
You know, a guy used to or for Google that you know,
lives in you know, a real place up in Oregon. And it helps
that we can recruit from anywhere. You know. We pay good salaries,
but it's anyway people can actually own a home because they are not in the
Bay area. Makes sense. Yeah, Utah. I mean, I'm always
amazed that the number of people that like are really good at selfware development that
come out of Utah. It's kind of crazy, actually, Like even the
people I meet in San Francisco a lot of times from Utah. It's a
growing market, It's yeah, kind of funny. Yeah, it's definitely interesting.
And we're seeing companies either move out here, open satellite offices out here
too, from the Bay area. So it's it's definitely an interesting market and
a growing market. But you can drive down the freeway and you'll see signs
for HP and Disney and stuff, and those are all you know, technical
programming jobs. So yeah, something interesting. So with you being in Missouri,
Oh, Mississippi, I'm sorry. Something that we were concerned about initially
is like placement. So like with as it relates to geography, so like,
you know, somebody who's in like, you know, North Dakota,
like, are they going to be able to get a development job, you
know, and is that going to be is that going to be an issue?
And what we found is that the graduates that we have in more rural
communities oftentimes have an easier time finding a job than the people in the Bay
Area or in New York and because they have a much less competitive labor market.
So, you know, Kroger out in Tennessee, you know, they
need to hire a bunch of software engineers, you know, and there's there's
not a large talent pole to draw from, and so so that the person
that we have there gets snatched up really quick. And we've seen that a
lot, and there's and quite a few companies are willing to pay for relocation
too. But that was something that was that was interesting. We didn't expect
that. But the rural students actually have a pretty good it's a little easier
for them to get jobs. Actually that's spot on. There's so many people
hiring here but in Mississippi. But the problem is there just aren't any people
that grow up here that are in this industry. So like a lot of
times they'll bring people from out of state to fill these positions or they'll just
go and feel like it's really it's really interesting, like if you if you
move here and you kind of you can live here and you're you know,
you have the very low cost of living. You won't have a problem finding
a job. But the problem is you may have not even become into this
industry if you're from here's the problem. So yeah, having a school like
this is really cool. All right, Well, is there anything else that
we should jump on talking about this stuff? If people want to apply to
lamb to school, where do they go? I go to lambdaschool dot com.
I want to be an instructor. Yeah, we have a careers page
at landa school dot com as well. So yeah, I know we have
a lot of engineers listening to this. You know, we're looking at higre
a bunch of engineers. We're actually looking at hiring or hiring software engineers,
and we're hiring instructors. We are launching in the United Kingdom, so if
there's anybody listening, especially who's willing to work out of the United Kingdom or
that time zone. Yeah, we're looking for a program director right there,
right now. Awesome? All right, Well, let's go ahead and do
some picks, Lucas, you have some picks for us, all right?
I have a pick today. It's not only a technology, because I'm pretty
sure you are ready chose this technology as a pick. But also a practice.
So I've been using Cyprus a lot lately and I've been using it as
a development environment for me, like working with front end. So this is
my peak today. Like usually we when we are developing a new feature,
we are like changing code. It hot reloads, and we go to the
browser, like play a little bit, see if it's all ready what we
want, go back to the code. Then after it's done, we're going
to write our integration tests. So what I'm doing is that I'm almost doing
like a TDD with integration tests now. So in this new project I'm working,
now, we set up a Cypress so I create the Cypress script to
pilot the browser as I am building the future, and I think that my
productivity like is much better now. So this is my pick today. Try
to look at Cyprus as a development environment. Try to automate your playing with
the browser while you create the features. And in the end, when the
feature is done, I have all those integration tests for free. So this
is my pick today. Awesome, Yeah, I love Cypress. It's awesome,
Nat or what are your picks? My pick is egghead dot iom and
it's the fact not only that Egghead is awesome, But I have a bunch
of stuff coming out on EGAD. So I've completed two full courses, one
on building mobile applications with React and Aws amplified serverless apps. I've also built
a full course on building server list graph ql apps using Aws apps Sync.
I'm also doing a course on Flutter that isn't completed yet, but it'll be
a full like fifteen course tutorial and building Flutter apps mobile applications cross platform using
Flutter. And then I have a bunch of one off courses and I'm actually
taking suggestions, so if you have any ideas for one off courses, these
courses are going to be anywhere between thirty seconds to five minutes long, and
they'll only be a single course or maybe at the most two or three together
versus like a long ten or fifteen course thing. But anyway, egghead is
a really great place to learn and kind of polish up on existing skills or
add like new skills within Like if I kind of compared to plural site,
Egghead, you can get a lot of information like a really short amount of
time, so it's kind of more condensed than a plural site. Is nice.
Yeah, I love Egghead In fact, John Lindquist actually lives within a
mile of my house, so oh no way, yeah, you're talking again,
right, Yeah, so funny stuff. But anyway, in fact,
the last time I saw him, I was at the church and I think
he was baptizing his son. They were having the baptism at the church.
Church. Well, we're both members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Slaturday
Saints and so, you know, and most people in our area are.
So there's kind of a central church and then there are a bunch of satellite
churches in our It's what we call the stake, and a stake just oversees
a bunch of congregations and that's where they have the baptisms and stuff is at
that stake center, is what we call it. So yeah, so I
was there for something else and I was just sitting out in one of the
foyers and it was a Saturday morning and that's when they do baptisms. So
anyway, funny, random story. But yeah, Egghead's awesome. They've got
a ton of content and so I'm a fan. So let me jump in
here with a few picks. One of the picks that I have this isn't
coding related at all. But I'm starting to I'm starting to really get some
clarity around what I want from dev chat dot tv, which is nice.
I mean I've only been doing this for like nine years, but you know,
finally figuring this stuff out. And really what I'm looking for is just
the opportunity to help liberate software developers to build cutting edge software that makes a
difference. And a lot of that just comes down to helping people get the
skills and finding the tools and you know, those kinds of things to do
it whatever it is they want to do. So if they want a promotion,
they want to be a team lead, or if they want to go
write more open source software or blog, or if they want none of that,
they just want to earn enough to be able to go home at five
o'clock and play with their kids. I mean, whatever that is, you
know, for people to kind of feel like they're free to do what they
want to do. And one of the books that I've been reading lately just
for my own thing, is called Extreme Ownership, and it's written by a
couple of Navy seals or former Navy seals. They fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom
and the book is just incredible. They came back, people asked them to
speak at their company retreats and things, and it kind of turned into this
business and they put a lot of their knowledge into this book, and it
kind of trades off between their experience in Operation Iraqi Freedom and then essentially,
this is what we learned to seals and here's how we've applied it in the
business sector. And it's terrific. And I think a lot of times we
fail to focus on building solid team leads and CTOs, and so we essentially
promote a developer to that position and then don't actually train them on any of
the skill they need to be good managers. And so if you're in that
position, or if you're trying to develop some of these skills, this is
a terrific book. A couple of other things I'm just going to throw out
there. I am actually hiring, so I'm looking for somebody who can help
me with the Ruby on Rails app that I've been building to manage the podcast
stuff. I want to be able to focus more on this freedom idea,
and instead what I wind up doing is, you know, hammering on stuff
that makes the processes run, and I don't have time to do all of
that well anyway, So I'm looking for somebody to help with that. I'm
looking for somebody who's interested in helping with selling and managing podcast sponsorships. And
I'm also looking for somebody who's willing to write show notes. I'm looking for
a couple of somebodies for that. So if you're interested in any of those,
just shoot me an email check at devchat dot tv and we'll set something
up so that I can talk to you and see how that will go.
But yeah, those are my picks, Ben, what are your picks?
Yeah, So a tool that we've used that's really helped Land School scale well
is uh it's called airtable. So it's kind of like parse API, the
thing that that used to exist not anymore. It's uh like spreadsheets with like
built in APIs around it. And so we've been able to use that to
uh uh i mean handle all of our student tracking and things like that and
then build some like simple quick you know services to connect with it. So
it's been really easy because there's a really nice guy that's in place, so
our non technical people can get in and work with the data, you know,
create, read, update, delete, whatever, you know, do
all the stuff that they need with the data. But then there's these generated
APIs around the spreadsheets that we can then interact within a dynamic way, which
you wouldn't use it for like you know a massive like you know, production
and application where you need like you know, really consistent like like like Facebook's
not going to build off of it, you know, but but you know,
for simple little projects and things that you're throwing up, it can be.
It can be really nice, especially for as like an admin interface airtable.
I think I've seen this before. I think somebody else I know was
using this and was sharing some of the spreadsheets for people to like enter data
in and stuff. Yeah, they have like forms and stuff that you can
then send out that populate in and then yeah, and then like use it.
You can use Zapier then as well with it. So then like to
like glue it together with a bunch of other apps, so like conservices you're
using and yeah, we didn't write any code for ourselves for like the first
year and just use like Zapier and a bunch of other different apps to just
kind of glow everything together and a little bit of a house of cards.
But it actually worked really well. We could spin stuff up pretty fast.
Makes sense, all right. Well, if people want to find you online,
where do they go? So Twitter? And uh, maybe this wasn't
the best Twitter handle, but I picked it a few years ago. It's
a it's a s U n j I, E M I and those and
Jammy. I used to live in Taiwan, so that's my Chinese name.
All right. Well, let's go ahead and wrap this up. Thank you
for coming, Ben, Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It
was great to meet you guys, and you know, it was a fun
discussion. Very cool to meet you too. I've been following Land to school
for a while, so it's cool to just kind of talk about it.
So yeah, all right, Well we'll wrap it up and we'll catch everyone
next week.