
Lambda School threatens ex-employee for coming forward - Tomte
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/9/21166640/lambda-school-former-employee-threat-coding-bootcamp-nondisclosure
======
boublepop
Naturally the article is leaning towards putting Lambda in a bad light, but
honestly if she signed a document saying “don’t do X, collect Y$” and then
goes and does X, it’s pretty simple, she should give back the money. You can’t
both take the payday, and then am also try to take the high moral ground, even
if you try to do it anonymously. “I didn’t think you’d figure out it was me”
isn’t a valid defense against breach of contract.

~~~
ohazi
Maybe there isn't a moral high ground here?

You can't sign a contract that allows someone to murder you -- there's case
law supporting that.

But you _can_ sign a contract that limits your future ability to speak freely.

Regardless of what case law says about this, a lot of people appear to feel
that this really shouldn't be a thing, particularly when there's a large power
imbalance between the parties, and when the more powerful party is obviously
trying to hide evidence of malfeasance, embarrassing secrets, etc.

What is the moral thing to do if you're the less powerful party and you feel
that your counterpart is acting immorally in offering you a contract like
this?

Maybe the moral position is not to take the money.

Maybe it's okay to take the money and leak it anyway (assuming you think you
can get away with it), because your counterpart is already irredeemably
unethical, and all you can do is try to make the best of a bad situation.

I don't think it's always so clear cut. Contracts shouldn't _always_ be
considered sacred.

~~~
duxup
She could have left without signing.... there isn't anything to indicate there
was more than money at play.

~~~
michaelmrose
She was 5 months pregnant being threatened with termination for not complying
with a performance plan she had never seen before. They were trying to get rid
of her without doing the proper legwork to establish that she failed in any
measuable fashion.

Depending on her other financial situations she might be facing financial
disaster including uninsured, life destroying, medical bills plus the
inability to get any other position while visibly pregnant.

It's highly likely that she was pretty much obliged to take the money
regardless of how she felt.

~~~
duxup
You talk to a lawyer in that situation... you don't take the cash.

~~~
pmiller2
And the lawyer tells you something like "maybe we could win against them in
court, but it will take a year. Even if they settle, we're looking at 3
months." Meanwhile, she's still uninsured, _etc._

~~~
duxup
Potentially, but then you make that call in an informed way.

------
duxup
She signed a deal not to talk for cash... and then talked.

Maybe Lambda stinks but it would seem she chose to violate the agreement.

Maybe she was concerned about what she experienced later, but how much does
someone care about a topic when they choose to make money by not talking about
it....

~~~
gameswithgo
Lot of people in hackernews seem to stick up for bad guys, why is that?

People sign things without looking at them, especially when in desperate
situations. Why adopt a stance that further weakens the position of the poor
and unconnected, are the rich and connect not powerful enough already? Do we
really need to allow "don't tell the truth" contracts to stand?

~~~
gamblor956
Lots of techies have lots of money and assume everyone else is as financially
secure as them and just able to walk away from a bunch of money when their
employer fucks them over.

Lambda has been documented screwing people over. Of course they'd screw over
their own employees. It's their modus operandi.

~~~
techslave
no one is faulting her for taking the money

------
LatteLazy
I'm confused,the article itself says she signed a confidentiality agreement
and that she broke the agreement. What did she think would happen? She got 36k
for signing it. Was that just free money in her mind!?

~~~
throwsprtsdy
It is free money until Lambda School actually gets it back. It's up to Lambda
School to decide the if money and/or the precedent are worth the public
relations cost of fighting about it.

------
whalesalad
I have always had a bad taste in my mouth for Lambda school. I bought into the
YC hype though and when friends asked me for a bootcamp I reluctantly told
them that Lambda was a good place to go.

Really regret ever spreading that advice and glad that none of my friends
actually went into the program.

~~~
exhilaration
If it helps, they probably still would have done it, regardless of what you
said. I've found that even friends and family you explicitly tell "bootcamps
are a scam" will ignore your advice, quit their jobs, drop 10's of thousands
of their limited savings into them, then avoid the subject afterwards when
they can't find those much promised programming jobs. That's how good bootcamp
marketing is.

~~~
tracker1
On the other side of the table, interviewing bootcamp grads... Only granted
interviews for about 10-15% of the ones presented. Of those, most _only_ did
what was assigned, which really wasn't enough to be close to productive in
terms of ramp up, and indicated that they wouldn't put the effort needed to
being productive employees.

In the end, I'm really supportive of those who come into software outside
college. I never went to college and some of the best developers I've worked
with never went. What we do share in common is a _LOT_ of effort beyond the
minimum in terms of self driven learning and projects on the side. Open-source
gives a huge amount of potentially highly visible work to demonstrate.

Yes, some may turn their noses up at someone who didn't go through a college
program. Regardless of the path you take, you have to do more than just show
up, and some really just don't have the natural ability to do certain kinds of
work.

My advice to people is grab a book or two, and try to make something useful to
you. Do it on github/gitlab if you can. It may be a crappy, one-off
implementation, but you'll probably learn more than a bootcamp, and in the end
you get something you and others might find useful.

~~~
lhuser123
I know a Lambda student that’s now on what they call labs. Not sure how to
explain it but students are in teams & meetings with project managers,
designers, other teams, etc. It kind of resemble working in a big
organization. They are actually working in a real project with a real
investor. I’m no expert, but think that the exposure to real interactions in
an environment like that could help in the job search.

~~~
tracker1
I cannot speak for Lambda specifically... but have been on interviews on the
other side. When your only technical understanding as a developer is literally
what you were assigned, with no personal effort beyond that, you will be very
unlikely to be able to fit into most development environments, which imho
requires a certain amount of discovery, research and ongoing reading.

You cannot just sit on your knowledge for 20+ years in this career path...
some come close, but they hit a wall... I've also seen that when interviewing
those with 20+ years of experience with nothing more recent.

In the end if you cannot/will-not grow, and this can include taking time
during work hours, you won't succeed. When you're starting out, you have to
bury yourself with learning to get a leg up for at least a few years. Later,
you can get by with reading a few articles a day and maybe a couple
experiments over a year. But you can not stop learning. And not putting extra
effort in when starting out, to me at least, is a bad sign that you won't do
well without someone holding your hand.

~~~
lhuser123
Thanks for sharing. May I ask, how can an applicant demonstrate “certain
amount of discovery, research and ongoing reading“?

In this specific case, the student have a few GitHub repos of courses taken
before enrolling in Lambda. One repo is in a different programming language.
Would that help?

------
ajsharp
Regardless of the specifics of her contract, it's a really, _really_ bad look
for a well-funded startup to sue a former employee for $36k.

Good luck hiring from here on out.

~~~
arnvald
I think the suing part is not about the $36k, rather it's to give a message
that they won't tolerate it (otherwise other people who signed similar
agreements might feel empowered to speak up as well).

~~~
sjg007
This is a PR disaster not just for Lambda school but also for YC.

~~~
kick
YC has had its share of bad publicity. I don't think one more company full of
seemingly-bad people will shock them any.

So long as 'pg or someone doesn't double down on their love of them, at least,
but that'd be incredibly unlikely.

Then again...

------
blueyes
The media have had their knives out for Lambda for quite a while. A reporter's
instinct is to view anything that's booming with skepticism; and to lionize
the underdogs. There is a certain tension and surprise in both takes (even if
they are, in their way, predictable perspectives). Both of those trends are at
play in Lambda coverage, which reveals the weird and systemic conservatism of
the tech press.

The problem with lionizing underdogs is that, if you take a broad enough
sample of underdogs, they represent the general population, and the general
population has its share of jerks and liars. We can't assume Lambda's former
employee is good just because she is less powerful than the company.

But the story implies, with its choice of verbs in the headline (Lamba
"threatens" while Baez "comes forward"), which player the reporter wants us to
sympathize with. They could just as easily have written that Baez "breaks her
word" or "defrauds" the company, while Lambda "enforces agreement".

I deeply disagree with the people questioning whether contracts should be
honored, particularly after you walk out the door with the cash.

~~~
sjg007
ok old blueyes.. you are not helping the argument here. In my opinion Lambda
has an ex-employee who left under allegations of performance despite allegedly
not being notified and yet being 5 months pregnant and now Lambda is suing her
for 36k which is a trivial amount of money. What Lambda needs to do is IGNORE
the negative press and FOCUS on customer satisfaction. Do not SUE former
employees. It will not end well.

~~~
monkeywork
>ok old blueyes.. you are not helping the argument here

Whose argument are they not helping - your bleeding heart narrative?

> In my opinion Lambda has an ex-employee who left under allegations of
> performance despite allegedly not being notified and yet being 5 months
> pregnant and now Lambda is suing her for 36k which is a trivial amount of
> money.

You kind of leave out the part where the adult female who since she is 5
months pregnant should be really balancing all risks to her financial well
being if she has been terminated signed a contract saying she wouldn't do X
and then went and did X anyway.

> Do not SUE former employees. It will not end well.

Do not break contracts - it will not end well.

------
Gatsky
I find NDAs rather problematic. The main purpose they seem to serve is to hide
corporate malfeasance. It would be nice to have a public register for NDAs,
such that one could determine how many are being issued by a particular entity
(obviously without knowing the content of the NDA). If I was a student, and I
found that the bootcamp I was thinking about signing up for was issuing a lot
of NDAs, it would be useful information.

~~~
tlb
The primary purpose of NDAs is to keep confidential information confidential.
Every business has information about their operations and plans they want to
keep confidential, in order for their competitors and suppliers not to have an
advantage.

Essentially every knowledge work employee signs a nondisclosure agreement
during their employment. Most who leave reaffirm the agreement in return for
severance. So statistics of NDAs would just tell you how many employees an
outfit has.

An employee who knows of actual lawbreaking can report it to authorities and
be protected as a whistleblower. There's no protection for telling journalists
that the company had execution problems.

~~~
Gatsky
I see, thanks, my original comment was not very well informed.

------
DonHopkins
"Nothing like those statements was reported to us by her or anyone else about
her, and if they were, we’d take immediate action. Out of respect for the
employee, we can’t comment in deeper detail on this situation."

That's the most cyclomatically complex, passive-aggressively voiced weasel
wording I've read in a long time. How about a little respect for the English
language, huh?

I sure hope they don't teach people to write code like they write PR legal
speak.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity)

~~~
1123581321
It looks like a straightforward denial and refusal to comment. What is complex
or passive-aggressive about it?

~~~
DonHopkins
It's aggressively passive voice. You do that when you're trying to avoid
responsibility. Or in other words: Responsibility was avoided.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice)

It also uses Trump's favorite template: It isn't, but if it is, it doesn't
matter. That means it is, and it matters.

~~~
1123581321
The first line uses the passive voice. Despite that it’s a clear statement.

The main action in the other two (“we’d take” and “we can’t comment”) are
active because “we” is the subject and acts on the object. A negative
statement like “cannot comment” isn’t passive voice.

Also, passive aggressive doesn’t mean using the passive voice aggressively. It
means assenting to some encroachment in a way that signals hidden
belligerence.

Hopefully that was helpful (passive aggressive! Sorry.)

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sjg007
I would expect pg or sama to look into this. This is a situation that needs
high level attention.

------
tuesday20
I didn’t know about the working conditions. Now I know, because they are
threatening her and because of this article. Next time I hear about them, I am
going to remember this article.

Sometimes it is best to keep quiet, is it not?

Yes, I do understand she got paid for her silence.

------
nicesnowoman
They had many students sign NDA-like terms as well to get out of their ISAs.
This school is not to be trusted and Austen is known to lie frequently.

~~~
ghufran_syed
Citation?

~~~
FireBeyond
Whilst accusations without evidence can be problematic, you don't see the
irony in asking someone to violate NDAs in a discussion about how willing this
company is to sue people to prevent them violating NDAs?

------
threatofrain
> Baez claims that Lambda tried to fire her in 2018 for not living up to a
> performance plan. When she told her manager she hadn’t received any
> documentation about this plan, she claims he walked back his comments and
> said she could stay. Baez says she decided to leave anyway because she no
> longer felt supported in her role. She was five months pregnant at the time
> and signed a nondisclosure agreement to get severance. Because of this
> agreement, The Verge agreed not to use Baez’s name in the article. She has
> decided to come forward publicly in this piece since the school is
> threatening legal action.

~~~
oh_sigh
It seems pretty clear she violated the NDA. And I'd imagine she was the one
who reached out to the journalist, not the other way around.

