This, right here, is Lambda's biggest trick.
I created a hacker account just because of how much it infuriates me to see Austen doing it again here.
Austen is very very good at finding public criticism and responding to it. In contrast, in Lambda's slack, every criticism is automatically taken to private PM, to get it out of the way as soon as possible and to immediately shutdown any ensuing conversation. (A few times, when that didn't work, they turned off comments altogether.)
Lambda's strategy is to PRETEND to be responsive to feedback, to say a lot of pretty words and act concerned, while actually ignoring all of it.
For example, they created a student survey to see how students felt about removing the majority of paid teachers (team leads) and forcing us to be mentors instead.
One of the first questions?
"Do you agree that leadership is an important part of being a successful programmer?" (approximately)
The rest of the survey was the same. They weren't interested in getting feedback. They were interested in pretending to listen to feedback.
Austen is minimizing student frustration in this comment, acting like people are grumbling about minor changes.
He's ignoring the many many people who have written out long, articulate, arguments about how the changes damaged their education and removed the value of Lambda for them.
He also acts like he didn't delete every post in the Lambda subreddit that offered criticism over the last three months, without any response.
False honesty in threads like this is how Lambda gets away with being dishonest.
Also a lambda student, 100% agree. This was actually one of the biggest selling points for me, I dug up lots of old articles and reddit threads and weighed the criticism against his responses. I thought it was endearing and refreshing and a really good sign to see the CEO have these discussions in public. It still gets to me too, reading his responses in this thread, I still want to believe they will do well by their students, but their track record doesn't hold up. He is just a STELLAR marketer.
In Lambda slack, dissent is shut down immediately by "student success" staff directing you to DMs. Or an individual zoom chat, which is friendly and seemingly receptive to feedback, but ultimately pointless. A student-created poll with 90+ votes was posted after the changes went live, and it was taken down immediately, along with all feedback, to be replaced by their byzantine "More Transparent" survey system, conveniently delayed to be issued on a Friday evening, that could be twisted into yet another glowing report on the exciting new changes.
Lambda has plenty of real feedback and criticism (constructive and otherwise) and they have no interest in it. They make a very convincing show of listening and having meaningful discussions, but look at the form of the substantive changes. They've completely gutted their successful learning structure to replace it with something cheaper, and hide the damage in their reporting. But they're still "iterating" so we'll see, right?
My key criticisms:
1. Waves arms This, all of this. The dishonesty.
2. Removing TLs. The accountability and required meeting every day really made the difference between this and self-study. TLs were holding the program together.
3. Instituting self grading with no human evaluation, even for end-of-module tests. You can join "code review" group calls but it's voluntary, there's no one checking your work at the end of the section.
4. Cutting the curriculum (there is no python instruction) Opting into the "extended curriculum" just means you repeat the same thing twice.
If you're considering joining, also be aware that he deletes comments and tweets, and is the moderator of the subreddit. From what I've seen, the style is to allow the dissent, maybe even engage, and then quietly delete it later after things have blown over. What you see online may be curated even if it seems like it's outside the purview of Lambda official channels.
”Do you agree that leadership is an important part of being a successful programmer?"
I don’t have a horse in this fight, but the above is a generalization of what’s called Push Polling: polling in a way to change opinions and get a desired outcome, rather than to actually gather pre-existing opinions.
It’s like when the manufacturer responds to negative reviews on Home Depot. There’s no follow up from the customer so people just assume it was resolved.
Austen is very very good at finding public criticism and responding to it. In contrast, in Lambda's slack, every criticism is automatically taken to private PM, to get it out of the way as soon as possible and to immediately shutdown any ensuing conversation. (A few times, when that didn't work, they turned off comments altogether.)
Lambda's strategy is to PRETEND to be responsive to feedback, to say a lot of pretty words and act concerned, while actually ignoring all of it.
For example, they created a student survey to see how students felt about removing the majority of paid teachers (team leads) and forcing us to be mentors instead. One of the first questions?
"Do you agree that leadership is an important part of being a successful programmer?" (approximately)
The rest of the survey was the same. They weren't interested in getting feedback. They were interested in pretending to listen to feedback.
Austen is minimizing student frustration in this comment, acting like people are grumbling about minor changes. He's ignoring the many many people who have written out long, articulate, arguments about how the changes damaged their education and removed the value of Lambda for them.
He also acts like he didn't delete every post in the Lambda subreddit that offered criticism over the last three months, without any response.
False honesty in threads like this is how Lambda gets away with being dishonest.