BloomTech

I can't even begin to explain how amazing my time at Lambda School has been. I came in to Lambda with 0 relevant CS work experience. I had been working as a welder for a hand full of years and I always knew that I wanted to find something that I actually... Read More LOVED. The curriculum is A+, the ISA is awesome, all of that is true, but the best part about Lambda is the COMMUNITY!! Theres ALWAYS someone on to help. Theres always a hand to pull you up. There are THOUSANDS of Lambda Students eager to do everything that they can to succeed, and being surrounded by that Is AMAZING.

Lambda isn't selling a dream. It's not unrealistic. But It takes SO MUCH HARD WORK. I've dedicated every single day of the last 8-9 months to this program. And it worked. Two days before graduation, I received an offer for a Software Engineering position making multiple times more than I've ever made before. It just takes the hours.

Lambda dosn't just teach you. They don't just show you the skills/how to write a resume/how to set up your portfolio. They hustle WITH you. They teach you how to SELL YOURSELF. As soon as you're "endorsed" (meaning lambda thinks you're ready to interview for jobs/you've met the criteria), you'll be given a FULL TEAM to help you get a job. They'll help set up interviews FOR you. They'll practice WITH you. All that is asked of you is that you bust your butt.

I'm 24, I had 0 relevant experience, 0 degree, and a million other reasons to say "no one will want to hire me". I would have been wrong to say that. Not only do I have a great job now, but Lambda set me up so well that I'M being reached out to for interviews. Employers want your skill set and your abilities. If you can work hard, you'll make it. They'll make sure of it.

Despite being a very strong student academically, I dropped out of university. Nothing wrong with the professors or curriculums, just didn't fit the very self-directed style of learning I have developed. Before coming to Lambda School, I knew that I probably... Read More already had the skills required to be a junior data scientist, but couldn't get past application screenings. Lambda School promised to put me directly in contact with hiring partners upon graduation, which is what I needed. Plus, in a field that changes so quickly, 6 months of additional training couldn't hurt.

In the end, Lambda delivered on its promise. While the curriculum was still a bit shaky, due to me being part of the very first cohort, it was still engaging and helped me grow. I ended up taking a position with the very first company that presented to us (which is in large part due to luck that they happened to have an interesting research agenda), but as a lead data scientist rather than a junior one, making more than the average engineer at Microsoft or Amazon in Seattle. First job out of (halfway finished) college!

If getting up every morning to solve a new problem excites you, and you're confident that you can demonstrate your skills when put in front of the right person, then I think Lambda school could be right for you. Everyone's situation is different though, and I think I had a better experience with Lambda than others in my cohort because I had a clearly defined vision of what I wanted out of it. So put lots of thought into your decision and don't let any individual reviews sway you.

Lambda School has been a life-changing experience for me. The culture, the curriculum, the support, the fellowship, Lambda school got me through one of the toughest times of my personal and professional life and I am coming out on the other end educated,... Read More appreciated, and marketable. I am able to care for my family and myself and support the hopes and dreams of those around me. I have received 3 job offers in 1 month. I have never felt so relevant in anything that I do. I am confident and I am ready to tackle any challenge. The students have become family and some of the staff are the best mentors I could ever ask for. I've done the traditional higher education thing and it should be illegal! I beat out Ph.D.'s for my jobs because Lambda makes sure that we can do the technical stuff from the first principal!

pros:
ISA(regardless of the percentage you pay back)people dream of opportunities like Lambda but can't because if financial reasons. IF YOU BLAME THE 17% PAYBACK, MAYBE YOU SHOULD PAY UPFRONT. While us dreamers stand in line to change our lives and careers.... Read More
Support:
You have as much support as you ask for, everyone is willing to help out.
unlimited library:
Everything we learn or have lectures about, is saved in our TK. Unbelievable!

cons:
None, I don't have issues with employees or students. Be respectful, there's no dumb question, and ask for help and assist help when you can.

I graduated from Lambda School's 3rd cohort in March 2018. The training was fine, but I was mostly interested in going to Lambda School for the career support after I graduated. To say I was disappointed in the career support is an understatement.

They... Read More touted how many hiring partners they have, but they were largely pointless since Lambda School did nothing to try to set up interviews with them. Instead, you're left on your own to apply to jobs on Indeed, LinkedIn, etc along with the hordes of other junior developers trying to find their first job. Lambda School has zero name recognition and so does not help to differentiate you from the other applicants. The "career support" that Lambda provides was nothing more than a cursory review of your resume and LinkedIn profile.

I attended Lambda School hopeful for their career support, but ended up applying to hundreds upon hundreds of jobs on my own with minimal support from Lambda School, which I could've done on my own with needing to fork over 17% of my income to a company that did nothing to help me.

I ended up getting a job, but it was without having Lambda School on my resume and never talking about it during my interview. I'm still stuck paying them 17% of my income for 2 years even though they did exactly nothing to help me.

I feel like this is the most important thing, so I am putting it at the top. I got a job as a React.JS Developer only 4 weeks after graduation.

After I graduated from college I quickly realized I hated working in my field. I had no idea what to do from... Read More there. Going back to school would be expensive and time consuming. I wanted to be able to make a jump quickly instead of starting from square one all over again. After deciding on a career in web development I began to look at bootcamps. Most were cost prohibitive, and required me to uproot myself to attend. When I saw Lambda School it checked all my boxes. I could afford it thanks to the income sharing agreement, and I wouldn’t have to move.

Lambda School is hard. You put a lot of time in, and have a ton of information thrown at you. The analogy I have heard several people say is that it’s like drinking from a firehose. With that being said the teachers are great. They do a fantastic job breaking down difficult concepts. With all the lectures being live if you do have a question you can ask and get it answered in real time, which is something I really liked compared to pre-recorded videos.

The school’s environment is also super supportive. Teachers, their assistants, other students (in your cohort or not) are always willing to help.

The school is very receptive to student feedback. If they roll something out and the students say hey this isn’t working they don’t keep trying to fit that square peg into a round hole. Your voice actually gets heard, which was weird for me coming from a traditional college background where that is anything but the case.

Is Lambda School perfect? Of course not. No school is. No school ever will be. If you are on the East Coast your hours kind of suck. 11AM-8PM. Some teacher’s assistants will be rock stars while others may not be a good fit for you. From time to time they may roll an initiative out that needs tweaked. Compare that to the good. In 9 months Lambda School will have you career ready at no cost to you until you are hired making over $50k/yr. Lambda School was the best decision I ever made for my future. It went so well for me that my wife is following in my footsteps and applying to be a full time student as well.

After accepting a job offer today that has completely changed the direction of my life for the better, I have an immense feeling of gratitude toward Lambda School. My base salary has gone up almost 3.5x from my former career as a teacher in San Francisco!... Read More

I decided to join Lambda School on a whim and honestly, it was something I stumbled into by chance from a series of events that happened over a couple of weeks that led me to meet a Lambda student who referred me directly to Austen Allred, CEO of Lambda. After getting special permission to complete the coursework in under a week due to my life circumstances, I joined the CS8 cohort that began in early February 2018.

The curriculum is rigorous to say the least, and my having no previous programming experience, apart from maybe some very basic HTML & CSS, every day and week was admittedly quite overwhelming. With that being said, the instructors at Lambda are A++ and the support system is like nothing I'd ever seen before in my 11-12 years as an educator. The system, though continually evolving , is designed where no student is left behind, and each individual student gets all of the support they need (granted they put in 100% effort) to succeed.

In just a matter of a few weeks, I had gone from basically knowing nothing to building responsive websites. In just a matter of a few months, I was building full stack web applications from end to end. By the time I got to Lambda Labs (apprenticeship program), I was working on a small team to build a first-of-its-kind app to market in only 5 weeks under the direction of an experience engineer/mentor. The progress students make at Lambda in just a short amount of time is truly incredible, and I would attribute this to two things: 1. Lambda's curriculum, instructors and staff. 2. The amount of work you put into the program.

On top of all this, Lambda's career services program is truly revolutionary. I've never seen or heard anything like it. Each student is assigned to an individual career coach and also has access to all of the other career coaches and other student success staff at pretty much anytime. One of the coolest things at Lambda is that graduation isn't celebrated, job offers are. To help you get job, the sales & outcomes teams work tirelessly to bring in new partners. In short, they set you up with all of the opportunities you need to be successful; you just have to step up to the plate and hit a home run when you're up to bat.

After I finished the curriculum in late July 2018, I signed on as a Teaching Assistant (internally known as a Project Manager) for 4 months (in my case). This program, open to most students upon reaching a certain point in the course, is pivotal in growing your skills for the tech industry. Having the opportunity to work more closely with an instructional team and mentoring and teaching others, launched me to a new level. It also helped me understand how much work goes on behind the scenes to run a school at the top notch level Lambda does. The amount of work and energy put into this school to make it an industry leader is phenomenal.

If anyone is looking to join one of the programs that Lambda offers and launch yourself into the technology industry, this is undoubtedly the best there is. The difference between Lambda & other schools is that Lambda isn't a bootcamp. It's a full fledged CS program merged with your track of choice (web for me) and designed to make you successful on day one of your job as an engineer. Even if you do have a CS degree or have worked in engineering for a while, Lambda would still be beneficial to you. In fact, I've talked to several folks with CS degrees who were in my cohort, and they said the education at Lambda was much better and much more relevant than anything they learned in their respective 4-year university programs.

I cannot thank Lambda School enough for changing my life and the lives of so many others for the better. They are a one of a kind in this industry, led by visionaries, and I truly believe they will come to lead the industry across the world with this model.

*Full disclosure: Lambda asked me to write this review about 2 weeks after I had accepted a job, in exchange for some Lambda swag.

I'm skeptical of any company that promises to replace traditional education, because it's often framed with disingenuous... Read More arguments about student debt, the uselessness of educational bureaucracy, and what education should philosophically be. For most people, education is about gainful employment, which I disagree with.

That being said, I'm also a self-appointed expert in educational fraud—where established universities mislead students about outcomes in favor of enrollment numbers, or in my case fees—with the excessive private student loan debt to prove it. Yes, the interest is variable, and Sallie Mae is now a member of my family. Did I mention that my cosigner, my mom, is on the hook for payments larger than her mortgage? (Ask yourself, why is this legal?)

Point being: if you are thinking about taking out student loans, only do so if they are federally backed. NO private loans whatsoever. I have the lovely privilege of having *all* types of student debt.

Moving on. Lambda School. I was in the Fullstack Web track. I started in April of 2018, finished in October 2018, and was on the job market just as everyone was leaving for the holidays. I managed to land a job through my own efforts in January 2019. The career assistance was meager when I graduated, but better than any other career service I've had at the two universities I've attended. As of February 2019, I can say the career assistance has exploded in support and there are unbelievable companies giving presentations every single day that are looking for talent.

This has been my experience with Lambda as an organization: continuous improvement at an unbelievable pace. They take feedback incredibly seriously, because incentives are aligned if you are using the income-share agreement. It was main reason I chose Lambda (alongside the remote nature of the program), because I was weary of financial blunders that I continue to deal with from past educational experiences.

If you have the option to attend and complete a CS degree, do that!

Then attend Lambda!

Or better yet, attend Lambda in your last year of your CS degree.

I say this because of my experience so far at my new job. I made a production level contribution of several hundred lines of code in a framework I did not know on my 7th day of work. They said it was probably a record for first contribution. Am I an algorithm or data structure expert because of Lambda School? Absolutely not. Do I know how recursion affects computer memory and how to avoid writing quadratic algorithms because of Lambda? Yes.

Let's break down some problems I encountered with Lambda:

1. PM groups - most problems I faced at Lambda revolved around my project manager group, which is just a small group of students you interact with on a daily basis, led by a project manager (which during my time was a Lambda student who had completed most or all of the course). It seemed that people's Lambda experience was largely influenced by who your project manager was, and who else was in your group. The format for these daily "standup" meetings definitely needs standardization, so that the hundreds of hours spent in these meetings are structured for a purpose. (This may have already changed! Remember, I've already been out of the program since October 2018).
2. Code Reviews - I never really felt like my code was reviewed regularly, or if it was, the feedback was not always given, or it was non-technical. If you need help, there is always someone to help. However, sometimes when you are stuck, you don't even realize you are stuck. Lambda really requires personal responsibility and awareness, and making yourself vulnerable if you don't know what is going on.
3. Pair programming - Looking back, I wish I had been forced to pair program more. I did a fair amount of it in the latter half of the program (remember they are always changing things—usually for good reason), and now at my job I realize how fundamental this is to working professionally as a programmer.
4. HTML / CSS gaps - When I attended, this was the first thing we learned, and the teacher was excellent. However, as the program progressed into React, Javascript, and until the end, you could really tell how easy it is to forget everything you learned about web basics. I failed a technical interview partly because I did not know what the ARIA standard was off the top of my head. Lambda did not cover Accessibility, nor a lot of the finer details of many important, native Web APIs that many would consider basic web dev required knowledge. For example, how to access a webcam. (I believe Lambda has introduced something called build weeks throughout the program, which I think would go a long way to closing this gap).
5. Growth stage - The organization is incredibly intelligent, but always be aware that this is an investor-backed venture that could sour for a lot of reasons. Thankfully, the income-share agreement reduces that risk to basically 0 for yourself, and my personal ISA terms are generous.

And for the incredible benefits of Lambda:

1. Lambda for life - you have full access to the curriculum, which is always being updated, for your life or that of the company (whichever is shorter).
2. A growing network of Lambda students all over the world, ready to help at the post of a Slack message.
3. If you get in to Lambda, you will be surrounded by highly motivated people (usually), which is probably a principle that their admissions process screens for.
4. If something goes wrong while attending Lambda, they will go out of their way to help (including financially).
5. A sincerely kind and positive atmosphere, which I hope never changes.

Overall, Lambda continues to surprise me, and I'm thankful to have chosen it and been accepted. It's also not bad that I found some dollars along the way. If you know you like staring at computers for hours on end, and continually being frustrated / elated, then programming is probably for you. Like I said, CS degree first (for lots of silly and not so silly reasons), and Lambda 1.5st because sometimes ain't nobody got time for that CS degree.

Within 6 months of graduating from college and moving to the San Fransisco Bay Area, the place I was born and raised, I came to the dreaded realization that I wouldn't be able to support myself financially. I was working 50+ hour weeks in a career path... Read More that I was quickly losing interest in.

*queue quarter life crisis*

Coming into my career change I had barely any programming experience. The most I knew about computers was that there was a thing called the "command line" where you could execute commands to the Operating System. I began self-studying after work for 6 months before realizing I was ready to take the plunge... but I needed help. I had just started learning React and it was destroying my mind. I needed the accountability to push through the hard parts (I'm looking at you CS curriculum).

I knew from college that I do well with remote/online classes. Plus the time saved from commuting to San Fransisco I got to spend working part-time. It was the instructors and administration staff that really sold me. They had excellent communication and answered all of my concerns right away. So I pulled the trigger on Lambda School, a new startup that had only 2 reviews here.

I won't speak too much about the curriculum, structure, or job assistance because the thing about Lambda School is that they are always improving. Honestly, some of my experience was a little rough around the edges, but as I went through the program and became a Project Manager for later cohorts Lambda iterated on itself and improved. Everyone there is committed to your success (the beauty of an ISA). There are multiple disciplines to study now, insanely strong career support, and multiple opportunities to make real-world projects with a team (just as you do on the job).

At the end of the day, Lambda School is not a miracle. It will be hard work, not only through the schooling itself, but in the many extra hours you will need to spend studying off of school time. Then there is the interview process, which is a whole beast in itself. And then a lifetime of learning to be had on the job. But if you are ready to dive in head first - to fast track yourself - Lambda School is the best and most painless way to do it.