8 votes

Lambda School's misleading promises

3 comments

  1. [2]
    thundergolfer
    Link
    This guy sounds like an awful candidate to start an education company focusing on software courses. Not an educator, nor an experienced software professional, but a growth-hacking marketer.

    Allred, a serial entrepreneur from Utah with a background in marketing, founded Lambda in 2017. His previous work was mostly concerned with “growth hacking,” which is Silicon Valley jargon for finding underappreciated (or, less charitably, underhanded) ways of marketing something. He’s also published several articles about entrepreneurship — including one with the inauspicious title “Successful Entrepreneurs Are Usually Liars.”

    This guy sounds like an awful candidate to start an education company focusing on software courses. Not an educator, nor an experienced software professional, but a growth-hacking marketer.

    7 votes
    1. daturkel
      Link Parent
      I'm mixed on this. Obviously this specific guy turned out not to be well suited to the task, but some people really excel at starting and growing companies and they're capable of finding people...

      I'm mixed on this. Obviously this specific guy turned out not to be well suited to the task, but some people really excel at starting and growing companies and they're capable of finding people with the relevant expertise to advise them and run aspects of companies that require that knowledge. We see the reverse situation too: in the earlyish days of Facebook when it was clear that even if Zuckerberg knew how to build a cool app, he didn't really know how to make money, and Sheryl Sandberg was brought in to help fill that gap.

      1 vote
  2. Deimos
    Link
    This is a story that mostly started last week, with The Verge publishing a couple of stories about Lambda School. There's been quite a bit more since yesterday: New York Magazine published this...

    This is a story that mostly started last week, with The Verge publishing a couple of stories about Lambda School. There's been quite a bit more since yesterday:

    6 votes