by mobileexpert on 2/22/20, 6:38 PM with 99 comments
by austenallred on 2/22/20, 8:07 PM
It started with misaligned expectations. We worked with a lot of hiring partners to create a UX curriculum that would be easiest to jump into a first UX career from, and it was clear in doing that research that a research-first perspective with less emphasis on design is what would get students hired faster in a field that can be notoriously difficult to break into (relative to software engineering). We hired experts in that aspect of UX design, which can be terribly broad.
Partway through the data started to show that half of the class was pretty happy and about half was not. Usually it’s not split like that - there’s always an outlier student or two but not half totally happy and half frustrated, so we started to dig in.
Two things happened:
1. We realized half of the students were expecting a design-heavy experience, and we hadn’t communicated well enough what to expect. There were pieces on design, but you wouldn’t come out of this curriculum as a UI designer, and students were expecting that.
2. We decided to try and help those students who wanted the UI emphasis, hired more folks, and started creating curriculum in a pretty rushed manner to help them reach their goals. In retrospect that was a huge mistake; there simply wasn’t enough time to build a full design-heavy curriculum in flight, and the students who wanted design-heavy curriculum were very disappointed.
That cohort was (rightly) frustrated because we tried to do too much too late. I recognized that was a risk going into those curriculum changes, but took on the risk because the most important thing is making students successful and happy. In retrospect it was the wrong call.
I wish like hell that I could go back and make everything perfect for that cohort of students; there are about 20 of them and I’ve spent time one on one with every one. We brought in more people to work with them one on one and that curriculum is much better now, but understandably 5 or 6 students in that cohort had lost their faith in our ability to deliver and opted to leave the program. Of course, we cancelled their ISAs; we lost a ton of money training these students and they don’t owe us anything, but that’s the right thing to do. We promise an awesome experience and in this instance didn’t deliver. We tried to do too much in too short a timeframe and missed the mark.
by pembrook on 2/22/20, 7:43 PM
We all know UX is extremely important to the success of any startup, but quantifying it is a different story. Designers can’t even agree on their own responsibilities and what to call themselves, with job titles and responsibilities I’ve seen at many companies having 0 correlation to the next.
Any great UX/product/service/interaction/blah blah designer I’ve worked with is a former graphic designer with great taste, who over the years learned how to build usable software by working on tons of software products and spending tons of time with users.
It’s not exactly something that lends itself to the bootcamp model. It makes much more sense in an apprentice model.
If it makes her feel any better, I’m certain 90% of schools teaching multi-year “UX” design programs would not have done a better job. At least she doesn’t have to go into debt this way.
by heymijo on 2/22/20, 7:50 PM
You can set aside the issue of ISAs or anything about this woman.
This poor of a product from Lambda is indefensible. A consumer or enterprise software startup can get away beginning with an ineffective MVP and iterating. A school offering an educational opportunity has a much higher floor to responsibly operate. This person shows that Lambda is operating well below that floor.
Even if the students will never activate the repayment clauses of their ISAs Lambda has failed them. Silicon Valley seems to think that what it can't measure doesn't matter. But Lambda School, by pitching itself as a way for anyone to be a part of the tech boom gets up a person's hopes and then completely and utterly fails to deliver on its promise. That is on top of the opportunity cost of attending a school that fails to deliver anything close to the education advertised.
by wpietri on 2/22/20, 7:04 PM
I was very wrong. The ISA incentive appears to be nothing to the VC/startup incentive to Show! Massive! Growth! as you chase ever-larger chunks of money. Somehow we've gone from "move fast and break things" (which is not a terrible slogan to encourage experimentation on non-consequential things) to "move fast and break people" (which horrifies me).
by jfarmer on 2/22/20, 8:01 PM
Half the point of school is to get students to first fail in a low-stakes way.
Groups need time to develop. Any change in a group will cause it to storm before re-norming.
The higher the stakes the more critical it is to navigate storming effectively. You "learn by doing", i.e., by getting students to storm 50 times before the the stakes are high.
Students should not have to pay the price for someone else's crash course in learning design.
by waterside81 on 2/22/20, 9:23 PM
by tchaffee on 2/23/20, 10:21 AM
by djeikyb on 2/23/20, 12:59 AM
https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/?s=bootcamp
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fhashtagcausea...
by Antoninus on 2/22/20, 9:14 PM
and Lambda School fits into many of the described.
by jsjddbbwj on 2/22/20, 7:04 PM
by minimaxir on 2/22/20, 6:49 PM