RRU 039: Lambda School with Ben Nelson

Panel: Nader DabitLucas ReisCharles Max Wood Special Guests: Ben Nelson In this episode, the panelists talk with Ben Nelson who is a co-founder and CTO of Lambda School. The panelists and Ben talk about Lambda School, the pros & cons of the 4-year university program for developers, and much more. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Kendo UI 0:33 – Chuck: We have Nader, Lucas, and myself – our special gust is Ben Nelson! 0:50 – Guest: Hi! 0:54 – Chuck: Please introduce yourself. 0:58 – Guest: I love to ski and was a developer in the Utah area. 1:12 – Chuck: Let’s talk about Lambda School, but I think explaining what the school is and how you operate will help. Give us an elevator pitch for the school. 1:36 – Guest: The school is 30-weeks long and we go deep into computer fundamentals. They get exposed to multiple stacks. Since it’s 30-weeks to run we help with the finances by they start paying once they get employed. It’s online and students from U.S. and the U.K. 3:23 – Chuck: I don’t want you to badmouth DevMountain, great model, but I don’t know if it works for everyone? 3:43 – Guest: Three months part-time is really hard if you don’t have a technical background. It was a grind and hard for the students. 4:03 – Nader: Is it online or any part in-person. 4:11 – Guest: Yep totally online. 4:40 – Nader: Austen Allred is really, really good at being in the social scene. I know that he has mentioned that you are apart of...since 2017? 5:20 – Guest: Yeah you would be surprised how much Twitter has helped our school. He is the other co-founder and is a genius with social media platforms! 6:04 – Guest mentions Python, marketing, and building a following. 7:17 – Guest: We saw a lot of students who wanted to enroll but they couldn’t afford it. This gave us the idea to help with using the income share agreement. 8:06 – Nader: Yeah, that’s really cool. I didn’t know you were online only so now that makes sense. Do you have other plans for the company? 8:33 – Guest: Amazon started with books and then branched out; same thing for us. 8:56 – Chuck: Let’s talk about programming and what’s your placement rate right now? 9:05 – Guest: It fluctuates. Our incentive is we don’t get paid unless our students get employed. Our first couple classes were 83% and then later in the mid-60%s and it’s averaging around there. Our goal is 90% in 90 days. Guest continues: All boot camps aren’t the same. 10:55 – Lucas: Ben, I have a question. One thing we have a concern about is that universities are disconnected with the CURRENT market! 11:47 – Guest: We cannot compare to the 4-year system, but our strength we don’t have tenure track Ph.D. professors. Our instructors have been working hands-on for a while. They are experienced engineers. We make sure the instructors we hire are involved and passionate. We pay for them to go to conferences and we want them to be on the cutting-edge. We feel like we can compete to CS degrees b/c of the focused training that we offer. 13:16 – Chuck: Yeah, when I went to school there were only 2 professors that came from the field. 14:22 – Guest: Yeah, look at MIT. When I was studying CS in school my best professor was adjunct b/c he came from the field. I don’t know if the 4-year plan is always the best. I don’t want to shoot down...