I do a lot of ‘firsts’, and I guess we all do. This, for example, is my first Medium post. My first blog post was written years ago on a Webs.com website. My first startup was hosted on that website. This past weekend was the first one in the seven years since my son was born that I’ve had to myself. But yesterday, I started another first — my first day at Lambda School!
For those that aren’t familiar with Lambda School, it’s an online only coding bootcamp whose principal business model is the Income Sharing Agreement, which we will get to in a moment. The way I explain it to my non-technical friends is that it’s similar to a trade school for programming. Tracks, or courses, include User Experience (UX) Design, Full Stack Web Development, iOS Development, Android Development, and finally Data Science. What trade schools do for motorcycle mechanics and plumbers, Lambda School does for programmers.
What’s different about Lambda School, and many other coding bootcamps like IronHack based here in Miami, is that it’s primary revenue source is the Income Sharing Agreement. This means it doesn’t take upfront tuition (unless you want to pay and can afford it) in exchange for a share of your income when you land a job in the field that you trained in. For example, I will have to dedicate 17% of my income to Lambda School until I payback $30,000, but I only have to pay it back while I have and maintain a job earning more than $50,000 per year.
This is great for a few reasons. First, the median starting salary for data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence positions $95,000 per year according to one study. Paying back the ISA on a nearly six figure salary compared to one half that size makes a big difference, and it would be done sooner rather than later.
Second, the interests of the school/bootcamp and the student are inherently aligned. While I don’t want this to turn into a post about the state of higher education in the US, students of today are frankly tired of committing to tens of thousands of dollars of debt for not even the prospect of a job in their dedicated field of study. ISA’s like Lambda School’s require that the student obtain gainful employment in their field of study in order for the school to make their money back.
Finally, in order for Lambda School to get paid their students have to be proficient if not excellent in their chosen field, otherwise they won’t get hired. This is the part that’s most exciting for me, because this means we get to focus on code and building cool programs, and not the unnecessary nonsense that often comes with higher education and gets in the way of true, pragmatic discovery. This isn’t to suggest that there isn’t value in a traditional university educational track — just that such a path isn’t inherently geared towards a graduates professional success.
Day one was similar to every other Day One you might have at a traditional college. It had it’s ups and downs, snags and what-have-yous. But what shown bright through the clouds was CODE! We started writing code on Day One, which is one of the best things that could have happened. It was stuff similar to Po’s Level Zero, but code nonetheless. I didn’t personally have a problem with the assignment, but I know some people did and the Team Leads were there to help immediately.
The most valuable lesson I picked up was a working introduction to Github and the basics of making pull requests and committing new code. I’m positive we’ll get into the more advanced features as we get deeper into the course and we start working on code bases together. What blew me away was that I learned something new that I have wanted to learn for some time on DAY ONE! This is the magic of Lambda School. And I’m happy as dog with two tails to be part of it!