Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of React Roundup. This week, on our panel, we have Lucas Heish, Hello for everyone, nat Or Davitt Hello, Hello, I'm Charles max Wood from dev chat dot TV. This week we have a special guest and that's Ben Nelson. Ben, do you want to say Hi, Hi, Good morning everyone. Now you're from Lambda School, which is kind of an interesting thing that we're going to talk about here in a minute. Are there other things that people should know about
you? So? Yeah, I was a software engineer from Utah and uh yeah, I left the ski and get up in the mountains and but now I'm living out here on the Bay Area. Yeah, Utah. I don't know about people from Utah. Awesome. Well, let's jump right in and talk a little bit about LAMBA School. I kind of want to make this a little bit broader discussion about boot camps and people getting into code, but I think explaining what Lamba School is and how you guys operate is probably going
to inform the discussion fairly well. So do you want to just kind of give us an elevator pitch for LAMB to school and explain why you operate the way you do. Yeah. So I was a lead instructor head of code
boot Camp part time one for a while. You know, it was dead Mountain and Utah out of their program, and you know they were doing some things right, but you know, part time program it's hard to get people up to speed, you know, in three months, and you know, just kind of the boot camp space in general is trying to address the problem
of you know, adults trying to get re educated. And then you know, and then there's just companies need more engineers and boot camps some of them are are you know, are pretty good, and a lot of them, you know, not so much. And we kind of worked backwards from a boot camp. I thought, okay, like where are the deficiencies and what's really the sweet spot between you know, like a four year you know, full on CS degree and you know, in a three month boot camp.
And that's where we kind of settled on LAMB to school. So with LAMBA School, that's thirty weeks long, so seven months instead of your typical three month model. And then we also go deeper into computer science fundamentals, so it's quite a few more hours, go a lot more in depth. The students get exposure to multiple stacks, So we tried to make this more more in depth, more intense. But because it's thirty weeks long, you know,
that's a more expensive course to run. It's difficult to charge more upfront for that. So what we did is we came up with this income Shore Agreement model. And what this does is it our students. They don't pay upfront, they pay once they're employed. And it's great too because it's it aligns our incentives with our students. It makes it so people that otherwise wouldn't have an opportunity to attend a program like this. You know, they don't
need to put a deposit down, they don't need any upfront money. They just need to be willing to work hard. And we made it online so it's live, structured online and have students all over the United States and we're launching in the United Kingdom at the end of the year. Awesome. That's really cool. I don't want you to bad mouth dev Mountain or anything, but it seems like they follow the traditional boot camp model and that works for
some folks. But yeah, I don't know if I completely follow what the real issues were, other than maybe that it was part time for the students you were working with, and that makes it really hard to really focus in and get where you need to go to get a job. Yeah, like three months part time. That's it's just really hard if you don't have you
know, some type of a technical background coming into it. And you know, we did see quite a bit of success, you know, students that would come through, but it was a grind, it was it was really really hard for the students. But yeah, it's there. You know. The full time program is you know, is much more doable. You mentioned that it's online. Is it only online or is there also like an in person part of the Yeah, so we're one hundred percent online. We started
to we wanted to be online first. Our company is remote first as well. We decided just to own it. This is something that probably wouldn't have been possible, i mean four or five years ago, but now with Slack and zoom like, we slack and zoom like that's that's our classroom. And
yeah, it makes it. It helps with recruiting too, so we're able to find great instructors that you maybe don't want to live in the Bay Area anymore, want to be able to actually own a house, so they move back home, and you know, we're able to find a lot of good instructors that way. So that's pretty interesting. I follow Austin all Read, and I guess that you work closely with him. I'm sure, but he's he's like really really good at being in the social scene. I guess you
would say, I don't really know to how to explain it. He seems to do a really good job of getting the word out. And I know that I've seen him mention that you were a part of YC when twenty seventeen, Is that right? Yep, yeah, summer seventeen. So like how long was Lamba School around before that? And how has that affected Lamba School? Yeah, so Austin all Right on Twitter, Yeah, he's my co founder, absolutely brilliant when it comes to like you know, Twitter and social
media. I mean, you would not believe how much value like Twitter has brought to our company, just like with recruiting and you know, finding investors and just like positive pr I mean, it's been amazing. But yeah, so Austin and I know we both grew up in a you know, the same kind of smaller town at Utah. Anyway, he was out in the Bay Area working at land Up and you know, I've been working at Dedva Mountain and he had started up this online school teaching functional programming. That's where
Lambda School came from. It was just like some my little paid class, kind of like a you to me model, and then his co founder at the time bailed. But they, you know, Austin's a brilliant marketer and had several thousand people signed up for a free class that they had going and needed somebody to teach it. So reached out to me, and you know and kind of at the drop of a hat, I was able to jump in and teach this Python class that they were doing. And yeah, so
we were both working full time jobs as a software engineer. He was working you know, Atlenda doing growth marketing and and just on the side, we built up this This following we get up to over ten thousand students and these just totally free classes we were doing in the evenings, and yeah, and then we started doing some paid classes, some paid upfront classes, and using those, you know, that pool of ten thousand and students that we had,
we were able to get some of them to come in and pay upfront for some different classes. That we did, and and you know, got enough revenue, were able to bootstrap it. I was able to quit my job go full time on it. And you know, we both had always wanted to do Y Combinator. I mean, you know, they're they're the experts when it comes to starting a new company. And so as we're going through the application process, you know, something we were thinking about was,
you know, how does this scale like what we're doing right now? How do we take this from just like a normal boot camp, and how do we make it special and unique? And you know, one of the things is online just because we can, we can scale better and and with technology now we can provide a you know, a great experience. You know, it could be comparable to being in a classroom and in many ways better.
And then the other thing was in conversations with these thousands of people we had in the free classes, trying to get them to sign up for our paid
ones. You know, there were so many people that wanted to do it, they just couldn't afford it, and debt was just way too much risk, you know, to take that debt on and if it doesn't work out, they're stuck with debt and That's where we came into this idea of an income shore agreement where we could you know, increase top of funnel and then also it would expand and you know allow us to help a lot of people
that wouldn't didn't have these opportunities otherwise. And so those were like the main ideas that we pitched when we went into Y Combinator and said, hey, we're going to do this online because we're flipping the payment model, we can make the course longer, be more of a premium offering and fill it, you know, hit kind of a sweet spot between a boot camp and a CS degree, and then we'll use an income shore agreement that you know,
incentivizes the school to really perform well for the students. And yeah, we were I think we were kind of on the bubble. They interviewed us, I think twice as many times as they typically interview you know, A candidate brought us in a bunch, decided to bike. That's so we got in
and it was a great experience. That's really cool. Yeah, you mentioned the scalability and it's kind of like when I think of Why Combinator, I think of them investing in companies that have the potential to scale, you know, but I don't know if that's always the case or if that's just my perception is wrong. But this doesn't seem to fit in that category. But now that I didn't know you were online only actually, so now that I
know that, that kind of makes a little more sense. But also it doesn't do you Do you all have any other like plans for the company other than kind of being a school. Yeah, so we're starting with software. You know. The internal analogy that we like to use is, you know, Amazon started with books because that was the easy first thing to start with, but then eventually we want to branch out and teach lots of different topics. So you know, so so tech is the is the clear first step
because there's a proven market there on both sides. Then you know, nursing is something that we're looking at. There's there's a few others as well. Interesting. I kind of want to dive back into just getting people into programming and things like that. I mean, what's your placement rate for people?
Yeah? So right now, you know, it fluctuates, and one of the nice things about having our our models you know, incentivized, is that it you know, like we don't get paid if our students don't get jobs, and so, you know, so and we launch it in the very beginning too, we made the decision to launch a new class every month, so our classes started overlapping pretty quickly, and what that allowed us to do
is to quickly iterate. So our first class, you know, first couple of classes, you know, it was like like eighty three percent was you know, it was the very first one. And then you know, we had the sum that were in like the mid sixties seventies, and so that's kind of where it's fluctuating. That the goal, the main like objective that our company is focused on right now for you know, for this next quarter. The big push is you know, is ninety percent hired in ninety days,
you know, and that's it's a bit of a moonshot. And if you look at the sir like cr R like reporting for most like for the boot camps that do report there, you know a lot of them like hack Reactor, you know, they're they're sitting in the mid sixties. So it's something that we hired a full time business development guy who's out there, and you know, we have some companies that have you know that are starting to come back for repeat hire. So you have a couple of companies that have
hired you know, once hired eight, once hired seven. You know. So it's you know, initially there's there's a little bit of a stigma that we have to fight against in our brand. And it doesn't have any weight because you know, boot camp grads to an ex have been seen as like with some companies, you know, they kind of look down a little better the nails up at boot camp grads and and you know, we get kind
of lumped into that same category. And you know, and not all boot camps are the same, and so I don't want to you know, pay in the entire industry, as you know, is a part. It's just there's a there's a wide very like wide scale of quality there and so you know, but now we're now we're beginning to position ourselves as you know, on the top end of that, we're getting repeat hires from companies and you
know, strong NPS scores. So yeah, Ben, one question, So this is a new education model, right, and I think that this boot camps they sell that they are much more like hands on right. One thing, one thing that we complain A lot from about universities is that they're very like disconnected from the real world, from the real working world a lot of the time. Right, you go to a university course and like the teachers
are not in the market, Like it's disconnected. Right, you leave the university and you say, like, oh, I'm really not prepared to just have like a piece of paper. A lot of this is off course as a cartoonistic version of but it's a real thing. So how can you make sure when you are teaching a lot of people, how can you make sure that your course is going to like be relevant for the years to come. Yeah, you know, sometimes like investors will ask us, like, you
know, how do your graduates compare to CUS grads? And you know, we we can't compete on the four years of depth you know that a lot of them get and you know, and we can't teach the same the same depth and you know, operating systems and all that. Like we can do a little bit, but really where our strength is. You know, we
don't have tenured track research PhDs teaching our classes. You know, all of our instructors are senior level to you know, to VP level engineers at their previous companies that have been working hands on for you know, I think the least experienced one probably has like seven years of work experience, so it's you know, so they're all experienced software engineers that have actually done it and they've
used these things in practice, so that really informs it. But yeah, as far as like keeping up to date with the community, I mean that's something that we recruit for. We make sure that the instructors that we hire are you know, that are passionate involved, the types of people that you know, we're contributing the open source projects, the types of people who are going to meetups and you know, and we pay for them to go to conferences and you know, we really want them to be on the cutting edge
and cliche term. But but yeah, that's you know that that is actually one of the areas where we feel that we can't compete, you know, with CS degrees is that we give you know, a seven months thirty weeks actually comes out to about one year of college hour wise of focused training on relevant skills. Like we work from the job backwards instead of necessarily starting from
like a pure like first principles, bottom up type of approach. Yeah, I think you've got a major disadvantage there hiring these people out of the industry, because you know, oh my gosh, you know these these tenured PhDs, you know, they have absolutely no idea what it's like to work in the industry. I mean, it's insane. I got my four year degree in computer engineering, and I can tell you that I had a grand total of two professors who had worked out in the industry. Two. Yeah,
that's crazy. I mean it was ridiculous, right, And it's a fairly well known university here, and they do put out good CS grads, and you know, I was in the engineering department, so I got to split my time between electoral engineering and computer science. But still, I mean, I don't know, I tend to see less and less value in the four year degree. I mean, it shows that you have a certain level of discipline, you probably know the theory better than people who are going through the
boot camps. But I mean it's insane that they put people through four years and then they get out there and they still have to go through a whole bunch of on the job training before they can actually be really useful to the companies. Irom, Yeah, exactly. You know, and ever university is different. Like you look at MIT, you know, and they're a lot more you know, hands on, and they're coming out, you know and
doing multi hagathons things like that. But like you know, when I was studying CS in college too, I mean my one adjunct professor was the best professor I had, you know, as he was an engineer, you know that they brought him to teach. Yeah, it's it's definitely a mixed bag, you know, with when it comes to universities and trying to stick to a static four year model. Like I'm not sure that you know, that makes makes a lot of sense. I'm not going to you know, totally.
I don't want to say this, but like I don't want to like, you know, shoot down the whole, like you know, higher education, Like you know, that's not bad. And getting his degree is like a mark that you know that you do know some basics and you know how to work hard. But but yeah, maybe it's interesting because, like you know, the four year degree is spread across so many different job titles and
so many different professions. Every profession is different, and when you look at like each one, can you really in twenty eighteen, lump everyone together and a set amount of time for a set amount of skills, Like, it just doesn't really kind of make sense. I think we're going along again with like a model that was created a long time ago. That's kind of just in people's heads. It's kind of the normal thing to do, and that's
just kind of what they're used to doing. But I think one of the reasons that we're seeing that computer science is harder to keep up with is just because everything changes so fast, and what we're doing in the real world. They might not change. The theory behind everything might not change, but the actual implementation and the abstractions that we work with and the languages, and then to get something new into a computer science program at a typical university, it's
a very bureaucratic process. So but by the time something gets in there, it's outdated anyway, you know. And what you're talking about natter. It's funny because I think a lot of the computer science fundamentals don't change that quickly. But I mean, ten years ago, this iPhone was a brand new thing, right, you know, And now we're talking about AR and VR, we're talking about IoT, We've got a zillion different devices that you can write software for. I mean, you can write it for a thermostat and
a coffee maker. I mean it's crazy, and so so I think that's where we're seeing these things change, is that, Yeah, the fundamentals of good software are generally applicable everywhere, but I mean they're just they're not teaching you at that level. And yeah, like you said, you know, by the time they get around to talking about it even you know, I think some universities finally have like a web development class. Hello, it's not the nineties anymore, you know. But at the same time, I mean,
you know, yeah, you get a lot of the fundamentals. You spend a lot of time in those classes. Of course, I also spend a ton of time screwing around in college. But you know, it's just interesting. And I wonder a little bit, too, though, if my
bias comes out of the fact that I see boot camp grads. Most of them were pretty motivated to even get involved in one in the first place, And so I wonder if you get a different caliber of people, you know, where it's not a twenty year old who's expected to show up at the
university and come out of it four to six years later. Yeah, it took me six years to get my four year degree, you know, versus you know people who are like, look, I need I need a change, and they're going in and they're really motivated to make a career out of it. So I don't know. I mean, I think I have some bias here, especially since I don't feel like my degree really prepared me for
what I wound up doing. You know. The flip side is is that there is value and for some people they need kind of the regimented process that you go through at a university. Yeah. Well, and fortunately for you too, you know, being in Utah, you know, you probably didn't have much student loan dad, if any, you know when you finished college, and and I didn't have a lot. Yeah, and why is that? Well, yeah, I don't know anything about Utah and all this cool.
This sounds pretty cool. Yeah. So I went to a church run university and the tuition was comparatively low, to the to the point where I could work part time at the university and pay my tuition most semesters. And then I also was on the student council for the College of Engineering my senior year, and that was half tuition, so you know, I found ways to make it work. But I graduated with like four five branding student own debts all my take on this part. I'm also not a CS graduate,
right, so I don't stop studying. Like sometimes we say that maybe CS degrees are not very important things like that, and it sometimes it sounds like you are against knowledge, But like the fundamentals the theory, it's not that, Like I don't stop studying. I study every day. But I believe that the order of putting EU into the workplace first and the fundamentals coming after,
Like I think that's an order that I think makes more sense. Most of those fundamentals, you're just like they're just thrown at you when you're like nineteen twenty years old. You don't know, like you don't know why why those things are for After like one, two, three years working with the database, and then you start making questions, then you start to let me understand this a little bit, like oh, now I see like one year working with like Docker and then you're like, oh, how does os like
actually works? I think this is a much richer knowledge in the end of the day, Like when you put the practice before the theory. That means that usually you see you feel the problems before actually looking at the solutions. You know, are throwing like a bunch of solutions, and then you go to the world you find some problems, try to apply some of that. So I like this order of putting people like to work work knowledge go there
like this is web dev. You're learning JavaScript, react and stuff, and then after you are working for one year is like how does this GPU thing? I'm doing? Csays like what is a GPU? And then you start for that. I think that it's Uh, every time I learned theory after like understanding what problem I'm actually trying to solve what problem? Did like generate that theory? I think I learned much better than the other way. Yeah,
I think that's fair. I mean I took operating systems classes, and yeah, I know how the operating system works because of that, or at least parts of it where I just never used it in my web development career. So that's fair. And the universities are where they're doing a lot of the research that informs the field going forward, so there are definitely things to
be said about that. Yeah, like so something that like, So that's that's exactly what we focus on a land to school, Like we start with you know, we start with a script, but then they learn front end web development, so they're you know, they're they're working on things that are interactive, that are visual, and that is that is so much easier for
a new student to get into and enjoy. And then you know, and then we teach big O and data structures you know, three months later, you know, once they've you know, got in and the understand it and they're not confused about you know, like you know, the all the different syntax and you know, and stuff like that, and it definitely works a lot, you know, a lot better for our students work with that model,
you know. And the other thing to look at. Something that you know, I like to tell people is is if somebody were to come through and do the seven month Flama School program and you know, and then let's say it takes them, you know, five months to get a job, you know, and that's that's like below average you know, for five months. But so they come to the program, they get into a job,
and then we add on three years of work experience. So now you know, take that student after that four year period, compare them to a CS degree. You know, I have three years of paid experience. You know, you didn't have any student loan debt, and I mean you had your income. Sure, that's all paid off and done by then, you know, And they compare that to someone who's just now finishing with a CS degree.
Maybe you didn't get the same social experiences and all that, and maybe so maybe this isn't appropriate for an eighteen year old, if that's what you're looking to get out of it, But for an adult who's trying to get into a new career. I mean it's you know, you're miles ahead. Oh yeah, that's completely that's a completely interesting take on this. I haven't really thought of it that way, but when you put it in, when you frame it that way, and it's actually absolutely true, that's kind of
what is going to happen. You're right, that's there's no comparison, especially taking into consideration in the student lene that that people have these days. Yeah, I mean we've kind of been talking about college degree versus boot camp, and you know, and I've kind of been negative about the college degree, but I think I think it does have a place. I want to change tactics a little bit though, and I want to talk a little bit more
about just people coming into the field. So who do you see applying to the boot camps? I mean, is it generally you know, twenty somethings that decided not to go to college and then it's like, you know what, I don't want to be an auto mechanic or something. Or maybe they did get in a great degree and figured out they didn't want to be an accountant or a lawyer. Or are you seeing people that are a little bit older, you know, that have already had a career, or retirees that
are trying to have a second career. I mean, who are you seeing come at you? Yeah, so it's a mixed bag. So we see a little bit of everything. It's pretty concentrated around people who got into their career like they've been working for you know, five ten years, they don't
like what they're doing and you know, and they want to switch. So you know, you get you know, smart people that you know, maybe they're doing construction and they don't like doing that anymore and they want to get into offer engineering, you know, they you know, or there's people who you know, they studied finance in college. And you know, and they hate their life now, you know, and you know, working a finance
job, and so you want to switch it. Like you get some of that, you know, but yeah, we get we get some college students you know that come and do this, you know, instead of college or well, they'll what often happens is they'll take a semester off to our course and then they never go back because then they're employed. Interesting seeing that happen
a couple of times. But yeah, it's it's more definitely more adult, you know, retraining, and eventually our marketing focus and I think will shift to uh, you know, trying to to leave more students away from you know, from universities more that demographic. But but the nice thing though about older people who have families who you know, like work in their construction job.
You know, they you know, they're desperate and and they you know, are hungry, and they're willing to work hard and you know, extremely motivated. You know, we had this guy recently who you know, twenty
thousand dollars is you know what he was making. You know, he comes through the line of school program, you know, nine months later he's making it was like eighty five k and you know, we just nem we're talking to him and he was just you know, crying how and saying how his daughter could have her own bedroom now, you know, and it was just it's just really cool to see this this upward mobility that we're facilitating for a lot of these people that you know, that don't have a strong or just
you know, didn't make the right career choices early on. And you know, so we get a lot of that people that are you know a little further on it, that want to shift and do something better. That makes sense. How many students are you able to take on every however long it takes people to get through your program. Yeah, So our philosophy is, I mean, so you look at Stanford, Mit, Harvard, you know,
Berkeley nir CS programs. That's a lot of the value comes from the gating and the filtering, and so they get this positive selection bias where they have you know, all the top students that apply, they skim the top off that and you know, and so some of the value comes from from you know, closing that gate. You know, we don't want to operate in that capacity, so we set a ibar and a high standard and then we're willing to take everyone who can reach that. Because we're online, we
don't have to buy new buildings. We just have to hire new teachers. And so if we have an extra large class that's coming up, we'll divide it out into sections, make sure we have another teacher that's hired you know, higher additional tas, et cetera. So we can be flexible on the staffing. But really it's like we set a standard and then we try to
get as many people above that high standard as possible. Will be like as Stanford said, everybody with you know, a thirty act you know, and a three point a GPA can come now, and then we'll just make room, you know, like like without sacrificing quality, you know, but but you know, adapt to to make sure that endrom can get in. So that's more of our aproaches. We spend a lot of time and money training people before the course to get them to where they can meet our standards to
enter. Right now, we we only accept about five percent of applicants just because we do have pretty high standards and most people just get bored of it or you know, or give up before they before they reach that point. Because it's it's a lot of work. It's kind of like the first cuss in college. It's it's kind of like that amount of work and difficulty before you can get in, you know, and that may change going forward,
but that's that's our approach right now. That makes sense. I wonder a little bit what the differences are between like a fully online boot camp like yours versus you know, dev Mountain where they actually show up to a building and sit in the desk and have in person instruction. Do you think there's some trade offs there? Yeah, there's pros and cons for sure. You know.
So there's you know, a creative energy that you experience, you know when you're in the same room with people that you know that's really hard to duplicate online, you know. And yeah, yeah that you know, there's some of that magic that you know that you miss out on. But in some ways, you know, by doing it online, I mean there's a
lot of really convenient things that we can do. You know, lectures are you know, it's easy to record lectures and content and so students can go back and review everything because it's online, you know, they have access to a to a larger community, you know, that they're that they're baked into, you know, right from the very beginning, and so you know, so so they get a lot of positive interactions that way. But yeah, you know, there are some trade off. There's a lot of efficiencies that
we gain, you know, from doing it online. But yeah, there is some stuff that you miss. But I think overalls technology improves I think the cons will be minimized. But yeah, I'm kind of curious about the curriculum. I know that you say you focus on kind of what companies are hiring for, but is there just a set curriculum that everyone kind of uses every semester or whatever kind of however you group your students. I'm not sure if you do that by semester, but like, how do you come up
with that curriculum and how often is that curriculum revamped? And I'm also kind of curious what you are teaching right now too. Yeah, so right now we're teaching full stack web development, iOS development, Android development, data science, and UX design And so those are those are the five different courses that we have. Those are all separate courses. Yeah, all separate courses with
different faculties. And yeah, so we work backwards from hiring partners. So for example, I mean this is something like this week, we have a lot of hiring partners that are willing to very interested in well committing to hiring a significant number of our graduates if we can spin up Java portion of the
course. And so now we're looking at you know, a Java track you know that will fit in with like the full stack Web development course, and you know, we try to keep them, you know, a pulse on on, you know, what's what's happening, and you know what needs to
be taught. So right now with our full stack web course, it's full stake JavaScript initially, you know, so we teach React, we do reducts, you know, the twenty tools to go along with that, you know, and then node express on the back end, that's the first thing. And then uh, and then we do teach Mango. But then we you know, so that's that's kind of you know, standard boot camp fare.
Then after that we move in and we teach Python Postgress and uh, you know, to teach a different back end because that's something that there's a lot of different You're not going to see a ton of variation on the front end. I mean, okay, like maybe view or react, you know, or maybe like it's an older angular thing, but like that's a little more
consistent. But on the back end, like there's just pretty wide, you know, flavors of languages that you can encounter, and so we try to give them a totally different, you know stack, so they're exposed to something
is very different. Yeah, and then and then it's and then we go through a CS fundamentals after that, and so computer architecture and operating systems and you know, data structures and algorithms and networking even you know, they learned CE at that point and so they they dabble on that to give them some
more technical depth. Also heavily project focused, so when they finish up with that, they're working on team like projects and so by the end of the course, it's they have five or six hosted projects that they've worked on collaboratively and that's and that's really where everything gets solidified, and that's what helps get their foot in the door with with hiring partners. So with LAMB, the school kind of paying the way for them to kind of get in there,
and then after they graduate, they pay their way. What happens when someone like starts and they drop out, are they accountable for that? And how do you kind of vet people to kind of get the type of people that wouldn't drop out. Yeah, So when we first got started, the thing that people thought would kill us as drop out rates, you know, that was the first big hurdle we had to overcome, you know, And initially we had pretty high drop rates. I mean we had you know, like
forty percent you know in one of our classes. And just because it's hard and you can close your computer and walk away two different things we're doing. We use a master based progression system now, so if a student, if they don't master, like if they don't score eighty percent or higher on a week, then then they repeat that week. And so then the idea is that nobody finishes the course unless they have mastered and like badged on every single
topic that we teach. And this makes it so students that normally would get overwhelmed and get behind, they get a repeat a few times maybe on something that they struggle with, and students love it, you know. And that's so now our dropout rate is now below ten percent, but I mean five percent for some of our classes. But yeah, so with the actual income Store agreement. In those terms, they have like a grace period in the beginning where they can drop out, you know, for no penalty. I
think it recently changed. I don't. It's like two to four weeks or something like that. Initially after that, for every week they stay on, they would owe a pro rated amount stayed on for two months, they know, like part of the Income Sure agreement, not the full amount. Once they've been going full time for for over fifteen weeks, then then they're bound
at the entire Income Sure agreement if they drop out. I mean it's they're only paying if they are making fifty thousand dollars or more, you know, in a job that relates to the skills we taught. So I mean a lot of people that do drop out, they're going back to their construction job or something like that. So it's you know, so they're they're not going to be on the hook anyway. But yeah, so where do people get stuck then? I mean, at what point do people drop out or you
know that they start reducs. It changes and and uh that's something that we look at. I mean, like maybe we have an instructor you know that
isn't doing a good job. So like we had you know, an instructor that we let go, you know, and and the impact on that week, you know, you can see the you know, the drop out rate bump up a little bit, you know, compared to normal or maybe there's a certain lesson, you know, So like reducs is one that we had to like, you know, really look at and figure out how to simply
react as well. Like the first they hit react because going just from like JavaScript basing on CSS right and to react, it's pretty steep for somebody coming from from zero, and so that's something we had to like simplify, spread it out over a few more days, you know, take a few things out and like move to later in the course and like react, redecks.
Those are some some gatekeepers. And by the time we got to the really hard stuff at the end of the course like that, they were like, you know, battle proven by that point and willing to stick it out because it's it's a different type of model too, because it's it's full time, all day, you know, focused on this stuff, and so it's, uh, you know, it's it's pretty intense and it gets a little overwhelming to keep up with them. So we have to you know, provide a
lot of emotional support and coach our students. Yeah. I found this subject really interesting actually because like I live in Mississippi and i've actually I started a cutting school here about five years ago called Code South Lapse and I ran up for about two and a half for three years, and it never really went anywhere. But we did JavaScript, the PHP we did I think we did Angular one back then, and we did a little bit of React Native towards
the end when it was just coming out. And we never really were able to kind of get the number of people to come. And we even did free classes and we would still only have like three or four people. And I think the problem was that we were in Mississippi, first of all, and there just aren't that many people here that were solved opportunity in and I guess, but also, you know, scaling it is not an easy thing
to do. Like if you're in New York or San Francisco, you might have quite a few people to kind of pick from a pool of people there. But the fact that you're virtual kind of is a really really interesting take. And I assume that you all kind of had to overcome a lot of or solve a lot of new challenges that hadn't been solved before. I guess.
I know a lot of companies have attempted to do kind of like virtual online classroom training, but when you're working with this type of you know, when you're working with computer science and programming, a lot of the answers that I've been able to get that have been like from working directly with someone.
So I'm kind of curious, like what big hurdles that you've had to overcome to kind of fone tune that the training model or the actual teaching model to kind of get people to the point where they were able to learn and interact with the instructors without overwhelming the instructors. It's a totally different type of experience, and there was a lot of a lot of experimentation that we had to
do. And yeah, and I mean it's, uh, you know, one big problem after another, you know, and that's that's our life right now, you know, starting in business. But you know, like yeah, like so drop out rates that was one of the big ones. And yeah, okay, so I mean the very first big problem was growth and you know, how do we get people in seats? Can we prove that we can you know, find demand for this, and you know that's the
very first problem that needed to be solved. And you know the way that we did it was you know, through social media, you know, so we would the guy who runs free code camp was really nice. He let us post for our free our free courses and a lot of their groups. So we had a lot of people that signed up for that to you know, to get our free content. The uh you know Reddit, uh, you know, it can be hit it can be kind of a pretty vicious
group in there. But but the learned Programming subreddit, you know, we we posted a lot of our of our free courses in there and we're able to get a lot of people centered from there. So like it was like finding the right online communities that matched and like overlap with what we were doing. And you know, that helps us get people in seats, and then the income Sure agreement helps us get them to commit to you know, potentially
paying us at some point with the drop out rates. One of the big things that we had to had to worry about was the thing that solved that is the accountability. But then's we you know, kind of suck when it comes to you know, self discipline, and you know, and there's that
like you know entropy, you know, towards towards laziness. That's you know that it's inherent and everyone in And so we had to bake in a lot of mechanisms to to really help people stay on task and be focused when they're alone at the computer and command tee and enter and they're on Netflix, you know, and so we have so we have to like take attendance. You know, we create all their assignments. They're meeting with thas you know throughout
the day. So we have a lot of thas. We keep them you know, really tight ratio on that so they can you know, more hands
on help there. And then we block in you know, face to face time where they're supposed to be in there see you know, at beginning, middle, end of day, you know, things like that to you know, help them stay there and you know, and and then yeah, with the tight like attendance tracking, so like if they miss a class, you know, or miss part of the day, we have a student success person who like reaches out and was like, hey, like you know, ore,
you know class, we didn't have know that you were going to be gone, like just so they feel that that they're noticed, and then you know, facilitating a positive community. Like those have been the big things. The next big one that we're working on now is just you know, proving
to employers that are graduates are worth hiring. And we're seeing a lot of moments in there and a lot of positive signals and and that's so that's like the new the new, not the new, but that's the next like big thing that you know that we're we're in the middle of right now is you know, showing that the Alanda School graduate is worth hiring and that they can be a good software engineer. So I know some of your instructors. I
met an instructor named Luis Yeah Provo at Framework Summit. I don't know what course he teaches, but he was really nice. And then Andrew Madison teaches your iOS one of your iOS courses, and I know he used to work for dev Mountain YEP, and he's one of our panelists on our iOS development show on dev chat dot TV. How do you find these folks? How do you go about And it seems like you have some ties heer to Utah because both those guys live here in Utah, But yeah, how do you
find your instructors? How do you qualify him? Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of it's been through our network, you know, in the early days. But then yeah, like the Hacker news, you know who's hiring, you know, just job housing is Twitter. It's like Austin's Twitter. We get a lot of you know, job applications that come
through, like tweeting open positions through that. We started out being for the Utah based I mean about twenty five percent of our company is based out of Utah just because so so Caleb Hicks, who was also over the iOS program that in so the iOS program, you know that that was pretty incredible. It dead mountain and they had amazing results and you know, and was doing
really well. And several of them, you know I have moved on and there now they're working for us. The nice thing is, you know, we're remote, so like we have engineers that are just off in the boonies. You know, a guy used to or for Google that you know, lives in you know, a real place up in Oregon. And it helps that we can recruit from anywhere. You know. We pay good salaries, but it's anyway people can actually own a home because they are not in the
Bay area. Makes sense. Yeah, Utah. I mean, I'm always amazed that the number of people that like are really good at selfware development that come out of Utah. It's kind of crazy, actually, Like even the people I meet in San Francisco a lot of times from Utah. It's a growing market, It's yeah, kind of funny. Yeah, it's definitely interesting. And we're seeing companies either move out here, open satellite offices out here too, from the Bay area. So it's it's definitely an interesting market and
a growing market. But you can drive down the freeway and you'll see signs for HP and Disney and stuff, and those are all you know, technical programming jobs. So yeah, something interesting. So with you being in Missouri, Oh, Mississippi, I'm sorry. Something that we were concerned about initially
is like placement. So like with as it relates to geography, so like, you know, somebody who's in like, you know, North Dakota, like, are they going to be able to get a development job, you know, and is that going to be is that going to be an issue? And what we found is that the graduates that we have in more rural communities oftentimes have an easier time finding a job than the people in the Bay Area or in New York and because they have a much less competitive labor market.
So, you know, Kroger out in Tennessee, you know, they need to hire a bunch of software engineers, you know, and there's there's not a large talent pole to draw from, and so so that the person that we have there gets snatched up really quick. And we've seen that a lot, and there's and quite a few companies are willing to pay for relocation too. But that was something that was that was interesting. We didn't expect that. But the rural students actually have a pretty good it's a little easier
for them to get jobs. Actually that's spot on. There's so many people hiring here but in Mississippi. But the problem is there just aren't any people that grow up here that are in this industry. So like a lot of times they'll bring people from out of state to fill these positions or they'll just go and feel like it's really it's really interesting, like if you if you move here and you kind of you can live here and you're you know,
you have the very low cost of living. You won't have a problem finding a job. But the problem is you may have not even become into this industry if you're from here's the problem. So yeah, having a school like this is really cool. All right, Well, is there anything else that we should jump on talking about this stuff? If people want to apply to lamb to school, where do they go? I go to lambdaschool dot com. I want to be an instructor. Yeah, we have a careers page
at landa school dot com as well. So yeah, I know we have a lot of engineers listening to this. You know, we're looking at higre a bunch of engineers. We're actually looking at hiring or hiring software engineers, and we're hiring instructors. We are launching in the United Kingdom, so if there's anybody listening, especially who's willing to work out of the United Kingdom or that time zone. Yeah, we're looking for a program director right there,
right now. Awesome? All right, Well, let's go ahead and do some picks, Lucas, you have some picks for us, all right? I have a pick today. It's not only a technology, because I'm pretty sure you are ready chose this technology as a pick. But also a practice. So I've been using Cyprus a lot lately and I've been using it as a development environment for me, like working with front end. So this is my peak today. Like usually we when we are developing a new feature,
we are like changing code. It hot reloads, and we go to the browser, like play a little bit, see if it's all ready what we want, go back to the code. Then after it's done, we're going to write our integration tests. So what I'm doing is that I'm almost doing like a TDD with integration tests now. So in this new project I'm working, now, we set up a Cypress so I create the Cypress script to pilot the browser as I am building the future, and I think that my
productivity like is much better now. So this is my pick today. Try to look at Cyprus as a development environment. Try to automate your playing with the browser while you create the features. And in the end, when the feature is done, I have all those integration tests for free. So this is my pick today. Awesome, Yeah, I love Cypress. It's awesome, Nat or what are your picks? My pick is egghead dot iom and it's the fact not only that Egghead is awesome, But I have a bunch
of stuff coming out on EGAD. So I've completed two full courses, one on building mobile applications with React and Aws amplified serverless apps. I've also built a full course on building server list graph ql apps using Aws apps Sync. I'm also doing a course on Flutter that isn't completed yet, but it'll be a full like fifteen course tutorial and building Flutter apps mobile applications cross platform using
Flutter. And then I have a bunch of one off courses and I'm actually taking suggestions, so if you have any ideas for one off courses, these courses are going to be anywhere between thirty seconds to five minutes long, and they'll only be a single course or maybe at the most two or three together
versus like a long ten or fifteen course thing. But anyway, egghead is a really great place to learn and kind of polish up on existing skills or add like new skills within Like if I kind of compared to plural site, Egghead, you can get a lot of information like a really short amount of time, so it's kind of more condensed than a plural site. Is nice. Yeah, I love Egghead In fact, John Lindquist actually lives within a mile of my house, so oh no way, yeah, you're talking again,
right, Yeah, so funny stuff. But anyway, in fact, the last time I saw him, I was at the church and I think he was baptizing his son. They were having the baptism at the church. Church. Well, we're both members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Slaturday Saints and so, you know, and most people in our area are.
So there's kind of a central church and then there are a bunch of satellite churches in our It's what we call the stake, and a stake just oversees a bunch of congregations and that's where they have the baptisms and stuff is at that stake center, is what we call it. So yeah, so I was there for something else and I was just sitting out in one of the foyers and it was a Saturday morning and that's when they do baptisms. So anyway, funny, random story. But yeah, Egghead's awesome. They've got
a ton of content and so I'm a fan. So let me jump in here with a few picks. One of the picks that I have this isn't coding related at all. But I'm starting to I'm starting to really get some clarity around what I want from dev chat dot tv, which is nice. I mean I've only been doing this for like nine years, but you know, finally figuring this stuff out. And really what I'm looking for is just the opportunity to help liberate software developers to build cutting edge software that makes a
difference. And a lot of that just comes down to helping people get the skills and finding the tools and you know, those kinds of things to do it whatever it is they want to do. So if they want a promotion, they want to be a team lead, or if they want to go write more open source software or blog, or if they want none of that, they just want to earn enough to be able to go home at five
o'clock and play with their kids. I mean, whatever that is, you know, for people to kind of feel like they're free to do what they want to do. And one of the books that I've been reading lately just for my own thing, is called Extreme Ownership, and it's written by a couple of Navy seals or former Navy seals. They fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom
and the book is just incredible. They came back, people asked them to speak at their company retreats and things, and it kind of turned into this business and they put a lot of their knowledge into this book, and it kind of trades off between their experience in Operation Iraqi Freedom and then essentially, this is what we learned to seals and here's how we've applied it in the
business sector. And it's terrific. And I think a lot of times we fail to focus on building solid team leads and CTOs, and so we essentially promote a developer to that position and then don't actually train them on any of the skill they need to be good managers. And so if you're in that position, or if you're trying to develop some of these skills, this is a terrific book. A couple of other things I'm just going to throw out
there. I am actually hiring, so I'm looking for somebody who can help me with the Ruby on Rails app that I've been building to manage the podcast stuff. I want to be able to focus more on this freedom idea, and instead what I wind up doing is, you know, hammering on stuff that makes the processes run, and I don't have time to do all of that well anyway, So I'm looking for somebody to help with that. I'm
looking for somebody who's interested in helping with selling and managing podcast sponsorships. And I'm also looking for somebody who's willing to write show notes. I'm looking for a couple of somebodies for that. So if you're interested in any of those, just shoot me an email check at devchat dot tv and we'll set something up so that I can talk to you and see how that will go. But yeah, those are my picks, Ben, what are your picks?
Yeah, So a tool that we've used that's really helped Land School scale well is uh it's called airtable. So it's kind of like parse API, the thing that that used to exist not anymore. It's uh like spreadsheets with like built in APIs around it. And so we've been able to use that to uh uh i mean handle all of our student tracking and things like that and
then build some like simple quick you know services to connect with it. So it's been really easy because there's a really nice guy that's in place, so our non technical people can get in and work with the data, you know, create, read, update, delete, whatever, you know, do
all the stuff that they need with the data. But then there's these generated APIs around the spreadsheets that we can then interact within a dynamic way, which you wouldn't use it for like you know a massive like you know, production and application where you need like you know, really consistent like like like Facebook's not going to build off of it, you know, but but you know, for simple little projects and things that you're throwing up, it can be.
It can be really nice, especially for as like an admin interface airtable. I think I've seen this before. I think somebody else I know was using this and was sharing some of the spreadsheets for people to like enter data in and stuff. Yeah, they have like forms and stuff that you can then send out that populate in and then yeah, and then like use it.
You can use Zapier then as well with it. So then like to like glue it together with a bunch of other apps, so like conservices you're using and yeah, we didn't write any code for ourselves for like the first year and just use like Zapier and a bunch of other different apps to just kind of glow everything together and a little bit of a house of cards. But it actually worked really well. We could spin stuff up pretty fast. Makes sense, all right. Well, if people want to find you online,
where do they go? So Twitter? And uh, maybe this wasn't the best Twitter handle, but I picked it a few years ago. It's a it's a s U n j I, E M I and those and Jammy. I used to live in Taiwan, so that's my Chinese name. All right. Well, let's go ahead and wrap this up. Thank you for coming, Ben, Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It was great to meet you guys, and you know, it was a fun
discussion. Very cool to meet you too. I've been following Land to school for a while, so it's cool to just kind of talk about it. So yeah, all right, Well we'll wrap it up and we'll catch everyone next week.