A CS Education That's Free Until You Get a Job - Austen Allred of Lambda School

All right, so today we have Austin Allred. He is the CEO of Lambda School, which was in the summer 2017 batch. Lambda School is an education model that is free until you get a job. So, Austin, what I wanted to ask you about—you mentioned this on a few podcasts that I've listened to you on—and basically, there's this core idea in Lambda School that you have to be kind of confident enough to even apply. This is a great opportunity for many people, but what I'm curious about is how do you encourage people to do something that's probably good for them that they might just be scared to do or they make excuses about?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's actually the problem we grapple with the most. I think Patrick Collison said something along the lines of, you know, if you think about it, the highest leverage activity any human can have is inspiring other humans to do what they're capable of. In many ways, I see Lambda School as like the realization of that.

We've had a lot of students in the past who would graduate, and then whenever they felt ready, they would start applying for jobs. We have students that would just wait and wait and wait, and we’d be like, "What, you know, why are they not working hard? What's going on?" You talk to them, and you realize it's massive impostor syndrome. They're just not confident or comfortable with the idea that they're now a software engineer, and so they're just kind of procrastinating that.

So now we have some mechanisms that get you to, you know, start applying earlier. But yeah, like the minute they start applying, they get interviews, they get hired, they get a six-figure job, and it's like, "What? What were we waiting for?" Right? You're totally capable.

And what about the people before Lambda School? A few of the questions that came from Twitter were basically like, "Isn't this just an opportunity for rich people?" You know, like being able to leave your job and commit full-time to a seven-month program.

Yeah, my first answer to that would be we have part-time programs as well, so you can do it evenings and weekends. We have experiments running where we pay people living stipends that will be expanding greatly. We'll be announcing something in the near future along those lines in concert with a few other tech leaders here in the valley. But yeah, I mean, the number one problem we have to solve on the admission side is getting the people who are qualified to actually apply.

Yeah, it's kind of a—you wouldn't think of it as being a problem. It's a YC problem too. Um, yeah, but no, it totally is. Yeah, some of the best companies, there's like, "I just don't know if I can get into YC." And that's a difficulty of having a good reputation where a lot of people want to go there. There are people who assume that they won't get in, which is not the case, right?

I mean, so your acceptance rate maybe has changed, but I heard you say it's 25% of the people who make it through that first initial test. The people that make it through the pre-course work, it might even be higher now. I mean, though the free course work is more difficult, the vast majority of our selection mechanism is the pre-course work of how well you do on it. If you put in the time, sometimes I wonder if we could just make the pre-course work really long and have that be it—no interview, no nothing, just just the work.

Yeah, I mean, because that's obviously like your business hinges on you assessing that risk, right? Correct? And so if you could make it sufficiently difficult, yeah, it would work—yeah, in theory. I mean, you run the risk of false negatives or false positives, I guess. But yeah, all that we need to find out is: Are you of average, you know, mental intelligence, and will you work really hard?

Yeah, and I think YC is similar, right? Like, when I got into YC, I felt super intimidated. There were brilliant people all over in the room. But just because you went—you have a PhD in computer science from MIT, and you got a 1600 on the SATs as a freshman—doesn't necessarily mean you have a successful company.