Launch School 101:
Show Notes:
4:27 - (On leaving ‘ad tech’) Most software engineering jobs pay really well, of course, but - and this is probably the case with most jobs, period - you have to reconcile your personal beliefs with the primary goals of a money making enterprise. Everybody has to go through that. Ad tech in particular, especially in san francisco, is focused on growth, and focused on numbers.
It’s hyper focused on money, especially with regards to increasing conversions and eyeballs for the customers of the ad tech company. Which is a fine goal, but not my personal reason for getting up every morning. So it was hard for me to get excited for it. I was excited about my paychecks at first, but eventually you get numb to that.
6:18 - In the search for something different and more meaningful, we decided to focus on education (which led to LaunchSchool). My partner, Kevin, works on this with me, and I’ve known him since 2002. Early in our careers we were both computer engineers at IBM in Austin, Texas.
Early on, we read a book called Good to Great by Jim Collins and he talks about getting the right people on the bus.
9:18 - This is one of the things that makes us unique (in teaching coding skills), is our approach to Mastery Based Learning. It’s about making sure that people know what they’re doing each step of the way, and taking indefinite time on each step.
Ours is a curriculum where you have to demonstrate you understand each topic every step of the way. And we don’t know how long that will take. And we’re a 100% Mastery based program. We evolved over the past 3 to 5 years to that system because we were unhappy with the results we were seeing.
I think we are the only place where Mastery Based Learning is taught.
13:13 - We started this to try to figure out education. It was not a money making endeavor. So to us, teaching became the engineering problem to solve. I was not a proponent of Mastery Based Learning before LaunchSchool. Mastery Based Learning or Competency Based Learning is not unique to LaunchSchool, it’s a well known pedagogy in academic papers. But it’s really hard to implement.
Think about a physical classroom. Mastery Based Learning means that a student gets to occupy a seat in that classroom for an indefinite amount of time. That’s a really hard promise to make when our schools are tasked to usher through students. It’s not about training students and making sure they understand every topic, but getting people through.
15:39 - Complexity grows exponentially if not handled linearly. You have to handle one concept at a time, otherwise the complexity grows out of control.
16:49 - So, everyone wants to talk about algorithms. Well, there’s no point in talking about algorithms and solving complex algorithmic problems if you can’t handle loops. And lots of people can’t handle loops. Or nested loops. There’s no point. So to cover an advanced topic is pointless.
22:24 - I see a lot of people go from Explore - and bypass the Fundamentals - and head straight into Advanced. And then they realize there are so many knowledge gaps they have to plug in, and they spend years fixing that.
25:21 - We chose a pedagogy, and then built a pricing model around that.
27:30 - The value that students get from their education has such a lag from when they pay. There’s a tremendous lag. Think about Uber. You pay for an Uber ride, and you derive the value immediately. I view education almost like a restaurant that serves healthy food, and the restaurant says something like, ‘If you have eat here for 5 years, you’ll live an extra 10 years.’ It doesn’t taste great.
Coding bootcamps can make a big promise - ‘in a few months, you can get a job.’ And they have been getting away with that because the job market is so good. It’s so good - and there’s such high demand for software programmers - that they can take people who are just in that ‘Explore’ phase (of learning) and pay them. And that’s why bootcamps are very successful.
If you think about long-term though, it’s dangerous. Because you have a lot of people who are underskilled. 2 months, 3 months, that’s just not enough time to develop context or nuance for some of these problems. So if there’s a downturn, people are not going to be able to get these jobs. So it’s very dangerous.
I think coding bootcamps are a marketing success. It’s market forces that allow this to happen, and it’s the marketing - it appeals to people's’ desires for fast results. Lasting education needs to last decades, a career. So that’s the hard part of education.
32:14 - You don’t just want a job doing programming. Because most programming jobs, as I alluded to earlier with ad tech, are not very good, are not very satisfying. What you want to do is develop enough mastery so you can dictate some of your own terms on your own career. In order to do that though, you need to get pretty good. And that’s what we’re trying to do here.
Fail State Movie - Documentary on for profit higher education.
36:10 - The key word in higher ed these days is ‘retention.’ It isn’t learning - it’s how do we get students, and how do we get them to stay. Because the attrition rates in a lot of schools are close to 50%. Which is astounding if you think about it. So they’re trying to retain students any way they can. One way they do that is to through grade inflation. So everyone gets a good grade now. A C nowadays is a Fail. If a professor fails too many students, that professor will get pulled into the Dean’s Office and be told ‘What are you doing? If you do that, these students won’t come back.’
38:21 - You’re starting to see companies not demand a college degree anymore. Google doesn’t demand that. Deloitte said recently they won’t demand a college degree. And it’s because the college degree has begun to lose any meaning as far as quality. And part of the reason for that is because schools need to retain all the students, otherwise they can’t make money, so for that reason, they’re letting everyone through. It’s a compound effect here.
It means more than ever that a Mastery Based system is required. Learning institutions have to hold the bar, and educate students on why that is. I spend most of my time talking about Mastery Based Learning for this reason.
47:50 - (On international students in some countries) - It’s pretty easy in the United States to say, if you want to work at Google, you need to learn this (x). That’s a fairly straightforward statement to make. And you can decide, that’s too hard or I don’t want to do that. But when you don’t have that context, it’s really difficult to convince people to learn things deeply unless they have this natural intellectual curiosity.
53:10 - Everyone needs to learn to code just from the perspective of awareness.
Does everyone need to become a software engineer? That I don’t know, it’s more of a career choice. But programming concepts will touch more and more things.
More and more jobs will require how data flows and how systems connect.