What is going on guys welcome to JavaScript LifeStyles! It has been a crazy week, and as some of you might have figured out I have had to juggle time pretty hard the last month or so and am likely looking at that kind of time management nightmare scenario for at least another few months as I finish out Lambda School. The Labs portion of the program is basically an exercise in frustration. There have been a few people who have asked about an update on Lambda so we will do a quick one.
Labs are cool in concept but are basically a nightmare in execution. The idea is that you are working on a legit project and dumping real code into a preexisting or new codebase. Sounds good right? Well here is the problem they are trying to expose you to stuff that most software engineers will not face until they are well into their career. Basically staff or lead engineer stuff. They are having students doing a large portion of the SCRUM work, they are having students figure out scoping and doing ALL of the sprint planning without assistance.
Here is the issue, and mind you this is coming from someone who has project management experience. The issue is that students are not on the same page. They are clueless and learning. Myself included, right? We go through sudo structured content for the better part of a year and then get dumped into labs where we do standup after standup and they feel basically useless because we, the TPMs, the planning managers basically, are trying to herd cats aka students, and get them moving on tasks, and we are consuming about 2/3rds more time than would really be necessary because we are basically being treated like staff or lead engineers without any of the authority that comes with it. I cannot tell one of the other students hey, here is your task accomplish it, touch base with someone if you have questions.
Instead, there is standup after standup after standup and you hope that people get up to speed. I get the concept and have already done the legwork to get things going on my end but other students AKA my team is still trying to go through the course documents and quizzes on canvas and are trying to understand SCRUM, trying to understand AGILE, and generally trying to get their bearing.
Instead, if the Lambda team just stepped in and said you folks are working on X feature. and helped to lead the standups a bit it would be a far better, and far more realistic situation. Now there is some awesome staff in this unit with a ton of experience, and they are doing their best, but the reality is that coming from project management, and even an educational background like I do (in addition to sales and retail) you quickly see the cracks. We need to be in the codebase and learning to translate the Trello cards to the code base, that is a general idea, but we could do far better work for the stakeholder's Lambda simply invested in just a few more staff...
Now, the final issue I will address here, is that the stakeholders should not be for-profit entities unless we are getting paid. It is a really gross look that I am paying upwards of 30 thousand dollars to work on a codebase that is going to have a monthly subscription model that is for-profit, regardless of the fact that it is a cool concept. I love the concept and would love to work on it long-term, but I am not being paid or offered college credit for my efforts. Lambda School is not an accredited university. Thus all work is on a voluntary basis, and which, correct me if I am wrong, means that they need to be non-profits. Additionally, I am pretty sure Lambda School makes money from our efforts as well. So the model is to use our skills and efforts and our work product for free. Generally, just not something I am thrilled about. Now there is not much I can do here. I could quit and get an attorney and take it to court but at the end of the day, and I would assume this is the general consensus, I just want to be done, it really is not worth the effort. Talk about burnout. Lambda School and all of the horrid frustrations took something that I find fun and turned it into a nightmare over the course of the year that I have been doing it.
Final verdict? Understand that Lambda School is far more interested in getting paid than your success. All of the clamoring about their pay being aligned with student success is not really true, and they are not holding up their end of the bargain. They are paid every time someone signs an ISA, they are funded regardless of how well you do. Their fellow's program sells student services and the student might get employed for a month at a time. It is a potential opportunity, but at the end of the day, we are doing a program to get hired. That is the goal. In closing my lambda rant, I have repeatedly asked for someone to come on this show, or to even talk about stuff and got one leadership level person to take a meeting, but nothing came from it. It is all lip service. And I would hope that there is good intent but at this point, after over a year dealing with this organization, I have found far more flaws than I have redeeming qualities. I originally wanted to do App Academy, and still wish that I had, and while I would have missed out on meeting a few amazing classmates I would not be staring at glaringly obvious shortcomings that are being swept under the rug without any student recourse. Austen Allred & Lambda Team, here is a hint: You have hundreds of people per month coming into your school. From all walks of life, and instead of utilizing them to figure out how to better your program you demand form after form after form asking for input, and not once have I seen any of it taken.
Alright, let's move on. Enough on Lambda. They won't listen, and to be honest, I am fed up trying to give valuable input only to be ignored. If I sound bitter and frustrated I apologize, I just see the school I am getting an endorsement from going down the tubes and my success and my investment in my quote education are tied to their continued success. After I get hired in the industry it will be null and void, but until I have that experience locked in for a couple of years their endorsement is a part of my package to get hired. If they do not get their act together I am locked into paying for a part of a service that is being turned into toilet paper basically. That is a frustrating situation.
So researching is quite literally looking something up. It seems simple but there are a few tips and tricks that I am going to share with you today. You pull up your favorite search engine and you type in what you are looking for. Pretty simple right?
What if I told you that you could do it in a faster more effective way. First, let's have a common metric. Let's use character count as our metric. Each time we hit a key it takes a fraction of a second and how many overall characters go into something is a good measure of our time spent. (Want to do a character count on these show notes LOL). So it will be our yardstick, our measure of time.
Try this: Type the following into google: "Top UI component libraries react.js" into google and hit search. Screenshot in the show notes:
Now type in "top UI react.js"
