1/ @LambdaSchool I would be remiss if I didn't say something. I've been contemplating writing this for a long time now. I am going to preface this with the following: I am not anti-Lambda, in fact, quite the opposite. I feel a responsibility to the past and future student body.

2/ Lambda was a fantastic experience that brought with it great friends, a great education, and in my case, great opportunities. I have tried to pay that forward by always being available to new cohorts to answer questions, review resumes, and help people make connections.

3/ In some cases,I have been able to leverage my position and hire Lambda students. See, I am a Lambda 'success story'. I am now working for a large international consulting firm as a Project Technical Lead for the Gov't. But my success was born out of the old Lambda School.

4/ I was successful because of the curriculum, the community, and the collaboration. I started in February 2019 and Lambda was very different then. Each new iteration of Lambda strays farther and farther from what made it great to begin with. And that really bothers me.

5/ Ill explain why. Let's start with curriculum. The DS curriculum as it stands today is wholly inadequate for an aspiring Data Scientist. Lambda has actually removed the most pertinent units for a Data Scientist. There is no longer a unit on big data or on cloud architecture.

6/ If Lambda hadn't taught me Dask, DataBricks, and AWS, I would NEVER have gotten my job. And as a technical lead, do you know what I have learned in the real world over the last 11 months? The sexy Machine Learning part is about 1/8th of what we spend our time on.

7/ Most of our time is spent on Data Gathering, Data Analysis, Data Preprocessing, and variable selection. Then comes the sexy model building part (blink and you'll miss it) Finally, pipeline engineering and deployment to production. Ill give you one guess where the majority of

8/ that work takes place. In a Unified Analytics Engine. In my case, and many others, Databricks. And do you know what supports all that storage, processing, and data manipulation... Cloud Architecture. So to say that Big Data and Cloud Ops are not important components of

9/ Data Science education is like saying we dont really need air to breathe. If you don't come out of the education understanding the cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) or how to use a Unified Data Analytics Engine. You were not prepared. Instead, for whatever reason Lambda has chosen to

10/ substitute the life blood of data science with extra computer science units. Guess how many times I've used block chain in Data Science? Never. How about data structures? Very infrequently, and I am being generous by choosing to count python dictionaries as hash tables.

11/ The curriculum priorities are moving in the wrong direction for DS. I can't speak for the other learning paths. Now lets talk about community. Perhaps the catalyst for this post was being removed from the student slack channels this weekend. When I was starting out slack

12/ and the interaction it allowed for with more advanced students and graduates who had jobs was invaluable. I spent hours every day connecting, collaborating, and learning from the Lambda community. Up until last night when the Alumni was castrated I was still using slack.

13/ I pride myself that I continued to learn from the community and teach others in the community. This is part of what made Lambda great. It was open source knowledge transfer. Now the very element that has succeeded is being cut off from the students to everyones detriment.

14/ The other thing I have noticed is a steady decline in moral of the student body. People used to be so positive and trusting about Lambda. They use to be open and willing to express themselves. Over the past year and a half it seems this free expression has been stifled by

15/ student success in many ways. Student Success came about roughly 3/4 of the way through my time at Lambda. And, to be blunt, seems to be more about protecting Lambda the organization than Lambda the student body. That was the first major culture shift I witnessed in Lambda

16/ Student Success exists no more for the students than HR exists for employees. They are watch dogs. They are enforcers of rules under the guise of assistance. I, myself had a run in with them because I actually got a job, and that was straying from the defined path.

17/ But I am not here to talk about me. The general mood of the entire culture shifted. People were more guarded in what they said, and what they did. Even instructors acted differently. Any great scientist knows that community and creativity are the life blood of research.

18/ Ok we talked Curriculum and we talked Community, but before we talk collaboration I want to underscore one more point. As of this weekend Alumni can no longer interact with the student community. Why the social isolation? Haven't we had enough of that. I cannot count how

19/ many times I have been asked pertinent questions in before and after hours. And I cannot count how many times, back when I was a student, I asked those very same questions of the Lambda OG's. And this brings me to collaboration.

20/ A school that preaches Open Source should be a school without walls and barriers. Collaboration is so important. And while I understand build week and labs is a time to collaborate, it, at best, represents about 20% of time at Lambda. I lead a team of 18 people

21/ Data Scientists, Software Engineers, DevOps, and DBA's. Collaboration is the name of the game. We cannot so much as hope to bring a machine learning solution to a production environment without understanding how to effectively communicate and work together. We use to do

22/ a lot more of that. Before it felt forced. Before it was a box to check. And if I could drift backward for a moment in my thoughts, forced collaboration should not have been implemented to the detriment of the most important pieces of the curriculum, Big Data and Cloud.

23/ In summary, Lambda is making critical errors, in my professional and experiential opinion in Curriculum, Community, and Collaboration. I have tried over months to have conversation with decision makers behind closed doors because I truly care about the mission and the people

24/ of Lambda. But it has been to no avail. It concerns me that the current lot of DS students will not be prepared take on the demands of the jobs they apply for. It saddens me when I see the culture shift because people feel like their opinions are stifled and it irritates me

25/ that the spirit of collaboration seems to be evaporating. @Austen -- You had an incredible vision, and instructors like @ryanallred , @rrherr, Aaron, and John Cody. Use them. Lambda can only muffle concerns and emotions of the students for so long. I sense a storm brewing.

I say these things out of genuine concern to see Lambda Students and the organization succeed. Please take a good introspective look at what has changed. I think its time to revert to an earlier release.