It is actually so much work and costs a lot to produce an online course. After you have a lot of content is it not better try and sell the content you have, and then offload the creation workload udemy style, especially with coding courses since there are so many remote work people in this space.
Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff
11–20 of 59 posts
Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff
#12Would love to know what caused this to happen, given (as the article says) huge amounts of money being poured into (seemingly) similar businesses.
It can be summed up easily: Most of the teachers left years ago due to a toxic work environment and all of the content went stale making it not live up to competitors.
Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff
#13I was always impressed by Treehouse and recommended it for people trying to learn to code. But it did require you to have more inner drive (or grit) than a bootcamp
Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff
#14I know that not all remote learning companies are doing great, Khan Academy which was booming in the mid teens had layoffs as well. In addition Udacity has also had multiple rounds of layoffs as they are struggling with profitability. Those 2 mentioned are very prominent and if they are doing bad then smaller players like treehouse probably are not doing great also. I don't agree with the no management change they di…
The 4 day work week was great. It was just a convenient scape goat for failed business initiatives at the time.
100% and the CEO blamed his own lack of work ethic, it's been mistranslated over the years, but this was not due to any real "study".
Do not attribute 32 hour work week to not being successful, it was incredible and allowed for a ton of creative work to come to life.
Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff
#15Sad news. I remember finishing the HTML, CSS and PHP courses on there back in 2014. They really paid attention to details and made video-based learning less boring. It's a pretty stark contrast to Udemy, where I don't think I've ever finished a single course.
They had (at the time), really good teachers, and the forums were a great source of knowledge.
Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff
#16Would love to know what caused this to happen, given (as the article says) huge amounts of money being poured into (seemingly) similar businesses.
I imagine part of the problem is many of these coding schools are scams. It isn't that people can't learn from them, but what they are teaching is usually just too narrow to be all that useful.
How is it a scam? It's a month-to-month subscription service, $25/mo. from what I recall. They didn't charge 5-figure tuition and offer weak "job guarantees", which is what coding bootcamps do.
Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff
#17Sad news. I remember finishing the HTML, CSS and PHP courses on there back in 2014. They really paid attention to details and made video-based learning less boring. It's a pretty stark contrast to Udemy, where I don't think I've ever finished a single course. They had (at the time), really good teachers, and the forums were a great source of knowledge.
Similarly, I remember taking a handful of courses there many years ago. They were very high quality relative to what was available then.
I wonder if their particular niche of online education is tougher nowadays. There seems to be a wealth of online platforms tailored towards the "professional skills" edge of the market—if I ever need a course on migrating to Azure using only a TI-86 calculator while respecting HIPAA, I'm sure Pluralsight has a course—but when I think of the more general "learn to code" style courses, I don't think of Treehouse anymore.
In particular, having watched multiple family members/friends transition into software development (coming from no real background in code) over the last couple years, I've noticed they swing between two extremes:
1. Completely free resources, like FreeCodeCamp, CodeAcademy's free plan, or App Academy Open. 2. Going all-in on an immersive bootcamp, typically with some kind of job placement assistance program at the end.
I wonder if more middle-of-the-road premium options like Treehouse are losing marketshare to this. Though obviously, this is big time anecdata.
Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine part of the problem is many of these coding schools are scams. It isn't that people can't learn from them, but what they are teaching is usually just too narrow to be all that useful.
How is it a scam? It's a month-to-month subscription service, $25/mo. from what I recall. They didn't charge 5-figure tuition and offer weak "job guarantees", which is what coding bootcamps do.
They stole much of their initial content from other people and ripped all attribution from it. I found two of my blog posts on their site, without any attribution or permission.
Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff
#19Perhaps a business that makes money from educational content needs something that provides additional value (over and above what you'd get from a folder of videos), e.g.
A. Interactive features (scrimba.com)
B. Mentors (demandcurve.com)
C. Credentials (Udacity, Coursera)
D. Community/cohort
E. Convenient access to frequent updates (blinkist, shortform, getabstract)
Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff
#20This is a bummer. I met a few of the Treehouse folks as well as a couple students at a private social thing some years ago. They made a strong impression of being both passionate and competent, a real contrast to the bulk of the online class companies imo, but it's hard to compete against dirt cheap or free.