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Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

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Re: Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

#151

Post by javajosh »

prdonahue wrote: post #138
cpursley wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out https://cogenteducation.com/products when you have a chance. We make interactive case studies for biology that go much further than any textbook, digital or otherwise. We have a free trial: https://cogenteducation.com/trial full disclosure: I'm a developer there

> I think most of my colleagues will be moved over to open educational resources within fifteen years, and I'm not sure there's long-term profit to be made in this market. Sounds like he's looking for a free solution, not trialware.

"Interactive case studies" is a value-add that might be worth paying for.

Re: Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

#152

Post by andrew_wc_brown »

mabbo wrote: post #2

As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I've had two or three interactions with them and each time they completely dropped the ball. Extra funding is great, but if they can't hire, they can't use it.

Toronto startup hire culture is really sad even today.

I interviewed at Top Hat 3+ years ago and I remember their hiring process was sad because it was a FizzBuzz test under conditions that were setup for me to fail.

I wasn't allowed to use my own laptop, editor of choice, or language of choice to complete the test. They wouldn't tell me what conditions they wanted eg. do they want test code?

I had to do the test on their computer, in javascript, no internet.

They said I was slow. Well you should have let me use MacVim and I would shown how slow you are in TextMate.

They said I didn't write test code. They wouldn't tell me, and they wouldn't even look at mass bodies of work of production apps where I had tons of test code I written with CI.

Re: Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

#153

Post by flukus »

softawre wrote: post #145
throwawayosiu1 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything from: 1. how you'd handle customers for various problems? (which seems fair enough). 2. some coding questions (my friend did this in matlab but they wanted him to do it in python). 3. some IQ questions 4. some questions about the platform (which my friend didn't have an idea about as he'd never used top hat before).

> some questions about the platform I think it's useful to know whether an interviewee who has driven into your place of business is serious enough to spend 30 mins learning your platform.

It's fair if the website has useful content. I've been pinged before for not researching the company after their website basically said "we specialize in absolutely everything".

Re: Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

#154

Post by PublicFace »

PDFs are free and all students already know this. The only people who care are the people with a vested interest in selling pointless and useless garbage(textbooks). I didn't pay for my textbooks in school. Nobody should. If it's useful you should copy it and share it with your friends. Software, textbooks, tools, designs, ideas, whatever. Information is free whether you believe it or not. The medium is what you should pay for....but it is not the message.

Re: Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

#155

Post by wahnfrieden »

andrew_wc_brown wrote: post #152
mabbo wrote: post #2

As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I've had two or three interactions with them and each time they completely dropped the ball. Extra funding is great, but if they can't hire, they can't use it.

Toronto startup hire culture is really sad even today. I interviewed at Top Hat 3+ years ago and I remember their hiring process was sad because it was a FizzBuzz test under conditions that were setup for me to fail. I wasn't allowed to use my own laptop, editor of choice, or language of choice to complete the test. They wouldn't tell me what conditions they wanted eg. do they want test code? I had to do the test on…

Hey, I'm Alex @ Top Hat, in engineering

Sorry to hear you had an awful experience like that. We definitely want to provide a better candidate experience than that.

As I mentioned before in this thread I can't speak for interviews that long ago, but these days we have a standard process: we want to see you in your element, so you're encouraged to use your own machine and whatever tools and languages you're best at. We also currently do a pairing-style mini-project where you're free to look things up - Google has become another essential tool for devs, so we want to avoid forcing people into unnatural ways of working that won't reflect their actual abilities in an interview.

Re: Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

#156

Post by gravypod »

javajosh wrote: post #151
prdonahue wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most of my colleagues will be moved over to open educational resources within fifteen years, and I'm not sure there's long-term profit to be made in this market. Sounds like he's looking for a free solution, not trialware.

"Interactive case studies" is a value-add that might be worth paying for.

What will you be paying with after your 5 to 30k/year tuition? You can't bleed a stone.

Re: Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

#157

Post by [deleted] »

surge wrote: post #19
pyre wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through the interview process with them several years ago (when they were still called Top Hat Monocle). I basically got very positive feedback from the interview process, until I had to interview with the CEO. Apparently the reason given by the CEO for torpedoing me was that I didn't have enough projects on my Github account so I didn't "love the web" enough. Take from that what you will about their attitude…

Seriously? Not every project can be in a public repo, are all their projects on open repos? Some of us host our own or use different sites because we've been using git longer than github. Also, love the "web". It's called the Internet, are you a tech CEO or not? I love how critical they are because you didn't conform to their specific idea of how coders share their code and communicate. Someone can be pro open source…

[deleted]

Re: Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

#158

Post by aphextron »

danielford wrote: post #103

I teach biology at a community college and most of the services listed in that article wouldn't improve my courses. I've already switched three of my four courses over to open textbooks, which students can download for free or purchase for the cost of printing. I use Openstax for these. https://openstax.org/subjects For the online learning software, I've also dumped the publisher products and switched to the free spa…

>I think most of my colleagues will be moved over to open educational resources within fifteen years, and I'm not sure there's long-term profit to be made in this market.

As a student, I'm not sure I agree with this. I think there's a lot of value in having a really well laid out, well designed textbook with good examples and illustrations. Especially in lower division classes where you end up mostly teaching yourself the material from the text anyways. Most of the open courseware I've had to deal with in classes was extremely sub par compared to actual textbooks.

I think if someone could create textbooks at the quality of Pearson in the range of $20-$50 instead of $100-$200, I would be happy to pay for better materials.

Re: Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

#159

Post by jimhefferon »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #100
jimhefferon wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about TopHat. But I'm a professor and I've offered material for free for twenty years. I can think of some very good reasons to prefer this marketplace-thingy from an author's perspective. 1) Exposure. If you want to sell you want to be on the shelves at the local mart. (And some authors don't want to support the download traffic.) 2) Platform. If what you are offering is guaranteed to work beca…

Thank you for the response. I understand why authors might find this beneficial but do you think it can outweigh the advantage of being free?

I offer a text, Linear Algebra, both for Free download and for sale (at Amazon $22). It generates a respectable number of sales. People will pay, or at least some people will pay, for quality. They do get mad, though, at paying hundreds.

I am not a business person but I can imagine a scenario where schools purchase a block of the materials for classes. Say, a prof wants to use a Graph Theory document. Their bookstore pays $13 each for the materials, and a bill for that appears on the student's college charge. Seems possible to me. And beyond that individuals could buy one at a time, of course.

Re: Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

#160

Post by js4win »

Panini_Jones wrote: post #30
stephanos2k wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how so?

They have a reputation for being a bad employer for interns (culture/mentorship) and also producing bad software. Apparently, many of the students (not including myself) have actually used the software and not enjoyed the experience.

Hi, I'm a current dev at Top Hat, went to UofT and started about a month ago. As @fastftw mentioned, the culture and mentorship are much better than you would expect at most growing startups.

The teams are small, yet the software we deliver is well tested internally before being put out into production. The best part here is that employees are encouraged to use the Top Hat products themselves, which really helps better the overall applications.

As for mentorship, team leads and the execs are very accessible and guide you through how the processes at the company work. New employees are encouraged to share their opinions while doing development which is a big plus. I hope this cleared up some concerns you had!

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