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Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

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Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

#21

Post by midev »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #9
tedyoung wrote: post #2

Would 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.

> what they are teaching is usually just too narrow to be all that useful

They were video lessons on HTML, CSS, and other languages. Your comment makes no sense, and sounds more like projection than valid criticism.

Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

#22

Post by rchaud »

tedivm wrote: post #18
rchaud wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is unfortunate about your blog posts. But customers pay for their video lessons, which (at least in 2014), were all created in-house.

Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

#23

Post by [deleted] »

rchaud wrote: post #15

Sad 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.

[deleted]

Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

#24

Post by 908B64B197 »

I have to say this doesn't come as a surprise.

Bootcamps have failed one after another. The most well known, Lambda, is even desperate enough they will "loan" you a new "grad" for free to try to get you to hire one [0]. And that's not even scratching the surface of what's wrong with bootcamps in general, like having instructors barely a few months ahead of students giving out lectures and grading assignments [1].

I can't say I've seen anyone out of a bootcamp that was a great hire. I guess these online coding schools might cater to motivated teenagers that are interesting in trying out CS before enrolling in a proper degree. But there's no money to be made there.

[0] https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-lambda-fello...

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

#25

Post by b9a2cab5 »

epa wrote: post #8

"Treehouse rolled back the no-boss workplace in 2015, saying employees felt they were 'lonely islands with no support' without a management structure."

How this works in practice is that there are informal bosses and political infighting to determine who is the informal boss on a team. You can have pretty flat hierarchies where many teams share 1 director-type person as their boss and it works pretty well though.

Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

#26

Post by Apocryphon »

b9a2cab5 wrote: post #25
epa wrote: post #8

"Treehouse rolled back the no-boss workplace in 2015, saying employees felt they were 'lonely islands with no support' without a management structure."

How this works in practice is that there are informal bosses and political infighting to determine who is the informal boss on a team. You can have pretty flat hierarchies where many teams share 1 director-type person as their boss and it works pretty well though.

It seems like the solution isn't to abolish bosses or hierarchy, but to simply make them more accountable and subject to scrutiny or replacement.

Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

#27

Post by catchmeifyoucan »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #19

Perhaps 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)

(CoLab - https://joincolab.io)

Is one that's doing Community/Cohort style learning by pairing Devs, PMs and Designers together to learn.

Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

#28

Post by jstx1 »

subsubzero wrote: post #5

I 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…

Do you have a source on the Khan Academy layoffs? My impression was that they've grown a lot since the pandemic started.

Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

#29

Post by bdcravens »

racl101 wrote: post #4

Ironic that most people taking their courses are doing so to be able to ..... get jobs. I always liked Treehouse's presentation but it was a bit pricey compared to other services like Udemy for example.

Comparing prices for anything (courses, software, services, etc) to a marketplace (Udemy, app stores, Upwork, etc) isn't a good comparison. A single source will never be able to compete with the efficiencies of scale, and often the quality in marketplaces is a race to the bottom.

Re: Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

#30

Post by rob74 »

system2 wrote: post #6

Why would a learning platform need 41 employees? These are all instructor and expert videos. Were these 41 employees instructors? If not, for just the infrastructure is it really necessary to have 41 employees?

For creating high-quality content that people actually want to pay money for, and keeping it up to date? Of course, you can lay off most of these people and try to survive using the existing material (which Treehouse apparently wants to try), but, particularly when coding is involved, content gets obsolete really fast...
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