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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

#31

Post by rickosborne »

908B64B197 wrote: post #24

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 c…

> I can't say I've seen anyone out of a bootcamp that was a great hire.

My own experience has been that there's no correlation between where the dev graduated from and how productive/valuable/etc they've been at work. I've seen just as many rock-star bootcamp grads as I have complete wastes of space from Stanford/CMU/MIT.

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

#33

Post by yuy910616 »

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)

There are scalable bits of Education - courses, books, practice questions (look at leetcode), and lectures. I think that is why a lot of ed-tech fails. Information really does want to be free, and anything that can be broadcast is usually better free. Youtube has seen an influx of high quality content IMO.

There are also non-scalable parts - access to expert, prestige, and all the bits you've mentioned. I think that's probably where the future of ed-tech is going.

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

#34

Post by busterarm »

908B64B197 wrote: post #24

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 c…

Lambda isn't even the most well known bootcamp[1], just the most well-known failure.

Nearly everyone in my AppAcademy cohort was already a STEM grad and some from top schools. Also that didn't correlate with performance as the person with the most advanced degree was unhirable and the degreeless folks are among the most successful. More than half a decade on, we're still at like 98% of our cohort with long and successful careers. The few cohorts ahead of and behind me have similar results. More than half of my cohort are senior ICs at this point as well (staff engineers, architects, startup CTOs, etc).

Most of us didn't even need the bootcamp, per-se, but were there for the helpful aspects of building a portfolio in a short time and the psychological benefits of being coached through the interview process.

_YOU_ may not have seen successful bootcamp grads, but you also might not be in any of the places where they're looking for work. Or you have a very strong bias.

[1]: Dev Bootcamp, GA, AppAcademy and Flatiron School are/were easily more well-known than Lambda School ever was.

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

#35

Post by oregano »

Treehouse was the very first online learning platform I ever paid for when I started to entertain the idea of learning to code.

Back in 2012-2013 it was amazing. I sunk countless hours into the videos and thought it was a great value.

After building some basic sites I decided to take the plunge and enroll in a bootcamp. Fast forward to today and I’m incredibly thankful for taking these steps.

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

#36

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#37

Post by busterarm »

rickosborne wrote: post #31
908B64B197 wrote: post #24

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 c…

> I can't say I've seen anyone out of a bootcamp that was a great hire. My own experience has been that there's no correlation between where the dev graduated from and how productive/valuable/etc they've been at work. I've seen just as many rock-star bootcamp grads as I have complete wastes of space from Stanford/CMU/MIT.

I don't know what it is about Waterloo though, but everyone I've worked with who came through there was a significant asset to whatever team they were on.

There could be some filtering function here like the pool of grads who made a significant effort to come to the US afterwards, but yeah. 100% rockstars every time.

Don't just take my word for it -- from the lips of pg himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6655271

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

#38

Post by open-source-ux »

Sad to hear about their staff. It sounds like the company has been almost gutted.

Treehouse are skewed towards beginners but I wonder if the market for beginner content is too saturated? Udemy dominates for paid video courses (for beginners) and YouTube covers the free tutorials option.

Also, Treehouse's content is divided into lots of separate videos. It's a big collection of videos but it isn't always obvious how each video relates to another - I wonder if this confuses beginners? I presume this more modular approach was designed to let learners tailor their own learning path. Or to flexibly arrange the content into modular tracks.

Contrast the Udemy approach: The all-in-one course for a language or topic that promises the user a more linear curriculum. Of course, the quality of Udemy courses can vary hugely, but there's no doubt the all-in-one course is appealing to beginner learners.

These is a small but helpful YouTube channel which reviews online learning platforms (Udemy, Pluralsight, etc) called Tech Course Review. Here is an informative review of Treehouse from December 2020:

Treehouse Review 2021: Is Treehouse worth it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSuv0QaALZM

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

#39

Post by rkk3 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #24

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 c…

> Bootcamps have failed one after another.

Crowded space and the businesses were service oriented (not infinitely scaling like software) so very different success & risk profiles.

For the students... Most were lied to about the outcome statistics, but many people were able to leverage it into new career.

> I can't say I've seen anyone out of a bootcamp that was a great hire.

Most people aren't going to brand themselves as boot camp grads if they don't have to.

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

#40

Post by guessmyname »

> Workers later posted an online spreadsheet with the names of 41 employees looking for new jobs. Treehouse has a geographically distributed workforce and the company’s employees live in cities across the country

They forgot to include a link to the spreadsheet.

I found it here → https://twitter.com/nickrp/status/1436747911220457482

(and in case they delete the Twitter post) → https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D8419ThkbOibfMcGQRUi...

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