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Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

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Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#51

Post by azemetre »

zerkten wrote: post #35
azemetre wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took it more as Pluralsight courses are barely better than documentation, and from my experience of being a subscriber I definitely agree.

I don't think there is much vision or editorial control. Anyone with an idea can seemingly produce content for these platforms and it almost always falls short. How do you position this video content versus documentation? Anecdotally, younger audiences may have a preference at times, but I think it's more about the use case and preparation. I've seen really good video content and bad. Same applies to docs, or any con…

I mean IME with Pluralsight, I fully meant what I said. Most videos barely go beyond the documentation.

I've paid for Lynda (now LinkedIn learning), Frontend Masters, Egghead, educative.io, Udacity, Laracasts, UI.dev, Safari, Ardan Labs, etc.

If you want to interview for a FAANG job, educative.io has the best content. Everything else on the site is extremely poor but hey if you need to refresh on system design or leetcode patterns no other content is as good.

I use to like Frontend Masters, but the decay rate of their courses is too high. You can take a workshop from 2 months ago but the instructor will never mention the version of the language they use and often the project files will fail to install. I absolutely do not think this is a good thing and should absolutely not be tolerated. You can blame NodeJS but it's a terrible indictment when 90% of your catalog is worthless. I've also disliked the new generation of instructors they have where it's mostly the same 3-4 people every year that always talk about the same topics. It's disappointing because this would be a service I use to recommend every frontend dev 3 years ago.

The only thing I continued to subscribe to is Safari/O'Reilly. Here you get books from all the major publishers and some decent courses as well (like Ultimate Go by Bill Kennedy); but I won't be renewing this. Books on extremely advance topics aren't released in massive amounts annually. There's like maybe one or two software books truly worth buying every year. Here's what I've bought the last 5 years (Beautiful Code, The Cathedral & the Bazaar, The Soul of a New Machine, Writing An Interpreter In Go, Game Engine Black Book, Refactoring UI).

Maybe I've progressed enough in my career that I see the best way to learn is to just read the docs ASAP then just build as many things as possible after. I truly mean build too, you can't watch someone make a project for you and copy them. You have to struggle when learning, because that's how you confirm your priors and what you actually know. There's also the benefit of just getting better at delivering software the more you make.

They've done studies about pottery classes where two groups of students were graded differently, one would be graded on the amount of pottery they make and the other would be graded on a single piece at the end of the system. The students that were graded on the amount of pottery tended to do better and make more advance things. This mimics my experience as a dev too.

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#52

Post by mardifoufs »

skywhopper wrote: post #42
eterm wrote: post #34

I don't know if it's my own career development, but it felt like the quality of Pluralsight has also taken a nosedive. I had a bit of career break during the pandemic, so went from being a fairly regular consumer of pluralsight in 2018/9 to only coming back to it fairly recently. Whereas previously it felt like I could find interesting guides at my level, when I tried to look for similar things now, nothing felt quit…

Essentially no company bought out by private equity manages to remain high-quality. The entire point is to milk the revenue stream dry while overleveraging on debt to provide investors with a large short-term payout. They do this by slashing costs to the bone, laying off too many people, and betting that the remaining husk will coast long enough to make the target return before they sell off what’s left to second-sta…

Depends on the PE tbh. We recently got acquired (after being split from our previous owner) and if anything we now have much better leadership, and they seem to focus on R&D more than anything else. It does help that they have clearly stated that they aim for making the corporation public in 5-7 years, which makes it less likely that they'd engage in bleeding the current assets dry for short term gains.

It might be different for startups though for sure, in our case we were spun off from a very old corporation :)

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#53

Post by acchow »

throwanem wrote: post #49
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very often, when I ask 'how do I do x' and had no idea how to do it in the first place. I know what your trying to say, but if you ask how to do your problem, instead of something like how do I use a for loop to do it, you'll be given a solution.

Yeah, I've definitely seen it come up with API methods and the like, that I'd never have known to look for in docs. That's not quite what I have in mind here, though, but more how well LLMs tend to replicate the ancillary context that is available when reviewing documentation. My experience has been that they tend more narrowly task-focused than I do, although it occurs to me I don't think I've tried prompts around "…

You can modify the system prompt to describe who you are and your ability level, and to instruct the LLM to fill in gaps of knowledge you wouldn't know to ask about.

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#54

Post by alexey-salmin »

lenerdenator wrote: post #46
blackhawkC17 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider it the beauty of capitalism. People are equally free to create huge value or destroy huge value.

Rarely is value created or destroyed. It's transferred, as it is here. There are a few big exceptions to this. Discovering a new deposit of mineral wealth and the microcomputer revolution drastically speeding up business tasks are examples.

That's like exactly the opposite of how economy works. Taking a great firm and reducing it to zero destroys value. Building a great firm from zero creates it.

I personally believe that the failure to understand this is the reason why the political left is so bad at building economies when given a chance. Being obsessed with the fair distribution of value, they overlook the creation and preservation aspect. In the end there's nothing to distribute.

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#55

Post by acchow »

lenerdenator wrote: post #46
blackhawkC17 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider it the beauty of capitalism. People are equally free to create huge value or destroy huge value.

Rarely is value created or destroyed. It's transferred, as it is here. There are a few big exceptions to this. Discovering a new deposit of mineral wealth and the microcomputer revolution drastically speeding up business tasks are examples.

Barring rent seeking and other anti-competitive behavior, all net profit is value creation.

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#56

Post by coffeebeqn »

throwanem wrote: post #49
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very often, when I ask 'how do I do x' and had no idea how to do it in the first place. I know what your trying to say, but if you ask how to do your problem, instead of something like how do I use a for loop to do it, you'll be given a solution.

Yeah, I've definitely seen it come up with API methods and the like, that I'd never have known to look for in docs. That's not quite what I have in mind here, though, but more how well LLMs tend to replicate the ancillary context that is available when reviewing documentation. My experience has been that they tend more narrowly task-focused than I do, although it occurs to me I don't think I've tried prompts around "…

I’ve found them to be quite good but I often give an example of what this would look like in another language or I ask follow up questions on are there other ways and what are the tradeoffs etc. it’s all what you make it. Not that different from talking to another engineer.

The best part by far is I can ask to dive deeper or explain something that I didn’t understand very easily. If I was reading a book or in school I can’t stop the world and have it refocus on what I need to understand to continue easily. I haven’t really had that many hallucinations in coding questions - sometimes it’s almost typos where the library and method do exist but typed slightly differently

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#57

Post by s1artibartfast »

acchow wrote: post #55
lenerdenator wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rarely is value created or destroyed. It's transferred, as it is here. There are a few big exceptions to this. Discovering a new deposit of mineral wealth and the microcomputer revolution drastically speeding up business tasks are examples.

Barring rent seeking and other anti-competitive behavior, all net profit is value creation.

Even rent seeking is value creation, just less than alternatives.

No free exchange ever occurs unless the counterparties disagree on value, leading to a net gain post transaction.

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#58

Post by s1artibartfast »

BillSaysThis wrote: post #11
nradov wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would any of us care? It's not our money. $1B+ valuation changes happen all the time.

Taxes? The investors in the PE's fund that owned this company?

It's not really anybody else's business if someone else is maximizing taxable revenue or not.

Investors have an interest though, but presumably more visibility if they want it

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#59

Post by coffeebeqn »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28
chollida1 wrote: post #6

Normally PE funds are know for not writing things down due to a few reasons: - they are private so whose to say what its worth - rolling funds where as one fund closes the new fund that is raising can take in those positions so no need to mark down or try and sell those positions at firesale prices. This is a bit different as this is a "dropdown". Here the company is moving some IP into a new company and using that t…

Tax-loss harvesting.

Ah, my investment “strategy” after the 2020 mania and ensuing losses.

Re: Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

#60

Post by ado__dev »

elicksaur wrote: post #48
ado__dev wrote: post #2

I've been a Pluralsight subscriber for probably over a decade now. Their content is awesome for getting up to speed quickly or just learning about a technology without too much fluff. I do see though how AI is a huge threat to them. Using Claude 3 for coding and being able to ask questions about my specific issues and getting tailored responses every time to my exact issue (vs watching a general video and applying th…

How regularly do you work in a new domain where studying on pluralsight has been helpful? Genuinely curious; I’ve used it when I started my current job, but haven’t thought to reach for it since.

Eh I'd say 3-4 times per year where it's really useful, but a lot of the time i like doing some of their courses just to brush up on stuff I already know, and usually I walk away with 2-3 new things that I didn't know about the tech stack i'm working in.
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