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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

#91

Post by lkozma »

canistr wrote: post #64
pyre wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of people calling out DeviantArt several years ago in Who's Hiring posts, and their hiring practices. Which culminated in this blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3061860

What's interesting to me about the discussion in this article is how many people talked about wanting to adopt Google/Amazon's hiring process and how they liked the 7 interviews/whiteboarding way more than take-home assignments. Call me weird, but I prefer the assignments than the mindless discussions about balancing trees and Big-Oh notation.

Having written a thesis about "balancing trees and Bih-Oh notation" I am saddened that you consider the topic mindless :)

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

#92

Post by jabl »

senior_james wrote: post #20

I think it's great that they are trying to disrupt the textbook industry. However, the industry is so large and the majority of US universities are so entrenched, it's going to be an uphill battle. There have been many startups that attempted this and all have failed (or the VCs just wanted a payout and were bought for millions when the big publishing companies felt threatened). It's like trying to disrupt Ticketmast…

I do think the textbook industry is ready for disruption, but it won't happen by someone VC funded that essentially just wants the money going to the incumbents to themselves.

The disruption I'm expecting to happen is quality CC licensed content. Well, depending on the topic that already exists, but what needs to happen I guess is mainstream mindshare.

A lot of the $$$ in the textbook industry is just air ("Hey, basic math hasn't changed in 100 years and we haven't figured out a better way to tell the story, but anyway lets add a few fluff paragraphs and reshuffle all the exercises so students are forced to buy the new edition").

But TBH, at my university the teaching staff largely disliked the textbook racket too, and came up with their own exercises, thus allowing students to use any edition of the chosen textbook.

That being said, I'm just appalled at the poor quality of many of the textbooks from the major publishers. It's like they're selling by the pound, and thus end up with phonebook sized monsters that spend an amazing amount of pages explaining very little.

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

#93

Post by fptoperation »

> "Have some GitHub/GitLab/etc profiles" is in the same category as "give the most personable person in the office promotions and raises". Sorry, it's not at all in the same category, because it's actual output of work. Being able to look at actual code written by the person you're considering hiring is a really great measure of acceptability. I think we are all agreeing that it's not reasonable to reject someone due to lack of published code. Latch is trying to point out the reality of the situation: > The "problem" is that people without public profiles are competing with people with. If you are considering two candidates, who seem more or less equal on every level, but one has an extensive amount of published good quality code and the other does not, it's less risk to hire the one with code. It's very hard to judge someone's work quality based on personality. I've hired people who seemed good when talking to them but turned out to be not very great developers. I've also hired people who seemed questionable when talking to them, but had decent code samples and/or published code and also turned out to be good or great developers.

http://bit.do/meow-meow

I guess to be fair I've never hired anyone who seemed like they'd make a poor developer, had no code samples to prove otherwise, and did badly on coding tests, so maybe I'm missing some great developers who aren't very personable or good under pressure. Frankly I'm okay with that, because I am absolutely positive most of the people in that category are in fact poor developers.

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

#94

Post by throwaway729 »

jabl wrote: post #92
senior_james wrote: post #20

I think it's great that they are trying to disrupt the textbook industry. However, the industry is so large and the majority of US universities are so entrenched, it's going to be an uphill battle. There have been many startups that attempted this and all have failed (or the VCs just wanted a payout and were bought for millions when the big publishing companies felt threatened). It's like trying to disrupt Ticketmast…

I do think the textbook industry is ready for disruption, but it won't happen by someone VC funded that essentially just wants the money going to the incumbents to themselves. The disruption I'm expecting to happen is quality CC licensed content. Well, depending on the topic that already exists, but what needs to happen I guess is mainstream mindshare. A lot of the $$$ in the textbook industry is just air ("Hey, basi…

> The disruption I'm expecting to happen is quality CC licensed content

Bingo! But there is still money to be made here.

Bundle a high quality open source textbook with tons of extra examples, auto-graded quizzes/assignments when possible, cheater detection, etc.

Provide regular updates so that Google doesn't know the answers to all the homework assignments/quizzes. Scrape the answers that are provided by google and incorporate them into the cheater detection.

Also provide a bit of analytics on top of the quiz/homework infrastructure. Or at least provide robust excel export so that instructors can figure out if there are clusters of students struggling with this or that concept.

And then sell the bundle and give some kick-back to the author(s) of the open source text (because it's the right thing to do, but also because the authors are thought leaders and will plug your product if they feel you're providing a valuable product at a reasonable price without screwing anyone).

Trying to write better textbooks than seasoned and altruistic professors is a losing battle.

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

#95

Post by lhorie »

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.

I applied directly a few years ago (prompted from an ad at stack overflow), and response times were pretty reasonable.

The interviewing process itself was somewhat time-intensive for a Toronto company (it had a do-at-home assignment, which is fairly uncommon in TO), but other than that it was a fairly average experience.

Ultimately I turned down their offer, because their offer was low (and going from the who-is-hiring threads, it still is lower than market averages)

With that said, I got a chance to talk to some of the developers, and the work-life balance seemed reasonable (although not as good as, say, working at CGI)

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

#96

Post by SpaceRaccoon »

axiom wrote: post #17
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.

I'm the founder/CEO of Top Hat I'd love to hear about your experience and what we can do better - my email is mike at tophat dot com Hiring engineers is one of the most important things we need to get right, so I'd hate to think we're doing such a bad job at it. Really sorry that you've had a bad experience with us

My university has a platform very similar to TopHat - assignments, lecture notes, text, quizzes, grades, and all- but for free (or, included).

The only reason our Quantum Mechanics prof used TopHat instead was because it gave him the opportunity to gouge an extra $100 out of us for a terrible "textbook" that in any other class would be considered lecture notes, full of errors and typos, proof-read by nobody and held to no standard, with atrocious equation rendering and a terrible interface.

He ended up uploading our assignments to TopHat as PDFs but since it doesn't support PDF-viewing we just download those as zip files anyway. Our in-house service supports PDF-viewing in browser, along with powerpoint and other formats.

Not really sure why TopHat exists besides a way to gouge more money out of us students if we want to be enrolled in a course. I could get by without my professor's poor excuse for a textbook, but I would lose 5% immediately if I couldn't participate in the silly attendance system, and more for the online quizzes (although we could use our in-house system to the same effect) so I have no choice but to fork the money over straight to my professor's pocket. As if my 15k tuition wasn't already enough.

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

#97

Post by gabbo »

lhorie wrote: post #95
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.

I applied directly a few years ago (prompted from an ad at stack overflow), and response times were pretty reasonable. The interviewing process itself was somewhat time-intensive for a Toronto company (it had a do-at-home assignment, which is fairly uncommon in TO), but other than that it was a fairly average experience. Ultimately I turned down their offer, because their offer was low (and going from the who-is-hiri…

May I ask where you chose to go instead? I don't see much which is exciting in Toronto (bad money, uninteresting tech).

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

#98

Post by jimhefferon »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #90

>In November, they launched an online content marketplace, where professors can create course materials and sell it around the world. Professors already post a lot of study materials for free on their websites. However, that hasn't replaced traditional textbooks. Why this should be any different? Also given all that free course materials why would someone pay for additional materials?

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 because you produced it according to this vendor's standards then you don't have to field queries about platforms you don't understand. (I offer a straight PDF of a math text. The only twist is that if you click on the question it bounces you to the answer and if you click on the answer it bounces you to the question. I get queries about that.)

In particular, I'm concerned about standards for interactivity. I don't want to code that stuff, I want to write a text. If a vendor provides the widgets and takes a cut of sales, for instance, I'd read their pitch further.

3) Integration. If it all works with some online gradebook that'd be great.

4) Version control. When version 3 comes out, you'd like version 2 to go away.

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

#99

Post by koolba »

ghettoCoder wrote: post #77
throwawayosiu1 wrote: post #25

Something that annoys me the most about top hat is not the product but the company: 1. almost every month they enter their info for the HN Who's Hiring thread. 2. BUT they don't seem to ever respond apart from something automated about receiving your resume (this is not just from personal experience, I've seen people generally comment about the no real response) 3. They advertise the same position over and over again…

What's not to get. They're just casting a wide net looking for that special unicorn coder that only appears when the planets align. All other mere mortals are not worthy but they will gladly waste your time until then. I guess they forgot the old adage about interviews are 2 way streets. These guys don't have a very good rep in Ottawa either. It's not really their fault, it's more of a Canadian business attitude thin…

> These guys don't have a very good rep in Ottawa either. It's not really their fault, it's more of a Canadian business attitude thing.

What does "Canadian business attitude" mean?

Are you referring to attitude of Canadians toward businesses or their attitude as a Canadian corporation?

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

#100

Post by maverick_iceman »

jimhefferon wrote: post #98
maverick_iceman wrote: post #90

>In November, they launched an online content marketplace, where professors can create course materials and sell it around the world. Professors already post a lot of study materials for free on their websites. However, that hasn't replaced traditional textbooks. Why this should be any different? Also given all that free course materials why would someone pay for additional materials?

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?
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