[HN Gopher] Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its ...
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Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff
Author : fantunes
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-09-14 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.oregonlive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.oregonlive.com)
| racl101 wrote:
| 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.
| bdcravens wrote:
| 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.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| 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)
| yuy910616 wrote:
| 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.
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| (CoLab - https://joincolab.io)
|
| Is one that's doing Community/Cohort style learning by pairing
| Devs, PMs and Designers together to learn.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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]
| ChefboyOG wrote:
| Similarly, I remember taking a handful of courses there many
| years ago. They were very high quality relative to what was
| available then.
|
| I wonder if their particular niche of online education is
| tougher nowadays. There seems to be a wealth of online
| platforms tailored towards the "professional skills" edge of
| the market--if I ever need a course on migrating to Azure using
| only a TI-86 calculator while respecting HIPAA, I'm sure
| Pluralsight has a course--but when I think of the more general
| "learn to code" style courses, I don't think of Treehouse
| anymore.
|
| In particular, having watched multiple family members/friends
| transition into software development (coming from no real
| background in code) over the last couple years, I've noticed
| they swing between two extremes:
|
| 1. Completely free resources, like FreeCodeCamp, CodeAcademy's
| free plan, or App Academy Open. 2. Going all-in on an immersive
| bootcamp, typically with some kind of job placement assistance
| program at the end.
|
| I wonder if more middle-of-the-road premium options like
| Treehouse are losing marketshare to this. Though obviously,
| this is big time anecdata.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| This is a bummer. I met a few of the Treehouse folks as well as a
| couple students at a private social thing some years ago. They
| made a strong impression of being both passionate and competent,
| a real contrast to the bulk of the online class companies imo,
| but it's hard to compete against dirt cheap or free.
| [deleted]
| subsubzero wrote:
| 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 did but thought
| the 4 day workweek was a smart idea. Microsoft japan reported
| that a 4 day workweek increased productivity by 40% -
| https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...
| jstx1 wrote:
| Do you have a source on the Khan Academy layoffs? My impression
| was that they've grown a lot since the pandemic started.
| dustinbrownman wrote:
| The 4 day work week was great. It was just a convenient scape
| goat for failed business initiatives at the time.
| craigsdennis wrote:
| 100% and the CEO blamed his own lack of work ethic, it's been
| mistranslated over the years, but this was not due to any
| real "study".
|
| Do not attribute 32 hour work week to not being successful,
| it was incredible and allowed for a ton of creative work to
| come to life.
| guessmyname wrote:
| > _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...
| nacho2sweet wrote:
| It is actually so much work and costs a lot to produce an online
| course. After you have a lot of content is it not better try and
| sell the content you have, and then offload the creation workload
| udemy style, especially with coding courses since there are so
| many remote work people in this space.
| tedyoung wrote:
| Would love to know what caused this to happen, given (as the
| article says) huge amounts of money being poured into (seemingly)
| similar businesses.
| sexhaver1984 wrote:
| It can be summed up easily: Most of the teachers left years ago
| due to a toxic work environment and all of the content went
| stale making it not live up to competitors.
| z0r wrote:
| I remember reading a number of articles by / about the founder
| Ryan Carson similar to this one, about not taking unnecessary
| investment: https://medium.com/@ryancarson/not-silicon-valleys-
| timeline-...
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| 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.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Treehouse isn't a school or bootcamp. It is just video
| lessons and such.
| midev wrote:
| > 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| tedivm wrote:
| 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]
| rchaud wrote:
| That is unfortunate about your blog posts. But customers
| pay for their video lessons, which (at least in 2014),
| were all created in-house.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| 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...
| rkk3 wrote:
| > 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| 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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Nearly everyone in my AppAcademy cohort was already a STEM
| grad and some from top schools.
|
| > Most of us didn't even need the bootcamp, per-se
|
| I think you hit the nail on this one. Today kids take
| https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ instead of doing a bootcamp.
| "Intro to CS" classes are also more prevalent (and sometimes
| mandatory) for everyone in STEM nowadays.
| rickosborne wrote:
| > 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| 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
| abeppu wrote:
| > I don't know what it is about Waterloo though
|
| I have also had extremely positive experiences with
| Waterloo grads (and student interns), and I kinda wish that
| I had done a program structured in the same way. In
| particular, the program requires that students do several
| "co-op" work terms, so by the time they graduate, they've
| worked in multiple organizations and have the equivalent of
| more than a year's work experience. They have a better idea
| of what kind of work is a good fit for them, they know they
| can be productive in real projects, and they have some
| exposure to the organizational/communication/process
| portion of getting stuff done as well.
|
| We complain sometimes about the disconnect between software
| engineering and the "computer science" curriculum -- and it
| turns out that actually having a thoughtfully composed
| "software engineering" program is a pretty good and natural
| solution.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I can't explain it.
|
| I think they Astroturf a lot. At least on this site. Any
| thread about a class at Stanford/MIT/CMU (often because
| they posted the textbook for free) and someone from
| Waterloo will post what they teach, no matter if it's
| relevant.
|
| It's also a giant school (36,000 undergrads and 6,000
| postgrads) and from what alumni told me, undergrads are
| incentivized to apply everywhere and especially during the
| off-cycles (winter) for internships when they are
| effectively the only ones looking.
|
| Contrast that with Stanford that's barely 7,000 undergrads
| and 10,000 grad students).
|
| I think they also _have_ to get internships to even stay in
| the program (it 's coop) so I guess that weeds out the
| unemployable.
| busterarm wrote:
| Everything about Waterloo's curriculum weeds out the
| weak.
|
| The coop program is probably their biggest strength.
| Working with coop interns is fantastic and almost always
| leads to a job post graduation.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Did you attend?
| busterarm wrote:
| I've had long conversations about the curriculum with a
| few dozen grads I've worked with or hired over the years
| because they're obviously a special bunch.
| zactato wrote:
| Shhhh don't let the secret out.
| system2 wrote:
| 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?
| rob74 wrote:
| 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...
| oregano wrote:
| 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.
| epa wrote:
| "Treehouse rolled back the no-boss workplace in 2015, saying
| employees felt they were 'lonely islands with no support' without
| a management structure."
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| 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
| rmason wrote:
| I was always impressed by Treehouse and recommended it for people
| trying to learn to code. But it did require you to have more
| inner drive (or grit) than a bootcamp
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