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I truly don’t get how sites like udacity are able to sell thousands of amateurish introductions to various trends, when you can literally follow CS50 in all its

I truly don’t get how sites like udacity are able to sell thousands of amateurish introductions to various trends, when you can literally follow CS50 in all its incantations for free on edX.org. Sure it won’t give you a video guide of X popular framework intro-documentation pages, but it will actually teach you CS for free, and I’d argue, that if you can complete CS50x and CS50x Web, then you’ll never need a site like udacity. I guess FOMO sells though.

dunpeal 8y ago
> I’d argue, that if you can complete CS50x and CS50x Web, then you’ll never need a site like udacity. Sure, but that's a tiny minority of people. If you have the capacity to complete deep CS courses, you can buy a book for $12 and learn React or Angular or any technology you want. Most people don't have this capacity. > I truly don’t get how sites like udacity are able to sell thousands of amateurish introductions to various trends 1. People read that some trend gets you jobs. 2. People don't have the discipline or enough foundation to just buy the $12 book and learn trend by themselves. 3. People find a course online that is really basic and thus doesn't tax their mental resources while convincing them they'll be able to get job later in the trend. 4. People get job, or they don't (I bet they don't, since having low learning capacity isn't a good predictor for getting a job in an intellectual field), either way Udacity gets paid. It's not a bad business model, but eventually it will collapse because customers routinely fail to obtain the key value proposition: tech skills or a job using them.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  > If you have the capacity to complete deep CS courses, you can buy a book for $12 and learn React or Angular or any technology you want. But this is how you learn new skills, no? People were learning from books for ages. > Most people don't have this capacity. If you can't understand written word, how on Earth could I trust the code you write?
  - lazyasciiart 8y ago
    No, people (on any meaningful scale) have never learned from books without teachers. What scenario were you thinking of?
- povertyworld 8y ago
  Woah, where are they selling these $12 tech books? I just blew like 50$ on Manning's half-off sale ordering prerelease books. There was nothing below $40.
  - sfifs 8y ago
    India, South East Asia and used books in Europe/US
    - candiodari 8y ago
      Any way to order them online ? Ordering $50 for even basic algorithms books, just cause I want them on paper seems more than a bit excessive.
      - rchaud 8y ago
        In College, I bought the Indian versions of my Econ/Finance textbooks on Ebay. Exact same content down the sentence, just in a plain cover and probably 25% of the college bookstore/Amazon price.
        rahimnathwani 8y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Sons,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So....
  - androidgirl 8y ago
    Agreed, $12 books would be a godsend. Currently buy mine used on AZ most of the time, always pay around $30.
- Jweb_Guru 8y ago
  > Most people don't have this capacity. Citation badly needed for the ridiculous assertion that most people don't have the "learning capacity" for "deep CS courses" (whatever that means). The fact that one can reliably teach programming to eight year olds, boot camp graduates can get jobs in the industry with high probability, and just about anyone in any other scientific field can fill a data science position suggests that CS is not such a rarified academic pursuit.
  - tEMporality7 8y ago
    I think he means core CS stuff like OS or compilers or algorithms. Programming =/= CS. You can be a good programmer who can build amazing apps or websites while having little idea about how an OS works or how to create/analyze some complex algorithm. I highly doubt most of those eight year olds or boot camp graduates can invert a binary tree.
    - paublyrne 8y ago
      No one knows how in to invert a binary tree until they learn what a binary tree is.I don't think the number of people who could learn computer science deeply is very small, although the number of people who really want to is probably small.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      What’s strange is that people think “knowing how to invert a binary tree” is more important than “knowing how to program”. Yes, I have a CS degree.
      - j45 8y ago
        Having a CS background I agree with this. Problems exist at many levels of complexity and they can be solved in many different ways. Clever architecture often beats clever programming.
      - TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
        > What’s strange is that people think “knowing how to invert a binary tree” is more important than “knowing how to program” More important: Knowing how to work with other people I don't care how well you can code, if you can't interface with people and know how to switch up your lexicon there's going to be a problem in a lot of teams. I'm not a programmer, but when I'm in interviews for them I look to see how well they can interact & discuss their projects with me without divulging into intense CS discussion.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  CS50 is an introductory course, I think almost anyone can do it. It may take a lot of effort, but once you finish, you’ll have obtained the ability to learn X from its documentation because you’ve learned basic CS and not just google coding.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ransom1538 8y ago
  "4. People get job, or they don't (I bet they don't, since having low learning capacity isn't a good predictor for getting a job in an intellectual field), either way Udacity gets paid." Arrogance crystallized. These kinds of statements give our entire community a bad name. If a kid wants to learn how react works on a crowded bus and finds a book difficult to follow -- he has a "low learning capacity". What a terrible thing to say. Gross.
  - stanfordkid 8y ago
    "Low learning capacity"... Ha! Intellectual arrogance. It's way too common in our field (Computer Science). Exercises for anyone who thinks this way: 1. Pick an individual sport (running, swimming, biking) 2. Study an elite athlete in that sport 3. Try to get as good as them. What you'll notice is that, in fact, you can get really really far. Coding is the same way -- I doubt someone who can't get through a book would ever become Jeff Dean (same way most of us won't be Usain Bolt), but they can become employable and lead a good, meaningful, productive life doing coding! Brains aren't so different from muscle fibers ... they can grow and learn anything with enough activation.
    - _m96l 8y ago
      I never said folks couldn't pick up a stack of books and in theory study well enough to get a good tech job. I said they generally don't because they don't have the stamina, discipline, and curiosity to do so. Some do. The minority. Most don't. Respondents are attacking me as if I am saying this is how things should be. Trust me, I wish it was the opposite. I've been involved in hiring in all my recent roles, and we'd be happy to hire anyone who has enough motivation, discipline, and interest in the field to learn CS and React through books and come work for us. There's just not many of these. I didn't make it so. I didn't stand behind people taking Udacity courses and whispered in their ear "give up!" like some sort of comical Satan. If I could, I'd whisper "Try harder! You can succeed!" However when I did end up interviewing folks coming out of code bootcamps, I ended up not being able to offer them a job. Bluntly, most of them seemed to have no real interest in tech. They initially studied something else, were on a different track in life, typically had little interest in tech at best. Then they heard you can make 6 figures in tech no problem, and I met them 4-10 months later, often after they went through some lazy course designed specifically to game my interview process. Results from recruiting straight out of bootcamp simply do not justify the effort. In fact they're so bad that despite all our need for talent, we don't hire anyone straight out of bootcamp anymore. We'll gladly be your second job after bootcamp, but never your first. Because the vast majority who even complete these bootcamps realize the money isn't enough to keep them engaged in a field they don't inherently like - which is why they didn't go to tech in the first place. My impression is that a large majority of them leave the field after working for a short while on their new job. This is based on reports from friends in the industry + the fact we get a ton of resumes from people who just finished bootcamp, but very few from people who finished bootcamp and then worked in the industry for any amount of time. All this is for people who signed up and finished a bootcamp, which is already a high bar. The amount of people who bought a "micro-degree" from commercial companies like Udacity is probably far larger, and only a tiny minority of them even completed this relatively easy course (look up MOOC completion ratios), let alone went through a bootcamp which is far more taxing and less accessible. People will probably attack me like I'm the evil wizard who conjured this unfortunate situation. They're killing the messenger.
povertyworld 8y ago
I think you're confusing Udemy with Udacity. I think this confusion is common, and probably not helping Udacity much.
- wukerplank 8y ago
  Even Udemy is not that bad. If you wait for the right price you can get a decent introduction to a topic you are interested in. I learned to use Blender that way, filled some gaps with different platform SDKs and so on. Great way to kickstart a hobby.
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    The Youtube ads are so unbelievably patronizing that I wouldn't dream of giving them my money.
    - tEMporality7 8y ago
      Your drawings would look great in 3D!
    - ChrisRR 8y ago
      I agree. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard "Python's where it's at. You can do almost anything with it" skips ad
  - znpy 8y ago
    I've known Udemy for a lot of time but never really cared. Until I started looking for courses on uncommon subjects I am interested in. Then I discovered a new world, basically. I now always keep one eye on sales at Udemy, and will be spending 200€ on a single course in the following day. Content quality, as always, depends on the course and the author but generally when it comes to IT and related stuff the rating is a good indicator of quality.
    - jf- 8y ago
      > I now always keep one eye on sales at Udemy, and will be spending 200€ on a single course in the following day. Are these not covered by the perma-sales?
plinkplonk 8y ago
"all its incantations" - did you mean 'incarnations'? (though I like 'incantations'! )
GlennS 8y ago
I'd disagree with amateurish. I agree that some of what they're advertising looks like 'intro to web bodging' and 'learn to mash tables without learning the maths', but there's also Norvig: https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--cs212 https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--... Granted, I haven't actually paid them any money.
- wl 8y ago
  Norvig and Thrun's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class was pretty awful. I hope their offerings improved since the original class in 2011, but I'd be wary of paying money for any classes with their names attached to it. On the other hand, Widom's database class and Ng's ML class were excellent.
anonymous5133 8y ago
I thought the same thing but it really makes sense. The second you start going into anything challenging...your retention drops off a cliff. For Udacity, they have to give the illusion that MOOCs have high retention rates (because everyone criticizes them for low retention). If you don't believe me then just go on youtube and look for some Stanford, MIT etc. course where they uploaded all the lectures. You'll see the first lecture has lots of view but if you scroll through the rest you'll see the retention drops significantly. I've ran some numbers on this and it turns out the biggest drop is actually in the second lecture.
jf- 8y ago
You seem to be painting this as an issue of ability: intelligent people do real computer science. These people would never need a user-friendly course introducing them to a topic. Seems both uncharitable and untrue.
prepend 8y ago
I’m a “buy a book” kind of person and didn’t get it until I used its value as a sensitive screener. People can learn in many ways, but there’s a sheepskin effect [0] just by paying $49 to prove you end through it and got the button to add to LinkedIn. There are certainly false positives, but these courses are helpful to 1) help users sort out all the EdX vs. wannabes and 2) demonstrate willingness to learn. Of course I would never use this to try to determine whether someone knows a skill or is competent or is a learning lover, but it’s helpful as one of many filtering criteria. I also use it as a casual way to recommend training when I care enough about the person that they learn, but not enough that I want to answer every question that comes up with open courseware (eg, what’s a command prompt, why doesn’t this package work with that package, etc). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepskin_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepskin_effect
projectramo 8y ago
CS50 is great but many of the free courses on Udacity are superior. (Not all of them, but I would say more than half). Also, Udacity is for learning self-driving cars, algorithmic trading, conv nets for object recognition and stuff you wouldn't get elsewhere.
- Eridrus 8y ago
  I'm not sure about algorithmic trading, or what the self-driving car class contains, but there is tonnes of content on object detection and other recent AI breakthroughs.
mruts 8y ago
I'm currently taking AI for Trading on Udacity and it's the best course I've ever taken. I highly doubt you could find a comparable course anywhere else.

dunpeal 8y ago

> I’d argue, that if you can complete CS50x and CS50x Web, then you’ll never need a site like udacity. Sure, but that's a tiny minority of people. If you have the capacity to complete deep CS courses, you can buy a book for $12 and learn React or Angular or any technology you want. Most people don't have this capacity. > I truly don’t get how sites like udacity are able to sell thousands of amateurish introductions to various trends 1. People read that some trend gets you jobs. 2. People don't have the discipline or enough foundation to just buy the $12 book and learn trend by themselves. 3. People find a course online that is really basic and thus doesn't tax their mental resources while convincing them they'll be able to get job later in the trend. 4. People get job, or they don't (I bet they don't, since having low learning capacity isn't a good predictor for getting a job in an intellectual field), either way Udacity gets paid. It's not a bad business model, but eventually it will collapse because customers routinely fail to obtain the key value proposition: tech skills or a job using them.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
> If you have the capacity to complete deep CS courses, you can buy a book for $12 and learn React or Angular or any technology you want. But this is how you learn new skills, no? People were learning from books for ages. > Most people don't have this capacity. If you can't understand written word, how on Earth could I trust the code you write?
- lazyasciiart 8y ago
  No, people (on any meaningful scale) have never learned from books without teachers. What scenario were you thinking of?
povertyworld 8y ago
Woah, where are they selling these $12 tech books? I just blew like 50$ on Manning's half-off sale ordering prerelease books. There was nothing below $40.
- sfifs 8y ago
  India, South East Asia and used books in Europe/US
  - candiodari 8y ago
    Any way to order them online ? Ordering $50 for even basic algorithms books, just cause I want them on paper seems more than a bit excessive.
    - rchaud 8y ago
      In College, I bought the Indian versions of my Econ/Finance textbooks on Ebay. Exact same content down the sentence, just in a plain cover and probably 25% of the college bookstore/Amazon price.
      - rahimnathwani 8y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Sons,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So....
- androidgirl 8y ago
  Agreed, $12 books would be a godsend. Currently buy mine used on AZ most of the time, always pay around $30.
Jweb_Guru 8y ago
> Most people don't have this capacity. Citation badly needed for the ridiculous assertion that most people don't have the "learning capacity" for "deep CS courses" (whatever that means). The fact that one can reliably teach programming to eight year olds, boot camp graduates can get jobs in the industry with high probability, and just about anyone in any other scientific field can fill a data science position suggests that CS is not such a rarified academic pursuit.
- tEMporality7 8y ago
  I think he means core CS stuff like OS or compilers or algorithms. Programming =/= CS. You can be a good programmer who can build amazing apps or websites while having little idea about how an OS works or how to create/analyze some complex algorithm. I highly doubt most of those eight year olds or boot camp graduates can invert a binary tree.
  - paublyrne 8y ago
    No one knows how in to invert a binary tree until they learn what a binary tree is.I don't think the number of people who could learn computer science deeply is very small, although the number of people who really want to is probably small.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    What’s strange is that people think “knowing how to invert a binary tree” is more important than “knowing how to program”. Yes, I have a CS degree.
    - j45 8y ago
      Having a CS background I agree with this. Problems exist at many levels of complexity and they can be solved in many different ways. Clever architecture often beats clever programming.
    - TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
      > What’s strange is that people think “knowing how to invert a binary tree” is more important than “knowing how to program” More important: Knowing how to work with other people I don't care how well you can code, if you can't interface with people and know how to switch up your lexicon there's going to be a problem in a lot of teams. I'm not a programmer, but when I'm in interviews for them I look to see how well they can interact & discuss their projects with me without divulging into intense CS discussion.
eksemplar 8y ago
CS50 is an introductory course, I think almost anyone can do it. It may take a lot of effort, but once you finish, you’ll have obtained the ability to learn X from its documentation because you’ve learned basic CS and not just google coding.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ransom1538 8y ago
"4. People get job, or they don't (I bet they don't, since having low learning capacity isn't a good predictor for getting a job in an intellectual field), either way Udacity gets paid." Arrogance crystallized. These kinds of statements give our entire community a bad name. If a kid wants to learn how react works on a crowded bus and finds a book difficult to follow -- he has a "low learning capacity". What a terrible thing to say. Gross.
- stanfordkid 8y ago
  "Low learning capacity"... Ha! Intellectual arrogance. It's way too common in our field (Computer Science). Exercises for anyone who thinks this way: 1. Pick an individual sport (running, swimming, biking) 2. Study an elite athlete in that sport 3. Try to get as good as them. What you'll notice is that, in fact, you can get really really far. Coding is the same way -- I doubt someone who can't get through a book would ever become Jeff Dean (same way most of us won't be Usain Bolt), but they can become employable and lead a good, meaningful, productive life doing coding! Brains aren't so different from muscle fibers ... they can grow and learn anything with enough activation.
  - _m96l 8y ago
    I never said folks couldn't pick up a stack of books and in theory study well enough to get a good tech job. I said they generally don't because they don't have the stamina, discipline, and curiosity to do so. Some do. The minority. Most don't. Respondents are attacking me as if I am saying this is how things should be. Trust me, I wish it was the opposite. I've been involved in hiring in all my recent roles, and we'd be happy to hire anyone who has enough motivation, discipline, and interest in the field to learn CS and React through books and come work for us. There's just not many of these. I didn't make it so. I didn't stand behind people taking Udacity courses and whispered in their ear "give up!" like some sort of comical Satan. If I could, I'd whisper "Try harder! You can succeed!" However when I did end up interviewing folks coming out of code bootcamps, I ended up not being able to offer them a job. Bluntly, most of them seemed to have no real interest in tech. They initially studied something else, were on a different track in life, typically had little interest in tech at best. Then they heard you can make 6 figures in tech no problem, and I met them 4-10 months later, often after they went through some lazy course designed specifically to game my interview process. Results from recruiting straight out of bootcamp simply do not justify the effort. In fact they're so bad that despite all our need for talent, we don't hire anyone straight out of bootcamp anymore. We'll gladly be your second job after bootcamp, but never your first. Because the vast majority who even complete these bootcamps realize the money isn't enough to keep them engaged in a field they don't inherently like - which is why they didn't go to tech in the first place. My impression is that a large majority of them leave the field after working for a short while on their new job. This is based on reports from friends in the industry + the fact we get a ton of resumes from people who just finished bootcamp, but very few from people who finished bootcamp and then worked in the industry for any amount of time. All this is for people who signed up and finished a bootcamp, which is already a high bar. The amount of people who bought a "micro-degree" from commercial companies like Udacity is probably far larger, and only a tiny minority of them even completed this relatively easy course (look up MOOC completion ratios), let alone went through a bootcamp which is far more taxing and less accessible. People will probably attack me like I'm the evil wizard who conjured this unfortunate situation. They're killing the messenger.

povertyworld 8y ago

I think you're confusing Udemy with Udacity. I think this confusion is common, and probably not helping Udacity much.

wukerplank 8y ago
Even Udemy is not that bad. If you wait for the right price you can get a decent introduction to a topic you are interested in. I learned to use Blender that way, filled some gaps with different platform SDKs and so on. Great way to kickstart a hobby.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  The Youtube ads are so unbelievably patronizing that I wouldn't dream of giving them my money.
  - tEMporality7 8y ago
    Your drawings would look great in 3D!
  - ChrisRR 8y ago
    I agree. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard "Python's where it's at. You can do almost anything with it" skips ad
- znpy 8y ago
  I've known Udemy for a lot of time but never really cared. Until I started looking for courses on uncommon subjects I am interested in. Then I discovered a new world, basically. I now always keep one eye on sales at Udemy, and will be spending 200€ on a single course in the following day. Content quality, as always, depends on the course and the author but generally when it comes to IT and related stuff the rating is a good indicator of quality.
  - jf- 8y ago
    > I now always keep one eye on sales at Udemy, and will be spending 200€ on a single course in the following day. Are these not covered by the perma-sales?

plinkplonk 8y ago

"all its incantations" - did you mean 'incarnations'? (though I like 'incantations'! )

GlennS 8y ago

I'd disagree with amateurish. I agree that some of what they're advertising looks like 'intro to web bodging' and 'learn to mash tables without learning the maths', but there's also Norvig: https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--cs212 https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--... Granted, I haven't actually paid them any money.

wl 8y ago
Norvig and Thrun's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class was pretty awful. I hope their offerings improved since the original class in 2011, but I'd be wary of paying money for any classes with their names attached to it. On the other hand, Widom's database class and Ng's ML class were excellent.

anonymous5133 8y ago

I thought the same thing but it really makes sense. The second you start going into anything challenging...your retention drops off a cliff. For Udacity, they have to give the illusion that MOOCs have high retention rates (because everyone criticizes them for low retention). If you don't believe me then just go on youtube and look for some Stanford, MIT etc. course where they uploaded all the lectures. You'll see the first lecture has lots of view but if you scroll through the rest you'll see the retention drops significantly. I've ran some numbers on this and it turns out the biggest drop is actually in the second lecture.

jf- 8y ago

You seem to be painting this as an issue of ability: intelligent people do real computer science. These people would never need a user-friendly course introducing them to a topic. Seems both uncharitable and untrue.

prepend 8y ago

I’m a “buy a book” kind of person and didn’t get it until I used its value as a sensitive screener. People can learn in many ways, but there’s a sheepskin effect [0] just by paying $49 to prove you end through it and got the button to add to LinkedIn. There are certainly false positives, but these courses are helpful to 1) help users sort out all the EdX vs. wannabes and 2) demonstrate willingness to learn. Of course I would never use this to try to determine whether someone knows a skill or is competent or is a learning lover, but it’s helpful as one of many filtering criteria. I also use it as a casual way to recommend training when I care enough about the person that they learn, but not enough that I want to answer every question that comes up with open courseware (eg, what’s a command prompt, why doesn’t this package work with that package, etc). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepskin_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepskin_effect

projectramo 8y ago

CS50 is great but many of the free courses on Udacity are superior. (Not all of them, but I would say more than half). Also, Udacity is for learning self-driving cars, algorithmic trading, conv nets for object recognition and stuff you wouldn't get elsewhere.

Eridrus 8y ago
I'm not sure about algorithmic trading, or what the self-driving car class contains, but there is tonnes of content on object detection and other recent AI breakthroughs.

mruts 8y ago

I'm currently taking AI for Trading on Udacity and it's the best course I've ever taken. I highly doubt you could find a comparable course anywhere else.