12 ms·

Udacity restructures operations, lays off 20 percent of its workforce

220 points by guiambros 8y ago

annon2323 8y ago
No cloud computing training, no success
mirimir 8y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20190410021520/https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/09/udacity-restructures-operations-lays-off-20-percent-of-its-workforce/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190410021520/https://techcrunc... Gotta hit ESC just after it loads.
tannerc 8y ago
Another round of layoffs in only a few months, things are not looking good for the company. Udacity cut 125 employees in November 2018 [1], just five months ago. Just before that 25 people were cut around August/September 2018 [2]. 1. https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/28/udacity-cuts-125-employees-as-part-of-global-restructuring-plan/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/28/udacity-cuts-125-employee... 2. https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/online-education-unicorn-udacity-has-quietly-laid-off-5-of-staff-at-least-25-people-since-august/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/online-education-unicorn-u...
- veryworried 8y ago
  Are we witnessing the end of Udacity?
  - thomasmeeks 8y ago
    Yeah, I think so. The players in the industry that went after enterprises are doing well, the players that stuck to selling mostly to individual customers are having a rough go of it. Udacity definitely had some big enterprise deals with their specific nanodegrees, but it never looked like they became an enterprise sales company from the outside. I believe most marketing departments (along with people trying to make a name for themselves) have massively cranked up the amount of free content they pump out in the last few years. It is making it terribly difficult to become big in the education space while selling to the masses. Enterprises, on the other hand, _really_ want to lower their salary expenditures through training and will happily throw money at a company like Pluralsight to train up new employees. For what its worth, I think they're correct that training can drive down payroll costs. But the company I worked for was acquired by Pluralsight, so there's some bias.
    - christudor 8y ago
      Something else that makes the B2C market difficult is the fact that the sign of a great educational video is one that you only need to watch once.
      - povertyworld 8y ago
        The point of Udacity is the projects, not the videos. You can skip all the videos, and just go straight to the projects if you want.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        Well, yeah, but there's always another video you can watch. The problem is more the overall devaluing of content prices by consumers generally. Especially absent much in the way of certification value for most people, that places a real ceiling on how much you can charge. I might pay something in the neighborhood of book pricing for an online course (or I may take one of the numerous free alternatives). But I'm unlikely to pay triple digits and I certainly won't pay thousands of dollars.
    - nkozyra 8y ago
      > The players in the industry that went after enterprises are doing well, the players that stuck to selling mostly to individual customers are having a rough go of it. Keep in mind they had a deal with Georgia Tech's OMSCS, but something went awry there too.
      - cgearhart 8y ago
        The ink wasn’t even dry on the OMSCS deal when Udacity did their “pivot” to Nanodegrees. They lived up to the letter of the agreement with GT—in fact Udacity is still the classroom platform for OMSCS classes—but they went in a completely different direction as a company with a product that effectively competes with OMSCS. It’s not hard to see why: GT said recently that through 5 years of operation the OMSCS has made $14M for the school. That’s wonderful from their perspective, but that’s a total disaster for a VC-funded unicorn company.
  - grosswait 8y ago
    Not sure, but this sounds promising "Last year, Udacity generated about $90 million in revenue. Even as Udacity slashes costs and headcount, it’s trying to expand its enterprise business, which has had recent success. Udacity now has contracts with 60 enterprise customers, including AT&T and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Airbus and Audi recently signed on, as well."
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Anecdotally, a fair number of companies seem to be tapping various providers that were originally mostly B2C as a way to bulk up company or technology-specific online training libraries with a catalog that addresses both more general skills and personal development. I don't know what this looks like as a business but I can imagine it's easier to sell a relatively modest number of business subscriptions than it is to beat the bushes for a lot of retail $10-50 courses.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- KerryJones 8y ago
  I have several friends who used to work there -- there has been 3 other rounds of layoffs in the last few years (not including the ones you mentioned).
mattbillenstein 8y ago
Interviewed here at the end of 2015, so quite a while ago, but even back then, something just didn't _feel_ right about that place -- like they had their eye on everything but the ball -- raised a ton of money, hired a bunch of smart people, drinking plenty of the koolaid, but they weren't really focused so much on the problem if anyone wanted what they were selling... It was a big vision and most startups fail, so maybe it's just they couldn't figure it out -- happens to most of us.
baoha 8y ago
It seems like being academically excellent and being successful in industry are totally different things. I still remember the hype about Udacity and Coursera a few years ago. Beside VmWare and Akamai, I haven't seen any company founded by university faculty that have survived and made impact (even though VMware was tiny compared to what it is today when EMC acquired them)
- learc83 8y ago
  >I haven't seen any company founded by university faculty that have survived and made impact Bose, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Financial Engines, Genentech, MathWorks, Boston Dynamics, Pixar (I think it counts), Arista Networks, MIPS, Rambus, Duolingo, Sun Microsystems. Depending on what your cut off is for made an impact, I'm sure there are dozens more from Stanford alone.
  - brian_cunnie 8y ago
    VMware (Stanford)
- momofarm 8y ago
  Akamai's CEO, Dr. Tom Leighton's math class at MIT, still my all-time favorite. It change my life, since I thought I will never be able to understand math above high school algebra. Gilber Strang's linear algebra and Stewart's calcus is the other two.
matt_j 8y ago
I completed a bunch of courses at Udacity before they introduced the Nanodegree programs. I enjoyed the experience and gained useful knowledge in areas that my regular degree program didn't cover (brushed up on Stats, Python web programming, JavaScript graphics, etc), but free courses doesn't seem like a viable business platform. The Nanodegree programs are not free, and from the courses that are included it's clear that you would gain valuable skills, but are they recognized as a qualification in industry at large? I'm sure some employers would consider them, but would enough employers? Regardless, it's a fantastic service that they offer, and I'm grateful for it. Hopefully they can keep the ball rolling and pivot to a place that is profitable enough for them to continue.
- dooes 8y ago
  There wasn’t enough innovation. What they offer is replaceable instantly by any single university in the world which offers a course for free and hosted on YouTube. I don’t have a solution but I think online education has not been solved. Clearly there is a lot of innovation but nobody is making it.
  - cinquemb 8y ago
    >What they offer is replaceable instantly by any single university in the world which offers a course for free and hosted on YouTube. I completely agree with this. >I don’t have a solution but I think online education has not been solved. Clearly there is a lot of innovation but nobody is making it. I don't think the problem is online education, I think problem with these ed-tech companies is that they still are trying compete with the credentialing system of universities without access to all the student loan debt the latter have access to. Gotta love the choices HS graduates can get funneled into/ reinforced by mainstream opinion today: bootcamps, nanodegrees, or loading up on student loan debt if you can edge out agaisnt the legacy/bribery admits. I think what people are really trying to solve is a cheaper credentialing system, that get's distorted by some of the incentives involved.
    - Gene_Parmesan 8y ago
wirthjason 8y ago
I like their model of education which focuses on highly targeted technical skills to be completed in 3-6 months. Continuing education is an interesting beast. The transitional educational opportunities are often out of sync for a working professional. We don’t need a second bachelors or a masters but rather an in-depth course to get us up to speed where we’re lacking.
- colmvp 8y ago
  It still feels like 3-6 months is far too short for a curriculum for people making career changes, as there is a great deal of depth for each topic covered. For example, in their Robotics Software Engineering degree, one of the topics they cover is Mapping and SLAM. That topic alone is a full university course and a specialization, i.e. Cyrill Stachniss' lectures on YouTube. I think online courses try too hard to squeeze too much material in a short time, whereby students only acquire a superficial understanding of a topic.
  - momofarm 8y ago
    if you look at the price they paid, compare to the students enrolled in real university, you got what you paid for. Knowledge always costs some money, for cheap things you should be ware of what really missing.
jamestimmins 8y ago
Whatever problems Udacity may have as a business, I will always be thankful bc they're responsible for me getting into software development as a career. CS 253, Intro to Web Development by Steve Huffman of Reddit, was an incredible introduction into full stack development. Udacity has always taken bold bets about the future of education, and I sincerely hope that they survive and thrive, simply because of their willingness to push the envelope.
- wanone 8y ago
  That course, practically, got me my first job!
- gordon_freeman 8y ago
  I completely agree. Udacity was the one that helped me move into my career in data analytics. I took Thrun's excellent Intro to Stats[1] class to brush up my Stats skills along with some other courses such as Intro to Descriptive Stats[2] and Intro to Inferential Stats[3]. [1] https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-statistics--st101 https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-statistics--st101 [2] https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-descriptive-statistics--ud827 https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-descriptive-statisti... [3] https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-inferential-statistics--ud201 https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-inferential-statisti...
- cgearhart 8y ago
  That's the only Udacity course that I've ever completed...
- filoleg 8y ago
  Echoing this. Took their intro to CS with Sebastian Thrunn around my senior year of high school, and it made me decide to get a degree in CS. 6 years later, i work as a dev, so I definitely feel like i owe some of it to taking that course
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
  I can also say that while that particular course was not formative for me (I took and enjoyed it, but it wasn't what got me into programming), I also can attribute at least the start of my career to Udacity. The CS101 course Udacity offered in Python many years ago was what really gave me the confidence to enter the dev scene and to start thinking about things as a real software engineer instead of hacking things together as I always had in the past.
randomacct3847 8y ago
I don’t think it’s clear from the customer perspective what you really get for $1k. Sure, it’s a lot cheaper than going to school but if it means nothing to an employer than psychologically it feels like money spent rather than money invested. I’m sure they have partnerships with some cos to offer to their employees but seems like investing on enterprise sales for employee training could be a more fruitful route than b2c.
muhneesh 8y ago
I don't know anything about the business or cultural elements of Udacity, but they have such high quality of courses that this makes me genuinely sad. I hope they can figure out a business model - even if it leans B2B vs. B2C.
bjourne 8y ago
That sucks. The site has some damn amazing content given the low cost (free!). For example, their courses on theoretical computer science and compiler theory are pretty great. But... I already have a degree so I can't see myself paying for a nanodegree. Hopefully, someone else will pay for it to keep the site running.
iandanforth 8y ago
I took the deep reinforcement nanodegree and was disappointed. The course had several instructors, only one of whom I thought was a really good teacher. When you're competing with free material like the David Silver lectures you need to produce something really awesome to justify a $1k cost. I think the potential was there, and the partnership with Unity helped, but overall it felt disorganized, outsourced, and of insufficient quality (after the first section which was awesome). Hopefully Thrun brings a renewed focus on course quality as well.
- tuesday20 8y ago
  I took the blockchain nanodegree, and was disappointed as well. There are 10$ Udemy courses that are better :( Hopefully things will improve
anonymous5133 8y ago
I like what udacity is doing overall but I think they've failed to really comprehend the nature of the education industry in the United States. Overall, the biggest problems are simply perceptions by employers in terms of what is considered a quality education. First, employers don't view self-studied or online education to be good. Second problem is employers overwhelmingly gravitate towards traditional degrees from government or private universities. This ends up corrupting the entire fabric of education. Students, seeking some sort of way to make themselves marketable in the job market, will only obtain education if it results in some sort of valuable degree. Hence the reason people are willing to spend hundreds of thousands to obtain these degrees. If you really want to disrupt education then you need to be directly figuring out how to change those perceptions. Start with the basics of making educational courses that would be considered the best in the world and then leverage the powerful benefits of an internet connected computer to create the best learning experience for the student. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. The way universities are teaching now is good but it is just not efficient and too costly overall. Take what works from traditional universities and then solve the weaknesses through the benefits of a computer. When I took udacity courses I just felt that the quality wasn't fully there. They felt more like something that would be a supplemental project you would take if you were studying a traditional course. You still need a way to obtain those key foundation skills before tackling the bigger projects.
- arcturus17 8y ago
  Udacity does a Masters of Science of CS with Georgia Tech for 7k. I hear most of the courses there are high quality and very rigorous... Perhaps they only need to apply that philosophy to smaller modules instead of a 12-course MS.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
    If you search around on HN there are more than a couple of threads speaking quite highly of this curricula. It’s probably the best MS in the world you can get in terms of value per dollar if you’re interested in applied CS.
bitL 8y ago
I took their Self-driving car Nanodegree and it was hands down the best online course I've ever taken in my life (and I took some crazy courses from MIT and Stanford). Where else could you end up with a capstone of actually programming a real self-driving car that is then running your code on some course in Mountain View? Offerings right now: 1. If you want academic rigor only, go with edX 2. If you want academic rigor and some more approachable/practical courses, go with Coursera; or if you want to do full MS/MBA/MSA online (they have the widest selection right now comparing to edX/Udacity) 3. If you want unique practical skills in hot areas like self-driving/flying cars, deep (reinforcement) learning etc. without fully committing to rigorous practices, go with Udacity 4. If you need anything else, go with Udemy, Masterclass, School of AI and similar
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  Interesting, I never ranked them.
- alexgmcm 8y ago
  For me, Udacity just has crazy prices. I mean I can pay ~40-50 euros for Coursera and edX (and lots of them are free). But Udacity costs thousands of euros - I could attend a brick and mortar school with a great reputation for that price here in Spain.
  - Isinlor 8y ago
    Would it be a private, subsidies free school, or a public one? Quite likely the actual cost of a public school will be 10 or 100 more than you have to pay in tuition.
    - alexgmcm 8y ago
      A public school - but ultimately that makes little difference to me as the consumer. Furthermore, none of the MOOC providers have cracked the issue of credibility to employers, if I felt an Udacity nanodegree would be taken as seriously as a 'real' masters degree then I'd be willing to pay much more for it. But when I'm just doing them more for self-fulfillment (as I'm sceptical employers give much credit to Coursera, Udacity etc.) then paying any more than 50 euros doesn't make sense.
codesternews 8y ago
The real problem for me as an investment in courses is Rate of return from Udacity. Their courses might be good but they are too expensive. In my country it is 100K. It is too expensive for most of the students and even professionals. Also, most of the courses are comparable on other MOOC sites like Udemy and Coursera. Udemy is best you can get in $10 and it helps a lot. I recently took AI course on Udemy for just $7 in sale and It is hands on course and I am really satisfied with it and the content. Even if it is not good I have not lost too much money. The value I got from that course far better than I would have got from udacity 100K ND courses. Their Nano Degrees does not provide value in the industry and you can not expect a job after it. After spending 2term fee of college I expect something from the course but it way too expensive. It's all hype you can do actually really good and get all the stuff and knowledge online. At the end for any job your knowledge will count.
- highhedgehog 8y ago
  wait, 100K?
- mesarvagya 8y ago
  Major courses cost $999, which is equivalent to Rs. 100,000 in Nepal. Of course it will be expensive for us.
  - mandeepj 8y ago
    That is just for one term. When I took SDC from Udacity, it had 3 terms.
Ice_cream_suit 8y ago
A story I know first hand: An unemployed PHP web developer struggled for 2 years to get a job. She had taken time off to have children. In that time PHP had acquired pariah status. I suggested that she do a Udacity "front end developer" course. A thousand dollars and 3 months later, she finished the course, found it valuable and obtained a job. She was promoted to project manager/leader a few months later.
- smartbit 8y ago
  She was promoted to project manager/leader a few months later. Must have been a horrible experience: you put in all that efforts to learn PHP and soon you get a job that requires a different skill set. Poor woman.
FailMore 8y ago
I'm not sure this is the case here, but one thing I notice is that competitive environments (i.e. non natural monopoly businesses) do catch up with businesses eventually. I don't think this should prevent VCs from investing (esp early stage), as great success can be achieved when capturing a market - but in the long run pricing pressures do force the business towards tighter margins.
CSMastermind 8y ago
I signed up for the very first Udacity class when it was first announced. I took several more in 2011 and 2012. I haven't logged into the site for a while. It's sad to see that they weren't able to figure things out.
amrx431 8y ago
I want Udacity to succeed as a business. The amazing course content of Udacity especially in AI and Machine Learning has no parallels when it comes to actually accomplishing something novel(for the student). If you take self driving car nanodegree, you will at the end of course be able to code actual software for the car.
gilaniali 8y ago
For me personally, it comes down to cost and acceptability. I would like to pursue nanodegrees but the cost is much higher than Coursera - which has a monthly subscription model. Also, Coursera has an expanding offering of Master's degrees from world renowned Univerities which employers will accept (my employer - a Canadian Bank will even pay for online masters degrees) but nanodegrees seem like vaporware, if Udacity goes under how do I get my nanodegrees verified? If the cost were lower, i could take the risk.
syntaxing 8y ago
Not surprised things aren't doing too well. I'm part of the deep learning nanodegree sponsored by Facebook (amazing course IMO). Two of the people in charge of our group from Udacity left back to back. I knew something weird was happening and this shows me why they left.
neves 8y ago
Hope they manage to fix their operations. Udacity is hands down the best MOOC. Their courses are professionally produced, with great visualizations, animations, and superb projects. I've already completed courses in Udemy, Coursera, PluralSight, and edX. Udacity is a level above everybody else.
netwanderer3 8y ago
I loved many of their individual courses at the beginning but now everything is just bundled into their nanodegree programs. While Udacity helped kick-start many similar online self-learning business models, but ultimately I believe they failed in their scaling effort. Their nanodegree programs often feel a little overpriced. I remember their mission was to democratize online education, but at those prices I'm not so sure. I tried it once and their support really left a lot to be desired.

220 points by guiambros 8y ago

No cloud computing training, no success

https://web.archive.org/web/20190410021520/https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/09/udacity-restructures-operations-lays-off-20-percent-of-its-workforce/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190410021520/https://techcrunc... Gotta hit ESC just after it loads.

tannerc 8y ago

Another round of layoffs in only a few months, things are not looking good for the company. Udacity cut 125 employees in November 2018 [1], just five months ago. Just before that 25 people were cut around August/September 2018 [2]. 1. https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/28/udacity-cuts-125-employees-as-part-of-global-restructuring-plan/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/28/udacity-cuts-125-employee... 2. https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/online-education-unicorn-udacity-has-quietly-laid-off-5-of-staff-at-least-25-people-since-august/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/online-education-unicorn-u...

veryworried 8y ago
Are we witnessing the end of Udacity?
- thomasmeeks 8y ago
  Yeah, I think so. The players in the industry that went after enterprises are doing well, the players that stuck to selling mostly to individual customers are having a rough go of it. Udacity definitely had some big enterprise deals with their specific nanodegrees, but it never looked like they became an enterprise sales company from the outside. I believe most marketing departments (along with people trying to make a name for themselves) have massively cranked up the amount of free content they pump out in the last few years. It is making it terribly difficult to become big in the education space while selling to the masses. Enterprises, on the other hand, _really_ want to lower their salary expenditures through training and will happily throw money at a company like Pluralsight to train up new employees. For what its worth, I think they're correct that training can drive down payroll costs. But the company I worked for was acquired by Pluralsight, so there's some bias.
  - christudor 8y ago
    Something else that makes the B2C market difficult is the fact that the sign of a great educational video is one that you only need to watch once.
    - povertyworld 8y ago
      The point of Udacity is the projects, not the videos. You can skip all the videos, and just go straight to the projects if you want.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Well, yeah, but there's always another video you can watch. The problem is more the overall devaluing of content prices by consumers generally. Especially absent much in the way of certification value for most people, that places a real ceiling on how much you can charge. I might pay something in the neighborhood of book pricing for an online course (or I may take one of the numerous free alternatives). But I'm unlikely to pay triple digits and I certainly won't pay thousands of dollars.
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    > The players in the industry that went after enterprises are doing well, the players that stuck to selling mostly to individual customers are having a rough go of it. Keep in mind they had a deal with Georgia Tech's OMSCS, but something went awry there too.
    - cgearhart 8y ago
      The ink wasn’t even dry on the OMSCS deal when Udacity did their “pivot” to Nanodegrees. They lived up to the letter of the agreement with GT—in fact Udacity is still the classroom platform for OMSCS classes—but they went in a completely different direction as a company with a product that effectively competes with OMSCS. It’s not hard to see why: GT said recently that through 5 years of operation the OMSCS has made $14M for the school. That’s wonderful from their perspective, but that’s a total disaster for a VC-funded unicorn company.
- grosswait 8y ago
  Not sure, but this sounds promising "Last year, Udacity generated about $90 million in revenue. Even as Udacity slashes costs and headcount, it’s trying to expand its enterprise business, which has had recent success. Udacity now has contracts with 60 enterprise customers, including AT&T and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Airbus and Audi recently signed on, as well."
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Anecdotally, a fair number of companies seem to be tapping various providers that were originally mostly B2C as a way to bulk up company or technology-specific online training libraries with a catalog that addresses both more general skills and personal development. I don't know what this looks like as a business but I can imagine it's easier to sell a relatively modest number of business subscriptions than it is to beat the bushes for a lot of retail $10-50 courses.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
KerryJones 8y ago
I have several friends who used to work there -- there has been 3 other rounds of layoffs in the last few years (not including the ones you mentioned).

mattbillenstein 8y ago

Interviewed here at the end of 2015, so quite a while ago, but even back then, something just didn't _feel_ right about that place -- like they had their eye on everything but the ball -- raised a ton of money, hired a bunch of smart people, drinking plenty of the koolaid, but they weren't really focused so much on the problem if anyone wanted what they were selling... It was a big vision and most startups fail, so maybe it's just they couldn't figure it out -- happens to most of us.

baoha 8y ago

It seems like being academically excellent and being successful in industry are totally different things. I still remember the hype about Udacity and Coursera a few years ago. Beside VmWare and Akamai, I haven't seen any company founded by university faculty that have survived and made impact (even though VMware was tiny compared to what it is today when EMC acquired them)

learc83 8y ago
>I haven't seen any company founded by university faculty that have survived and made impact Bose, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Financial Engines, Genentech, MathWorks, Boston Dynamics, Pixar (I think it counts), Arista Networks, MIPS, Rambus, Duolingo, Sun Microsystems. Depending on what your cut off is for made an impact, I'm sure there are dozens more from Stanford alone.
- brian_cunnie 8y ago
  VMware (Stanford)
momofarm 8y ago
Akamai's CEO, Dr. Tom Leighton's math class at MIT, still my all-time favorite. It change my life, since I thought I will never be able to understand math above high school algebra. Gilber Strang's linear algebra and Stewart's calcus is the other two.

matt_j 8y ago

I completed a bunch of courses at Udacity before they introduced the Nanodegree programs. I enjoyed the experience and gained useful knowledge in areas that my regular degree program didn't cover (brushed up on Stats, Python web programming, JavaScript graphics, etc), but free courses doesn't seem like a viable business platform. The Nanodegree programs are not free, and from the courses that are included it's clear that you would gain valuable skills, but are they recognized as a qualification in industry at large? I'm sure some employers would consider them, but would enough employers? Regardless, it's a fantastic service that they offer, and I'm grateful for it. Hopefully they can keep the ball rolling and pivot to a place that is profitable enough for them to continue.

dooes 8y ago
There wasn’t enough innovation. What they offer is replaceable instantly by any single university in the world which offers a course for free and hosted on YouTube. I don’t have a solution but I think online education has not been solved. Clearly there is a lot of innovation but nobody is making it.
- cinquemb 8y ago
  >What they offer is replaceable instantly by any single university in the world which offers a course for free and hosted on YouTube. I completely agree with this. >I don’t have a solution but I think online education has not been solved. Clearly there is a lot of innovation but nobody is making it. I don't think the problem is online education, I think problem with these ed-tech companies is that they still are trying compete with the credentialing system of universities without access to all the student loan debt the latter have access to. Gotta love the choices HS graduates can get funneled into/ reinforced by mainstream opinion today: bootcamps, nanodegrees, or loading up on student loan debt if you can edge out agaisnt the legacy/bribery admits. I think what people are really trying to solve is a cheaper credentialing system, that get's distorted by some of the incentives involved.
  - Gene_Parmesan 8y ago

wirthjason 8y ago

I like their model of education which focuses on highly targeted technical skills to be completed in 3-6 months. Continuing education is an interesting beast. The transitional educational opportunities are often out of sync for a working professional. We don’t need a second bachelors or a masters but rather an in-depth course to get us up to speed where we’re lacking.

colmvp 8y ago
It still feels like 3-6 months is far too short for a curriculum for people making career changes, as there is a great deal of depth for each topic covered. For example, in their Robotics Software Engineering degree, one of the topics they cover is Mapping and SLAM. That topic alone is a full university course and a specialization, i.e. Cyrill Stachniss' lectures on YouTube. I think online courses try too hard to squeeze too much material in a short time, whereby students only acquire a superficial understanding of a topic.
- momofarm 8y ago
  if you look at the price they paid, compare to the students enrolled in real university, you got what you paid for. Knowledge always costs some money, for cheap things you should be ware of what really missing.

jamestimmins 8y ago

Whatever problems Udacity may have as a business, I will always be thankful bc they're responsible for me getting into software development as a career. CS 253, Intro to Web Development by Steve Huffman of Reddit, was an incredible introduction into full stack development. Udacity has always taken bold bets about the future of education, and I sincerely hope that they survive and thrive, simply because of their willingness to push the envelope.

wanone 8y ago
That course, practically, got me my first job!
gordon_freeman 8y ago
I completely agree. Udacity was the one that helped me move into my career in data analytics. I took Thrun's excellent Intro to Stats[1] class to brush up my Stats skills along with some other courses such as Intro to Descriptive Stats[2] and Intro to Inferential Stats[3]. [1] https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-statistics--st101 https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-statistics--st101 [2] https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-descriptive-statistics--ud827 https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-descriptive-statisti... [3] https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-inferential-statistics--ud201 https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-inferential-statisti...
cgearhart 8y ago
That's the only Udacity course that I've ever completed...
filoleg 8y ago
Echoing this. Took their intro to CS with Sebastian Thrunn around my senior year of high school, and it made me decide to get a degree in CS. 6 years later, i work as a dev, so I definitely feel like i owe some of it to taking that course
SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
I can also say that while that particular course was not formative for me (I took and enjoyed it, but it wasn't what got me into programming), I also can attribute at least the start of my career to Udacity. The CS101 course Udacity offered in Python many years ago was what really gave me the confidence to enter the dev scene and to start thinking about things as a real software engineer instead of hacking things together as I always had in the past.

randomacct3847 8y ago

I don’t think it’s clear from the customer perspective what you really get for $1k. Sure, it’s a lot cheaper than going to school but if it means nothing to an employer than psychologically it feels like money spent rather than money invested. I’m sure they have partnerships with some cos to offer to their employees but seems like investing on enterprise sales for employee training could be a more fruitful route than b2c.

muhneesh 8y ago

I don't know anything about the business or cultural elements of Udacity, but they have such high quality of courses that this makes me genuinely sad. I hope they can figure out a business model - even if it leans B2B vs. B2C.

bjourne 8y ago

That sucks. The site has some damn amazing content given the low cost (free!). For example, their courses on theoretical computer science and compiler theory are pretty great. But... I already have a degree so I can't see myself paying for a nanodegree. Hopefully, someone else will pay for it to keep the site running.

iandanforth 8y ago

I took the deep reinforcement nanodegree and was disappointed. The course had several instructors, only one of whom I thought was a really good teacher. When you're competing with free material like the David Silver lectures you need to produce something really awesome to justify a $1k cost. I think the potential was there, and the partnership with Unity helped, but overall it felt disorganized, outsourced, and of insufficient quality (after the first section which was awesome). Hopefully Thrun brings a renewed focus on course quality as well.

tuesday20 8y ago
I took the blockchain nanodegree, and was disappointed as well. There are 10$ Udemy courses that are better :( Hopefully things will improve

anonymous5133 8y ago

I like what udacity is doing overall but I think they've failed to really comprehend the nature of the education industry in the United States. Overall, the biggest problems are simply perceptions by employers in terms of what is considered a quality education. First, employers don't view self-studied or online education to be good. Second problem is employers overwhelmingly gravitate towards traditional degrees from government or private universities. This ends up corrupting the entire fabric of education. Students, seeking some sort of way to make themselves marketable in the job market, will only obtain education if it results in some sort of valuable degree. Hence the reason people are willing to spend hundreds of thousands to obtain these degrees. If you really want to disrupt education then you need to be directly figuring out how to change those perceptions. Start with the basics of making educational courses that would be considered the best in the world and then leverage the powerful benefits of an internet connected computer to create the best learning experience for the student. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. The way universities are teaching now is good but it is just not efficient and too costly overall. Take what works from traditional universities and then solve the weaknesses through the benefits of a computer. When I took udacity courses I just felt that the quality wasn't fully there. They felt more like something that would be a supplemental project you would take if you were studying a traditional course. You still need a way to obtain those key foundation skills before tackling the bigger projects.

arcturus17 8y ago
Udacity does a Masters of Science of CS with Georgia Tech for 7k. I hear most of the courses there are high quality and very rigorous... Perhaps they only need to apply that philosophy to smaller modules instead of a 12-course MS.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
  If you search around on HN there are more than a couple of threads speaking quite highly of this curricula. It’s probably the best MS in the world you can get in terms of value per dollar if you’re interested in applied CS.

bitL 8y ago

I took their Self-driving car Nanodegree and it was hands down the best online course I've ever taken in my life (and I took some crazy courses from MIT and Stanford). Where else could you end up with a capstone of actually programming a real self-driving car that is then running your code on some course in Mountain View? Offerings right now: 1. If you want academic rigor only, go with edX 2. If you want academic rigor and some more approachable/practical courses, go with Coursera; or if you want to do full MS/MBA/MSA online (they have the widest selection right now comparing to edX/Udacity) 3. If you want unique practical skills in hot areas like self-driving/flying cars, deep (reinforcement) learning etc. without fully committing to rigorous practices, go with Udacity 4. If you need anything else, go with Udemy, Masterclass, School of AI and similar

WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
Interesting, I never ranked them.
alexgmcm 8y ago
For me, Udacity just has crazy prices. I mean I can pay ~40-50 euros for Coursera and edX (and lots of them are free). But Udacity costs thousands of euros - I could attend a brick and mortar school with a great reputation for that price here in Spain.
- Isinlor 8y ago
  Would it be a private, subsidies free school, or a public one? Quite likely the actual cost of a public school will be 10 or 100 more than you have to pay in tuition.
  - alexgmcm 8y ago
    A public school - but ultimately that makes little difference to me as the consumer. Furthermore, none of the MOOC providers have cracked the issue of credibility to employers, if I felt an Udacity nanodegree would be taken as seriously as a 'real' masters degree then I'd be willing to pay much more for it. But when I'm just doing them more for self-fulfillment (as I'm sceptical employers give much credit to Coursera, Udacity etc.) then paying any more than 50 euros doesn't make sense.

codesternews 8y ago

The real problem for me as an investment in courses is Rate of return from Udacity. Their courses might be good but they are too expensive. In my country it is 100K. It is too expensive for most of the students and even professionals. Also, most of the courses are comparable on other MOOC sites like Udemy and Coursera. Udemy is best you can get in $10 and it helps a lot. I recently took AI course on Udemy for just $7 in sale and It is hands on course and I am really satisfied with it and the content. Even if it is not good I have not lost too much money. The value I got from that course far better than I would have got from udacity 100K ND courses. Their Nano Degrees does not provide value in the industry and you can not expect a job after it. After spending 2term fee of college I expect something from the course but it way too expensive. It's all hype you can do actually really good and get all the stuff and knowledge online. At the end for any job your knowledge will count.

highhedgehog 8y ago
wait, 100K?
mesarvagya 8y ago
Major courses cost $999, which is equivalent to Rs. 100,000 in Nepal. Of course it will be expensive for us.
- mandeepj 8y ago
  That is just for one term. When I took SDC from Udacity, it had 3 terms.

Ice_cream_suit 8y ago

A story I know first hand: An unemployed PHP web developer struggled for 2 years to get a job. She had taken time off to have children. In that time PHP had acquired pariah status. I suggested that she do a Udacity "front end developer" course. A thousand dollars and 3 months later, she finished the course, found it valuable and obtained a job. She was promoted to project manager/leader a few months later.

smartbit 8y ago
She was promoted to project manager/leader a few months later. Must have been a horrible experience: you put in all that efforts to learn PHP and soon you get a job that requires a different skill set. Poor woman.

FailMore 8y ago

I'm not sure this is the case here, but one thing I notice is that competitive environments (i.e. non natural monopoly businesses) do catch up with businesses eventually. I don't think this should prevent VCs from investing (esp early stage), as great success can be achieved when capturing a market - but in the long run pricing pressures do force the business towards tighter margins.

CSMastermind 8y ago

I signed up for the very first Udacity class when it was first announced. I took several more in 2011 and 2012. I haven't logged into the site for a while. It's sad to see that they weren't able to figure things out.

amrx431 8y ago

I want Udacity to succeed as a business. The amazing course content of Udacity especially in AI and Machine Learning has no parallels when it comes to actually accomplishing something novel(for the student). If you take self driving car nanodegree, you will at the end of course be able to code actual software for the car.

gilaniali 8y ago

For me personally, it comes down to cost and acceptability. I would like to pursue nanodegrees but the cost is much higher than Coursera - which has a monthly subscription model. Also, Coursera has an expanding offering of Master's degrees from world renowned Univerities which employers will accept (my employer - a Canadian Bank will even pay for online masters degrees) but nanodegrees seem like vaporware, if Udacity goes under how do I get my nanodegrees verified? If the cost were lower, i could take the risk.

syntaxing 8y ago

Not surprised things aren't doing too well. I'm part of the deep learning nanodegree sponsored by Facebook (amazing course IMO). Two of the people in charge of our group from Udacity left back to back. I knew something weird was happening and this shows me why they left.

neves 8y ago

Hope they manage to fix their operations. Udacity is hands down the best MOOC. Their courses are professionally produced, with great visualizations, animations, and superb projects. I've already completed courses in Udemy, Coursera, PluralSight, and edX. Udacity is a level above everybody else.

netwanderer3 8y ago

I loved many of their individual courses at the beginning but now everything is just bundled into their nanodegree programs. While Udacity helped kick-start many similar online self-learning business models, but ultimately I believe they failed in their scaling effort. Their nanodegree programs often feel a little overpriced. I remember their mission was to democratize online education, but at those prices I'm not so sure. I tried it once and their support really left a lot to be desired.