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This company is a very smart scam. I'm an experienced ruby developer, and have been following them for a while. I checked out the course just out of curiosity w
by throwaway7989 13y ago
This company is a very smart scam. I'm an experienced ruby developer, and have been following them for a while. I checked out the course just out of curiosity when it was up on Skillshare. The way Mattan approaches the topic is interesting, and makes this company one of the most successful and not-scam -looking scams you will find. Here's how it works.
Rails is currently a buzzword for those just starting to try to learn how to code - very attractive. But in reality, Rails is not the best way to start learning code, it's a framework for experienced developers. Rails takes a ton of shortcuts and pushes a lot of things under the hood. This is very convenient if you understand the concepts that rails has abstracted, but very dangerous if you don't. Rails makes it easy to set up a basic rest MVC app for testing, but making a full blown custom web app requires a good understanding of many concepts, some of which are detailed below:
- The principles of computer programming
- SQL and relational database design
- HTTP protocol, how it works
- MVC architecture, why and how it operates
- HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby - proficient at least
- The difference between client and server and how they interact
- Basic web security
- The command line and UNIX
I could go on with that list, but you get the idea. Building a real rails app is tough, and requires a large stack of knowledge that simply cannot be amassed within one month.
So how does Mattan handle this? He does away with the part where you actually learn any of these things. In One Month Rails, you are quickly introduced to concepts, then given code you can copy and paste in order to make it work.
For students, this is fantastic. They are attracted by the word "Rails" and the concept of becoming a programmer in one month (and allegedly making over $100k/year after that, as he claims). Everything works great, and it comes really easy. You skip the whole hard part where you actually need to understand things, and are just fed answers that always work. You look at him type the code, then you copy it exactly yourself. Developing an app suddenly became easy.
Fast forward to the end of the course. You have a working clone of twitter or pinterest or something, and life is good. You made this all yourself - you put in the code, ran the migrations, added the twitter bootstrap classes, etc. You are asked to review the course and of course you give Mattan a glowing review. It really worked - within a month you were able to build a full web app on your own!
By now, most of you will recognize where the scam is. You paid for the course, you finished it and you gave it a great review. But you also have not learned anything at all. And as soon as you actually need to go build an app or apply for a job, you'll quickly realize that you are out of luck. This is a successful and obviously profitable class, but at it's core, it's a scam. And to add to that, Mattan is at most a junior level developer himself.
This post is not here with the intent to be mean to Mattan or his company - he is a great guy, and the company has obviously been successful. I just wrote this here to tell the truth about what the company is doing and how it operates. I would love to see stats on how many people who have taken Mattan's class have gone on to actually having a career as a developer. I'm willing to bet it's 1% or less. But prove me wrong, please.
- mattangriffel 13y agoThese are all fair criticisms that I'm happy to respond to, but let's please be careful when throwing around the word "scam". A scam is something dishonest and I promise that I have good intentions. We often forget that products can evolve. I'm not pretending that I've come up with the best version of what this product could eventually be. But I've validated the need for a product, released a version of it that has a modicum of value, and an overwhelming majority of the people who have completed the class are incredibly excited and thankful. I just got this email today (completely unsolicited): "Subj: $100K in wasted programming costs. OMR liberated me! Hi Mattan, I followed your Rails course and created Shruffle.com. It's a simple way for businesses to do text marketing. Nothing too fancy, but I'm marketing it to local restaurants and barber shops around where I live, and have been getting good responses. Just wanted to say a big THANK YOU for making a kick-ass course. I wasted so much time hiring wack ass programmers in the past who never understood what I wanted to do half the time. Over the course of 5-6 years I must have spent at least $100K in wasted programming costs for various projects that never went anywhere. Your course liberated me....now I can build anything that I dream of without spending a penny. Most of the other courses were a big freaking waste of time. I was looking for something that showed me how to do basic things quickly (login/logout, validations, etc etc), and your course did just that. Next step is to incorporate Stripe for payments." Now I'll admit that I'm not happy with what % of people finish the course (it's higher than average for an online class but still relatively low) and I'm not happy that I don't teach enough to give people the flexibility to build more than just a fairly simple CRUD app, but rest assured that as the creator of this product, I'm more critical than anyone else of its flaws. The first version was 3 hours, I took a lot of feedback and completely redid the lessons to turn it into a much longer class. The course has been redone 3 time so far and I'm currently in the process of expanding it out into a much larger one that teaches people the various concepts of web applications within the contexts of different kinds of applications (an about me, a wordpress, a yelp, a pinterest) which will give people more of that understanding that we're both looking for. Anyway, as I'm sure you can imagine, it hurts when someone takes a product you've spent a lot of time on and calls it a "scam".
- rrouse 13y agoWhat I don't know is whether or not the person in that email is equipped with what he or she needs to actually be able to figure out how to incorporate Stripe. Are you at all confident that you have taught people how to research and understand what they are looking at? I've known plenty of people who can follow patterns and regurgitate what they have seen, but have little to no ability to actually create. If what they want to do deviates just a little, they are toast.