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Comment by paukiatwee | Hacker News Reader

I personally paid one course and one specialization courses.

There are the reasons why I paid:

1. The course is awesome and I want to support the authors.

2. The course I paid is new learning area I never use professionally during job but I wish to use at my job (or new job). Instead of say "I interested in XYZ", I said "I interested in XYZ so I took online course to learn" at my interview. This is to partially solve chicken and egg problem.

3. For serious courses, I pay so I can have pressure and motivation to complete it.

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If you don't mind which courses did you pay for? Especially, which ones did you pay because they were so high quality?

I took:

1. Functional Programming Principles in Scala[1]

2. Machine Learning Specialization [2]

[1]: https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun [2]: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning

1 is a fantastic course. It changed my life, quite literally. Lead me down a path to a new job, new city, and a new partner.

If you've reached that stage yet, have you found prospective employers appreciate the (paid-for) certificate?

Over taking the course and saying "I'm interested in X, so I took the course for free, and consequently have no proof to show you".

I have some Machine Learning certificates from Coursera, and at the gig I'm working some really entry level Machine Learning was required.

I do believe it helped when I told them about the courses I took, showed them some code I had backed up online, at least it let them know I wasn't just completely bluffing.

In me experience, employers does not care whether it is free or paid, they care more about your passion to learn.

Yes, though the paid certs aren't much better than the unpaid.

Source: hiring manager for Data Scientist/Engineers.

I find lots of PhDs who can't code and lots of software devs who can't build a regression model. If you are a software developer who has done the Coursera ML course and/or a Kaggle then your resume gets read.

Surely the next question in the interview would be to ask a bit about the course and what was taught in it. No one asks to see my University qualifications in interview, an instead ask fairly irrelevant algorithmic questions (I am a database / systems engineer).

It depends on the role. For our team, IMO the difference in attention is epsilon, since we already see so many applicants who have a minimum required exposure to ML.

Source: not the hiring manager but involved in reviewing candidates for a DS team.

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