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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

It sucks for Pluralsight employees that were affected by this. Though I think that the company couldn't wait 2-3 weeks before announcing also sucks, at least make it over Christmas.

Pluralsight is one of a few companies in the "education" business that I don't really have high hopes for in general. Pluralsight, Lynda / Linkedinlearn, Udemy, etc. They either target enterprise companies as a way to "skill up" and save money on training. Or they sell to aspirational individuals. But the main problem is that the overall quality is really really low, borderline useless. I haven't seen a site with this model that does better than just buy a book and practice. I think most sites could be beaten by finding good videos on youtube.

I do like Coursera's model, namely because you can come away with a certificate or degree, and the average quality is way higher. Functional Programming by Martin Odersky on Cousera was one of the best online courses I've taken.

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re "at least make it over Christmas" A piece of advice I picked up from an old manager prior to his retirement, there's never a good time to lay someone off. Once you know you need to let someone go, don't delay. He once waited until after the Holiday season to layoff one of his team members thinking it was the 'right' thing to delay. She was very upset - "why didn't you tell me sooner, I wouldn't have spent so much money on presents!" Never assume what's best for someone in these situations, you'll often get it wrong.

> the overall quality is really really low

That has not been my experience with Pluralsight courses. I've done quite a few (10?) over the years for .NET, C, and C++. Most were authored by people who are experts in that specific niche (ex: Kenny Kerr's course on C, Kate Gregory's courses on C++) and quite well done.

Maybe it depends on the technological niche you're looking at?

It seems to me that the actual Pluralsight created courses were high quality, but I think their acquisitions diluted that.

I also found the C#/F# courses very well made. Specifically those by Mark Seemann, Kate Gregory and K Scott Allen... who I just found out died 2 years ago :(

Yeah, this seems like a really rough market. If you are educating people who can self-learn then there's a tiny market where it's not clear you can easily beat books/YT. If you're educating people who can't self-learn then you quickly learn how damn expensive it is to find good and stable teaching staff.

I find the best technical training is centered on a use case and has ample hands-on material to go with the concepts. Additionally it should curate what I really need to know so I’m not spending my time following bad leads or going down the wrong path.

Ultimately training should be associated with an outcome which accelerates the time to achieving business value. Good training pays for itself this way.

The best way to do upskilling for an Eng org is to have your more senior engineers learn the material and then present it to the portion of the org in which they operate and in a way that's relevant to why ICs in that org is learning the material.

I don’t think that’s true at all. There’s no reason to believe a senior engineer is good at teaching or even wants to. I’m not even sure it’s a great use of their time.

Often there’s enough complexity where you need juniors to cease an opportunity to become the go-to on something as well.

Correct regarding senior engineers teaching, or any person trying to teach, actually.

Teaching is a skill, the same as engineering.

All the winningest coaches in the NFL, NBA, etc were not the best players when they played themselves. But they can communicate and motivate. I don't think there's been any stellar players that became stellar coaches.

I know I've always been one of the shittier coders - whatever I do, I'm usually not the best. Don't get me wrong, I know what I'm doing, but just not the best by a long-shot. However, I've usually the one who everybody comes to for help and explanations, because I think I have a knack for teaching. I like teaching. Even stuff I don't really know well at all, I can give people the general idea of the concept, which is 75% of the battle. I can point people in the right direction and give an overview so they are not wasting time in a wild goose chase.

>>the overall quality is really really low, borderline useless.

I am going to concur with the other poster, this is not my experience at all

I will grant you that more advanced courses are some what fewer, but for a Jr Dev or Jr Admin, or technician looking to skill up I find Pluralsight to be one of the more complete sites out their, the video courses combined with their Internal testing (skillIQ) and realtime labs I think provide good training base

> But the main problem is that the overall quality is really really low, borderline useless.

A number of years ago just after they debuted, lots of people raved about the quality, but something happened along the way which I've noticed, too. It's a tragedy that the state of technical writing in general within the industry shows how drastically under-funded it is, and that under-funding extends even into these learning platforms.

Content creation is exceedingly difficult.

Content creators are typically a one-hit wonder. They usually move on and do other things in life.

And the shelf life of a one-hit wonder is so short. Technologies change, so the content needs to be updated. And content can easily be copied by other content creators.

I think one of the problems with sites like this in general is that the market is flooded with low-quality product with nothing but the reputation of the person teaching the course to go by. It's probably one of the reasons that university systems have accreditation organizations, so that courses and degree programs are forced to meet a set of standards.

Specifically for self study programs, there's not enough instruction time spent on tying everything together in a course. Most of them just bounce from topic to topic and then you're done. In certain "certificate" programs, they'll have some sort of capstone project, which still isn't the same as getting additional educational reinforcement, which I feel is probably needed MORE in self-study systems than in university settings where you can get office hours and discuss topics in-person with classmates.

IME sorting the wheat from the chaff on YT is half the value. I just recently bought a subscription to LaraCasts just to have a nice, curated collection of walkthroughs on common web stacks.

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