Learn to code, get a job. | Hacker News Reader

Learn to code, get a job.

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26 pointsjakegrygowski11 comments

Direct link: http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/treehouse-3-million

In short, Treehouse is giving away 2,500, 2-year long subscriptions to college students.

College students can always major in CS. With the down economy, personally I would find it more inspiring if they gave away some to people trying to find new careers.

This put Treehouse on the map for me. I have not seen evidence to suggest that Treehouse's $50/month program is any bit more worthwhile than Codecademy's program, but the notion that I could "save" $1,200 ($50/month * 2 years) on education makes this attraction too interesting to pass up.

I just signed up, told a friend, and will probably tell another five people about Treehouse today. Great marketing stunt.

That's a great idea! I'll talk to our team about us possibly taking that on next.

I really don't understand this.

College students are the last group in need of this kind of help. They already have numerous opportunities for scholarships, internships and other programs. Most college students are already faced with an excess of learning opportunities (at least in terms of academic subjects).

It's the people who don't have degrees or who have unrelated degrees that would benefit more from what Treehouse offers. Unemployed and underemployed people in particular would likely have both the time and motivation to take advantage of Treehouse, too.

Well, more power to them. There's a ton of people like me out there who would like to learn to code, and do so in a prescribed manner that could eventually lead to employment placement.

That said, this particular announcement is more than a little confusing, since presumably anyone with a .edu email who is interested in web design/dev would already be enrolled in related classes. But... I guess any press release is better than none...

I'm a college student and this is perfect for me. I know how to use HTML and CSS rudimentarily but know zilch about design. as an out of state student, the university I'm attending isn't cheap. also I don't believe cs majors have any web development courses.

When I see “lern2code” stuff like this, I always hear Elton John’s “Circle of Life” in my head.

1.“Our crappy developers aren’t worth what we pay them and coding is a commodity…let’s fire/outsource them all” 2. ”Only nerds and people who really love computers should learn how to code.” 3.“OMG! Those nerds are making so much money!! Everyone should learn to code and get rich!!!”

1 --> 2 --> 3 --> 1 --> 2 ...

I'm the Founder at Treehouse. This isn't about replacing or outsourcing Developer's jobs. Treehouse will help non-technical people skill up so they can launch MVP products. It will also help experts stay up-to-date on their skills.

I'm actually quite curious about Treehouse. I'll probably be finished with the AI for Ambition later this month and I'd like to release an attractive, marketable version before the end of 2012. I've worked on mostly back-end software my whole life, but I need to learn front-end development, and preferably reasonably quickly (because I work full-time, and I don't mean to trivialize FE development because I know it takes a long time to become great at it; I'm just looking for an efficient path to reasonably good). Is Treehouse a good place to learn how to do this kind of thing? (Sorry to thread-jack with my personal interests, but I'd imagine a lot of people have similar objectives.)

I don't think "front-end" development can be learnt methodologically. I'm assuming that front-end development ties in a bit of design skills to really make it effective.

I'm a backend guy myself. I'm probably good at thinking up nice UI, coding it with CSS or Interface Builder. In real life they somehow don't seem right. I'm not sure. I guess I need to delve a little bit more into design theory?

That said, there are some proven textbook recipes for front end development that mostly works.

As someone who has completed most of the Treehouse badges, I can tell you it is worth your time for learning front end dev.

Here's some front end design work I did with what I learned in a couple months - slatetechnologies.com . I was pretty happy that I could build a tablet out of straight HTML/CSS.

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