5 ms·

Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

97 points by fantunes 5y ago

tedyoung 5y ago
Would love to know what caused this to happen, given (as the article says) huge amounts of money being poured into (seemingly) similar businesses.
- z0r 5y ago
  I remember reading a number of articles by / about the founder Ryan Carson similar to this one, about not taking unnecessary investment: https://medium.com/@ryancarson/not-silicon-valleys-timeline-baa3475eb6ac https://medium.com/@ryancarson/not-silicon-valleys-timeline-...
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  I imagine part of the problem is many of these coding schools are scams. It isn't that people can't learn from them, but what they are teaching is usually just too narrow to be all that useful.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    Treehouse isn’t a school or bootcamp. It is just video lessons and such.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    How is it a scam? It's a month-to-month subscription service, $25/mo. from what I recall. They didn't charge 5-figure tuition and offer weak "job guarantees", which is what coding bootcamps do.
    - tedivm 5y ago
      They stole much of their initial content from other people and ripped all attribution from it. I found two of my blog posts on their site, without any attribution or permission.
      - rchaud 5y ago
        That is unfortunate about your blog posts. But customers pay for their video lessons, which (at least in 2014), were all created in-house.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - midev 5y ago
    > what they are teaching is usually just too narrow to be all that useful They were video lessons on HTML, CSS, and other languages. Your comment makes no sense, and sounds more like projection than valid criticism.
- sexhaver1984 5y ago
  It can be summed up easily: Most of the teachers left years ago due to a toxic work environment and all of the content went stale making it not live up to competitors.
racl101 5y ago
Ironic that most people taking their courses are doing so to be able to ..... get jobs. I always liked Treehouse's presentation but it was a bit pricey compared to other services like Udemy for example.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  Comparing prices for anything (courses, software, services, etc) to a marketplace (Udemy, app stores, Upwork, etc) isn't a good comparison. A single source will never be able to compete with the efficiencies of scale, and often the quality in marketplaces is a race to the bottom.
subsubzero 5y ago
I know that not all remote learning companies are doing great, Khan Academy which was booming in the mid teens had layoffs as well. In addition Udacity has also had multiple rounds of layoffs as they are struggling with profitability. Those 2 mentioned are very prominent and if they are doing bad then smaller players like treehouse probably are not doing great also. I don't agree with the no management change they did but thought the 4 day workweek was a smart idea. Microsoft japan reported that a 4 day workweek increased productivity by 40% - https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-says-4-day-workweek-boosted-workers-productivity-by-40 https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...
- dustinbrownman 5y ago
  The 4 day work week was great. It was just a convenient scape goat for failed business initiatives at the time.
  - craigsdennis 5y ago
    100% and the CEO blamed his own lack of work ethic, it's been mistranslated over the years, but this was not due to any real "study". Do not attribute 32 hour work week to not being successful, it was incredible and allowed for a ton of creative work to come to life.
- jstx1 5y ago
  Do you have a source on the Khan Academy layoffs? My impression was that they've grown a lot since the pandemic started.
system2 5y ago
Why would a learning platform need 41 employees? These are all instructor and expert videos. Were these 41 employees instructors? If not, for just the infrastructure is it really necessary to have 41 employees?
- rob74 5y ago
  For creating high-quality content that people actually want to pay money for, and keeping it up to date? Of course, you can lay off most of these people and try to survive using the existing material (which Treehouse apparently wants to try), but, particularly when coding is involved, content gets obsolete really fast...
  - system2 5y ago
    I didn't know they fired "instructors". Employee sounds a little different than the content creators.
epa 5y ago
"Treehouse rolled back the no-boss workplace in 2015, saying employees felt they were 'lonely islands with no support' without a management structure."
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  How this works in practice is that there are informal bosses and political infighting to determine who is the informal boss on a team. You can have pretty flat hierarchies where many teams share 1 director-type person as their boss and it works pretty well though.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    It seems like the solution isn't to abolish bosses or hierarchy, but to simply make them more accountable and subject to scrutiny or replacement.
nacho2sweet 5y ago
It is actually so much work and costs a lot to produce an online course. After you have a lot of content is it not better try and sell the content you have, and then offload the creation workload udemy style, especially with coding courses since there are so many remote work people in this space.
rmason 5y ago
I was always impressed by Treehouse and recommended it for people trying to learn to code. But it did require you to have more inner drive (or grit) than a bootcamp
rchaud 5y ago
Sad news. I remember finishing the HTML, CSS and PHP courses on there back in 2014. They really paid attention to details and made video-based learning less boring. It's a pretty stark contrast to Udemy, where I don't think I've ever finished a single course. They had (at the time), really good teachers, and the forums were a great source of knowledge.
- ChefboyOG 5y ago
  Similarly, I remember taking a handful of courses there many years ago. They were very high quality relative to what was available then. I wonder if their particular niche of online education is tougher nowadays. There seems to be a wealth of online platforms tailored towards the "professional skills" edge of the market—if I ever need a course on migrating to Azure using only a TI-86 calculator while respecting HIPAA, I'm sure Pluralsight has a course—but when I think of the more general "learn to code" style courses, I don't think of Treehouse anymore. In particular, having watched multiple family members/friends transition into software development (coming from no real background in code) over the last couple years, I've noticed they swing between two extremes: 1. Completely free resources, like FreeCodeCamp, CodeAcademy's free plan, or App Academy Open. 2. Going all-in on an immersive bootcamp, typically with some kind of job placement assistance program at the end. I wonder if more middle-of-the-road premium options like Treehouse are losing marketshare to this. Though obviously, this is big time anecdata.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rahimnathwani 5y ago
Perhaps a business that makes money from educational content needs something that provides additional value (over and above what you'd get from a folder of videos), e.g. A. Interactive features (scrimba.com) B. Mentors (demandcurve.com) C. Credentials (Udacity, Coursera) D. Community/cohort E. Convenient access to frequent updates (blinkist, shortform, getabstract)
- catchmeifyoucan 5y ago
  (CoLab - https://joincolab.io https://joincolab.io) Is one that's doing Community/Cohort style learning by pairing Devs, PMs and Designers together to learn.
- yuy910616 5y ago
  There are scalable bits of Education - courses, books, practice questions (look at leetcode), and lectures. I think that is why a lot of ed-tech fails. Information really does want to be free, and anything that can be broadcast is usually better free. Youtube has seen an influx of high quality content IMO. There are also non-scalable parts - access to expert, prestige, and all the bits you've mentioned. I think that's probably where the future of ed-tech is going.
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
This is a bummer. I met a few of the Treehouse folks as well as a couple students at a private social thing some years ago. They made a strong impression of being both passionate and competent, a real contrast to the bulk of the online class companies imo, but it's hard to compete against dirt cheap or free.
908B64B197 5y ago
I have to say this doesn't come as a surprise. Bootcamps have failed one after another. The most well known, Lambda, is even desperate enough they will "loan" you a new "grad" for free to try to get you to hire one [0]. And that's not even scratching the surface of what's wrong with bootcamps in general, like having instructors barely a few months ahead of students giving out lectures and grading assignments [1]. I can't say I've seen anyone out of a bootcamp that was a great hire. I guess these online coding schools might cater to motivated teenagers that are interesting in trying out CS before enrolling in a proper degree. But there's no money to be made there. [0] https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-lambda-fellows-new-way-for-graduates-get-hands-on-experience https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-lambda-fello... [1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-placement-rate-is-lower-than-claimed.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
- rickosborne 5y ago
  > I can't say I've seen anyone out of a bootcamp that was a great hire. My own experience has been that there's no correlation between where the dev graduated from and how productive/valuable/etc they've been at work. I've seen just as many rock-star bootcamp grads as I have complete wastes of space from Stanford/CMU/MIT.
  - busterarm 5y ago
    I don't know what it is about Waterloo though, but everyone I've worked with who came through there was a significant asset to whatever team they were on. There could be some filtering function here like the pool of grads who made a significant effort to come to the US afterwards, but yeah. 100% rockstars every time. Don't just take my word for it -- from the lips of pg himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6655271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6655271
    - abeppu 5y ago
      > I don't know what it is about Waterloo though I have also had extremely positive experiences with Waterloo grads (and student interns), and I kinda wish that I had done a program structured in the same way. In particular, the program requires that students do several "co-op" work terms, so by the time they graduate, they've worked in multiple organizations and have the equivalent of more than a year's work experience. They have a better idea of what kind of work is a good fit for them, they know they can be productive in real projects, and they have some exposure to the organizational/communication/process portion of getting stuff done as well. We complain sometimes about the disconnect between software engineering and the "computer science" curriculum -- and it turns out that actually having a thoughtfully composed "software engineering" program is a pretty good and natural solution.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
oregano 5y ago
Treehouse was the very first online learning platform I ever paid for when I started to entertain the idea of learning to code. Back in 2012-2013 it was amazing. I sunk countless hours into the videos and thought it was a great value. After building some basic sites I decided to take the plunge and enroll in a bootcamp. Fast forward to today and I’m incredibly thankful for taking these steps.
open-source-ux 5y ago
Sad to hear about their staff. It sounds like the company has been almost gutted. Treehouse are skewed towards beginners but I wonder if the market for beginner content is too saturated? Udemy dominates for paid video courses (for beginners) and YouTube covers the free tutorials option. Also, Treehouse's content is divided into lots of separate videos. It's a big collection of videos but it isn't always obvious how each video relates to another - I wonder if this confuses beginners? I presume this more modular approach was designed to let learners tailor their own learning path. Or to flexibly arrange the content into modular tracks. Contrast the Udemy approach: The all-in-one course for a language or topic that promises the user a more linear curriculum. Of course, the quality of Udemy courses can vary hugely, but there's no doubt the all-in-one course is appealing to beginner learners. These is a small but helpful YouTube channel which reviews online learning platforms (Udemy, Pluralsight, etc) called Tech Course Review. Here is an informative review of Treehouse from December 2020: Treehouse Review 2021: Is Treehouse worth it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSuv0QaALZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSuv0QaALZM
guessmyname 5y ago
> Workers later posted an online spreadsheet with the names of 41 employees looking for new jobs. Treehouse has a geographically distributed workforce and the company’s employees live in cities across the country They forgot to include a link to the spreadsheet. I found it here → https://twitter.com/nickrp/status/1436747911220457482 https://twitter.com/nickrp/status/1436747911220457482 (and in case they delete the Twitter post) → https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D8419ThkbOibfMcGQRUi_UC6cZrL3oQ6DCqeU4bgQxo/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D8419ThkbOibfMcGQRUi...
foolzcrow 5y ago
Get woke go broke

97 points by fantunes 5y ago

Would love to know what caused this to happen, given (as the article says) huge amounts of money being poured into (seemingly) similar businesses.

z0r 5y ago
I remember reading a number of articles by / about the founder Ryan Carson similar to this one, about not taking unnecessary investment: https://medium.com/@ryancarson/not-silicon-valleys-timeline-baa3475eb6ac https://medium.com/@ryancarson/not-silicon-valleys-timeline-...
encryptluks2 5y ago
I imagine part of the problem is many of these coding schools are scams. It isn't that people can't learn from them, but what they are teaching is usually just too narrow to be all that useful.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Treehouse isn’t a school or bootcamp. It is just video lessons and such.
- rchaud 5y ago
  How is it a scam? It's a month-to-month subscription service, $25/mo. from what I recall. They didn't charge 5-figure tuition and offer weak "job guarantees", which is what coding bootcamps do.
  - tedivm 5y ago
    They stole much of their initial content from other people and ripped all attribution from it. I found two of my blog posts on their site, without any attribution or permission.
    - rchaud 5y ago
      That is unfortunate about your blog posts. But customers pay for their video lessons, which (at least in 2014), were all created in-house.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- midev 5y ago
  > what they are teaching is usually just too narrow to be all that useful They were video lessons on HTML, CSS, and other languages. Your comment makes no sense, and sounds more like projection than valid criticism.
sexhaver1984 5y ago
It can be summed up easily: Most of the teachers left years ago due to a toxic work environment and all of the content went stale making it not live up to competitors.

racl101 5y ago

Ironic that most people taking their courses are doing so to be able to ..... get jobs. I always liked Treehouse's presentation but it was a bit pricey compared to other services like Udemy for example.

bdcravens 5y ago
Comparing prices for anything (courses, software, services, etc) to a marketplace (Udemy, app stores, Upwork, etc) isn't a good comparison. A single source will never be able to compete with the efficiencies of scale, and often the quality in marketplaces is a race to the bottom.

subsubzero 5y ago

I know that not all remote learning companies are doing great, Khan Academy which was booming in the mid teens had layoffs as well. In addition Udacity has also had multiple rounds of layoffs as they are struggling with profitability. Those 2 mentioned are very prominent and if they are doing bad then smaller players like treehouse probably are not doing great also. I don't agree with the no management change they did but thought the 4 day workweek was a smart idea. Microsoft japan reported that a 4 day workweek increased productivity by 40% - https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-says-4-day-workweek-boosted-workers-productivity-by-40 https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...

dustinbrownman 5y ago
The 4 day work week was great. It was just a convenient scape goat for failed business initiatives at the time.
- craigsdennis 5y ago
  100% and the CEO blamed his own lack of work ethic, it's been mistranslated over the years, but this was not due to any real "study". Do not attribute 32 hour work week to not being successful, it was incredible and allowed for a ton of creative work to come to life.
jstx1 5y ago
Do you have a source on the Khan Academy layoffs? My impression was that they've grown a lot since the pandemic started.

system2 5y ago

Why would a learning platform need 41 employees? These are all instructor and expert videos. Were these 41 employees instructors? If not, for just the infrastructure is it really necessary to have 41 employees?

rob74 5y ago
For creating high-quality content that people actually want to pay money for, and keeping it up to date? Of course, you can lay off most of these people and try to survive using the existing material (which Treehouse apparently wants to try), but, particularly when coding is involved, content gets obsolete really fast...
- system2 5y ago
  I didn't know they fired "instructors". Employee sounds a little different than the content creators.

epa 5y ago

"Treehouse rolled back the no-boss workplace in 2015, saying employees felt they were 'lonely islands with no support' without a management structure."

b9a2cab5 5y ago
How this works in practice is that there are informal bosses and political infighting to determine who is the informal boss on a team. You can have pretty flat hierarchies where many teams share 1 director-type person as their boss and it works pretty well though.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  It seems like the solution isn't to abolish bosses or hierarchy, but to simply make them more accountable and subject to scrutiny or replacement.

nacho2sweet 5y ago

It is actually so much work and costs a lot to produce an online course. After you have a lot of content is it not better try and sell the content you have, and then offload the creation workload udemy style, especially with coding courses since there are so many remote work people in this space.

rmason 5y ago

I was always impressed by Treehouse and recommended it for people trying to learn to code. But it did require you to have more inner drive (or grit) than a bootcamp

rchaud 5y ago

Sad news. I remember finishing the HTML, CSS and PHP courses on there back in 2014. They really paid attention to details and made video-based learning less boring. It's a pretty stark contrast to Udemy, where I don't think I've ever finished a single course. They had (at the time), really good teachers, and the forums were a great source of knowledge.

ChefboyOG 5y ago
Similarly, I remember taking a handful of courses there many years ago. They were very high quality relative to what was available then. I wonder if their particular niche of online education is tougher nowadays. There seems to be a wealth of online platforms tailored towards the "professional skills" edge of the market—if I ever need a course on migrating to Azure using only a TI-86 calculator while respecting HIPAA, I'm sure Pluralsight has a course—but when I think of the more general "learn to code" style courses, I don't think of Treehouse anymore. In particular, having watched multiple family members/friends transition into software development (coming from no real background in code) over the last couple years, I've noticed they swing between two extremes: 1. Completely free resources, like FreeCodeCamp, CodeAcademy's free plan, or App Academy Open. 2. Going all-in on an immersive bootcamp, typically with some kind of job placement assistance program at the end. I wonder if more middle-of-the-road premium options like Treehouse are losing marketshare to this. Though obviously, this is big time anecdata.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

rahimnathwani 5y ago

Perhaps a business that makes money from educational content needs something that provides additional value (over and above what you'd get from a folder of videos), e.g. A. Interactive features (scrimba.com) B. Mentors (demandcurve.com) C. Credentials (Udacity, Coursera) D. Community/cohort E. Convenient access to frequent updates (blinkist, shortform, getabstract)

catchmeifyoucan 5y ago
(CoLab - https://joincolab.io https://joincolab.io) Is one that's doing Community/Cohort style learning by pairing Devs, PMs and Designers together to learn.
yuy910616 5y ago
There are scalable bits of Education - courses, books, practice questions (look at leetcode), and lectures. I think that is why a lot of ed-tech fails. Information really does want to be free, and anything that can be broadcast is usually better free. Youtube has seen an influx of high quality content IMO. There are also non-scalable parts - access to expert, prestige, and all the bits you've mentioned. I think that's probably where the future of ed-tech is going.

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago

This is a bummer. I met a few of the Treehouse folks as well as a couple students at a private social thing some years ago. They made a strong impression of being both passionate and competent, a real contrast to the bulk of the online class companies imo, but it's hard to compete against dirt cheap or free.

908B64B197 5y ago

I have to say this doesn't come as a surprise. Bootcamps have failed one after another. The most well known, Lambda, is even desperate enough they will "loan" you a new "grad" for free to try to get you to hire one [0]. And that's not even scratching the surface of what's wrong with bootcamps in general, like having instructors barely a few months ahead of students giving out lectures and grading assignments [1]. I can't say I've seen anyone out of a bootcamp that was a great hire. I guess these online coding schools might cater to motivated teenagers that are interesting in trying out CS before enrolling in a proper degree. But there's no money to be made there. [0] https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-lambda-fellows-new-way-for-graduates-get-hands-on-experience https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-lambda-fello... [1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-placement-rate-is-lower-than-claimed.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

rickosborne 5y ago
> I can't say I've seen anyone out of a bootcamp that was a great hire. My own experience has been that there's no correlation between where the dev graduated from and how productive/valuable/etc they've been at work. I've seen just as many rock-star bootcamp grads as I have complete wastes of space from Stanford/CMU/MIT.
- busterarm 5y ago
  I don't know what it is about Waterloo though, but everyone I've worked with who came through there was a significant asset to whatever team they were on. There could be some filtering function here like the pool of grads who made a significant effort to come to the US afterwards, but yeah. 100% rockstars every time. Don't just take my word for it -- from the lips of pg himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6655271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6655271
  - abeppu 5y ago
    > I don't know what it is about Waterloo though I have also had extremely positive experiences with Waterloo grads (and student interns), and I kinda wish that I had done a program structured in the same way. In particular, the program requires that students do several "co-op" work terms, so by the time they graduate, they've worked in multiple organizations and have the equivalent of more than a year's work experience. They have a better idea of what kind of work is a good fit for them, they know they can be productive in real projects, and they have some exposure to the organizational/communication/process portion of getting stuff done as well. We complain sometimes about the disconnect between software engineering and the "computer science" curriculum -- and it turns out that actually having a thoughtfully composed "software engineering" program is a pretty good and natural solution.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

oregano 5y ago

Treehouse was the very first online learning platform I ever paid for when I started to entertain the idea of learning to code. Back in 2012-2013 it was amazing. I sunk countless hours into the videos and thought it was a great value. After building some basic sites I decided to take the plunge and enroll in a bootcamp. Fast forward to today and I’m incredibly thankful for taking these steps.

open-source-ux 5y ago

Sad to hear about their staff. It sounds like the company has been almost gutted. Treehouse are skewed towards beginners but I wonder if the market for beginner content is too saturated? Udemy dominates for paid video courses (for beginners) and YouTube covers the free tutorials option. Also, Treehouse's content is divided into lots of separate videos. It's a big collection of videos but it isn't always obvious how each video relates to another - I wonder if this confuses beginners? I presume this more modular approach was designed to let learners tailor their own learning path. Or to flexibly arrange the content into modular tracks. Contrast the Udemy approach: The all-in-one course for a language or topic that promises the user a more linear curriculum. Of course, the quality of Udemy courses can vary hugely, but there's no doubt the all-in-one course is appealing to beginner learners. These is a small but helpful YouTube channel which reviews online learning platforms (Udemy, Pluralsight, etc) called Tech Course Review. Here is an informative review of Treehouse from December 2020: Treehouse Review 2021: Is Treehouse worth it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSuv0QaALZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSuv0QaALZM

guessmyname 5y ago

> Workers later posted an online spreadsheet with the names of 41 employees looking for new jobs. Treehouse has a geographically distributed workforce and the company’s employees live in cities across the country They forgot to include a link to the spreadsheet. I found it here → https://twitter.com/nickrp/status/1436747911220457482 https://twitter.com/nickrp/status/1436747911220457482 (and in case they delete the Twitter post) → https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D8419ThkbOibfMcGQRUi_UC6cZrL3oQ6DCqeU4bgQxo/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D8419ThkbOibfMcGQRUi...

foolzcrow 5y ago

Get woke go broke