I clicked on a few and they all turned out to be tutorials for beginners.
I would use it if it had a filter for "How long have you been programming:"
[ ] Never
[ ] 1 Year
[ ] 3 Years
[ ] Over 10 years
Then I would tick the "Over 10 years" option and hope to find channels that update me on the latest developments. While somebody else would select the "Never" option and will find beginner tutorials.
This is also a problem with paid educational content e.g. Pluralsight.
You want 101 tier material? They have it in droves, for every language/framework/concept.
You want high level system design/architecture? Team management training? Project scheduling/estimation? Or other software engineering topics: Good luck with that.
I mean, I get it, you're selling shovels to gold miners. But at some scale, it must make sense to target smaller niches.
If it can be put into a book, it can be put into a presentation. "More efficient" is in the eye of the beholder, different people learn in different ways (see Audio Book Vs. Book Vs. eBook for another example, an Audio Book is less "efficient" too).
Personal training/mentoring isn't really even in this sphere in terms of cost/opportunity/availability. If it is free & high quality at work, great, but then you wouldn't care what YT/Pluralsight/et al has to offer.
> If it can be put into a book, it can be put into a presentation.
Would it be fair to say that there're actually a lot of videos on such more advanced topics, but they typically are recordings of talks from various conferences?
As an online educator, this is the nut I’m trying to crack. Beginner stuff doesn’t interest me and advanced stuff is often so specialized you can’t really teach it. And selling to intermediate engineers is crazy hard it turns out.
Everyone thinks they can figure it out on their own and doesn’t want to be taught. Or works in areas so specialized only their teammates can help.
And you’re always fighting against a sea of $10 Udemy courses and free resources.
That said, I think it’s a crackable nut. It’s just a longer slog than beginner stuff.
I very much want to be taught and can afford to pay a reasonable amount of money, provided my time is used efficiently. I’m not rich, but I’ve got a lot more money than time to invest.
I’m getting my money’s worth if you efficiently teach me (the critical elements of) a topic for $250 in 5 hours. The market seems to prefer to pay $11 for 25-40 hours of content. (And I admit to having bought hundreds of dollars of Udemy courses that I’ve never even watched, so in some way I’ve contributed to the problem. Rather than bookmark a course, I’ll often just buy it.)
Yep you’re the sweet spot for me. Exactly what I target :)
The part that makes me sad are complainers who buy a $200 course then ask for a refund because they blazed through it in an afternoon and feel like $200 should be at least 3 weeks of content.
How many hours of video are in such a course of yours?
Since I sell a subscription service, I've mostly studied others doing the same, but I've bought a few courses from very successful creators. Adam Wathan, for example, sells a 4 hour course for $150 a 22 hour course for $250. He's later said in interviews that he regretted making it such a giant course.
If I were to sell a one-off course, it would probably be at least somewhat grounded by those values since it's what the market has already set.
It’s 5 to 6 hours with another few hours of bonus material. The main thing I’m changing going forward is course structure so it becomes more like a self-paced workshop.
And to be honest it hasn’t been that bad, my main course has made $160k over its various iterations the past 5 years. The bigger thing is that I’m realizing the how-to style tactics course that is so popular these days doesn’t deliver what I truly want to teach.
Yeah that pricing / amount sounds in the normal range... I guess there's always some percentage of people like that.
My business is newer and smaller, but I've still encountered a couple of really aggressive emails. I suspect that it would be more if I were selling a one-off course instead of a feed, too!
Check out Hartl’s rails tutorial for an outline on how to monetize project-based content. His stuff is oriented towards beginners, but I could imagine a more intermediate or even advanced type of course working well.
But if you've been programming for over ten years doesn't looking at say, javascript. make you feel like you've been programming for never.
I totally understand that it's all been done. And you've probably done it all as well. But things really do move fast out there. Even if it's in silly circles.
After programming for 10 years, nothing really makes you feel you haven't programmed before. I have found that even looking into entirely different programming paradigms, beginner material does not resonate with me, essentially what i would want when approaching something entirely new would be X for Y programmers.
This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it has brief cheat sheet type treatments for many languages. It assumes you know the common programming language features, but want to know how they're done in a particular language.
Not particularly. JavaScript still runs on computers, and the broad concepts are transferrable. Like, I don't need to know how loops work, but an intro video will probably talk about that. Or even something more complicated like promises. If you've done concurrent programming before, you won't be surprised. After a certain point, truly, all that's old is new again. All that changes is the syntax.
No. If you really understand what you’re doing, which after 10 years you should, picking up a new framework or library is quick. You might not be writing the most idiomatic code after 3 days, but you’ll do fine.
If however you have 1 year of experience 10 times, then yes it’s an almost insurmountable challenge.
That was my initial thought as well, but then I realised that some resources wouldn't fit into this simple categorizaiton.
Take the Google Chrome Developers channel as an example. Most of the content creators there are fantastic, experienced, and smart developers. But then, they may discuss some fundamental issues such as browser apis or web components that are equally valuable both for novices and for experienced developers. I remember one video by the http203 crew about for-loops. I mean, for-loops! who doesn't know those! And yet, that video, as it progressed, got into deeper and deeper crannies of for-loops that I had never considered. I may not remember much from the video, but I do remember that I was very pleasantly surprised when watching it.
I don't know whether there are many other resources like that in that list.
I would use it if it had a filter for "How long have you been programming:"
[ ] Never [ ] 1 Year [ ] 3 Years [ ] Over 10 years
Then I would tick the "Over 10 years" option and hope to find channels that update me on the latest developments. While somebody else would select the "Never" option and will find beginner tutorials.