This company is a very smart scam. I'm an experienced ruby developer, and have been following them for a while. I checked out the course just out of curiosity when it was up on Skillshare. The way Mattan approaches the topic is interesting, and makes this company one of the most successful and not-scam -looking scams you will find. Here's how it works.
Rails is currently a buzzword for those just starting to try to learn how to code - very attractive. But in reality, Rails is not the best way to start learning code, it's a framework for experienced developers. Rails takes a ton of shortcuts and pushes a lot of things under the hood. This is very convenient if you understand the concepts that rails has abstracted, but very dangerous if you don't. Rails makes it easy to set up a basic rest MVC app for testing, but making a full blown custom web app requires a good understanding of many concepts, some of which are detailed below:
- The principles of computer programming
- SQL and relational database design
- HTTP protocol, how it works
- MVC architecture, why and how it operates
- HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby - proficient at least
- The difference between client and server and how they interact
- Basic web security
- The command line and UNIX
I could go on with that list, but you get the idea. Building a real rails app is tough, and requires a large stack of knowledge that simply cannot be amassed within one month.
So how does Mattan handle this? He does away with the part where you actually learn any of these things. In One Month Rails, you are quickly introduced to concepts, then given code you can copy and paste in order to make it work.
For students, this is fantastic. They are attracted by the word "Rails" and the concept of becoming a programmer in one month (and allegedly making over $100k/year after that, as he claims). Everything works great, and it comes really easy. You skip the whole hard part where you actually need to understand things, and are just fed answers that always work. You look at him type the code, then you copy it exactly yourself. Developing an app suddenly became easy.
Fast forward to the end of the course. You have a working clone of twitter or pinterest or something, and life is good. You made this all yourself - you put in the code, ran the migrations, added the twitter bootstrap classes, etc. You are asked to review the course and of course you give Mattan a glowing review. It really worked - within a month you were able to build a full web app on your own!
By now, most of you will recognize where the scam is. You paid for the course, you finished it and you gave it a great review. But you also have not learned anything at all. And as soon as you actually need to go build an app or apply for a job, you'll quickly realize that you are out of luck. This is a successful and obviously profitable class, but at it's core, it's a scam. And to add to that, Mattan is at most a junior level developer himself.
This post is not here with the intent to be mean to Mattan or his company - he is a great guy, and the company has obviously been successful. I just wrote this here to tell the truth about what the company is doing and how it operates. I would love to see stats on how many people who have taken Mattan's class have gone on to actually having a career as a developer. I'm willing to bet it's 1% or less. But prove me wrong, please.
> I would love to see stats on how many people who have taken Mattan's class have gone on to actually having a career as a developer. I'm willing to bet it's 1% or less. But prove me wrong, please.
I think the question is even broader than that: how many people who buy into these programs will be working as developers in five or ten years?
I'm a self-taught programmer, so I know first-hand that you don't need a computer science degree to learn how to build web applications that provide value to real people. But I think some of the programs out there aren't realistic about what it takes to become a decent developer over the long haul.
In my opinion the viability of the 0-to-$120,000 in x months pitch is primarily a function of the current market and little else. The bad news: the market is not static, and when the next downturn arrives, a lot of jobs that exist today will likely go away, even if the tech industry doesn't see a precipitous drop in jobs overall.
A couple of points on this:
1. A lot of people in tech today didn't live through the first .com boom, or if they did, have chosen to forget it. There was a very similar dynamic: tons of people rushed to learn HTML, web design, etc. If you lived in the Bay Area and knew how to, say, code an HTML table, chances were you could land a high-paying job at a startup. Post-crash, a good number of these .com refugees left technology, moved into non-technical roles or went back to school.
2. If you're serious about a career as a developer, it's wise to consider what you choose to learn. From what I see personally, a lot of the demand for Ruby on Rails developers comes from "startups." There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but somebody just starting out who hopes to be employed as a well-paid developer five years from now shouldn't assume that knowing how to develop a Rails CRUD app with a Bootstrap front-end is a perpetual guarantee of a six-figure salary. As you note, there's more to development than a framework, but frameworks do so much these days that new developers often see little incentive to go beyond the framework.
These are all fair criticisms that I'm happy to respond to, but let's please be careful when throwing around the word "scam". A scam is something dishonest and I promise that I have good intentions.
We often forget that products can evolve. I'm not pretending that I've come up with the best version of what this product could eventually be. But I've validated the need for a product, released a version of it that has a modicum of value, and an overwhelming majority of the people who have completed the class are incredibly excited and thankful. I just got this email today (completely unsolicited):
"Subj: $100K in wasted programming costs. OMR liberated me!
Hi Mattan,
I followed your Rails course and created Shruffle.com. It's a simple way for businesses to do text marketing. Nothing too fancy, but I'm marketing it to local restaurants and barber shops around where I live, and have been getting good responses.
Just wanted to say a big THANK YOU for making a kick-ass course. I wasted so much time hiring wack ass programmers in the past who never understood what I wanted to do half the time. Over the course of 5-6 years I must have spent at least $100K in wasted programming costs for various projects that never went anywhere. Your course liberated me....now I can build anything that I dream of without spending a penny.
Most of the other courses were a big freaking waste of time. I was looking for something that showed me how to do basic things quickly (login/logout, validations, etc etc), and your course did just that. Next step is to incorporate Stripe for payments."
Now I'll admit that I'm not happy with what % of people finish the course (it's higher than average for an online class but still relatively low) and I'm not happy that I don't teach enough to give people the flexibility to build more than just a fairly simple CRUD app, but rest assured that as the creator of this product, I'm more critical than anyone else of its flaws.
The first version was 3 hours, I took a lot of feedback and completely redid the lessons to turn it into a much longer class. The course has been redone 3 time so far and I'm currently in the process of expanding it out into a much larger one that teaches people the various concepts of web applications within the contexts of different kinds of applications (an about me, a wordpress, a yelp, a pinterest) which will give people more of that understanding that we're both looking for.
Anyway, as I'm sure you can imagine, it hurts when someone takes a product you've spent a lot of time on and calls it a "scam".
What I don't know is whether or not the person in that email is equipped with what he or she needs to actually be able to figure out how to incorporate Stripe.
Are you at all confident that you have taught people how to research and understand what they are looking at?
I've known plenty of people who can follow patterns and regurgitate what they have seen, but have little to no ability to actually create. If what they want to do deviates just a little, they are toast.
At first, it might be copying. But having something workable that you can tweak can give you a good idea of how something works. After enough time tweaking, you can start building new things based on those best practices/examples.
Yeah, so we definitely teach how to find gems, read through documentation and troubleshoot errors. There's a little bit of API knowledge that may be lacking (which we're definitely working on as a module - we've gotten a lot of requests).
Students who have taken the class have definitely figured out way more complicated stuff afterwards using some of the techniques we teach. Whether this person in particular will be able to figure out how to incorporate Stripe, I'm not sure.
I understand that this comment probably wasn't what you wanted to hear, and I apologize for that. Like I mentioned in the comment, it was not made out to be an intent to insult you, and I did acknowledge that I think you are a great guy, and it's obviously a successful product (but that has nothing to do with my criticism). I'm not here to troll, I'm here to push you to be better.
I think you haven't interpreted the word "scam" correctly. I believe that you have good intentions, but regardless of that, this product is dishonest. It says it will teach you how to be a rails developer, and it doesn't do that. It implies that you will be ready for six figure salaries after taking the course, and you won't. I know that you would call this "marketing", and sure it has worked. But what are you after in building this company? Money slash success, or the core reasons that you set out to build this company? You know - you mission: to really teach people how to code.
I think what you might be missing is that you don't learn how to code by cloning popular websites, and copy-pasting code someone else hands you. You learn to code by understanding how things work. Understanding how computers work sure helps. Understanding how the ruby language works helps too. Understanding how the web works, how databases work... all the things I mentioned in my previous comment. Then you take this general knowledge of how things work to build what you want, whatever that is -- whether it's a clone of a popular app (which it never is) or something entirely new and custom that nobody else has done (which is always the case).
I'm sure you are familiar with the flatiron school in NYC. They have a similar mission, but are actually doing it right (to be fair, also charging a hell of a lot more). You guys both approach the same problem, but get vastly different results. In the flatiron school, you spend full time for months learning and understanding how things work, and when you come out of it, you get a full-time job as a developer. In one month rails, you spend a couple weeks on and off watching online videos that skip all the underlying theory and come out with a low-quality pinterest clone and not even close to enough skills to land an internship.
What is your goal for one month rails? To make money, or to add real value to peoples lives? To have techcrunch articles written about you, or to actually promote the incredible mindset and skills that are building, creating, writing code? I think we both know that you are aimed after the wrong thing, and that's why I'm pushing you to do it right.
While I admire the work of Avi and the guys at the Flatiron School greatly, I disagree with some of their basic principles. In particular, they perpetuate this myth that only some people are cut out to be developers by working very hard to qualify people in advance of accepting them. This makes them a lot like an intensive computer science program. By making sure you only have people who are likely to be able to sit for months learning the very basics of syntax before ever moving on to the applicable stuff, you're alienating so many people who could potentially be building something very valuable just because they didn't happen to have an intrinsic interest in something like where a comma goes (not that that's not important, there's just no reason we have to teach it FIRST instead of second, or third, etc.).
I'm making a bet here (and all startups are bets after all) that there are some people who can become good developers but learn differently from everyone else. Let's please at least try to diversify the way we teach things, at least in the interest of testing a hypothesis, instead of just accepting the standard dogma?
So the idea is this: get people genuinely interested in code by showing them what it can do. Isn't that how great teachers teach at the end of the day? Inspire in them a yearning to learn more.
Plus I think it's a real shame that people learning coding totally out of context from its application. People finish Codecademy not understanding how the hell anything they learned actually fits into a web application.
My goal is to give people a broad understanding of the various parts of a web application: the view, the model, the controller, routing, deployment, version control, gems, StackOverflow, etc. How many other online resources are there than cover all that for beginners in one place? Not many.
Every single thing you said in the first paragraph that you don't agree with is how every professional field works. There are no shortcuts, you can't bullshit your way into a profession and be successful. If you are not genuinely interested in writing code and building things, it really isn't the right career for you. In addition, as far as I know flatiron school people deploy on the first day there - it's not a dry syntax run with no application of knowledge. The truth is that a career as a developer is not for everyone - some people really like it, and others try it and don't.
In addition, if you don't have interest in things like where commas go, it's pretty likely that you don't have an interest in writing code, since that's what code is all about, once you are on your own at least.
I think defining the theory of learning through understanding and aptitude as a 'dogma' is a little bit of a far reach. But what you are saying about the experiment does hold value. It would be easy to figure out the output of an experiment like this - take the flatiron school as all the way off the understanding and commitment end, and take your course as the option all the way off the other end, low commitment, little understanding. Then compare the outputs between the two -- how many graduates does each approach have into jobs in development?
Now as you go down the response here, you are getting more and more reasonable with your claims, which is good. Next, you are saying that the real purpose of your course is to inspire students. And that's totally fair - I can see that. Obviously you have done will with this: look at your reviews and the number of students you have had. You are a smart and passionate guy, and you can inspire your students.
BUT this is exactly my issue with the course. You claim to teach students to code, but you are not teaching them to code. You are exposing them to code and trying to get them motivated, with minimal real learning. You are, as you say in the last paragraph, giving them a broad, high-level overview of what it would be like to code, if they were to learn. If this is what your course does, this is what you should say it does.
As you get to the bottom of your comment, you further and further solidify the real purpose of your course. I like this, and where you have gone with it. I don't think you are going down a bad road. I do think though, that you need to be clear and honest about the goals of your course. And if you do, it will likely mean sacrificing some money, because what you're selling right now is an impossible dream, and lots of people buy into that stuff - that's marketing. But trust me, honesty and good work will come back and repay you, and the opposite will come back and bite... whether it's now or later, it is bound to happen.
Mattan, I wish you luck with this company. I wouldn't spend so much time here anonymously writing to you if I didn't care, at least a little. If there's anything you take away from this discussion, let it be that you should always be clear, honest, and transparent with your work. I promise that if you do, things will turn out better.
> how many graduates does each approach have into jobs in development?
To be fair, students at the flatiron school would be more likely to obtain a job simply because of the resources they have put in. Months of their lives and $12,000 per student. But to level the playing field I believe that for every $12,000 spent on one month rails by students (245 students) will produce more people who will go on to develop at a professional level than $12,000 spent at the flatiron school (One student). I believe this is what Mattan is after with the course, the ability to show people it isn't impossible to learn to code while exposing them to working examples and a plethora of resources that are not common knowledge outside of the tech industry. On another note, I also wouldn't be surprised to see more than 1 out of 244 go on to attend a dev boot camp like the flatiron school after finishing one month rails.
What you're describing is no different than many educational opportunities, is it?
I worked at a multi-campus, private college that had a series of classes for the MCSE certification program. Many of the students had no previous computer experience that would prepare them for the topics, and were told by the recruiters that riches await in the fast-paced world of network administration! The unfortunate truth is that most of those students weren't all that motivated. It wasn't possible for me, as a teacher, to give them every real-world scenario I could (I was a working network admin at the time), but I did my best. If they weren't motivated to study and to experiment on their own, they weren't going to get much for their money. They'd pass the class but they weren't going to pass Microsoft's tests or qualify for many positions if they weren't willing to go beyond the curriculum on their own time.
It seems to me that what Mattan is offering is no different than numerous other educational opportunities. Students will get out of it what they put into it. If they want to copy/paste his code and not ask themselves how it works, fiddle with it and see what happens, try to extend its functionality with their own ideas, then they probably weren't cut out for programming anyway. That's not his problem; it's theirs.
Rails is currently a buzzword for those just starting to try to learn how to code - very attractive. But in reality, Rails is not the best way to start learning code, it's a framework for experienced developers. Rails takes a ton of shortcuts and pushes a lot of things under the hood. This is very convenient if you understand the concepts that rails has abstracted, but very dangerous if you don't. Rails makes it easy to set up a basic rest MVC app for testing, but making a full blown custom web app requires a good understanding of many concepts, some of which are detailed below:
- The principles of computer programming - SQL and relational database design - HTTP protocol, how it works - MVC architecture, why and how it operates - HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby - proficient at least - The difference between client and server and how they interact - Basic web security - The command line and UNIX
I could go on with that list, but you get the idea. Building a real rails app is tough, and requires a large stack of knowledge that simply cannot be amassed within one month.
So how does Mattan handle this? He does away with the part where you actually learn any of these things. In One Month Rails, you are quickly introduced to concepts, then given code you can copy and paste in order to make it work.
For students, this is fantastic. They are attracted by the word "Rails" and the concept of becoming a programmer in one month (and allegedly making over $100k/year after that, as he claims). Everything works great, and it comes really easy. You skip the whole hard part where you actually need to understand things, and are just fed answers that always work. You look at him type the code, then you copy it exactly yourself. Developing an app suddenly became easy.
Fast forward to the end of the course. You have a working clone of twitter or pinterest or something, and life is good. You made this all yourself - you put in the code, ran the migrations, added the twitter bootstrap classes, etc. You are asked to review the course and of course you give Mattan a glowing review. It really worked - within a month you were able to build a full web app on your own!
By now, most of you will recognize where the scam is. You paid for the course, you finished it and you gave it a great review. But you also have not learned anything at all. And as soon as you actually need to go build an app or apply for a job, you'll quickly realize that you are out of luck. This is a successful and obviously profitable class, but at it's core, it's a scam. And to add to that, Mattan is at most a junior level developer himself.
This post is not here with the intent to be mean to Mattan or his company - he is a great guy, and the company has obviously been successful. I just wrote this here to tell the truth about what the company is doing and how it operates. I would love to see stats on how many people who have taken Mattan's class have gone on to actually having a career as a developer. I'm willing to bet it's 1% or less. But prove me wrong, please.