> What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Honestly...
The myopia some technologists display is really staggering sometimes.
I mean, it's not like people who aren't technologists would ever want to learn new skills or anything, would they? They should totally just stay at their menial, paper-shuffling desk jobs, or serve lattes to programmers, or something.
Those are of very different types. Where is the practical photoshop retouching course from MIT or Stanford?
Of course there isn't one, because that's not the kind of education they provide.
Where are the superior alternatives for someone to learn how to process HDR images in Photoshop or How to use Rhino to render architectural designs? And they need to learn this by tomorrow.
Do I need to go on? I'm not trying to be a dick but the first two examples I gave you took less than a minute to find FREE answers for.
Even if you do find some edge case where Lynda happens to have a better solution than what I can gather online within 5 minutes, what does that prove?
Lynda can't match MIT or Stanford, or Apple's developer resources. Instead of pivoting, they're selling what's available freely, for money, to those who are incompetent at using the internet.
That's their business model. If you think that's ok and worth 1.5 billion, great, we simply have a different outlook on life.
No, their business model is (among other things) curated online courses — yes, for money; it is a "business model", after all.
Without looking, I can't say definitively, but I'd bet an appreciable number of the Photoshop tutorials found in your (probably also unverified) LMGTFY-fu are poorly written, inaccurate, inspecific as to which version of Photoshop they're teaching or otherwise suffer from quality control issues — and probably more than one, at that.
I've also never taken an Lynda.com course, myself, so I can't speak directly to the quality of their offerings. A number of former co-workers work there [1], however, and if they're any indicator of the caliber of people the company employs, then they're probably pretty solid.
They're selling a (presumably somewhat reliable) minimum level of quality in the courses they put up, so that people who have better things to do than perform comparative analyses of the free offerings out there [2] can get on with the thing they wanted to do in the first place: learn the material they're interested in learning.
I don't think that's a particularly terrible business model at all — especially if you can also flip it for $1.5b.
[1] Congrats to them, and I hope their options agreement included accelerated vestiture upon acquisition!
[2] A thing that might be rather difficult, given their desire to learn about the subject in the first place. How, exactly, do you know which course or tutorial is worth a damn if you don't know anything about its subject matter? I guess you could pay someone to do it...
Oh, wait.
EDIT: Footnotes instead of parentheticals for legibility.
EDIT 2: Please don't call people whose priorities and skillsets differ from yours "incompetent". It smacks of the kind of elitism I find so disgusting in our industry, and of the myopia I was referring to up-thread: "Well, if I can do this, everyone should be able to!"
Lynda.com currently makes a $150 million per year in revenue. With all those free sources you mention, how are they doing that? Why are companies paying for education for their employees?
People pay for education. People will continue to pay for good education, forever. Education will never ever be free, because it has value.
Oh you can pick up some Ruby on Rails skills with a manual and some free tutorials. Not really what we're talking about here though.
Really shortsighted to think of the value as in the cash extracted from the student. The real value is that more people are educated. Ways that an educator can see the cash from that created value are various. They can make job referrals, they can do credentialing signaling, they can do ads, they can sell premium tools while providing free education on how the use the tools. So yeah, education can be free, should be free, and will be free (and in most cases are already free if you consider public schooling).
The myopia some technologists display is really staggering sometimes.
I mean, it's not like people who aren't technologists would ever want to learn new skills or anything, would they? They should totally just stay at their menial, paper-shuffling desk jobs, or serve lattes to programmers, or something.