I don't have a ton of experience with Udemy. But I took an introduction to Autodesk Inventor class there in January and I thought it was quite good. Was only something like €10 and I was able to do quite complex drawings (at least for what I need) after two days. Much cheaper and probably almost as effective as one of those expensive corporate training classes that are often a €1000,- for just two days.

I owe my Java career to following a Spring for Beginners course. It did more to accelerate me forwards than, at that point, 2 years of university.

From my experience most corporate classes are pretty bad. It seems to sell these the main skill is to sell to execs and make them feel good, not to have good classes. Pretty much like enterprise software is sold not to actual users but to execs who will never use it.

How many managers would give you time off to study a udemy course though, vs a £1000 professionally run one?

It’s frustrating that the main advantage of paying a lot for a course, is having some proper time to do it.

My team which manages our company's ecommerce website inherited maintaining an iOS app that was being developed by a contracting firm. No one on my team had much experience in iOS. My company is extremely frugal. I bought an intro to iOS course on Udemy for the five of us for about fifty dollars total. It was excellent. Was definitely blown away by the quality and the price. It got us quickly up to speed on xcode, debugging, swift, view creation and publishing to the app store among other things. I am sure there is junk content on udemy, but there is also really good content that is worth more than the price.

We as a team also did a four hour course on TLS and PKI and it was a game changer. It was much better than reading up stuff.

Oh nice! Whats the name? I dont need it. But i try to teach this stuff to newcomer!

I've felt that Udemy courses are a good starting point for understanding a topic in a structured manner. Once you know the basics, you can move to a better, more expensive course.

For instance, I bought a course on mixing vocals in Ableton. I've watched dozens of YouTube videos on this topic and know enough, but none of my learning has been in a structured fashion. The Udemy course compiled all these lessons in a way that's better paced and structured.

Given that it was less than $10 compared to the hundreds of dollars higher-tier courses charge, I find it good enough value.

> They mostly target lower income internet natives

Seems to me they're increasingly targeting businesses, with their Udemy for Business offering that is a subscription service. I have a course published there and currently get about half of the revenue from the Udemy for Business share.

The TechCrunch article also mentions this: "It also has, in more recent years, expanded to enterprise services, where Udemy works with companies like Adidas, General Mills, Toyota, Wipro, Pinterest and Lyft and others — 5,000 in all — to develop and administer subscription-based professional development courses."

This is probably the case in a lot if instances, however, it's not always the true. I think there is a lot of value to be gained for existing programmers who wish to dip their toes into something new before fully committing or refresh their skills after some time away.

I say this because it's helped me do both of these things. When MongoDB came out and I was looking to start a new personal project that looked like it could benefit from a nosql db, I bought a cheap course and was able to quickly see that boring old MySQL was more suitable. There was also the time when I needed to get back into Android development after a couple of years of doing only iOS and back-end work. For $10 I was able to quickly get up to speed on what had changed and identify what I needed to do deeper reading on.

All that said, I have trouble seeing how they will be able to make this investment worthwhile for their backers in the long-run.

Agreed, but the courses do offer a good look at the work, and can give a good introduction to the field. Not sure how it is in the US, but here in Germany probably around 3/4 of people studying CS drop out in the first two years.

If people unsure about their path can get a taste for 20 bucks, then that's a pretty great deal!

If you do not have the tools you need then it is difficult to succeed.

The constant sales are annoying but the few courses I took were quite good and helpful especially if it’s something you know nothing about.

Exactly. I respect Udacity's founder Sebastian Thrun for actually owning up to the fact that very little learning was happening on Udacity and that they needed to work on that. They actually cared.