artgillespie

By the time I used BFV simulators in 1989, they were more advanced: The driver and gunner had independent screens and controls, and the wireframes were shaded. Still, I remember thinking at the time that it felt similar to my misspent youth in arcades playing Battlezone. Wouldn't be surprised at all if there was a direct lineage.

I'm the Director of Engineering at Udacity and wanted to clarify a couple things: All of our content is available at no cost. It's an important manifestation of one of our most important core values—that education is available to everyone. What we charge for are services. Students enrolled in Nanodegree Programs have access to coaches, a massive worldwide network of code reviewers, certification, job placement and much, much more.

We work hard to help Nanodegree Program students that are looking for jobs in tech get them. For example, one of the best parts of my job is doing mock interviews. Folks on the engineering team volunteer to give a representative tech industry interview to a soon-to-be-graduate and then give them detailed feedback on how they could improve. Hearing back from these students a few weeks later that they got a job at Nest or Google or wherever is one of the most satisfying things I've experienced in my career, and everyone on the team who's done it feels the same.

Finally, we really do think our graduates are ready for jobs. So much so that we've hired two of them as full-time SWEs onto the small engineering team at Udacity. This has worked out incredibly well—these are smart, effective engineers that I'd put up against any traditional school's CS grads. We'll be hiring more of them, and we hear from companies that have hired our graduates that they'll be doing the same.