OMSCS Open Courseware

Would you say that a 1 class/semester pace is too much for someone with a full time job, two littles < 3 years, and a spouse that expects a nonzero amount of interaction?

Unemployment was _relatively_ high at that time, so individual consumers were eager to invest their own time & money to upskill and differentiate themselves. By 2018 unemployment hit record lows and suddenly it was _employers_ who were struggling to attract talent and wanted to differentiate themselves by offering upskill training as a benefit along with highly intentional training programs to organically grow the hard-to-hire talent from their existing workforce. This precipitated a shift from huge growth in the consumer side to growth in the enterprise business.

Contemporaneously, platforms like Udemy and Pluralsight commoditized content creation. Pluralsight bragged that it cost them $15k to launch a new course—orders of magnitude less than it cost us in house. Udacity pivoted away from high quality in house production to more partnerships with external content creators and identified the project grading and mentorship services as the largest cost drivers of ongoing course support costs.

As growth wasn’t tracking fast enough, Udacity closed most of the international offices—except India—then had two rounds of layoffs where the remaining content production was practically eliminated, and the mentorship and grading were commoditized by transferring the programs to the Udacity India office to administrate. All the hand-picked and trained graders and mentors were eliminated.

Then COVID hit. (I was gone by then.) I heard Udacity raised a debt round, but I think they were stuck against headwinds from the past few years. Eventually they were acquired for an “undisclosed sum”.

So what could have brought in more business? IMO, focusing on what was working for us, not trying to pivot into what worked for someone else. The problem I think is that we weren’t on track to make a reasonable return on all the money raised. We were trying to swing for the fences, even if it meant eventually striking out.

I don’t view class central as being useful, could really use much more detailed filtering of results.

OMSCS allowed me to add MSCS to my resume, with additional networking and work experience details as a TA for the algorithms and Computational Photography courses. Suddenly I started getting a lot more calls back. About 6 months after graduation I had moved to the SFBay (to work for Udacity) and within 2 years I was an ML engineer at Apple where I remain today. I don’t think any of that would’ve happened without OMSCS.

CS7210 (DC) is the hardest class I took. We had to write a correct Paxos implementation, then use it to build a distributed sharded KV store. I remember having to spend 10+ hours on a single day during weekend. It was worth it though, learned a lot about distributed consensus, and how difficult it is to get right (there were test failures that were fixed after hours of debug, and the fix was literally changing the order of some code lol).

Here is a tip: maybe don't assume so much!

That says nothing other than that the interviewers have a narrow mind and/or are ignorant. OMSCS is a very well known program, and it's their problem if they don't know it.

The OMSCS program is well known and well respected in the tech industry. It's a masters degree from the currently 8th ranked computer science school in the U.S.

The university make no distinction between students who take the courses online, vs in person. I.e., the diploma's are identical.

FWIW I meant the diploma is identical, the actual experience will obviously vary. Some people will get better outcomes online, some will get better outcomes in person.

https://www.omscentral.com/