Is the Udacity All-Access Program Worth It?
Hi, all. Udacity currently has a Black Friday sale where their new subscription service only costs about $130/month, 50% off from the normal price of $249/month. What’s Blind consensus on Udacity courses and certificates? I’d like to use it to gain some key knowledge that will help me down the line in my career, but know that their certifications aren’t considered as valuable, especially when compared to a college degree or experience. I’d like to focus on their cloud classes along with some of their DE classes with the hopes of becoming more valuable in the market and increasing my TC. I plan on continuing in consulting, but to hope to jump to Solution Engineering or Solution Architect roles down the line; however, I’m open to other tech roles that may be more lucrative such as Cloud Development or software based roles. Conversely, I have LC Premium and can renew at $130/year. However, I’m not a SWE and don’t believe that LC will be as valuable in my career going forward—plus I already bought Grokking and Neetcode, so that should be enough. In addition, I never touched it once during the year I had it, so I fear that it would just be wasted again like the last time. Any and all suggestions would be appreciated. TC: 105K YOE: 3 Location: HCOL Level: L4
i am a mle. in my experience, these external certificates don’t matter a lot. they can act like an addendum but only with a good base (for example: phd in ml or multiple papers in the field or multiple years of industry experience in faang or nvidia/linkedin etc. type of companies) companies seem to not care much about certificates rather what you can do once hired. try to get good projects done and get an understanding of how different models work at a nuts and bolts level i.e., transformers or seq2seq models. try to get practical understanding. the udacity type of courses are very superficial and/or introductory which rarely helps.
Thank you for your comment. Since I have no degree or research under my belt, I was hoping it further my education that way and see about getting some knowledge to help me down the line. Ironically I got another certification while with my new company that seems to have helped internally. I have LC Premium, but since I’m not a SWE, it won’t do me much good when transitioning into a new role since I’m pretty much only going to be limited to NG roles.
i found leetcode premium useful. but it depends on person to person. it helped me personally a lot so that i could even crush meta interviews. but then again i have been struggling with leetcode questions for years now.
I dont think any certifications will get you high paying. However, if you will *actually* use it and learn, that *could* help you get one. If it’s for fun, no brainer, do it.
Thank you for your comment. I did previously take a Udacity Nanodegree for digital marketing which only helped to land an internship making $13/hr, so I may be biased in that regard. The standard for SWEs on Blind is LC + SD, but I’m not sure it applies in my case. I just want to be able to get the most ROI of my learning since I have too little time and too many subscriptions. Keep in mind that I also have no degree, so I’m having to work a lot harder than normal just to get a job, let alone one paying 6 figures and more than what I make now.
Take this with a grain of salt because of a CS degree, and I am interviewing for senior eng roles (about 5 yoe) I personally rarely get asked about my education in interviews. I find resumes are most important for *landing* an interview, or for startups. Most bigger firms dont care past that. So the most important part of the process is the system design + leetcode sadly :(. If you learn better with course structure than just random articles, definitely do this. Some people learn more from courses (myself included).