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25 Comments

Building a course to help people level up their Software Engineering careers, what do you think?

  1. 2

    That would be cool, Ben. Personally, I'm building something similar. Started with a job board and community for juniors. The first like that in the world, over 25000 members now.

    What about coop or doing this together?

    1. 1

      Hey Dawid, great job scaling to 25k users and thank you for offering! I'll chat with @michaelcho about this and get back to you soon.

  2. 2

    Hey, this sounds cool. As pointed out by @danp Blog plus course is a great idea.

    1. 1

      Thanks Saket, appreciate it!

  3. 2

    Hey mate! Really like the copy and messaging. A few pieces of feedback:

    • For some reason "Hey fellow Software Engineer." comes off like Software Engineer was autofilled in on a mail merge. If you get what I mean?

    • I feel like the sign up form comes too early. You haven't done much to convince me why this is worth signing up for yet!

    • The way you highlight points in the check list is great and helps me cut through the high text density. I think you should try to accentuate more points through visual hierachy like this. I'm sure your course is good for more than just salary negotiation and a Discord server, but that's all my first read took in.

    • The logos are good reputation proof. I think you could weave that in earlier, as to why I should care about who is making this course.

    I love the blog + course approach, really interesting. Best of luck fellas!

    1. 1

      Thanks so much Dan, this is really valuable feedback. That's interesting RE: "Hey Fellow..." - I'll see if I can reword that, and will definitely add some more bullet points + try to move the logos higher up on the page!

      1. 2

        Yeah, it just comes off a bit... computer generated. The rest of the copy has a great tone though.

        I think you can blend the section where you intro you and Michael with the logos.

        1. 1

          Totally, I can see how it might come across that way.

  4. 1

    What video hosting are you using for your courses ?

    1. 1

      Right now we've been recording using Loom and then uploading to YouTube.

      1. 1

        But isn't youtube full of ads ? Would you use that for a paid course ?

        1. 1

          @Anil1729 good point! We're only using YouTube for our blog posts, which are snippets complementary to the course. The course is still in development, but I imagine we would be using Vimeo or self-hosting without ads of course.

  5. 1

    looks very good!

    I would like to see something about career progression and what should I focus on each of these steps:

    • Student to first job
    • Growing as a junior dev
    • The mid/pre-senior breakpoint
    • Becoming a senior dev
    • Growing as a senior dev (+10 years of experience)
    1. 1

      This was my takeaway too -- I read it and thought, "who is this even targeted to? The advice that I give prospective interns is SO different than the advice that I give staff+ engineers."

      I think Camille Fournier's "The Manager's Path" had a good way to frame this as a cohesive narrative, which was explaining the journey of your career as you level up.

      E3-E8 is probably unhelpful to people who need this course. Why apply Facebook's ranking system across the industry? This leveling doesn't even generalize across your "we've worked with" examples, since Microsoft's leveling is way different.

      1. 2

        Thanks for the comments! Yes maybe we should make it clearer by career stage.

        Btw we picked E3-E8 since that is broadly understandable in the industry, we realize every company has slightly different levels but didn't want to list all of them out.

    2. 1

      Thank you for the feedback @pablovgdev! We definitely will cover all of these in the course. We have a few lectures specifically focused on leveling up across all of the common engineering levels, available in this module once the course launches: https://swepro.co/course-modules/leveling-up.html

  6. 1

    Hello Ben,

    Sounds awesome! I'm also on the same track, working on a collection of books about software development and IT: https://dev-concepts.dev

    1. 1

      @dSebastien your books look good! How has your journey been?

      1. 1

        Thank you Michael!

        My journey into IT has been really fun so far. It's been my passion since forever and it's not going to change anytime soon. That's also why I'm writing this series; it's a pleasure for me to share things that I've learned about over the years. And it's a good excuse for me to go back and explore some more things along the way.

        The most difficult part for me is building an audience and learning about marketing/sales. But it's very enlightening!

        I've just launched a new version of the landing page, hopefully making the value proposition clearer ;-)

    2. 1

      Awesome man, your books look good! Thanks for checking us out as well.

  7. 1

    By the way, my co founder @michaelcho is also on IndieHackers. Let us know if you have any feedback! Cheers.

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