Back-End Engineering Career Path Constructive Feedback

Hi,

this is less of a bug report than a general ventilation of frustration. (I have posted this in the ‘bug report’ section as well, so feel free to delete one or the other if the category isn’t fitting)

So I have been doing the Back-End Engineer Career Path for a couple of weeks and now that I am about 25% into it, I think that I can confidently say that this is by far the worst course I have taken on Codecademy.
It seems incredibly unstructured as I have come across multiple lessons that I have already seen in that same path (keyword ‘REST APIs’) and it’s very confusing. Just now I have finished Module 10’s ‘REST Resource naming guide’ and clicked on ‘NEXT’ just to be directed to module 8’s ‘Introduction: JavaScript syntax part III’ - seems like even the developers who wrote this path were confused as to where they are and what they have already put in there…
The next thing that bothers me is that the path, so far, consists of one ‘external article’ after another for many, many lessons. I have had days where I have not read anything on Codecademy other than the short introduction to the ‘external article’ I am about to read. I did not sign up and pay for your content just to be redirected to stuff other people wrote! Especially when those ‘external articles’ are, more often than not, incredibly poorly written. Many have plain spelling and syntax errors, some are very long and talk about stuff that has nothing to do with the original syllabus, some don’t explain very well and with most of them, I just ask myself ‘Why am I reading this?’ Didn’t I pay Codecademy to break these concepts down for me, to tailor them to the syllabus so that I learn about the things that actually matter and not the trillions of other little things that surround the stuff that matters? If I wanted to read poorly written article after poorly written article, I wouls simply have done a quick google search instead…

I have been on Codecademy for almost two years now and I must say that the quality has seemd to decrease as much as the quantity increased. The thing is, quantity I can stumble upon for free in every corner of the internet, but quality is hard to find and until now I was happy to pay for the kind of quality content that Codecademy has provided. More and more, however, I get the feeling that these days are over.

Hello @theviggie! Curriculum Dev here!

Thank you so much for your feedback on the career path. We have heard learners like you loud and clear on the issues with the path. While the career path was created before my time here at Codecademy, I want to reassure you that we are working on improving it as we speak. I know that isn’t the most satisfying answer but to give you some context, here is what is happening behind the scenes to address the two issues you mentioned:

  • In terms of the career path structure: In early October, the web-development team began a full audit of all three career paths that we currently offer (full-stack, front-end, and back-end). Throughout the process, we have come up with various changes to each career path that should vastly improve the structure of the paths and improve the overall learning experience.

  • In terms of external content: Most of Q3 and Q4 so far have been dedicated (by various teams) to backfilling most of the external articles that you mentioned. We have heard this feedback consistently, and we are looking forward to offering the unique Codecademy content you have grown to love.

I don’t have a specific date for when we launch the changes, but we are fingers crossed aiming for the end of January. I hope this sheds some light on our plans and keep bringing your feedback so that way we can keep improving for you :slight_smile:

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Hi @dpatlutcc,

thanks for your answer! It’s good to hear that you are working on those issues, even if I most probably won’t benefit from them as I am relatively far into the path already. It felt more like a work in progress than an actually finished curriculum so at least now I know that you know about those issues and are working on them. It’s also what I grew to expect from Codecademy as usually you guys provide very good material.
So, keep up the good work, I guess :wink:

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The new update just went live! Enjoy :slight_smile: