This was my first thought when i read the headline.
Many people were told to get CS degrees because they will get a job, not because they love it. The cost of quitting a degree or not using a "valuable" degree is relatively high, especially for people who are inclined to coast. Most people who start college also graduate, even if they aren't prepared or love their program, so we have lots of bad cs graduates.
On the other hand, most people I know have at least dabbled in learning to code. In this case the cost of quitting is very low and the cost of getting good is reasonably high, so it self-selects for people who excel at it and love it.
That said, if you only compare people with similar aptitudes, my experience is that people with formal training are better.
tl;dr: The most important thing to me is comparing past work, interview and personality. If you have a CS degree with no personal projects, you won't get a job offer. If you don't have a degree but have active projects with good code then I don't care if you have a degree. That said, I have been getting hundreds of applications for every entry level job I post so I can normally find someone who has both.
I predict that all sites like this which thrive on community generated content will be getting rid of apis and bulk exports. This is because ai companies have used those tools to build their systems on data that prevents the need to the source website. This is an existential threat to sites like StackOverflow and a huge, missed opportunity for reddit.
AI companies can just scrape the content, and since the sites don't have an exclusive license to it (it's user-generated, after all) there is little they can do against that.
Actually, I'm not even sure the AI companies don't do this already. If I'd start such a company, I'd invest in a generic crawler once, instead of building countless integrations for all the different, proprietary APIs or dump formats.
Are they a multibillion dollar corporation though? I know they have had crazy valuation's, but we are moving past a time of value based on eyeballs and to a time of value based on monetization. Where does the monetary value of reddit really lie? It seems like most of their creative monetization strategies like gold, donations and custom avatars have failed. This leaves the more mundane avenues of advertising to users, and selling the content that users creates. Both of those are severely handicapped by a free/low cost api. If they cannot monetize a user or their data then that user is bad for their bottom line.
reddit is doing this because their investors want them to be a multi-billion dollar company, not because they already are.
Yes, get some limited funding to build out the infrastructure. We can build a platform that is better for the users and that will get them all to come. We will make it modern and very easy for third parties to help build on top of it this will increase value and uptake.
We will need to pay for servers and dev time so maybe we can allow our users to donate to upkeep. Maybe call it new service platinum. Unfortunately, most people don't pay so maybe we can have a limited number of non-intrusive ads on the site. Well now people with equity want some money back so we need to figure out how to make some more money. These third party apps aren't showing our ads, so lots of our power users use these third party apps and lots of companies are leveraging our service to make lots of money. The obvious answer is to get some money back from the api users.
I shall call this site reddit.
Oh, thanks for the hint. ...yes that does work. It said "scroll", so I tried cursor up/down as well as page up/down. Didn't even know horizontal scrolling with cursor left/right was a thing.
I would argue that high paying jobs are a big driver of cities and never in human history have people had the ability to work in high paying jobs outside of big cities like we do now. The ability to effectively work remotely is largely dependent on job duties and IT in general can work remotely with little productivity loss. Hence the bay area getting hit harder than most.
To me the question is whether companies/employees will continue letting/wanting to work remotely in the future. I am certainly not concerned about a population collapse in big cities because many companies and people want to live there and don't because of cost.
I think for their hard limit on MSDN funds, MS shuts down everything that creates incremental costs. As far as i know they don't delete anything, even things like storage that have an associated cost.
That said, i am pretty sure the the TOS for MSDN funds say they are not be used for production systems.
And you generally know the person who is on both ends. This leads to a sense of history and consequence which is most commonly not available on the internet.
On the other hand, most people I know have at least dabbled in learning to code. In this case the cost of quitting is very low and the cost of getting good is reasonably high, so it self-selects for people who excel at it and love it.
That said, if you only compare people with similar aptitudes, my experience is that people with formal training are better.
tl;dr: The most important thing to me is comparing past work, interview and personality. If you have a CS degree with no personal projects, you won't get a job offer. If you don't have a degree but have active projects with good code then I don't care if you have a degree. That said, I have been getting hundreds of applications for every entry level job I post so I can normally find someone who has both.