Joined 11 years ago
I told them the publisher was reputable and if they had $15 to drop on the whole thing, as I had, then they should go for it--but if they just didn't have the money, I offered to send them anything else they wanted from my own download provided they tell anyone else they thought might be interested about the deal.
This straight-up doesn't hurt anyone. If my friends don't have the cash anyway, there's no opportunity cost--but now they know about Humble Bundle and they're probably going to tell other people because it's such a good deal. (And they get at least one new book.) A common and effective marketing tactic is to put the product (or a sample) in people's hands and then ask if they want to buy it, and everyone likes freebies.
I think being DRM-free helps to spread the word more than it hurts, and it also acts as a giant "We're Not Evil" flag. I'd hazard that No Starch does this kind of thing more in order to increase its brand awareness (and its affiliation with good-karma organizations like HB) than it does to actually make money.
I found out about the deal from No Starch's web site, because I have a print copy of Clojure for the Brave and True and had gone looking for the associated files. I'd barely heard of the publisher before, but now I respect them almost as much as O'Reilly. CftBaT is actually available free in HTML form, by the way, and earned itself a big link on my blog.
Basically, this kind of thing is actually really common when you think about it! It kind of reminds me of open source, but without the ability to modify. Then again, you can always write your own book.
Anyway, if someone goes looking for something for free by questionable means and they can't find a pirated version of it, how often do you think they actually go out and buy it instead? I would say almost never, unless whatever it is is in high demand or well known--that tends to not be the case among Humble Bundle items, which are from indie developers and publishers.
Also, if we're talking about being frugal rather than relying on VC money, why not pick an area with a good university but not so much of a "city scene"/VC-land-ness, and hire college students? For example, Urbana-Champaign, IL. That way you're drawing from a pool where not all the talent has been snapped up yet, and the rent is usually reasonable because students have to live there.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper... (Kind of old, but still applicable.)
Supplying an allowance to rent somewhere with a good workspace or set up an office is still mostly cheaper than renting an inner-city space with private offices... and then you don't have issues with VCs thinking you're burning their money unnecessarily.
The big, flashy ads (you know, the ones that are animated, or play sound or video, or do something dumb if you mouse over them for 1/4 second) are generally purchased by makers of lesser products in order to manipulate users into choosing them, because they can't rely on the quality of their products to advertise for them. I don't feel bad about blocking them.
So, I don't think unobtrusive ads are so bad. The trick is figuring out how to let them through. I turn off AdBlock on certain smaller sites with less obnoxious advertising and find that sometimes the bar is set too high for what's considered unobtrusive; the ads would theoretically be acceptable under the AdBlock description of what's unobtrusive, but get blocked anyway somehow.
As the market improves, advertising may gradually go away. That first clause is kind of difficult though.
The other question is how we can support people making content like blog posts and so on... without limiting the people who actually can't pay for stuff like that (kids with no jobs, etc). It's the same question as the one faced by music and software producers. When you can find an answer to that, well...
Most of the good programmers I know just go to school mostly for the credentials and to socialize with other programmers there, and then go home and self-teach for actual skill. School centers around getting a job. But it's starting to become not the only way to get a job. (Leaving out startups, of course; you don't really need credentials there except to impress VCs.)
Some companies are recognizing that formal education in programming is not very effective, and are paying more attention to StackOverflow and GitHub accounts and that sort of thing. Our work and expertise is becoming more visible through the Internet. That suggests that maybe we're not going to have to worry so much about credentials.
My older brother is doing very well for himself as a developer, without any formal training past some classes in high school back in the 90s. As for myself, I'm leaving for Kansas City once I'm done with my Associate's degree, and I'm going to UMKC there... for a few semesters, until I find a job and/or a cofounder. I don't intend to finish the degree I'm going to sign up for. They let slip during my visit there that they're already having issues convincing students to finish their degrees rather than let themselves be hired out.
But I do intend to go, in order to meet other programmers. That's the real power of universities: they collect bright, ambitious people and let them work together. Online classes don't have that power, and the credential problem is already being solved better, so I don't think this is going to go very far. But maybe it'll help accelerate the current solution by giving more credence to self-teaching and online study. Good try, but it'll probably be irrelevant in the end.
Kind of begs the question of whether one could recreate the social aspect of universities and leave out the expense of formal classes as they are now? For instance, whether you could make a sort of hackerspace-modelled university where all the "classes" were projects that one student was looking for help with? I'd attend that.
Hmm... sounds familiar, doesn't it? ;)
Was that last example Obfuscated-C or something? I can't even tell. It's just that lovely. Of course I want to live in a world where that wins contests.
There's just something wonderful about a culture with this much openly acknowledged absurdity. People who sometimes literally dream in code, who have an unstoppable urge to grep books, who have had others point out grammatical errors because they reflexively ended a sentence with a semicolon;
But there's a lucidity about it. "Yes, I taught my computer to speak orangutan. As a side project, I scare normal people. What are your hobbies?"
In programming, you don't have to pretend to be reasonable. You can genuinely like what you do, and that usually makes you so good at it that you can get by with having your boss hear that your computer now knows fifty definitions of "Ook." And there's something incredibly special about making hardened bureaucrats take that without losing dignity.
I can't tell if the writer actually dislikes programming or not. (May seem an incredible statement.) But for how much programmers half-seriously complain about how ridiculous their work is, I don't know a one who would've gone back in time and told their younger self not to learn programming. Maybe they'd have said not to try to make a corporate career out of it, but that's more the brokenness of corporate structure than of programming proper.
At least they let you test out. The only reason I know Access is in the curriculum is that I BSed my way through that part of the test. Probably the reason it was there was so more people would have to spend money on taking the class.
There are a lot of people who spend lots of money doing something in a stupid way (look at big software companies), but even they have an underlying reason: it's difficult to pick good programmers and value them accordingly unless all your managers are also programmers (and who picked them?).
When you say, "The normal approach to X is stupid; we're going to do things differently," you have to understand how the normal approach came about so that you can avoid ending up there yourself regardless, and also so that you can avoid whatever problems it adapted to avoid.
There are situations when assuming by default that other people are reasonably intelligent is a bad or dangerous idea--while driving, for instance, or during basically anything involving casinos or Black Friday. But when a market governs a motivation as powerful as money and is sufficiently discerning, you'd better start really questioning whether those people are actually stupid or you just don't understand what they're doing.
You should still be able to test out, though. That way, if you're totally uninterested, you can test out of the MS Word class and move on.
I think there are enough students sufficiently interested in computers that they'd check out the harder course if its name didn't sound too obscure.
