I have worked with some people that are self-taught that ended up being incredibly good. However, I still bias myself a bit to people coming from a CS background because of other non-knowledge related reasons. Examples.
They are more ok with doing 'not fun' stuff, because they have suffered doing a bunch of homework. At work, maybe a percentage of the job is fun, and some things you need to power through. Tuning logs, painfully stepping through the code for the 110th time to find the erratic bug, or boring documentation, also part of the job.
They are less inclined to just copy-paste a solution that you found on StackOverflow and more agreeable to go into the R&D mode of finding the right algorithm. This can be a blessing and a curse.
People that have been through several years of education are more inclined to follow a schedule. We are very relaxed at Silicon Valley and yes some people do their best work from home, but sometimes you just have to be here. College helps form some of these habits.
Last, a degree comes with a lot of soft skills that Universities just throw in sometimes. Communication skills, the ability to summarize properly, grammar and spelling .. not required for a coder but definitely useful for someone that wants to grow into a career into software, eventually you need to interact with Product Managers, Business, Customers, and those unrelated-to-the-job skills start becoming very handy.
I like this idea a lot. It goes away from the regular though that you get a friend that is forever that is there for you for good and bad, and puts you into the driver seat. I also liked that it is in general a framework for being a good person.
Where did you learn this? My Google search didn't get that far
"The performance appraisal nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and politics… it leaves people bitter, crushed, bruised, battered, desolate, despondent, dejected, feeling inferior, some even depressed, unfit for work for weeks after receipt of rating, unable to comprehend why they are inferior. It is unfair, as it ascribes to the people in a group differences that may be caused totally by the system that they work in."
If you want to go all conspiracy theory on this, you can go with the "There is no such thing as bad publicity", and this amount of coverage ironically could even get some sales on the product, or some attention on the company at the very least, even if it's in the context of mocking it.
Had it not be for the fact apparently you need the machine for the privilege of buying juice pouches, I would even say some people might see the value of buying the pre-packaged juice and then squeezing it themselves, feeling good for having saved "400 dollars on an expensive machine", while still causing some revenue impact for the company that now has pivoted to selling only the juice pouches, maybe even as a subscription service.
I downloaded the app and it asked me for a forced login using Facebook, with no other choices.
I was expecting to at least be able to bypass the login screen, browse the app a little, and login once I have something to contribute to it or do something with it, but I never found the option.
I don't mind creating an account, but I do mind sharing my Facebook profile even if it's as little as the name and email. An additional option to just register using email would be welcome.
This is personal, but I taught myself how to code, before the internet, and with barely any books. One thing that made, for example, the PHP documentation a lot easier to read vs. Perl was: examples
On an API level, don't just explain what things do, but how to use it, what is the intention behind a particular call or method, and how it integrates with other pieces of the environment. If there are best practices, this is the place to call them out. And it does not need to be a tutorial, but if the class calls for a "usage sample", that is perfect for the documentation.
Pick on these:
1) What decisions did you take for the implementation?
2) What tradeovers are made (this is written like this because ...)
3) How is it supposed to be used
4) What is the common pattern for accessing the resource (instantiate it, factory, singleton, dependency injection?)
5) How does it relate with the rest of the codebase?
Now, this is PHP, but on other languages...
6) Is it Thread-Safe?
7) How cheap is it to instantiate a new object of that type?
The % model would indeed work better with a low volume sales. So, if I wanted to distribute a file just once or twice, then this would work, since I end up paying just 50c (if the price of the digital goods were $10) instead of a fixed price for the subscription.
But if someone intends to sell several hundreds of copies, or the price is bigger (say, 5% of $10,000), then it is not a good deal.
So, I really only see the target audience as someone that must have DropBox integration (though other services also have integration with your webserver, and mounting a DropBox folder and exposing that through the webserver seems trivial), or maybe people with such a dispersion of files that the other services won't work (they allow you a fixed number of products).
The % transaction fee is a turndown. I have been looking for a solution to distribute digital goods, and I try to stay away from anything that is a percentage, it does not scale once you have hundreds of sales.
They are not absorbing the Paypal transaction fee, which means that on top of the 5% I would still be charged the 2.6% that Paypal wants (amount vary). So, unless the service provides a payment gateway, where is that 5% coming from? That starts adding to the cost really fast.
It might not be pretty but ejunkie (http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/pricing.htm) has a fixed cost of 5 dollars. It ends up being cheaper as soon as I sell more than 10 copies of any $10 digital goods.
For something prettier than ejunkie (but with way less features), PulleyApp does a fixed price of $6 (http://pulleyapp.com/signup). The only reason I am not using PulleyApp is because I wanted different paypal email addresses (for microtransactions vs. regular one - different fees), and at some point the ability to call a backend service does matter for integration.
I don't really see why I would use a service that takes a commission and does not charge a fixed price unless they have a value added service. As it stands, there are better alternatives already that do the same thing.
The new thing in here is the DropBox and Google Drive integration, but that is not enough for me to justify using them.
They are more ok with doing 'not fun' stuff, because they have suffered doing a bunch of homework. At work, maybe a percentage of the job is fun, and some things you need to power through. Tuning logs, painfully stepping through the code for the 110th time to find the erratic bug, or boring documentation, also part of the job.
They are less inclined to just copy-paste a solution that you found on StackOverflow and more agreeable to go into the R&D mode of finding the right algorithm. This can be a blessing and a curse.
People that have been through several years of education are more inclined to follow a schedule. We are very relaxed at Silicon Valley and yes some people do their best work from home, but sometimes you just have to be here. College helps form some of these habits.
Last, a degree comes with a lot of soft skills that Universities just throw in sometimes. Communication skills, the ability to summarize properly, grammar and spelling .. not required for a coder but definitely useful for someone that wants to grow into a career into software, eventually you need to interact with Product Managers, Business, Customers, and those unrelated-to-the-job skills start becoming very handy.