I haven't used StackOverflow hardly at all since ChatGPT came out.
Unrelated to AI, I haven't really had a positive experience on StackOverflow in 7+ years. The way they aggressively close questions as duplicates despite the previous questions having incomplete or outdated answers was already making it a much less useful site.
At your size, I would think bringing payments in-house would be financially worthwhile. I worked at a company doing less than $1B in revenuesand we had our own payment processor integrations. It requires some work in each country/region. In the US our partner was Chase.
I've gone through some shenanigans like with AWS. I now have a rule that I don't use any cloud providers where I can't get proper customer service which rules out the main big clouds.
Here's the thing: It doesn't matter what you do. It matters what other people know you did. You've got to be a self-promoter to get places. You might get lucky occasionally and have a manager who does this for you, but you generally have to do it yourself. It's like marketing yourself and then selling yourself to others.
Not sure if this meets your criteria, yet iNaturalist [1] is kind of "gamified". Has a rather large "bird" taxon observation amount. 38,393,861 observations, 11,165 species, 1,130,700 observers, 188,988 identifiers (people who identify species from your pictures)
When Romania announced that the Lesser Kestrel had returned after 100 years iNaturalist actually had several of the observations in the nearby area. [2]
I spent some time consulting over the last few years. So many companies are laying off their US engineering teams and replacing them with offshore teams. There used to be this notion that offshore meant lower quality but it doesn't seem like that as much these days. I've worked with some Ukrainian teams for example. They're 20% the price of Americans, produce the same quality, work harder, and speak great English. It seems like a no-brainer to go offshore.
There is an eternal cycle between uncomfortable and productive and comfortable and lazy.
15-20 years ago SWE work was brutal and paid OKish, but not great if you calculated the hourly.
Then the era of free VC money came, culminating in the pandemic boom, where people were crash coursing JavaScript to land a remote job doing 4 hours of work a week for $170k.
The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction.
Before the first dotcom era, software jobs paid like most other professional office jobs. Decent money but nothing really remarkable.
With the dotcom boom and VC money, that changed. I doubled my salary going to a startup in 1998. I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it.
15-20 years ago software development was still very well paid compared to 30 years ago. And then the really insane FAANG money started flowing.
> I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it.
That's not the whole story, though. The Internet inherently changed the value prop for software work, where a small number of engineers could support a huge number of users. That leverage makes software work inherently waaaay more profitable than it was pre-Internet, which is why companies could afford to throw gobs of money at top engineering talent.
I worked in software 15-20 years ago. The work was not "brutal". I worked hard, but mostly because I enjoyed the work. I lived in a major American city and my pay was essentially the highest pay you could get outside of professions requiring professional degrees like doctor or lawyer, or some high finance positions. And even then, I made more than some doctors in lower-tier specialties.
I don't personally see much audience for non-JS websites other than headless web crawler. It's good for SEO but otherwise why bother?
I actually intentionally put some content behind JavaScript because AI crawlers see enough of the page to reference it as a source but not enough of the answer to provide the answer without linking to my site. I get decent traffic from AI bots as a result.
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