I really like this idea.

edit: I'd happily pay someone $10 to save me an hour of frustration, or answer questions that I have solved on my own if I get a bit of reimbursement. I'm too lazy to bother right now in a lot of cases.

Yeah, I'm sort of brainstorming potential ideas for a startup (down the road though so not very serious about it right now) and I thought that one was pretty good. At least good in the sense of an idea, not really that good as the foundation for a company.

from your average users perspective (someone with a question), how would that benefit me more than stack overflow? I already get my questions answered and answered well. I would worry that if you are paying for answers there is going to be a lot more noise because lots of people are just going to give an answer because they want to try and get paid, so im going to have to wade through a bunch of garbage rather than actually getting better answers because you are paying for them.

I guess from the business side tho, if you pay people for answers, no one is going to answer questions at stack overflow and instead will answer questions at your site, so maybe you just steal all the people, so your site becomes the defacto site. But im not sure, because stack overflow is already so huge and is the first several spots on any question you google, and no doubt lots of people will still just answer questions there for free because of a sense of community or loyalty.

Now if you had actual experts on each topic and that was there job to sit there and answer questions, and charged the user to ask a question, I would use that site, as lots of times I would gladly pay money to get my question answered right away than spending however long trying to figure it out or research it. but thats kinda different, and I have no idea the profibility of that

grue, adios,

Thanks for the input, seems like I dont have a good idea of what the work life is like for a programmer, I might not even hate it! Will add that aspect into my research, thanks!

I don't think you have to worry about users deciding between stack overflow and paid stack overflow. Ultimately content is king and they'll go wherever the better content is. For example, I don't think I've ever gone to SO to search directly. I google for a problem and click on results I think look promising - SO is just often one of those results.

In terms of content per question - I think the Stack Overflow model works well. People that are just trying to pump out answers to make money still have to make them good or no one will vote for them. If you also tie the payout to the popularity of the question you have a very effective incentive system for popular questions getting popular (aka good) answers. The bounty addition is nice in that it also gets good content for less popular/more obscure questions - something SO sometimes struggles with.

Competing with Stack Overflow so head-on is one of the main reasons I think its not a great idea for starting a company. I think you'd need at least a couple of other, very fundamental differences with what they're doing - and I don't know what those things would be. SO just works well.

Cramster (now Chegg Homework Help) has something like this where you redeem points for gift cards.

http://www.chegg.com/homework-help/chegg-experts

It's normal school subjects not programming though.

I was thinking how Stack Overflow would adapt if someone started a pay-out Stack Overflow that was doing well and I figured it would be something like that. They could partner with someone that lets users convert karma points to rewards.

When I mention that I'm learning to program, people often pooh-pooh it, saying good coders are a dime a dozen and that I should be focusing on a different area of expertise (a common theme is that I should just come up with a million-dollar app, hire cheap Indians to code it for me, and then reap all the profits - easy game). Are they just blatantly wrong, or is there some truth to what they say?

They're more like 1.5 million dollars a dozen per year. They are correct you won't hit a huge score and retire instantly off it, but a smart person can make very good money doing the unremarkable by becoming a software developer.

This further incentivizes gaming/spamming - people will create fake accounts to vote for their own answers, duplicate existing popular questions and answers to steal votes, spam other sites to promote their own answers, etc. Also, part of what makes SO so great is that it's a wiki - other people are able to edit and enhance your initial questions and answers. This is practically impossible with a pay-for-contribution model.

Q&A sites are not economical if you set the payout high enough to attract actual talent. The whole point of them is to harvest free labor and capture value. A low payout mostly results in mobilizing spammers with bot farms and unskilled desperate people to game your system. Also, even if you're successful, you then have an entire army of people grinding out low wages who will create a PR nightmare every time you make a policy/site change that threatens their livelihood.

Gaming/spamming would definitely be an issue, although I don't think an insurmountable one. For example, some basic personal verification, tying payouts to a % of actual revenue derived by a question, crowd sourcing identification of spam, and so on...

Anyway, probably never know since its something that would really need to be tried to see how well it actually works out.

Why would top contributors put up with this? Their time is still worth way more than what they'd be paid and you're killing their motivation by treating them like unskilled contractors desperate for money. Their most valuable contributors are probably procrastinating from their actual work when they are answering questions and by making this process feel like a minimum wage contracting job, you're helping them get back to work. Not to mention that you're putting them in an awkward spot from a legal/ethical standpoint.

Lots and lots of paid Q&A sites have come and gone. Paying users to generate content (content farms) is a very old idea. The problem is, as far as getting high quality work is concerned, paying lots of money > getting volunteers > paying small amounts of money. And Q&A sites simply don't have the economics to pay a lot of money.

Like what? This is what I was originally asking about.

Google Answers most famously. Also,

http://www.quora.com/Q-A-Websites/Wh...paid-Q-A-sites

http://www.quora.com/Are-any-of-the-...tes-doing-well

http://www.inc.com/jones-scott/paid-...r-q-and-a.html

http://gigaom.com/2012/06/12/meet-th...0-for-answers/

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/08/pea...ies-b-funding/

I just took a quick look but it seems like most of those are a different thing. Making users pay to get their questions answered or providing 'expert' answers as opposed to crowd sourced answers.

I was trying to point out sites that are more on the legit side of the spectrum. Then there are content farms where you're bribing people to create content which you then monetize with display advertising. Those are barely profitable despite extremely aggressive and shady SEO/monetization strategies. There just isn't enough money to interest quality people and anyone who could generate legitimately good content for a living can monetize better in other ways. There are very good reasons why eHow.com and its ilk have significantly worse articles than Wikipedia. Here's another good list:

http://www.jongales.com/blog/2011/02...content-farms/

These are probably closest to what you had in mind:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com#Mahalo_Answers

First issue to point out: the highest voted questions on SO are basic "How to do a for loop in JavaScript" type things, or meta items that really don't help anyone, like "Clojure -vs- Haskell -vs- Erlang" type questions.

The second issue is the myriad studies on reward and enjoyment. Social Scientist have found, on many occasions, that those who are paid a pittance find *less* enjoyment than those who have done the exact same job for free. The prime example I can think of is the study where they had people picking up trash at a park. The results are as I just described. Definitely give "Influence" a read on these aspects.

You'd be facing a tough dichotomy: those that work for money will need a much larger incentive to do the exact same work they are doing for free on SO to gain equal enjoyment. This goes into issues of gaming the system, which will happen, and vetting the answers so that only those that truly deserve the reward get the reward. This then creates the chicken-egg problem: why would I pay a site for answers to my questions if there are no qualified people to answer? If you could get Guido, Hickey, DHH, Linus, etc on board, then you may have something, but these guys don't work for peanuts, so now you have an issue of charging too much money. I'll stop the ouroborus here.

Alobar,

I researched and found that there are generally mixed reviews unless you get accepted in some of the top tier bootcamps, ie (hackreactor?). Do keep in mind that most of them are web development boot camps. So if you want to change paths, it may be a little tough.

If I were in your shoes, I would take a few classes at a local community college to see if you like it or not. And if you do decide to join a bootcamp, you can use some of that experience to leverage in your applications to the bootcamps. Not to mention, will increase your chance of success in the bootcamp. I read of stories where bootcamps will ask you to leave and refund your money since they don't want people hampering their numbers if they graduate without the necessary skills.

If I were you, I would get a degree. It just would be life-tilting to get no job offers and still wonder if it's your portofolio or your lack of degree. I would rather eliminate that from the equation.

That's my 2 cents. But again, I am bias since I am going for a 2nd degree in comp science.

Codersclan seems like a stackoverflow with monetary reward for the best solution.

https://www.codersclan.net

Good point.

I went the community college route for $13/credit hour, and it turned into a nice career.

@Barrin6
I am not disputing your take. I don't think undergrad courses are a good test of whether or not you will want to pursue a career though. To me the ideal situation would be to gain some "real world experience" and then pursue a degree emphasizing areas you really want to delve into.

I understand school != career in programming. However it is a good litmus test if you will succeed or not if you do decide to pursue the career.

I am guessing you put "real world experience" for a reason? Your ideal situation does not have to be mutually exclusive. Attempt to get "real world experience" and go to school at the same time.

It is going to be hard to go get "real world experience" when you no one wants to hire someone who is self-taught. So teach yourself actual programming skills for which industry you are looking for and at the time use school as backup in case you can't get a job doing the self-teaching.

To me that's the safest route.

I was at a meetup recently, and they were talking about how there were so many JavaScript programmers now days that started learned about 6 months before they got their first job. The implication was that these guys and gals couldn't program a paper bag sideways in order to walk out. As someone who is self-taught and not employed as a programmer, I can see how both sides of the debate are reasonable.

My take is that I couldn't kid myself and tell people that I am industry-ready when I just started to learn. It comes down to attitude, confidence, and perhaps a bit (or a lot) of rosey-eyed naivety. If school or whatever is what will give you confidence, then by all means do so. I definitely understand the humility.

Not sure if anyone uses this but go check out Zeal if you use linux/windows or Dash if you have a mac. It improved my productivity by a lot.

I have it setup with vim so I hit a hotkey over a word and about 500ms later I'm looking at the latest official docs for that term from a locally downloaded version of the docs that was all handled by Zeal. It handles about 100 different techs that you can turn on/off. I'm jealous that Dash is mac only because it seems quite a bit better than Zeal but what can you do.