I heard an interesting theory that sounded more conspiratorial than anything but they basically said the reason why so many tech companies put out free resources on coding is because the more programmers there are, the less they can charge salaries.
To my surprise, every coding book can be downloaded for free – often times as a PDF straight from the author’s own site.
Google has many free resources for coding.
What are our thoughts?
The theory you’ve heard is pretty interesting!
The way I think of it is that since the programming languages (like, say, Python) provide free docs, there’s not really much that you can’t find for free anyway. It’s therefore in the best interest of other resource providers (such as W3Schools, etc) to provide free content. It’s then easier for them to charge for something else (like an “in-depth course”, or what have you), and they have a large base of users that already trust their information…
You can give people all the resources you want, but it’s useless if you aren’t willing to apply yourself and do the work.
probably just what you said a theory but you never know
If that were true, then you would also see a lot more open source projects. A company can’t take advantage of all the “free” labor out there from people using these resources if the people can’t access the code to work on it.
The reality of all the free resources is that marketing studies show releasing free resources like this help brands grow. It’s why if you go looking for “x product vs. y product”, the first result will ALWAYS be the website for one of those products trying to sell itself to you through a comparison. Giving out free information draws traffic and attention to your product and increases the chance of a sale. Maybe a company wants to hire more talented Python developers, the best way to do that is to put out a bunch of free resources for Python devs and 3% (random number for the sake of argument) of the people who see it will decide that your company is a good fit for them, so they apply. The rest of the people just go about their day, no loss to you and maybe a gain in knowledge to them.
As for the salaries argument, if that were true, then why are devs and software engineers the highest paid career paths in the world right now, and the projected salaries continue to rise every year? If the point of all these free resources is to deflate the cost of hiring people, it’s doing a really bad job.