"Cletus's post raises very valid points and expresses the feelings of betrayal of many people who contributed to StackOverflow many hours of work for free."

I'm kinda curious about this sentence. Are there people out there who didn't know that Joel runs his website/forums/StackOverflow for Joel's benefit and not necessarily for the benefit of those who contribute?

I read a bunch of Joel's articles in college, then decided that his site wasn't the place for me. I felt that I wasn't really learning anything new from him, and that the forum participants were rehashing really basic stuff that I'd already learned and wanted to move on from. When it came time to get a job (which was right around Joel's big "Great Programmers Work for Fog Creek" push), I kinda laughed and figured that if I were really a great programmer, I'd rather go build search engines or financial models than bugtracking software. So I just quietly applied to financial software startups, stopped reading JoS, and didn't make a big stink about it on the Internet.

I thought about not writing this comment because, as Raganwald notes, I'm being part of the problem and not part of the solution. But I found my life got so much easier when I started worrying about my goals first and other people's second, rather than assuming other people were looking out for me and then feeling betrayed when it turned out they weren't. That doesn't mean being an asshole or never lifting a finger to help someone. It means that when I help someone out on the Internet, it's because I want to, and I don't expect Reputation or Karma or a job offer because of it. They're nice if they happen, but not something to expect.