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Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

skeptics.stackexchange.com

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Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#11

Post by taspeotis »

forgotAgain wrote: post #3

A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that. The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation. If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better. I'm thinking of msdn as an example since a lot of the Stack questions are MS technology based. MS is far from alone though. Much of the money saved has gone to vendors. Even given those po…

    The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation ... I'm thinking of msdn as an example
The number of questions on SO that can be answered by RTFM is quite remarkable. I think that points to a lot of the documentation being just fine. The last bug of my own I spent any significant of time on was answerable by RTFM [1].

There are plenty of PHP+MySQL questions that appear where the OP is clearly learning about PHP+MySQL and the code looks something like...

    $result = mysql_query("select username, password from user where username = " . $username)
...shows that they haven't bothered to RTFM [2].

[1] I had made a new thread and was calling ShellExecute on it. It didn't work on some computers because I hadn't initialised COM (presumably they had some shell extensions installed). See the first sentence of "Remarks" http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb76...

[2] Big red box: http://www.php.net/mysql_query

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#12

Post by arthur_debert »

code_duck wrote: post #6

It is the internet and www in general that enables people to be connected and share ideas. There's no reason to credit specific sites like Facebook or eBay with connecting people, because someone else would have done it (possibly better) if they had not.

It is language and written language that enables people to be connected and share ideas. There's no reason to credit specific networks like www or the internet with connecting people, because someone else would have done it (possibly better) if they had not.

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#13

Post by InclinedPlane »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #10
zsombor wrote: post #7

More likely it had merely promoted the quick and easy pop culture, where people no longer take the time of reading a book. After all you can just use google and look up your next short fix.

Oh I hear you! I can't say how much I regret all the time spent in the 700-800 pages of these Wrox or Addison-Wesley books trying to find that one line fix. These were the good old days!

Every Wrox book I've come across has been terrible. If I wanted to read raw documentation I'd do that, when I spend hard money on a technical book I want to benefit from some practical expertise and I don't want an infodump of reference info that's already out of date by publication date.

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#14

Post by dragonwriter »

forgotAgain wrote: post #3

A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that. The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation. If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better. I'm thinking of msdn as an example since a lot of the Stack questions are MS technology based. MS is far from alone though. Much of the money saved has gone to vendors. Even given those po…

> If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better.

Documentation quality had been declining for many years before SO -- I think its more accurate to say that if vendors were doing better, there would be no (or less interest in) StackOverflow than the other way around.

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#15

Post by cclogg »

forgotAgain wrote: post #3

A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that. The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation. If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better. I'm thinking of msdn as an example since a lot of the Stack questions are MS technology based. MS is far from alone though. Much of the money saved has gone to vendors. Even given those po…

I find the opposite with iOS/Apple programming. Often I'll be looking for something on Stack Overflow only to find the true answer lurking somewhere in one of Apple's guides or example apps lol. But if there's a Stack Overflow answer, it's often exactly what I was looking for, and that can't be undervalued!

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#16

Post by InclinedPlane »

dccoolgai wrote: post #2

I know it's fashionable in certain circles to rag on it lately, but I'm not too big to admit it has saved me a lot of time here and there over the last 4-5 years. I would bet a lot of devs use it more than they would admit to check down on things throughout the course of any given project. Billions seems like a lot, but I wouldn't call BS on it out of hand.

Personally I think StackOverflow is pretty good. It's always nice to see it popup in search results when googling for a technical problem, for example. My main complaint is that they've been resting on their laurels for quite a while, there's a lot of potential that's been wasted with SO/SE.

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#18

Post by lukifer »

code_duck wrote: post #6

It is the internet and www in general that enables people to be connected and share ideas. There's no reason to credit specific sites like Facebook or eBay with connecting people, because someone else would have done it (possibly better) if they had not.

I think there's plenty of credit to go around. Stack Overflow's fundamental decisions (gamification, open content, canonicity, searchability) were very significant in releasing valuable knowledge from the arcane vaults of obscure forums and mailing lists, not to mention creating a reliable(-ish) place to go for new questions. The project also represents an interesting template for community curation (which was begun well before launch), that can be learned from by other projects and startups.

Obviously, someone will always build a better mousetrap eventually. They still deserve credit for actually doing it.

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#19

Post by TrainedMonkey »

I think stackoverflow is more than just sum of it parts. Solutions presented there are not just provided by experts, they are reviewed by experts, and if someone has a better solution, it has a really high chance to boil to the top. Portion of experts will recognize that and adopt superior solution. This will keep driving code quality and standards of participants up.

Or at least so my reasoning goes. So to answer the question, I believe it had done much more than that - stackoverflow drove people to improve their technical knowledge, and that is priceless.

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#20

Post by jc4p »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #16
dccoolgai wrote: post #2

I know it's fashionable in certain circles to rag on it lately, but I'm not too big to admit it has saved me a lot of time here and there over the last 4-5 years. I would bet a lot of devs use it more than they would admit to check down on things throughout the course of any given project. Billions seems like a lot, but I wouldn't call BS on it out of hand.

Personally I think StackOverflow is pretty good. It's always nice to see it popup in search results when googling for a technical problem, for example. My main complaint is that they've been resting on their laurels for quite a while, there's a lot of potential that's been wasted with SO/SE.

Just curious, what do you think we could be doing that we aren't?

Also thanks for teaching me a new idiom :)

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