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Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

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

#31

Post by ep103 »

ritchiea wrote: post #23
taspeotis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clearl…

I want to float a different hypothesis: the perception of programming is so hung up on the idea of individual brilliance that most people, especially beginners, don't even realize how much value there is in reading the manual. And we as programmers add to the problem. It's not very sexy to say that there is a lot of useful software out there written and documented by smart people and if you read that documentation, a…

My experience has been that technet's documentation is so unreliable that I've learned to go to SO first.

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

#32

Post by baddox »

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…

> Much of the money saved has gone to vendors.

That's not a contradiction to the claim that wealth has been created. Of course it has to go somewhere.

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

#33

Post by hackula1 »

I found it hugely useful in the .Net world. With closed source, obscure errors cannot be as easily tracked down, especially when they are not covered by MSDN or a prominent blog. A couple years after switching to an open source stack, I barely use it at all, and when I do finally hit a wall and ask a question, I get an answer ~20% of the time (compared to 90%+ when I was in .Net). I am a huge fan of SO, but good docs and readable code go a lot further.

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

#34

Post by InclinedPlane »

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #22
InclinedPlane wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(*) where resting on laurels is defined as launching 111 sites running on 9 web servers with traffic doubling every 12 months while writing two native mobile apps and localizing the site :-)

Hey, that's great, but to be brutally honest most of those sites are borderline inconsequential. The fact that SE has yet to launch a site that's gotten bigger than StackOverflow is pretty damning. Everything else you describe is just work, it's not innovation.

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

#35

Post by gus_massa »

michalu wrote: post #24

How can £45k per annum equal £12.5 per hour, what am I not getting? Is he assuming average 69 hour work week?

4500/360/10=12.5

No weekends, no vacations, and 2 hour daily unpaid overtime. :)

Probably, back of the envelop calculation, with a lot of rounding in the parameters.

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

#36

Post by seiji »

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 know programmers at microsoft who use SO as an intern.

They just post questions about strange windows problems they can't work around. Somebody on SO will respond with a 1,000 word essay with 500 lines of code about it within a day, thus solving their problem with no employee time "wasted" by thinking or researching or paying for anything additional resources.

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

#37

Post by InclinedPlane »

jc4p wrote: post #20
InclinedPlane wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

In general, experimenting more. You've tackled the narrow use case of a single question with answers, but is that all SE can be, or should be? The thing that I think SE is most lacking is better ways to tackle the sheer amount of data on the site. There's a lot of information there but in general it's not very well organized. Go back to the original announcements about the launch of SO and see what it was supposed to be and how it has either lived up or not to those ideas.

Try this thought experiment: if a stack exchange competitor showed up tomorrow, what sorts of features would it have to have to make you start waking up in a cold sweat every day?

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

#38

Post by [deleted] »

drawkbox wrote: post #9
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…

When you answer questions and get points though you teach and that is the best training. Many times when I answer questions I find out more details and learn as well. Anytime a question is answered this is training investment for free really. It is also something that helps your programmer brand. With open source and sites like stackoverflow, a single programmer can become a team of programmers/knowledge very quickly…

[deleted]

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

#39

Post by tlogan »

icelancer wrote: post #26
jurassic wrote: post #21

I feel like StackOverflow is a blade that cuts both ways. I find it's most useful for troubleshooting really cryptic/obscure error messages that I would undoubtably blow through huge amounts of time trying to solve on my own; those are the type of problems I'm not sure I would ever get through without help from wizardly members of community. But for other answers, to the kind of lazy questions that save me the moment…

StackOverflow has been the opposite for me. I am someone who reads the man pages and does a lot of experimentation before turning to a Q&A site, I fully document what happened, the expected result, and the deviations between the two, and my hypotheses on why it happened, then post. As a result something like 85% of my questions go unanswered or are eventually answered by myself. I have stopped answering my own questi…

Exactly. If you have complex question (the actual problem) it will be unanswered or downvoted to oblivion. That is logical because inexperienced engineers don't know what they don't know and experienced ones will be wisely silent. And the worst thing is that some answers are wrong but since they are upvoted so they seem "right" (the joke is that all javascript questions are answered with "use jQuery").

So in short: if you are novice engineer (or novice in certain field) then StackOverflow might help. If you are experienced engineer, stackoverflow is useless.

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