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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?

#41

Post by spolsky »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #34
sklivvz1971 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(*) 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.

stackexchange.com is bigger than stackoverflow.com.

Source: https://www.quantcast.com/stackexchange.com?country=US https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com?country=US

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

#43

Post by AznHisoka »

seiji wrote: post #36
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.

Ha, that's me. I'll post questions on how to write code, not just problems I can't work around. Then I go off and slack off, and wait until someone answers it. My version of "I'm compiling".

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

#44

Post by jc4p »

spolsky wrote: post #41
InclinedPlane wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

stackexchange.com is bigger than stackoverflow.com. Source: https://www.quantcast.com/stackexchange.com?country=US https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com?country=US

True and Stack Overflow is #1 in North Korea.

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

#45

Post by pavanred »

EGreg wrote: post #25

It's simple. For every minute a developer spends writing an answer, many people read the answer. So if the best answers are voted to the top, and there is little duplication, the site has saved a lot of programmers time.

SO is a wonderful site, I remember the days before SO when I used to get annoyed by sites like Experts Exchange that required a paid membership. Though, I agree SO has saved a lot of time with a great source for common questions and best answers, great answers. But, I also have to say that for many developers, specially in their early days, it provides a lazy alternative to learning.

A lazy debugging practice is to find a question that generally has a subject line almost exactly the same as the error message and pick the first answer, without even trying to understand it. I see the difference personally when I worked on .Net/Java and when I was working on a applet for Gnome. The latter is not very popular and so I have to resort to documentation, IRC etc. I might spend more time initially but I end up reading the documentation, develop a better understanding and even create my own snippets which in turn save me time eventually. To summarize, SO saves time but one might tend to leech on to it instead of learning. I guess some metric of how many times a person revisits the same question might be a good indicator of this.

Not to mention how many times I have seen a comment like, is this homework; show me what you tried, instead of an answer.

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

#46

Post by jc4p »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #37
jc4p wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Luckily a lot of us are on the same page as you :)

One of the things I consider a main detriment of our current product is that for the vast majority of users it's built to be transactional. Search, land on SO, read, go back to work.

On our currently in development mobile apps we're trying out something different, for the first time at scale we're pushing content to users rather than having them search for it as the number one utility of the product. The apps have a "Feed" which is machine learned interesting for you questions.

I love it since I search SO at work but when I get home or am walking around town I can open my app and instantly lose 30 mins (at least) to reading and interacting with very interesting content. I can't wait to see if others like it.

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

#47

Post by duaneb »

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.

What on earth is bad about using StackOverflow? You're expected to google around to find solutions anyway, if anything I would think much less of the programmer who tried to avoid it. It's stupid pride when it's such a valuable resource.

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

#48

Post by InclinedPlane »

spolsky wrote: post #41
InclinedPlane wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

stackexchange.com is bigger than stackoverflow.com. Source: https://www.quantcast.com/stackexchange.com?country=US https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com?country=US

That's good but SE is a federation of sites, so it's an unfair comparison.

From the start I've always thought that the biggest danger to SO/SE wasn't failure, you guys are smart enough to see and recover from outright failure. Instead it's reaching a level of success far below what you're capable of.

It seems to me that SO/SE spent a lot of work innovating in the early days but once they found their comfort zone they've stopped innovating. They are good sites for their intended purpose but how much of the original vision has been abandoned? I remember back when you and Jeff were talking about taking over the way all online discussion happened. Nothing like that is even remotely possible with the way StackExchange is today.

To be bluntly honest I think you guys are just lucky that most of the ambitious and competent folks in the industry don't view discussion as "sexy" so you don't have as much ompetition as you would otherwise (quora is practically a joke). But realistically it's just a matter of time until SE will be out innovated.

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

#50

Post by wslh »

I am 100% sure that SO makes my employees and me more productive. QAOP (Question and Answer Oriented Programming) boosts the productivity significantly.

But I think in the long term, when everybody incorporates the same QAOP skills all developers will compete at the same level and new productivity horizons will came.

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