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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?

#71

Post by gabriel34 »

laurent123456 wrote: post #61
kaffeinecoma wrote: post #53

I'm still waiting for someone to coin a term for when you google around for a problem and end up at your OWN answer on SO from a year or so earlier. This happens more often than I'd like to admit. I'm incredibly thankful for the many, many hours that SO has saved me personally.

Actually, if your question is about an obscure enough topic, you'll get your own question within seconds on Google. It's a kind of loop - search on Google desperately without finding anything; turn to SO and ask a question. Since probably nobody will answer soon, in the meantime search more on Google... and you find your own question on top (and feel just a bit more desperate).

He said he ended up on his answer, therefore it's something he knew but forgot. Nonetheless your observation still holds, as the obscurity of the topic increases the chance of such coincidence both by the scarcity of content on the matter and because he is more likely to forget little used information

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

#72

Post by sehugg »

Pretty much, yes. In fact I wonder how you can release a complicated product like a mobile device SDK nowadays without millions of eyes solving and documenting problems.

I used to trace into disassembled library code to root cause issues. Now that's somewhere between infeasible and impossible. On Android I can sometimes look at the source to solve issues. On closed platforms I have to rely on cut-and-paste from StackOverflow forums.

Commercial software vendors are lucky SO users are doing their documentation and testing services for free.

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

#73

Post by GalacticDomin8r »

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…

> I feel like StackOverflow is a blade that cuts both ways.

That is a feeling, not a thought.

http://www.wildmind.org/applied/depression/distinguishing-th...

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

#74

Post by startuup »

jc4p wrote: post #46
InclinedPlane wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thats a great start but there are other ideas too. Why isn't SE as useful for people in other professions, like product managers or data scientists or marketers who are also looking for answers to their work problems? The key is that just replicating the site is not the answer, you need to really focus on community dev and getting the thought leaders from those professionals involved. Lastly, along with the 'feed' implementation, you can also start curating other content from the web that could be useful to the users of your site. example: If I am particularly interested in Javascript, I get a feed of curated resources from around the web that will help me learn about the latest and greatest in Javacript. Thats whats missing today and thats why SO is a transactional site

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

#75

Post by gabriel34 »

That is a really complex matter. However much time was saved it's value for mankind, the value added depends on what the programmer does on the spare time he gained from the increase in productivity and what value does mankind puts in these activities.

(note that value for the world as stated in the question is a lot harder to grasp)

At the end of the day it's a matter of knowing whether the programmer was the bottleneck of the productive system he is a part of or if he had slack capability.

EDIT: I was going to post a more complete answer, with references bells and whistles, on Stack Overflow, but having never created an account there I didn't have the 10 reps minimum. Kind of dumb for a question with zero answers IMHO.

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

#76

Post by RandallBrown »

taspeotis wrote: post #11
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 clearl…

StackOverflow is just the manual in an easily searchable form. Lots of times I'm not even sure of what to even look up and that's when I post to StackOverflow. The next time someone else tries to do something similar, Google will have found it in StackOverflow and it will be easily found.

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

#77

Post by evanspa »

SO has helped me tremendously in learning new languages. Java is the first language I learned really well, and it's great to be able to ask SO questions like: "What's the equivalent of an abstract class in Objective-C?" Answers to questions like this aren't exactly easy to extract from the "manual."

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

#78

Post by jackmaney »

I'm certain that Stack Exchange in general--and Stack Overflow in particular--has saved a huge amount in programmer productivity. However, what the OP hasn't taken into account is that Stack Exchange sites can also suck up potentially productive time, as well. Although this loss is difficult to quantify, I'm sure it's not anywhere near the magnitude of time saved.

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

#80

Post by wslh »

GalacticDomin8r wrote: post #70
wslh wrote: post #50

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.

> I am 100% sure Your 100% certainty means nothing to me. > makes my employees and me more productive. A very strong claim. > QAOP (Question and Answer Oriented Programming) boosts the productivity significantly. First Google results don't even know what this is. Listen, I actually think your claims have merit, but the way you present them is "crap, crap, mega crap". Please cite something we can take take to the mana…

Looking at your comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=GalacticDomin8r it seems like you are a new kind of spell checker.

I am not writing a formal proof here in HN. I have proofs of what I said but don't like to discuss them with you, your reply was rude.

I invented the QAOP acronym just to be funny and illustrate the concept. Your answer reminds me of this Babbage letter: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm

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