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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?

#131

Post by leoedin »

I was always under the impression that Stack Overflow was an information-dense bible of programming knowledge. Having recently started attempting to answer some questions on there, I quickly realised that it is in fact, in line with every Q&A website, filled to the brim with idiots with barely any understanding of programming whatsoever.

What they do fantastically well is quickly push the stupid questions out of the way and let the good ones float to the top (on the site and in search rankings).

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

#132

Post by mattmanser »

subsection1h wrote: post #90
rrich wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but several people I have encountered don't feel this way. For instance I had someone try to explain how using HAML made their developers more valuable because of all the keystrokes they were saving. When you're counting keystrokes as a developer productivity metric I can only wonder how toxic the work environment becomes when you need to stop to look at documentation yet alone use Google or SO.

Maybe that person's team is more productive with Haml not simply because of the small amount of time that's saved by less typing, but because of the huge amount of time that's saved by not needing to replace developers who are institutionalized or commit suicide as a result of being forced to type HTML tags like it's still 2005[1]. [1] The year before Haml was introduced.

Uh, not to rag on HAML which I'm sure you find great but all the text editors I use these days auto-complete HTML, including closing tags. I spend a fraction of the time typing html compared to the time I spend thinking about why the hell the damn image/span/font/button isn't in the right place.

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

#133

Post by sampo »

leoedin wrote: post #131

I was always under the impression that Stack Overflow was an information-dense bible of programming knowledge. Having recently started attempting to answer some questions on there, I quickly realised that it is in fact, in line with every Q&A website, filled to the brim with idiots with barely any understanding of programming whatsoever. What they do fantastically well is quickly push the stupid questions out of the…

In my experience, when I need information, I google with some keywords, and then land on a Stack Overflow page where my question has already been asked and answered. Thus I almost never see the questions and answers by the idiots.

Sometimes I ask questions, and usually receive good answers, but it may take a day or two.

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

#134

Post by derleth »

mkartic wrote: post #122
chavesn wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people assume that RTFM does not have a cost? In fact, it's probably higher than searching SO through Google. This is why I'm hugely in favor of even basic questions getting answers on SO.

very well put. Both obscure and implicit/obvious information can be very hard to find by just reading the manual. (Aside from above) I love Python. I only know enough to get by though. I have this program that runs for a really long time, storing the results of each iteration in a dict. These results are complex python objects, and are meant to be processed later on. Naturally, I tried pickling them. As the file grew…

> Well, if not for SO, I would have been stuck with the wrong set of keywords to search with.

This is precisely the sort of bootstrap problem good tutorials are meant to help you avoid. Learning out of a book is not as satisfying as grabbing an interpreter and some example code and just hacking away, but this is precisely a case where the by-the-book method can save you a lot of time and frustration later on.

Another example of a problem tutorials solve is not knowing what 'tasteful' means in a given language. If you don't know what the language culture considers good taste, you'll beat your head against a wall trying to solve problems tasteful developers don't even have, because you're cutting against the grain.

(Yes, yes, a Real Programmer can write FORTRAN-IV in any language.)

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

#135

Post by derleth »

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…

> The number of questions on SO that can be answered by RTFM is quite remarkable.

Every language needs two manuals: A reference text, to teach you what is possible, and a tutorial, to teach you what is tasteful. You should expect people to read the tutorial, but expecting everyone to inhale reference material is a bit much.

(Later, there should be a third book: An anti-tutorial, laying out anti-patterns, or things you shouldn't be doing but that people tend to do anyway, and how to solve the problem the right way, with pointers to other tools if necessary.)

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

#136

Post by rtb »

leoedin wrote: post #131

I was always under the impression that Stack Overflow was an information-dense bible of programming knowledge. Having recently started attempting to answer some questions on there, I quickly realised that it is in fact, in line with every Q&A website, filled to the brim with idiots with barely any understanding of programming whatsoever. What they do fantastically well is quickly push the stupid questions out of the…

It is both!

In search results it is an information-dense bible of programming knowledge.

If you click on the feed of newly asked questions, it is filled to the brim with idiots with barely any understanding of programming whatsoever.

The magic of their voting system and google's search algorithms converts the latter into the former.

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

#137

Post by reledi »

rtb wrote: post #136
leoedin wrote: post #131

I was always under the impression that Stack Overflow was an information-dense bible of programming knowledge. Having recently started attempting to answer some questions on there, I quickly realised that it is in fact, in line with every Q&A website, filled to the brim with idiots with barely any understanding of programming whatsoever. What they do fantastically well is quickly push the stupid questions out of the…

It is both! In search results it is an information-dense bible of programming knowledge. If you click on the feed of newly asked questions, it is filled to the brim with idiots with barely any understanding of programming whatsoever. The magic of their voting system and google's search algorithms converts the latter into the former.

> The magic of their voting system and google's search algorithms converts the latter into the former.

In addition to that, there's a lot of peer review going on. First posts, late answers, low quality posts, suggested edits, and so on are all reviewed by the community. Once you start reviewing, you'll quickly notice lots of shoddy content.

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

#138

Post by agilebyte »

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?

Yeah, it is very rough:

a) 45k has not been the average for the years leading up to 2013.

b) 45k is pre tax, 33k is post tax.

c) I suspect that SO is used more frequently by people on the lower rungs of the pay scale.

d) The average for "developer" (which is the biggest group in the stats) is 40k.

As a side note, wow 45k is a massive number.

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/developer.do

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

#139

Post by reledi »

pavs wrote: post #111
lukev wrote: post #87

I believe it. And that's not even counting looking up answers or getting your questions answered. When I am truly stumped, I immediately start drafting a comprehensive SO question. Nine times out of ten, clearly enunciating the problem leads me directly to the answer and I never even post it.

In my case, nine times out of ten my questions are closed down by overzealous mods. I still find SO very useful but not for asking questions.

The bright side is that in such cases you'll likely have received an answer or two before the question has been closed. Or maybe someone points you to a duplicate question which got more attention.

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

#140

Post by ma2rten »

I am always impressed by the amount of effort some people put in answering stackoverflow questions.

I have sometimes been answering stackoverflow questions, that I happened to come across and that I knew the answer to. I gave that up because my answers stood next to other people's who obviously spend extensive amounts of time researching and compiling their answer.

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