141–150 of 179 posts
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.
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.
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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…
"I remember back when you and Jeff were talking about taking over the way all online discussion happened." Aren't they now -- or at least Jeff Atwood -- working on Discourse?
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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…
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.
My problem is the duplication of those simple questions: people asking the absolute basics having not bothered to try Google or the site's own search function. They know the right keywords, they've got them in their question, and they'd learn more by looking through the existing answers than by asking a very specific question themselves.
Some people aren't there to learn: they are there to get someone to do their homework/job for them. But many genuinely are and I'd like to help those people where I can, especially those who have obviously given some thought beforehand and articulated their attempt at understanding thus far (it is easier to be helpful in these cases: you often don't have to explain everything in detail you can say "it looks like you've got it almost right, the niggly little thing that you are missing in your understanding is..."). And sometimes even the obvious beginners will actually ask a really interesting question.
From the other side: answers that simple say "Do X" but ofer no further word of explanation are worse than a bad question. A good answer will help the questioner and other passers-by learn from the question+answer, an overly terse answer is just handing the man a fish (and not necessarily the right fish). Luckily there are enough good people contributing on most of the stackexchange sites that the bad answers are outnumbered and the voting system works well enough that the good ones float to the top.
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…
I've experienced this several times too. In verifying details to make sure I'm not handing out duff information, I've stumbled over a semi-related point in the documentation that triggers a "I wasn't aware of that, I'll have to look into it as it might be very useful" response.
Also I sometimes just browse for interesting questions. You occasionally stumble upon something you didn't know that you needed/wanted to know!
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.
What types of questions are you asking (any examples)? In the time I've been using SO (just over 3 years) I think I've only ever had one question closed (and it was a bad question so they were right in closing it).
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.
Has Hacker News cost billions of dollars in programmer productivity? :P
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Some programming language and software product vendors encourage quantity rather than quality in questions posted to Stack Overflow because various popularity rankings use the number of Stack Overflow questions as one criteria when calculating rank.
Costs need to think in terms of the entire ecosystem: the time spent creating the answers, the time spent writing official documentation that isn't consulted, and the time saved finding the answer faster. Many technical writers and documentation teams from large corporations have been reaching out to me on this topic, they are definitely interested in learning how to adapt their processes based on Stack Overflow's success.
But not everything is roses. Providing answers can be [slow](http://blog.ninlabs.com/2012/05/crowd-documentation/), unanswered questions are rising, and [users stop doing actions](http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~scott/papers/MSR2013.pdf) that lead to badges as soon as they achieve them. On recent field study at a large industrial company, when learning WPF, they relied on books, and internal seminars to learn new concepts because Stack Overflow at the time did not have sufficient saturation on examples yet. As seen with [another study](http://blog.leif.me/2013/11/how-software-developers-use-twit...) on twitter usage, in some contexts, the subject matter and available of easily accessible experts makes looking online less effective.