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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?

#151

Post by sklivvz1971 »

CJefferson wrote: post #124
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 :)

My main with stack overflow, as it gets older, is answer rot. A couple of times I have come across answers which have become out of date, but it is non obvious to me the best way to reopen the question (I, along with most readers don't have the karma to edit questions / answers )

Everyone can edit questions and answers (if you don't have the full-on privilege yet, your edit will go in a queue and be vetted by more experienced users).

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

#152

Post by sklivvz1971 »

chrisparnin wrote: post #150

We've been researching at what resources developers actually use when browsing the web. The [initial results]( http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/03/api-documentation/ ) of Android developers confirm Stack Overflow is highly consulted, often over official documentation. We're seeing the same with data collected from [web developers]( http://checkbox.io/studies/?id=51fac5175ec6012222000001 ). Costs need to think in terms of…

That's very interesting, thank you.

I work at Stack Overflow and we are very liberal in sharing our data when it doesn't involve PII. If there is any way I can help you, I am sklivvz@ our domain name.

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

#153

Post by sklivvz1971 »

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…

> A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that.

Agreed, however one answer will help many developers, which should more than offset the initial effort

> The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation.

Documentation has not deteriorated, in my opinion. In fact, a point could be made that it is now much easier for small vendors to have outstanding developer support through stack overflow. A lot of open source project use it as the main support line.

> It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.

It is probably correlated to the time spent on the site, but the money saved is certainly not related, as users don't gain any reputation by reading answers or simply browsing the site.

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

#155

Post by denzil_correa »

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.

> In my case, nine times out of ten my questions are closed down by overzealous mods.

You may not be following the guidelines.

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

#156

Post by denzil_correa »

Stackoverflow is a very good model for future Q&A websites. The aim of Stackoverflow is not just to answer questions but in the process be the largest software knowledge base of programming related topics. Personally, I find Q&A based system very nice to learn and absorb information rather than the traditional manuals/API docs.

Shameless plug - I did some analysis on closed (or low quality) questions on Stackoverflow [0]. I owe immensely to Stackoverflow for my doctoral dissertation.

[0] http://bit.ly/GFNNLm

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

#157

Post by Tloewald »

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…

We found a fairly highly ranked "ticked" answer to a question yesterday (it was on keeping the heading rows of tables visible during scrolling) and immediately thought: (1) this answer seems stupid, (2) we can think of better solutions. Within thirty minutes we had two superior proof-of-concepts working and had found a decent off-the-shelf solution.

What Stack Overflow is great at is SEO (not sure if this is organic or deliberate or both). This at least tends to pull interested eyeballs in a kind-of similar direction. What happens then is anyone's guess.

1) Highly ranked answers are often horribly wrong. People asking common questions are, presumably, often being pulled to these answers and treating them as gospel.

2) Once an answer gets "ticked" (even when hopelessly wrong) there's very little that can happen to fix it.

3) Stack Overflow is (actively or passively) good at appearing in Google search results, but not at converging like threads; which thread appears in a search is far from stable, so two similar searches can take you to completely different threads.

4) The depth and quality of threads seems highly language-correlated. E.g. the PHP threads I've seen seem to mainly consist of someone posting bad code they've written and having it debugged by someone else. Javascript discussions are of a much higher quality. Obj-C discussions are another level or two beyond that. (Which says something... perhaps about the awfulness of PHP's error messages.)

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

#158

Post by barrkel »

chavesn wrote: post #66
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…

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.

Your power as a user of software is increased by learning how to read documentation efficiently, however.

It's even further increased by being able to read the source, but that's even more costly.

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

#159

Post by davidw »

It's certainly a nice, central place to ask for help. That said, we got by pretty well with mailing lists in the past. Stackexchange did a lot of work to reduce the friction of asking and answering questions, but the basic mechanism was there in the past.

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

#160

Post by CodeCube »

Tloewald wrote: post #157
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…

We found a fairly highly ranked "ticked" answer to a question yesterday (it was on keeping the heading rows of tables visible during scrolling) and immediately thought: (1) this answer seems stupid, (2) we can think of better solutions. Within thirty minutes we had two superior proof-of-concepts working and had found a decent off-the-shelf solution. What Stack Overflow is great at is SEO (not sure if this is organic…

re #2, that's not entirely true. There have been a good amount of times that another answer gets upvoted way higher than the accepted (ie. "ticked") answer because it's better. In those cases, even the original asker has chosen one, the community has chosen another ... so it's often worth scrolling to see the other answers that have been given.

That being said, I agree with everything else you've said :)

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