I have been a professional Java programmer since 1999 and I am comfortable stating publicly that StackOverflow can save a lot of time. In fact, I would be willing to pay for it. However, I don't always agree with the 'accepted' answers.
Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
161–170 of 179 posts
Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
#162I 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…
You are always going to have people of different skill levels, including those you call idiots. Now if it's a basic question it will likely get answered but if it's incoherent rambling then there isn't much the community can do. Except maybe teach people to ask better questions.
Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
#163Yes such is average pay in the US or the UK, but these happen to be the top paying countries in the world. It's not average world pay for a programmer.
Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. If you have complex question (the actual problem) it will be unanswered or downvoted to oblivion. That is logical because inexperienced engineers don't know what they don't know and experienced ones will be wisely silent. And the worst thing is that some answers are wrong but since they are upvoted so they seem "right" (the joke is that all javascript questions are answered with "use jQuery"). So in short: i…
Does John Carmack count as experienced? Because he is the guy who made the claim we're talking about.
tlogan was not saying SO was not valuable, he specifically said that it did not provide much value for experienced programmers. SO can still provide value to the masses of less experienced programmers out there and be extremely valuable.
In my experience I have found this to be true. When first starting out stackoverflow was crucial to my learning process, now it seems I've answered all of my own questions the last year or so. And I wouldn't even claim to be extremely experienced. Thus, SO has certainly become significantly less valuable to me, but I would have never gotten this far without SO.
Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
#165Earlier 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…
If you're stringing together a Unix pipe command, TFM might be for, say, awk. Would you rather stop what you're thinking about for 10 minutes and shave that yak, or get a quick answer and move on?
There's another cost to consider: if you do this more than infrequently, learning the tools will save more time than consulting SO repeatedly — particularly if you end up adding and debugging extra steps. Not a big deal for something you're running once but I've seen people running carefully constructed gargantuan shell pipelines multiple times a day because it was "too hard" to learn how to do it all in a single awk / perl step
Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
#166Earlier 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.
Way higher. Technical documentation is only in rare cases easy to read, whereas SO answers are specifically incentivized to be easily accessible. And any comparison assumes that you can get instantly to the right page of the FM by making a web search, which is far from reality in most cases.
I've tried out many different programming languages in an effort to be able to "read" any language that comes my way (as a security researcher, I've noticed malware authors tend not to write in enterprise Java). The only language I can think of off the top of my head where the manual is the only thing you really need is Lua. I don't know if it's just because it's so tiny or because it's a well-written manual (or both), but it's lucky that this is the case because finding Lua code examples isn't exactly easy.
Many other languages I've come across have oddities that pretty much require asking someone who already knows the answer.
Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
#167It'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 f…
What's wrong about the "is this homework" comment? Why would you (this is a generic "you") expect someone else to answer your question _for free_ if you haven't bothered to actually try solving it yourself? Where is the courtesy and etiquette in that?
I think SO/SE's aggressive discouragement of leechers and high question-closing rate makes their website better for everyone. Except the leechers and "help vampires", that is.
Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
#168StackOverflow is good is some ways, but if you have a solid base knowledge of programming you shouldn't really be looking there all the time in the first place. It's a great website but it's also definitely made coders lazier.
Did you notice it was John Carmack who said what's in the title, right? Has StackOverflow made John Carmack lazier?
Anyway, in his twitter TL he has an answer for a quip similar to yours:
> "people probably said similar things about books..."
Yup. Reading books has made people lazier, because if they had knowledge about [topic] they shouldn't be reading about it anyway.
Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google did this as well. It's extremely annoying. They're basically telling users to "Fuck off, we don't have time for you. Go ask your questions somewhere else."
When I first started doing Android development in late 2009 the API documentation quickly brought back memories of MSDN in the late 90's.
Which is where resources like Stack Overflow really shine.
I had someone add a link to MSDN to an answer I posted on SO a few years back. That topic didn't exist when I wrote the answer - and the subsystem being documented was already fairly old when I wrote about it.
Waiting around for months or years for vendors to get their documentation up to snuff is rarely an option; how many people have ended up reinventing the wheel, badly, because the only indication that it already existed was tucked into a bit of test code collecting dust somewhere?
Every time Apple releases a new version of iOS, I see questions regarding the new APIs being asked and answered on SO... Usually before the NDA is even lifted. "RTFM" is useless if the manual is incomplete or inaccessible until long after the fact.
Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
#170I 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…
>What they do fantastically well is quickly push the stupid questions out of the way and let the good ones float to the top.
A friend of mine goes shopping with me for very much that reason, because I am her living process of elimination of taste in fashion. Having found a wrong answer as being wrong is also something positive.