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Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

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Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#11

Post by duxup »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #2

An interesting thing to me about SO is how their focus on being Dev Centric ultimately led to some problematic internal culture issues. This came up in a podcast episode I did and then turned up on twitter. At one point in 2013/2014, an exec asked me if any of the developers had ever treated me badly because I was a woman. My honest reply at the time was “not because I’m a woman, but they definitely have treated me b…

Entitled "special" people are a problem everywhere.

Dev's who are labeled as high performers get greenfield projects that can be pumped out quickly / look good ... someone else does the maintenance, they get all the flack for an obvious bug that wasn't fixed even if they didn't make it.

The random executive who is thought to be highly successful who jumps from department to department spreading his fingerprint long enough to make an impact and leaves quickly enough to avoid any responsibility for the results.

I fear it is a human thing and people are really good at sensing when they can get away with things.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#12

Post by i80and »

veave wrote: post #4
adamgordonbell wrote: post #2

An interesting thing to me about SO is how their focus on being Dev Centric ultimately led to some problematic internal culture issues. This came up in a podcast episode I did and then turned up on twitter. At one point in 2013/2014, an exec asked me if any of the developers had ever treated me badly because I was a woman. My honest reply at the time was “not because I’m a woman, but they definitely have treated me b…

[flagged]

I don't think there's a polite way to put this, but to be honest this comment is an excellent example of what the parent is talking about.

All companies have needs that engineers tend to be very poor at, and if the engineers are dominant and see the other members of the organization as parasites, that's a serious dysfunction and not by any means "normal".

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#13

Post by robertlagrant »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #2

An interesting thing to me about SO is how their focus on being Dev Centric ultimately led to some problematic internal culture issues. This came up in a podcast episode I did and then turned up on twitter. At one point in 2013/2014, an exec asked me if any of the developers had ever treated me badly because I was a woman. My honest reply at the time was “not because I’m a woman, but they definitely have treated me b…

> But SO seems like an interesting case where they allow entitled behaviour of some devs to get out of control and it led to problems.

This is hard to quantify, and to make objective.

E.g. in a previous company HR once sent an email asking for feedback from employees, and one of my engineers gave some - polite, thoughtful, and clear. This caused quite an incident as the HR staff in question were not used to getting anything but encouragement in feedback, and I advised him to filter feedback through me, his manager.

Being "made to feel unwelcome" is both very real when you feel it, but looking slightly deeper it's not being made to feel unwelcome; it's feeling unwelcome. A mismatch of what's welcoming doesn't mean the person feeling unwelcome is correct; there may be no "correct" in that scenario. But it will be reported as though it is correct.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#14

Post by gostsamo »

duxup wrote: post #5

That was a really interesting. I do worry about the effect of sort of aggregating forces impact on places where content is created. We've seen it with news and etc already. Having said that with Stack Overflow the real reason I hit ChatGPT first in many cases is FRICTION. The UI, the users, the answers that are technically correct but "weird". It's a lot of filtering I have to do as a user that I don't do with ChatGP…

You can generalize it to every market where the proxy owns the relationship with the client and captures the generated value. UI or whatever, if ChatGPT kills Stack Overflow, we will be in a situation where the shared knowledge will be at the level of 2021 and everything later will be with declining quality due to lack of data.

I'd say that it is in OpenAI's interest to pay for SO and Redit so that they don't kill the hen with the golden eggs.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#15

Post by gonzo41 »

veave wrote: post #4
adamgordonbell wrote: post #2

An interesting thing to me about SO is how their focus on being Dev Centric ultimately led to some problematic internal culture issues. This came up in a podcast episode I did and then turned up on twitter. At one point in 2013/2014, an exec asked me if any of the developers had ever treated me badly because I was a woman. My honest reply at the time was “not because I’m a woman, but they definitely have treated me b…

[flagged]

I work for a 'hard' engineering company. Hard in the sense it makes physical things and does physical things. They don't give a shit about software and any of the engineering around it. And I consider that a pretty good deal from working at a finance place where I was doing support dev work on their data warehouse. There they just saw me as an expensive cost center (I was probably not paid enough in retro)

Anyway. Shoes on the other foot at SE.

What surprises me about SE is that it has all these smart people and a big community but it has let google and the parasites scrape it to death.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#16

Post by discors »

From my experience, interacting with stack overflow and other software related sister communities has always left a bitter taste in my mouth. Ignoring the elephant in the room that I do use SO everyday with some success, but it’s mostly replaced by ChatGPT.

The ridiculous (IMHO) moderation under the guise of “we have only one purpose” often didn’t even align with that goal.

The writing was on the wall.

So many questions that could have served answers are locked, deleted, and unfortunately, never asked due to the unpleasantness of dealing with the moderation.

I speak for myself.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#17

Post by shriek »

duxup wrote: post #5

That was a really interesting. I do worry about the effect of sort of aggregating forces impact on places where content is created. We've seen it with news and etc already. Having said that with Stack Overflow the real reason I hit ChatGPT first in many cases is FRICTION. The UI, the users, the answers that are technically correct but "weird". It's a lot of filtering I have to do as a user that I don't do with ChatGP…

> the answers that are technically correct but "weird"

In ChatGPT's instance they can be downright wrong and I have to verify if what it's saying is indeed correct on many occasions.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#18

Post by DrBazza »

ML works well, when it is only trained on correct data.

ML trained on all the things ever written about programming is going to get things wrong quite a lot of the time, and you'll only have the context of its reply to you, for you to figure out whether the ML answer is correct. And of course, ML always wants to please you with an answer.

SO, on the other hand has accepted answers, and upvoted answers that are easier to decide on whether they're correct (or what you're actually looking for). And there's more nuance to it as well.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#19

Post by rejectfinite »

discors wrote: post #16

From my experience, interacting with stack overflow and other software related sister communities has always left a bitter taste in my mouth. Ignoring the elephant in the room that I do use SO everyday with some success, but it’s mostly replaced by ChatGPT. The ridiculous (IMHO) moderation under the guise of “we have only one purpose” often didn’t even align with that goal. The writing was on the wall. So many questi…

[flagged]

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#20

Post by hattmall »

veave wrote: post #4
adamgordonbell wrote: post #2

An interesting thing to me about SO is how their focus on being Dev Centric ultimately led to some problematic internal culture issues. This came up in a podcast episode I did and then turned up on twitter. At one point in 2013/2014, an exec asked me if any of the developers had ever treated me badly because I was a woman. My honest reply at the time was “not because I’m a woman, but they definitely have treated me b…

[flagged]

Yeah and I think an issue is how engineers think vs other people. What maybe seen as rude or negative is just an engineer optimizing for efficiency or technical correctness. Other people then tend to take things personally and attach emotion to situations where they are having to be corrected.

I have this play out repeatedly in my personal life. I've found I have to simply let people do the wrong things or fail a little bit and gently guide solutions. Otherwise there will be emotional pushback that entrenches their position.

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