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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?

#171

Post by i_s »

billmalarky wrote: post #164
i_s wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

I know. My point was that the fact that John Carmack was the one who said this suggests that he still finds it useful for himself, even though he is an experienced programmer. That is not conclusive proof, of course, just something to think about.

My take is that experience only lowers the value of SO for the particular platform(s) you have experience in. I've found SO very valuable in the last couple of years even though I'm (in general) not a newbie anymore, because I've had to build software for many different platforms like ruby, mac cocoa, ios cocoa, and windows (C#/WPF and C++).

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

#172

Post by pavs »

denzil_correa wrote: post #155
pavs wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is possible that I wasn't following the guidelines at least in some cases. But I vaguely remember is some of the cases where a simple paraphrase of a sentence would have been enough. Questions were simply closed wasn't allowed to edit and a link to TOS violation without any specific reasons what I did wrong.

Its been a while since I asked questions over there. Haven't logged in for a long time but I do find useful answer through google search quite often. I just don't ask questions. I think its a major annoyance when you spend decent amount of time writing questions only to get your question closed with vague reasons. Maybe I had some bad luck and things might have gotten better? Who knows.

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

#173

Post by pavs »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #146
pavs wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> "nine times out of ten my questions are closed down by overzealous mods" 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).

Its been a while, I don't remember specifics. But I think most of my questions where related to server admin stuff. I don't remember which email I used, I might have to open a new account and see if things are better now.

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

#174

Post by teh_klev »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #48
spolsky wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

stackexchange.com is bigger than stackoverflow.com. Source: https://www.quantcast.com/stackexchange.com?country=US https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com?country=US

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." - not quite right. The problem in hand was that good Q&A was buried in discussion forum type apps.

The whole point of SO from the beginning was to build a Q&A site for programmers that didn't suffer from the shortcomings of using apps such as phpBB etc, where threads get hijacked and pages upon pages of extraneous discussion and arguments take place making it difficult to find and answer to a specific problem.

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

#175

Post by nathan_long »

acdha wrote: post #165
nathan_long wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed. But there are yaks you shave but once.

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

#176

Post by rndstr »

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.

I just spent a month getting back into Android development with writing an app. I can't express how many times I knew the answer would be easily findable in the docs but I also knew that by searching on Google it would give me a SO link where it takes about 5-10s to have the answer. While looking it up and reading the SDK documentation would more likely lead to 60-90s with presenting me less information and alternatives.

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

#177

Post by Tloewald »

CodeCube wrote: post #160
Tloewald wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Yes it's true that better answers can rise above garbage, but it's an uphill battle.

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

#178

Post by warmfuzzykitten »

StackOverflow was indispensable for learning to code Python. Every single time I googled a question, StackOverflow was right there at the top with a high-quality answer. Sure, the Python docs mighta-coulda led me to the same answer, but for searching efficiency StackOverflow won hands down.

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

#179

Post by d0mine »

tlogan wrote: post #39
icelancer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StackOverflow has been the opposite for me. I am someone who reads the man pages and does a lot of experimentation before turning to a Q&A site, I fully document what happened, the expected result, and the deviations between the two, and my hypotheses on why it happened, then post. As a result something like 85% of my questions go unanswered or are eventually answered by myself. I have stopped answering my own questi…

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…

Nobody is expert in all fields.

A more constructive way to think about StackOverflow is you give in those areas where you know more and take where you know less.

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