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My top 3 answers are one-liners that solve "problems" any semi-competent developer shouldn't even need stackoverflow to solve. The answers that required some ef

by pawelk 9y ago

My top 3 answers are one-liners that solve "problems" any semi-competent developer shouldn't even need stackoverflow to solve. The answers that required some effort, more code and explanations are not that "valuable" because they answer more specific problem that is not shared by many developers. I don't have a problem with that, I don't answer on SO only to accumulate points, but in my opinion it skews the incentives towards going after the low-hanging fruit. The closer it gets into "RTFM" territory the bigger the possible payoff. EDIT: And the karma DOES matter if you want to get new opportunities via stackoverflow careers. I have landed a job recently via SO and chatted with the recruiter a bit about their experience with the platform. He told me some companies specify they want to hire from the pool of Top X% in given technology. Another thing is the response rate on SO is dramatically better than Linkedin, which doesnt surprise me: I do my best to answer every SO Careers message while I mostly ignore Linkedin recruiters.

dionidium 9y ago
I've answered a bunch of narrow questions like the ones you described, only to see them closed later because the community decided it doesn't want to include those questions. My attitude has always been, "Speak for yourself. I'm fine answering them." But, of course, they still get closed, so now I don't even bother. There are people (like me) willing to kill some time solving useful problems that people in the real world are actually having, but SO's theory of broken windows is so extreme that they want to make me feel bad for doing that.
- mark-r 9y ago
  You can blame Jeff Atwood. He outlined his theory of the descent of sites into irrelevance in some blog posts, then put it into action. There's code on SO to prevent two questions having an identical title for example. Even though he's long gone from SO management, the legacy of his philosophy is still abundant.
gwbas1c 9y ago
The thing with the RTFM moments, is that, when I'm experimenting with a new technology, I often ask Google a question and it points me to a stack overflow page. Yes, the question is obvious. And yes, it can be answered via 10-20 minutes of RTFM. But, the value of Stack Overflow is that it replaced 10-20 minutes of RTFM with a simple answer. So, don't knock the RTFM questions on Stack Overflow. That's part of its value to the greater community. (I must admit that I've answered very few Stack Overflow questions because every time I find an answer. I did take the time to write out a well-written answer for an obscure problem, and it got me plenty of points. It's nice that the community has a 1000x ROI, too.)
- the8472 9y ago
  > But, the value of Stack Overflow is that it replaced 10-20 minutes of RTFM with a simple answer. But at the same time you are learning with blinders on, i.e. you miss out all those things you would have also learned by reading the documentation. This is not particularly bad when you're just starting out. But if you see RTFM-level questions from people which appear to already be in the business of building complex applications then you start to wonder if this kind of thing incentivizes help-vampirism. Personally I prefer to answer niche questions or things that are not well-documented yet.
  - inetknght 9y ago
    > you miss out all those things you would have also learned by reading the documentation. That's assuming that the documentation is articulately and technically well written. Unfortunately that's more often the exception than the rule. That's rather the whole reason that StackOverflow even exists, I think.
    - the8472 9y ago
      I agree where things are badly documented. But look at the top tags, java and javascript are generally well-documented.
      - 9y ago
jldugger 9y ago
> My top 3 answers are one-liners that solve "problems" any semi-competent developer shouldn't even need stackoverflow to solve. Remember that SO's main traffic source isn't experts, it's novices searching for answers. I did some digging at one point, and the most popular questions on ServerFault are extremely basic, like 'how to make a symlink' basic (viewed 1 million times https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1951742/how-to-symlink-a-file-in-linux https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1951742/how-to-symlink-a...). If you're a developer or student just trying to figure out this one UNIX thing so you can get back to JavaScript or CS:Go or whatever, this is great.
- d23 9y ago
  I agree and appreciate that, but I don't know that it's always true. The problem is that a lot of documentation and man pages out there just aren't written well. They bury the lede and make you dig around to figure out how to do that simple thing you want to do. Googling for something and immediately finding that specific question on SO even if you could go look it up in pages of docs is a time saver. Edit: Or perhaps the library has poor usability. I've been doing python programming for 6 years now and know the standard library like the back of my hand, but if I have to do anything reasonably complex with datetime you can bet I'll probably just look for someone on SO that has had the same problem and crib the answer.
  - tajen 9y ago
    Documentation should contain a complete reference off all options. StackOverflow rather describes... usecases. It sounds fine to me, because the programmer can't think about all usecases, so they better be on a user-managed website.
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
It's weird that they're closing Documentation, because my experience is that SO doesn't actually want to be a Q&A site, it wants to be a crowdsourced documentation site disguised as a Q&A site for some reason. They'll close legitimate questions because they're not broadly applicable, which isn't really how Q&A works.

by pawelk 9y ago

dionidium 9y ago

I've answered a bunch of narrow questions like the ones you described, only to see them closed later because the community decided it doesn't want to include those questions. My attitude has always been, "Speak for yourself. I'm fine answering them." But, of course, they still get closed, so now I don't even bother. There are people (like me) willing to kill some time solving useful problems that people in the real world are actually having, but SO's theory of broken windows is so extreme that they want to make me feel bad for doing that.

mark-r 9y ago
You can blame Jeff Atwood. He outlined his theory of the descent of sites into irrelevance in some blog posts, then put it into action. There's code on SO to prevent two questions having an identical title for example. Even though he's long gone from SO management, the legacy of his philosophy is still abundant.

gwbas1c 9y ago

The thing with the RTFM moments, is that, when I'm experimenting with a new technology, I often ask Google a question and it points me to a stack overflow page. Yes, the question is obvious. And yes, it can be answered via 10-20 minutes of RTFM. But, the value of Stack Overflow is that it replaced 10-20 minutes of RTFM with a simple answer. So, don't knock the RTFM questions on Stack Overflow. That's part of its value to the greater community. (I must admit that I've answered very few Stack Overflow questions because every time I find an answer. I did take the time to write out a well-written answer for an obscure problem, and it got me plenty of points. It's nice that the community has a 1000x ROI, too.)

the8472 9y ago
> But, the value of Stack Overflow is that it replaced 10-20 minutes of RTFM with a simple answer. But at the same time you are learning with blinders on, i.e. you miss out all those things you would have also learned by reading the documentation. This is not particularly bad when you're just starting out. But if you see RTFM-level questions from people which appear to already be in the business of building complex applications then you start to wonder if this kind of thing incentivizes help-vampirism. Personally I prefer to answer niche questions or things that are not well-documented yet.
- inetknght 9y ago
  > you miss out all those things you would have also learned by reading the documentation. That's assuming that the documentation is articulately and technically well written. Unfortunately that's more often the exception than the rule. That's rather the whole reason that StackOverflow even exists, I think.
  - the8472 9y ago
    I agree where things are badly documented. But look at the top tags, java and javascript are generally well-documented.
    - 9y ago

jldugger 9y ago

> My top 3 answers are one-liners that solve "problems" any semi-competent developer shouldn't even need stackoverflow to solve. Remember that SO's main traffic source isn't experts, it's novices searching for answers. I did some digging at one point, and the most popular questions on ServerFault are extremely basic, like 'how to make a symlink' basic (viewed 1 million times https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1951742/how-to-symlink-a-file-in-linux https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1951742/how-to-symlink-a...). If you're a developer or student just trying to figure out this one UNIX thing so you can get back to JavaScript or CS:Go or whatever, this is great.

d23 9y ago
I agree and appreciate that, but I don't know that it's always true. The problem is that a lot of documentation and man pages out there just aren't written well. They bury the lede and make you dig around to figure out how to do that simple thing you want to do. Googling for something and immediately finding that specific question on SO even if you could go look it up in pages of docs is a time saver. Edit: Or perhaps the library has poor usability. I've been doing python programming for 6 years now and know the standard library like the back of my hand, but if I have to do anything reasonably complex with datetime you can bet I'll probably just look for someone on SO that has had the same problem and crib the answer.
- tajen 9y ago
  Documentation should contain a complete reference off all options. StackOverflow rather describes... usecases. It sounds fine to me, because the programmer can't think about all usecases, so they better be on a user-managed website.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

It's weird that they're closing Documentation, because my experience is that SO doesn't actually want to be a Q&A site, it wants to be a crowdsourced documentation site disguised as a Q&A site for some reason. They'll close legitimate questions because they're not broadly applicable, which isn't really how Q&A works.