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Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

285 points by yitchelle 13y ago

dccoolgai 13y ago
I know it's fashionable in certain circles to rag on it lately, but I'm not too big to admit it has saved me a lot of time here and there over the last 4-5 years. I would bet a lot of devs use it more than they would admit to check down on things throughout the course of any given project. Billions seems like a lot, but I wouldn't call BS on it out of hand.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Personally I think StackOverflow is pretty good. It's always nice to see it popup in search results when googling for a technical problem, for example. My main complaint is that they've been resting on their laurels for quite a while, there's a lot of potential that's been wasted with SO/SE.
  - jc4p 13y ago
    Just curious, what do you think we could be doing that we aren't? Also thanks for teaching me a new idiom :)
    - InclinedPlane 13y ago
      In general, experimenting more. You've tackled the narrow use case of a single question with answers, but is that all SE can be, or should be? The thing that I think SE is most lacking is better ways to tackle the sheer amount of data on the site. There's a lot of information there but in general it's not very well organized. Go back to the original announcements about the launch of SO and see what it was supposed to be and how it has either lived up or not to those ideas. Try this thought experiment: if a stack exchange competitor showed up tomorrow, what sorts of features would it have to have to make you start waking up in a cold sweat every day?
      - jc4p 13y ago
        Luckily a lot of us are on the same page as you :) One of the things I consider a main detriment of our current product is that for the vast majority of users it's built to be transactional. Search, land on SO, read, go back to work. On our currently in development mobile apps we're trying out something different, for the first time at scale we're pushing content to users rather than having them search for it as the number one utility of the product. The apps have a "Feed" which is machine learned interesting for you questions. I love it since I search SO at work but when I get home or am walking around town I can open my app and instantly lose 30 mins (at least) to reading and interacting with very interesting content. I can't wait to see if others like it.
        startuup 13y ago
        Thats a great start but there are other ideas too. Why isn't SE as useful for people in other professions, like product managers or data scientists or marketers who are also looking for answers to their work problems? The key is that just replicating the site is not the answer, you need to really focus on community dev and getting the thought leaders from those professionals involved. Lastly, along with the 'feed' implementation, you can also start curating other content from the web that could be useful to the users of your site. example: If I am particularly interested in Javascript, I get a feed of curated resources from around the web that will help me learn about the latest and greatest in Javacript. Thats whats missing today and thats why SO is a transactional site
        jc4p 13y ago
        I actually originally had something related in my post but removed it: I won't personally consider the site I work on a success unless my mom uses it. She's a physics PhD and she once in a while stumbles onto physics.SE when searching online but she doesn't actually use the site. I think SO and Server Fault are the size they are because they have an intrinsic advantage over our other sites. People in the target audience work and live in the same tech ecosystem as a website, with something like physics that's an initial burden. SE itself also has a high barrier to entry. Every one of our sites has it's own rules and definition of what type of content is acceptable. This is for a very good reason, seeking out absolute answers to questions. Most other websites on the internet live to foster discussion, but we're not a forum. Making stack exchange a common name (in more than our sizable niche) is one of our company goals, but I don't really know what we can do to get past the initial issue I mentioned and reducing the second would hurt our product. It's quite an interesting idea to be more proactive about bringing thought leaders to out lesser known sites, I don't know if we could do it just directly since most thought leaders are very busy people who already have a dozen places people ask them questions but it's something to think about. We already consider expertise of contributors in Area 51, our incubator for new website ideas. Perhaps while we may not be able to get the top 1% of thought leaders onto our websites without giving them a really hard question to answer (my mom loves difficult questions, god knows how many times she used to run into my room and say she solved a question I asked her in passing days prior) but it might be possible to bring in up-and-coming thought leaders. A lot of my friends from the health and fitness industry (were I used to live) might want to use our Physical Fitness Stack Exchange site to foster their own personal brand.
    - CJefferson 13y ago
      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 )
      - pjbrunet 13y ago
        Maybe write a comment, "This is out of date. Can someone update this?" You might even want to flag the question. You can also add a new answer and downvote the obsolete answer. Getting enough points to edit questions is pretty easy.
      - sklivvz1971 13y ago
        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).
  - sklivvz1971 13y ago
    (*) where resting on laurels is defined as launching 111 sites running on 9 web servers with traffic doubling every 12 months while writing two native mobile apps and localizing the site :-)
    - InclinedPlane 13y ago
      Hey, that's great, but to be brutally honest most of those sites are borderline inconsequential. The fact that SE has yet to launch a site that's gotten bigger than StackOverflow is pretty damning. Everything else you describe is just work, it's not innovation.
      - spolsky 13y ago
        stackexchange.com is bigger than stackoverflow.com. Source: https://www.quantcast.com/stackexchange.com?country=US https://www.quantcast.com/stackexchange.com?country=US https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com?country=US https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com?country=US
        jc4p 13y ago
        True and Stack Overflow is #1 in North Korea.
        InclinedPlane 13y ago
        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've stopped innovating. They are good sites for their intended purpose but how much of the original vision has been abandoned? I remember back when you and Jeff were talking about taking over the way all online discussion happened. Nothing like that is even remotely possible with the way StackExchange is today. To be bluntly honest I think you guys are just lucky that most of the ambitious and competent folks in the industry don't view discussion as "sexy" so you don't have as much ompetition as you would otherwise (quora is practically a joke). But realistically it's just a matter of time until SE will be out innovated.
- fein 13y ago
  I can learn and know one language incredibly well, excluding the html/css/js world, as those are effectively required at this point. For me, that's PHP. However, when I need to go to work, and my boss decides "So that position we hired you for, now its going to be ruby as well, but later on ObjC and Java.", SO comes to the rescue. The core concepts of programming languages were cemented in my years deciphering terrible notes and learning to code in college, however the little nuances of each language inherently evade me. This is where SO has shined the most. Most of the time, solutions with multiple approaches suggested show more about the language itself than the problem asked.
- duaneb 13y ago
  What on earth is bad about using StackOverflow? You're expected to google around to find solutions anyway, if anything I would think much less of the programmer who tried to avoid it. It's stupid pride when it's such a valuable resource.
  - rrich 13y ago
    I agree with you, but several people I have encountered don't feel this way. For instance I had someone try to explain how using HAML made their developers more valuable because of all the keystrokes they were saving. When you're counting keystrokes as a developer productivity metric I can only wonder how toxic the work environment becomes when you need to stop to look at documentation yet alone use Google or SO.
    - subsection1h 13y ago
      Maybe that person's team is more productive with Haml not simply because of the small amount of time that's saved by less typing, but because of the huge amount of time that's saved by not needing to replace developers who are institutionalized or commit suicide as a result of being forced to type HTML tags like it's still 2005[1]. [1] The year before Haml was introduced.
      - rrich 13y ago
        I'm not saying HAML isn't of value. Please don't misunderstand me, I like HAML. I use it for my template engine with Sinatra. But in the grand scheme of things if using HAML to increase productivity by saving keystrokes is what the company thinks is its competitive advantage, which is what they told me, then how do they deal with someone spending time just researching (i.e. stackoverflow, google) and thinking a problem and solution through thoroughly? The two seem at odds to me.
      - mattmanser 13y ago
        Uh, not to rag on HAML which I'm sure you find great but all the text editors I use these days auto-complete HTML, including closing tags. I spend a fraction of the time typing html compared to the time I spend thinking about why the hell the damn image/span/font/button isn't in the right place.
moocowduckquack 13y ago
It did improve programmer productivity, but Hacker News has sort of evened things out by wrecking it again through an advanced form of continuous nerd-sniping.
nextstep 13y ago
There is probably a good number of visits from people not "at work" per se, like students and hobbyists working on things in their free time.
forgotAgain 13y ago
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 points it has still saved a lot of money. But billions? I don't know if it would be that much. It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.
- seiji 13y ago
  I know programmers at microsoft who use SO as an intern. They just post questions about strange windows problems they can't work around. Somebody on SO will respond with a 1,000 word essay with 500 lines of code about it within a day, thus solving their problem with no employee time "wasted" by thinking or researching or paying for anything additional resources.
  - AznHisoka 13y ago
    Ha, that's me. I'll post questions on how to write code, not just problems I can't work around. Then I go off and slack off, and wait until someone answers it. My version of "I'm compiling".
    - fat0wl 13y ago
      The microsoft thing is a little ethically strange but yeah i feel you on this.... if these try-hards wanna do your work for you just to get a "+10" may as well give them the privilege of "building their digital resume" while you read about something more interesting. Programmer culture involves too much self-glorification & SO embraces that in the hugest way. If the discussions were more interesting it would probably worth more attention but usually it's just some know-it-all quoting docs they just Googled for so they can lock down the question / points. I'm not sure I'd ever want to hire a SO mod...
- deleted 13y ago
fiatmoney 13y ago
From an econometric perspective evaluating these kinds of things is fun. I would guess that any productivity gains would be concentrated in the most difficult-to-answer questions, that you can otherwise spend hours / days trying to debug or understand. "20 hours for 5% of questions" is probably a more accurate characterization, although it would work out the same.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
code_duck 13y ago
It is the internet and www in general that enables people to be connected and share ideas. There's no reason to credit specific sites like Facebook or eBay with connecting people, because someone else would have done it (possibly better) if they had not.
- arthur_debert 13y ago
  It is language and written language that enables people to be connected and share ideas. There's no reason to credit specific networks like www or the internet with connecting people, because someone else would have done it (possibly better) if they had not.
  - code_duck 13y ago
    People credit facebook with connection people, when AOL did the same thing 10 years ago and someone else will be providing software for that in 10 years. People credit stack overflow with programmers answering each others questions, while Usenet did that 10 years ago and someone else will be helping with that 10 years from now. Meanwhile, language has been around for thousands of years and is not quite comparable.
- lukifer 13y ago
  I think there's plenty of credit to go around. Stack Overflow's fundamental decisions (gamification, open content, canonicity, searchability) were very significant in releasing valuable knowledge from the arcane vaults of obscure forums and mailing lists, not to mention creating a reliable(-ish) place to go for new questions. The project also represents an interesting template for community curation (which was begun well before launch), that can be learned from by other projects and startups. Obviously, someone will always build a better mousetrap eventually. They still deserve credit for actually doing it.
  - code_duck 13y ago
    They deserve credit for doing what they did, but it is for doing what they did well, and not what some people confuse that with, which is making what people do on their site possible.
zsombor 13y ago
More likely it had merely promoted the quick and easy pop culture, where people no longer take the time of reading a book. After all you can just use google and look up your next short fix.
- thibaut_barrere 13y ago
  Oh I hear you! I can't say how much I regret all the time spent in the 700-800 pages of these Wrox or Addison-Wesley books trying to find that one line fix. These were the good old days!
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    Every Wrox book I've come across has been terrible. If I wanted to read raw documentation I'd do that, when I spend hard money on a technical book I want to benefit from some practical expertise and I don't want an infodump of reference info that's already out of date by publication date.
xarien 13y ago
Yes.
TrainedMonkey 13y ago
I think stackoverflow is more than just sum of it parts. Solutions presented there are not just provided by experts, they are reviewed by experts, and if someone has a better solution, it has a really high chance to boil to the top. Portion of experts will recognize that and adopt superior solution. This will keep driving code quality and standards of participants up. Or at least so my reasoning goes. So to answer the question, I believe it had done much more than that - stackoverflow drove people to improve their technical knowledge, and that is priceless.
jurassic 13y ago
I feel like StackOverflow is a blade that cuts both ways. I find it's most useful for troubleshooting really cryptic/obscure error messages that I would undoubtably blow through huge amounts of time trying to solve on my own; those are the type of problems I'm not sure I would ever get through without help from wizardly members of community. But for other answers, to the kind of lazy questions that save me the momentary hassle of consulting the docs, it's also kept me from the serendipitous learning that should happen in that process. Since knowledge compounds and makes it easier to learn other things later, overall I'd say the "lazy questions" on SO definitely have a significant learning opportunity cost. Will it be a net productivity gain over my lifetime, including learning opportunity cost? Probably, but only because of those insane bugs I'd never solve on my own. Edit to clarify: I'm not the one asking the "lazy questions" without looking around. But these SO results often rank higher than official docs for my google queries.
- icelancer 13y ago
  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 questions on SO because some of the questions I ask and do legwork on I feel I should be paid for since it's shitty lack of documentation from the vendors, so screw them.
  - tlogan 13y ago
    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: if you are novice engineer (or novice in certain field) then StackOverflow might help. If you are experienced engineer, stackoverflow is useless.
michalu 13y ago
How can £45k per annum equal £12.5 per hour, what am I not getting? Is he assuming average 69 hour work week?
- gus_massa 13y ago
  4500/360/10=12.5 No weekends, no vacations, and 2 hour daily unpaid overtime. :) Probably, back of the envelop calculation, with a lot of rounding in the parameters.
- agilebyte 13y ago
  Yeah, it is very rough: a) 45k has not been the average for the years leading up to 2013. b) 45k is pre tax, 33k is post tax. c) I suspect that SO is used more frequently by people on the lower rungs of the pay scale. d) The average for "developer" (which is the biggest group in the stats) is 40k. As a side note, wow 45k is a massive number. http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/developer.do http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/developer.do
EGreg 13y ago
It'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.
- TrainedMonkey 13y ago
  Indeed, what a simple way to express powerful sentiment!
- pavanred 13y ago
  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 find a question that generally has a subject line almost exactly the same as the error message and pick the first answer, without even trying to understand it. I see the difference personally when I worked on .Net/Java and when I was working on a applet for Gnome. The latter is not very popular and so I have to resort to documentation, IRC etc. I might spend more time initially but I end up reading the documentation, develop a better understanding and even create my own snippets which in turn save me time eventually. To summarize, SO saves time but one might tend to leech on to it instead of learning. I guess some metric of how many times a person revisits the same question might be a good indicator of this. Not to mention how many times I have seen a comment like, is this homework; show me what you tried, instead of an answer.
  - the_af 13y ago
    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.
KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago
Wikipedia, Youtube, Google, StackExchange, should all get world peace awards.
- im3w1l 13y ago
  Foodstamps and cat videos are the new bread and circuses
- geoka9 13y ago
  A donation should suffice (they are running a campaign now, BTW) :)
ilovecookies 13y ago
StackOverflow 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.
- the_af 13y ago
  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.
hackula1 13y ago
I found it hugely useful in the .Net world. With closed source, obscure errors cannot be as easily tracked down, especially when they are not covered by MSDN or a prominent blog. A couple years after switching to an open source stack, I barely use it at all, and when I do finally hit a wall and ask a question, I get an answer ~20% of the time (compared to 90%+ when I was in .Net). I am a huge fan of SO, but good docs and readable code go a lot further.
stuartd 13y ago
Two words you youngsters probably don't remember - Expert Sexchange..
- roryokane 13y ago
  What about it? I very much doubt that Experts Exchange saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity. I was always annoyed at landing there from searches before Stack Overflow existed. And it is/was much harder to use than Stack Overflow is today.
wslh 13y ago
I am 100% sure that SO makes my employees and me more productive. QAOP (Question and Answer Oriented Programming) boosts the productivity significantly. But I think in the long term, when everybody incorporates the same QAOP skills all developers will compete at the same level and new productivity horizons will came.
- GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
  > I am 100% sure Your 100% certainty means nothing to me. > makes my employees and me more productive. A very strong claim. > QAOP (Question and Answer Oriented Programming) boosts the productivity significantly. First Google results don't even know what this is. Listen, I actually think your claims have merit, but the way you present them is "crap, crap, mega crap". Please cite something we can take take to the manager or test or vet in some other way. Otherwise you comment is just "ME RIGHT. ME SELL YOU SOMETHING".
  - wslh 13y ago
    Looking at your comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=GalacticDomin8r https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=GalacticDomin8r it seems like you are a new kind of spell checker. I am not writing a formal proof here in HN. I have proofs of what I said but don't like to discuss them with you, your reply was rude. I invented the QAOP acronym just to be funny and illustrate the concept. Your answer reminds me of this Babbage letter: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm
itchitawa 13y ago
Has Hacker News cost billions of dollars in programmer productivity? :P
- easy_rider 13y ago
  They have probably subtracted billions of dollars of value from the world in decreased programmer productivity. They probably level each other out.
kaffeinecoma 13y ago
I'm still waiting for someone to coin a term for when you google around for a problem and end up at your OWN answer on SO from a year or so earlier. This happens more often than I'd like to admit. I'm incredibly thankful for the many, many hours that SO has saved me personally.
- laurent123456 13y ago
  Actually, if your question is about an obscure enough topic, you'll get your own question within seconds on Google. It's a kind of loop - search on Google desperately without finding anything; turn to SO and ask a question. Since probably nobody will answer soon, in the meantime search more on Google... and you find your own question on top (and feel just a bit more desperate).
  - gabriel34 13y ago
    He said he ended up on his answer, therefore it's something he knew but forgot. Nonetheless your observation still holds, as the obscurity of the topic increases the chance of such coincidence both by the scarcity of content on the matter and because he is more likely to forget little used information
rgovind 13y ago
Stackoverflow is awesone and for me, it has saved me countless hours of thinking, even on non mainstream platforms like FPGA design. That said, I hope for one improvement. I would like to upload my code into a machine with a command line...and those who are on stackoveflow can with login, try their hands at it without having to ask me. This way, they will save time trying to reproduce my sandbox.
GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
Don't hurt yourself trying to pat you on the back. The vast majority of those questions have already been answered by Google. Some people just like paying. In other words, if you pay for something that you could get for free with just a bit more effort, how is that saving money?
mlangdon 13y ago
Just FYI, if you are making $10 per hour programming in the US please Google "salary entry level <your job> <your nearest metro area>" and tell your boss what you find out.
ateevchopra 13y ago
I guess the best thing about stack overflow is how helpful the community is. They will help you with anything and even virtually shout on you if required. I guess it has made me the programmer that I am today. But I still have a journey ahead of me and that isn't gonna be without stack overflow. I remember when I was using stack overflow for the first time, I asked a really silly question, and got my answer within 1 minute. I thanked that person for helping me with such a simple question, but his reply changed my thinking about the communities and why they help each other. He just said : "no probs, someone did that for me too".
Jagat 13y ago
Now that this has made it to the frontpage of HN, I'm waiting for someone to write a post on the millions of dollars lost in productivity because of HN.
sehugg 13y ago
Pretty much, yes. In fact I wonder how you can release a complicated product like a mobile device SDK nowadays without millions of eyes solving and documenting problems. I used to trace into disassembled library code to root cause issues. Now that's somewhere between infeasible and impossible. On Android I can sometimes look at the source to solve issues. On closed platforms I have to rely on cut-and-paste from StackOverflow forums. Commercial software vendors are lucky SO users are doing their documentation and testing services for free.
gabriel34 13y ago
That is a really complex matter. However much time was saved it's value for mankind, the value added depends on what the programmer does on the spare time he gained from the increase in productivity and what value does mankind puts in these activities. (note that value for the world as stated in the question is a lot harder to grasp) At the end of the day it's a matter of knowing whether the programmer was the bottleneck of the productive system he is a part of or if he had slack capability. EDIT: I was going to post a more complete answer, with references bells and whistles, on Stack Overflow, but having never created an account there I didn't have the 10 reps minimum. Kind of dumb for a question with zero answers IMHO.
evanspa 13y ago
SO has helped me tremendously in learning new languages. Java is the first language I learned really well, and it's great to be able to ask SO questions like: "What's the equivalent of an abstract class in Objective-C?" Answers to questions like this aren't exactly easy to extract from the "manual."
jackmaney 13y ago
I'm certain that Stack Exchange in general--and Stack Overflow in particular--has saved a huge amount in programmer productivity. However, what the OP hasn't taken into account is that Stack Exchange sites can also suck up potentially productive time, as well. Although this loss is difficult to quantify, I'm sure it's not anywhere near the magnitude of time saved.
Fomite 13y ago
StackOverflow saved me enough time that I ended up thanking the folks at SO and CV who helped me in the Acknowledgements section of my dissertation. Below my committee, but above the good people at Dr. Pepper.
NDizzle 13y ago
Let's not forget that StackOverflow has basically replaced ExpertsExchange for everything. That alone is probably worth $1B+.
gesman 13y ago
Nothing can beat a quick search and hitting the direct answer on even very basic question. SO saves time and nerves of countless newbies, myself included from RTFM-ing through each vendor's convoluted ways of presenting messy instructions or being abused on IRC by OP's :)
lukev 13y ago
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.
- Stratoscope 13y ago
  If you're feeling generous, go ahead and post the question anyway, along with the answer you found. That's very much encouraged, and very helpful to people searching for answers later.
  - marvin 13y ago
    Half my SO answers are of this type. And the number of views I get on them usually indicates that the problem is very common. (I have done SharePoint development in the past).
- micmcg 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
- jdludlow 13y ago
  On multiple occasions I've searched for an answer, found it on S.O., thought "this seems vaguely familiar," and then realized that it was my own answer from a couple years prior. Saved me time the second time around I guess.
- pavs 13y ago
  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.
  - reledi 13y ago
    The bright side is that in such cases you'll likely have received an answer or two before the question has been closed. Or maybe someone points you to a duplicate question which got more attention.
JohnBooty 13y ago
It's probably saved my sanity more than it's saved (or made) me money. If not for SO I probably would have had a lot of 12-hour days of frustration that wound up only being 8-hour days of frustration. Which is good, like life-improvingly good, because project timelines and estimates don't often budget for the kinds of bizarro problems that sometimes only have solutions on Stack Overflow.
halter73 13y ago
I have written 85 SO answers, yet I have never posted a question of my own on SO. Even so, I think SO has made me more productive, and that's counting all my time answering questions as wasted when in reality my time spent answering questions was certainly not completely wasted. My primary reason for believing that SO has made a net positive impact on my productivity is that about half the time I google some programming problem, I end up on SO. I'm fortunate that most of my questions (or questions similar enough) have already been asked on SO. I suspect I've read thousands if not tens of thousands of SO answers, and most of those answers were far more helpful than what I was able to find elsewhere. I've often wondered why I've never asked a question myself. I think part of it is that I like searching/tinkering to find answers, and I hate waiting. I know it's not the best explanation because I know how quickly some SO questions can be answered. I guess I should just be thankful there are plenty of other programmers more than willing to post SO questions.
dreamdu5t 13y ago
Pointless speculation. Value is not the same thing as a nominal price. Individuals value things for their use in accomplishing certain ends. The notion of aggregate value derived by summing arbitrary numbers is absurd and meaningless. If I define taking a piss as saving me $10/hour in productivity, then I can arrive at a number of $2,847,000 saved by me urinating an average of 3 times a day throughout my lifetime. That says nothing about productivity and clearly my piss isn't worth $2,847,000.
dnKK 13y ago
Is this a question? Or a user with 31k points using skeptics.stackexchange as a blog host? The back of the envelope calculation was fun to read, though.
Groxx 13y ago
One hour saved per land-on-answered-question is being incredibly generous, in my experience. Generally I need a dozen or so "answered" questions to get one that's both relevant and even remotely correct. Even with that though, it has undeniably saved me time. All told though, possibly not as much as Google results for blogs talking about similar things, which usually have a lot more context so you can determine if it's still accurate or not. SO has huge bit-rot problems.
stiff 13y ago
There are two assumptions here that are untrue and changing them would change the order of magnitude of the answer: - That as soon as an answer to something is on StackOverflow, it isn't available anywhere else - That every pageview on an answer saves someone 10$. Everyone running any kind of webpage knows how small of a percentage of the views is from people really trying to use it at all, and likely even among those a large fraction does not have any particular problem, but just view those "top 100 books" etc. mini-articles.
mmgutz 13y ago
Github has been a much more productive resource for me as well as blogs. Yes, every now and then I find something valuable on StackOverflow but too many times the question I want answered is deemed not worthy or the answer outdated.
dmourati 13y ago
This first hit just got me working right away with vagrant. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14404777/vagrant-hostonlyif-create-not-working http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14404777/vagrant-hostonly... I'd pay $1
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
patrickg 13y ago
(Not read the article yet, just answering to the question for myself.) I sometimes use stackexchange network (more precisely: tex.stackexchange.com) to provide many, many answers and I have spent hours over hours there, mainly to procrastinate. So, before reading the article, I'd say it evens out. But stackoverflow really helps me a lot.
enterx 13y ago
"closed as not constructive"
MichaelMoser123 13y ago
For me StackOverflow is similar to wikipedia: - stackoverflow tends to have the most relevant answer when searching on a programming problem . - wikipedia tends to have the most relevant answer when searching for broader/more general knowledge, . Also recently I took up adding details to answers on stackoverflow that help me, or that have incomplete answers.
leoedin 13y ago
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 way and let the good ones float to the top (on the site and in search rankings).
- sampo 13y ago
  In my experience, when I need information, I google with some keywords, and then land on a Stack Overflow page where my question has already been asked and answered. Thus I almost never see the questions and answers by the idiots. Sometimes I ask questions, and usually receive good answers, but it may take a day or two.
- rtb 13y ago
  It is both! In search results it is an information-dense bible of programming knowledge. If you click on the feed of newly asked questions, it is filled to the brim with idiots with barely any understanding of programming whatsoever. The magic of their voting system and google's search algorithms converts the latter into the former.
  - reledi 13y ago
    > The magic of their voting system and google's search algorithms converts the latter into the former. In addition to that, there's a lot of peer review going on. First posts, late answers, low quality posts, suggested edits, and so on are all reviewed by the community. Once you start reviewing, you'll quickly notice lots of shoddy content.
    - vorg 13y ago
      > you'll quickly notice lots of shoddy content Some programming language and software product vendors encourage quantity rather than quality in questions posted to Stack Overflow because various popularity rankings use the number of Stack Overflow questions as one criteria when calculating rank.
ma2rten 13y ago
I am always impressed by the amount of effort some people put in answering stackoverflow questions. I have sometimes been answering stackoverflow questions, that I happened to come across and that I knew the answer to. I gave that up because my answers stood next to other people's who obviously spend extensive amounts of time researching and compiling their answer.
chrisparnin 13y ago
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/ 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 http://checkbox.io/studies/?id=51fac5175ec6012222000001). Costs need to think in terms of the entire ecosystem: the time spent creating the answers, the time spent writing official documentation that isn't consulted, and the time saved finding the answer faster. Many technical writers and documentation teams from large corporations have been reaching out to me on this topic, they are definitely interested in learning how to adapt their processes based on Stack Overflow's success. But not everything is roses. Providing answers can be [slow](http://blog.ninlabs.com/2012/05/crowd-documentation/ http://blog.ninlabs.com/2012/05/crowd-documentation/), unanswered questions are rising, and [users stop doing actions](http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~scott/papers/MSR2013.pdf http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~scott/papers/MSR2013.pdf) that lead to badges as soon as they achieve them. On recent field study at a large industrial company, when learning WPF, they relied on books, and internal seminars to learn new concepts because Stack Overflow at the time did not have sufficient saturation on examples yet. As seen with [another study](http://blog.leif.me/2013/11/how-software-developers-use-twitter/ http://blog.leif.me/2013/11/how-software-developers-use-twit...) on twitter usage, in some contexts, the subject matter and available of easily accessible experts makes looking online less effective.
- sklivvz1971 13y ago
  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.
coldtea 13y ago
Yes, the same way a widespread virus is said to have costed "billions in lost productivity" too. That is, BS estimates of an essentially non measurable factor.
denzil_correa 13y ago
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 http://bit.ly/GFNNLm
davidw 13y ago
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.
mring33621 13y ago
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.
V-2 13y ago
Yes 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.
warmfuzzykitten 13y ago
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.

285 points by yitchelle 13y ago

I know it's fashionable in certain circles to rag on it lately, but I'm not too big to admit it has saved me a lot of time here and there over the last 4-5 years. I would bet a lot of devs use it more than they would admit to check down on things throughout the course of any given project. Billions seems like a lot, but I wouldn't call BS on it out of hand.

InclinedPlane 13y ago
Personally I think StackOverflow is pretty good. It's always nice to see it popup in search results when googling for a technical problem, for example. My main complaint is that they've been resting on their laurels for quite a while, there's a lot of potential that's been wasted with SO/SE.
- jc4p 13y ago
  Just curious, what do you think we could be doing that we aren't? Also thanks for teaching me a new idiom :)
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    In general, experimenting more. You've tackled the narrow use case of a single question with answers, but is that all SE can be, or should be? The thing that I think SE is most lacking is better ways to tackle the sheer amount of data on the site. There's a lot of information there but in general it's not very well organized. Go back to the original announcements about the launch of SO and see what it was supposed to be and how it has either lived up or not to those ideas. Try this thought experiment: if a stack exchange competitor showed up tomorrow, what sorts of features would it have to have to make you start waking up in a cold sweat every day?
    - jc4p 13y ago
      Luckily a lot of us are on the same page as you :) One of the things I consider a main detriment of our current product is that for the vast majority of users it's built to be transactional. Search, land on SO, read, go back to work. On our currently in development mobile apps we're trying out something different, for the first time at scale we're pushing content to users rather than having them search for it as the number one utility of the product. The apps have a "Feed" which is machine learned interesting for you questions. I love it since I search SO at work but when I get home or am walking around town I can open my app and instantly lose 30 mins (at least) to reading and interacting with very interesting content. I can't wait to see if others like it.
      - startuup 13y ago
        Thats a great start but there are other ideas too. Why isn't SE as useful for people in other professions, like product managers or data scientists or marketers who are also looking for answers to their work problems? The key is that just replicating the site is not the answer, you need to really focus on community dev and getting the thought leaders from those professionals involved. Lastly, along with the 'feed' implementation, you can also start curating other content from the web that could be useful to the users of your site. example: If I am particularly interested in Javascript, I get a feed of curated resources from around the web that will help me learn about the latest and greatest in Javacript. Thats whats missing today and thats why SO is a transactional site
        jc4p 13y ago
        I actually originally had something related in my post but removed it: I won't personally consider the site I work on a success unless my mom uses it. She's a physics PhD and she once in a while stumbles onto physics.SE when searching online but she doesn't actually use the site. I think SO and Server Fault are the size they are because they have an intrinsic advantage over our other sites. People in the target audience work and live in the same tech ecosystem as a website, with something like physics that's an initial burden. SE itself also has a high barrier to entry. Every one of our sites has it's own rules and definition of what type of content is acceptable. This is for a very good reason, seeking out absolute answers to questions. Most other websites on the internet live to foster discussion, but we're not a forum. Making stack exchange a common name (in more than our sizable niche) is one of our company goals, but I don't really know what we can do to get past the initial issue I mentioned and reducing the second would hurt our product. It's quite an interesting idea to be more proactive about bringing thought leaders to out lesser known sites, I don't know if we could do it just directly since most thought leaders are very busy people who already have a dozen places people ask them questions but it's something to think about. We already consider expertise of contributors in Area 51, our incubator for new website ideas. Perhaps while we may not be able to get the top 1% of thought leaders onto our websites without giving them a really hard question to answer (my mom loves difficult questions, god knows how many times she used to run into my room and say she solved a question I asked her in passing days prior) but it might be possible to bring in up-and-coming thought leaders. A lot of my friends from the health and fitness industry (were I used to live) might want to use our Physical Fitness Stack Exchange site to foster their own personal brand.
  - CJefferson 13y ago
    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 )
    - pjbrunet 13y ago
      Maybe write a comment, "This is out of date. Can someone update this?" You might even want to flag the question. You can also add a new answer and downvote the obsolete answer. Getting enough points to edit questions is pretty easy.
    - sklivvz1971 13y ago
      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).
- sklivvz1971 13y ago
  (*) where resting on laurels is defined as launching 111 sites running on 9 web servers with traffic doubling every 12 months while writing two native mobile apps and localizing the site :-)
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    Hey, that's great, but to be brutally honest most of those sites are borderline inconsequential. The fact that SE has yet to launch a site that's gotten bigger than StackOverflow is pretty damning. Everything else you describe is just work, it's not innovation.
    - spolsky 13y ago
      stackexchange.com is bigger than stackoverflow.com. Source: https://www.quantcast.com/stackexchange.com?country=US https://www.quantcast.com/stackexchange.com?country=US https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com?country=US https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com?country=US
      - jc4p 13y ago
        True and Stack Overflow is #1 in North Korea.
      - InclinedPlane 13y ago
        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've stopped innovating. They are good sites for their intended purpose but how much of the original vision has been abandoned? I remember back when you and Jeff were talking about taking over the way all online discussion happened. Nothing like that is even remotely possible with the way StackExchange is today. To be bluntly honest I think you guys are just lucky that most of the ambitious and competent folks in the industry don't view discussion as "sexy" so you don't have as much ompetition as you would otherwise (quora is practically a joke). But realistically it's just a matter of time until SE will be out innovated.
fein 13y ago
I can learn and know one language incredibly well, excluding the html/css/js world, as those are effectively required at this point. For me, that's PHP. However, when I need to go to work, and my boss decides "So that position we hired you for, now its going to be ruby as well, but later on ObjC and Java.", SO comes to the rescue. The core concepts of programming languages were cemented in my years deciphering terrible notes and learning to code in college, however the little nuances of each language inherently evade me. This is where SO has shined the most. Most of the time, solutions with multiple approaches suggested show more about the language itself than the problem asked.
duaneb 13y ago
What on earth is bad about using StackOverflow? You're expected to google around to find solutions anyway, if anything I would think much less of the programmer who tried to avoid it. It's stupid pride when it's such a valuable resource.
- rrich 13y ago
  I agree with you, but several people I have encountered don't feel this way. For instance I had someone try to explain how using HAML made their developers more valuable because of all the keystrokes they were saving. When you're counting keystrokes as a developer productivity metric I can only wonder how toxic the work environment becomes when you need to stop to look at documentation yet alone use Google or SO.
  - subsection1h 13y ago
    Maybe that person's team is more productive with Haml not simply because of the small amount of time that's saved by less typing, but because of the huge amount of time that's saved by not needing to replace developers who are institutionalized or commit suicide as a result of being forced to type HTML tags like it's still 2005[1]. [1] The year before Haml was introduced.
    - rrich 13y ago
      I'm not saying HAML isn't of value. Please don't misunderstand me, I like HAML. I use it for my template engine with Sinatra. But in the grand scheme of things if using HAML to increase productivity by saving keystrokes is what the company thinks is its competitive advantage, which is what they told me, then how do they deal with someone spending time just researching (i.e. stackoverflow, google) and thinking a problem and solution through thoroughly? The two seem at odds to me.
    - mattmanser 13y ago
      Uh, not to rag on HAML which I'm sure you find great but all the text editors I use these days auto-complete HTML, including closing tags. I spend a fraction of the time typing html compared to the time I spend thinking about why the hell the damn image/span/font/button isn't in the right place.

moocowduckquack 13y ago

It did improve programmer productivity, but Hacker News has sort of evened things out by wrecking it again through an advanced form of continuous nerd-sniping.

nextstep 13y ago

There is probably a good number of visits from people not "at work" per se, like students and hobbyists working on things in their free time.

forgotAgain 13y ago

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 points it has still saved a lot of money. But billions? I don't know if it would be that much. It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.

seiji 13y ago
I know programmers at microsoft who use SO as an intern. They just post questions about strange windows problems they can't work around. Somebody on SO will respond with a 1,000 word essay with 500 lines of code about it within a day, thus solving their problem with no employee time "wasted" by thinking or researching or paying for anything additional resources.
- AznHisoka 13y ago
  Ha, that's me. I'll post questions on how to write code, not just problems I can't work around. Then I go off and slack off, and wait until someone answers it. My version of "I'm compiling".
  - fat0wl 13y ago
    The microsoft thing is a little ethically strange but yeah i feel you on this.... if these try-hards wanna do your work for you just to get a "+10" may as well give them the privilege of "building their digital resume" while you read about something more interesting. Programmer culture involves too much self-glorification & SO embraces that in the hugest way. If the discussions were more interesting it would probably worth more attention but usually it's just some know-it-all quoting docs they just Googled for so they can lock down the question / points. I'm not sure I'd ever want to hire a SO mod...
deleted 13y ago

fiatmoney 13y ago

From an econometric perspective evaluating these kinds of things is fun. I would guess that any productivity gains would be concentrated in the most difficult-to-answer questions, that you can otherwise spend hours / days trying to debug or understand. "20 hours for 5% of questions" is probably a more accurate characterization, although it would work out the same.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

code_duck 13y ago

It is the internet and www in general that enables people to be connected and share ideas. There's no reason to credit specific sites like Facebook or eBay with connecting people, because someone else would have done it (possibly better) if they had not.

arthur_debert 13y ago
It is language and written language that enables people to be connected and share ideas. There's no reason to credit specific networks like www or the internet with connecting people, because someone else would have done it (possibly better) if they had not.
- code_duck 13y ago
  People credit facebook with connection people, when AOL did the same thing 10 years ago and someone else will be providing software for that in 10 years. People credit stack overflow with programmers answering each others questions, while Usenet did that 10 years ago and someone else will be helping with that 10 years from now. Meanwhile, language has been around for thousands of years and is not quite comparable.
lukifer 13y ago
I think there's plenty of credit to go around. Stack Overflow's fundamental decisions (gamification, open content, canonicity, searchability) were very significant in releasing valuable knowledge from the arcane vaults of obscure forums and mailing lists, not to mention creating a reliable(-ish) place to go for new questions. The project also represents an interesting template for community curation (which was begun well before launch), that can be learned from by other projects and startups. Obviously, someone will always build a better mousetrap eventually. They still deserve credit for actually doing it.
- code_duck 13y ago
  They deserve credit for doing what they did, but it is for doing what they did well, and not what some people confuse that with, which is making what people do on their site possible.

zsombor 13y ago

More likely it had merely promoted the quick and easy pop culture, where people no longer take the time of reading a book. After all you can just use google and look up your next short fix.

thibaut_barrere 13y ago
Oh I hear you! I can't say how much I regret all the time spent in the 700-800 pages of these Wrox or Addison-Wesley books trying to find that one line fix. These were the good old days!
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Every Wrox book I've come across has been terrible. If I wanted to read raw documentation I'd do that, when I spend hard money on a technical book I want to benefit from some practical expertise and I don't want an infodump of reference info that's already out of date by publication date.

xarien 13y ago

Yes.

TrainedMonkey 13y ago

I think stackoverflow is more than just sum of it parts. Solutions presented there are not just provided by experts, they are reviewed by experts, and if someone has a better solution, it has a really high chance to boil to the top. Portion of experts will recognize that and adopt superior solution. This will keep driving code quality and standards of participants up. Or at least so my reasoning goes. So to answer the question, I believe it had done much more than that - stackoverflow drove people to improve their technical knowledge, and that is priceless.

jurassic 13y ago

I feel like StackOverflow is a blade that cuts both ways. I find it's most useful for troubleshooting really cryptic/obscure error messages that I would undoubtably blow through huge amounts of time trying to solve on my own; those are the type of problems I'm not sure I would ever get through without help from wizardly members of community. But for other answers, to the kind of lazy questions that save me the momentary hassle of consulting the docs, it's also kept me from the serendipitous learning that should happen in that process. Since knowledge compounds and makes it easier to learn other things later, overall I'd say the "lazy questions" on SO definitely have a significant learning opportunity cost. Will it be a net productivity gain over my lifetime, including learning opportunity cost? Probably, but only because of those insane bugs I'd never solve on my own. Edit to clarify: I'm not the one asking the "lazy questions" without looking around. But these SO results often rank higher than official docs for my google queries.

icelancer 13y ago
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 questions on SO because some of the questions I ask and do legwork on I feel I should be paid for since it's shitty lack of documentation from the vendors, so screw them.
- tlogan 13y ago
  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: if you are novice engineer (or novice in certain field) then StackOverflow might help. If you are experienced engineer, stackoverflow is useless.

michalu 13y ago

How can £45k per annum equal £12.5 per hour, what am I not getting? Is he assuming average 69 hour work week?

gus_massa 13y ago
4500/360/10=12.5 No weekends, no vacations, and 2 hour daily unpaid overtime. :) Probably, back of the envelop calculation, with a lot of rounding in the parameters.
agilebyte 13y ago
Yeah, it is very rough: a) 45k has not been the average for the years leading up to 2013. b) 45k is pre tax, 33k is post tax. c) I suspect that SO is used more frequently by people on the lower rungs of the pay scale. d) The average for "developer" (which is the biggest group in the stats) is 40k. As a side note, wow 45k is a massive number. http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/developer.do http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/developer.do

EGreg 13y ago

It'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.

TrainedMonkey 13y ago
Indeed, what a simple way to express powerful sentiment!
pavanred 13y ago
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 find a question that generally has a subject line almost exactly the same as the error message and pick the first answer, without even trying to understand it. I see the difference personally when I worked on .Net/Java and when I was working on a applet for Gnome. The latter is not very popular and so I have to resort to documentation, IRC etc. I might spend more time initially but I end up reading the documentation, develop a better understanding and even create my own snippets which in turn save me time eventually. To summarize, SO saves time but one might tend to leech on to it instead of learning. I guess some metric of how many times a person revisits the same question might be a good indicator of this. Not to mention how many times I have seen a comment like, is this homework; show me what you tried, instead of an answer.
- the_af 13y ago
  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.

KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago

Wikipedia, Youtube, Google, StackExchange, should all get world peace awards.

im3w1l 13y ago
Foodstamps and cat videos are the new bread and circuses
geoka9 13y ago
A donation should suffice (they are running a campaign now, BTW) :)

ilovecookies 13y ago

StackOverflow 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.

the_af 13y ago
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.

hackula1 13y ago

I found it hugely useful in the .Net world. With closed source, obscure errors cannot be as easily tracked down, especially when they are not covered by MSDN or a prominent blog. A couple years after switching to an open source stack, I barely use it at all, and when I do finally hit a wall and ask a question, I get an answer ~20% of the time (compared to 90%+ when I was in .Net). I am a huge fan of SO, but good docs and readable code go a lot further.

stuartd 13y ago

Two words you youngsters probably don't remember - Expert Sexchange..

roryokane 13y ago
What about it? I very much doubt that Experts Exchange saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity. I was always annoyed at landing there from searches before Stack Overflow existed. And it is/was much harder to use than Stack Overflow is today.

wslh 13y ago

I am 100% sure that SO makes my employees and me more productive. QAOP (Question and Answer Oriented Programming) boosts the productivity significantly. But I think in the long term, when everybody incorporates the same QAOP skills all developers will compete at the same level and new productivity horizons will came.

GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
> I am 100% sure Your 100% certainty means nothing to me. > makes my employees and me more productive. A very strong claim. > QAOP (Question and Answer Oriented Programming) boosts the productivity significantly. First Google results don't even know what this is. Listen, I actually think your claims have merit, but the way you present them is "crap, crap, mega crap". Please cite something we can take take to the manager or test or vet in some other way. Otherwise you comment is just "ME RIGHT. ME SELL YOU SOMETHING".
- wslh 13y ago
  Looking at your comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=GalacticDomin8r https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=GalacticDomin8r it seems like you are a new kind of spell checker. I am not writing a formal proof here in HN. I have proofs of what I said but don't like to discuss them with you, your reply was rude. I invented the QAOP acronym just to be funny and illustrate the concept. Your answer reminds me of this Babbage letter: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm

itchitawa 13y ago

Has Hacker News cost billions of dollars in programmer productivity? :P

easy_rider 13y ago
They have probably subtracted billions of dollars of value from the world in decreased programmer productivity. They probably level each other out.

kaffeinecoma 13y ago

I'm still waiting for someone to coin a term for when you google around for a problem and end up at your OWN answer on SO from a year or so earlier. This happens more often than I'd like to admit. I'm incredibly thankful for the many, many hours that SO has saved me personally.

laurent123456 13y ago
Actually, if your question is about an obscure enough topic, you'll get your own question within seconds on Google. It's a kind of loop - search on Google desperately without finding anything; turn to SO and ask a question. Since probably nobody will answer soon, in the meantime search more on Google... and you find your own question on top (and feel just a bit more desperate).
- gabriel34 13y ago
  He said he ended up on his answer, therefore it's something he knew but forgot. Nonetheless your observation still holds, as the obscurity of the topic increases the chance of such coincidence both by the scarcity of content on the matter and because he is more likely to forget little used information

rgovind 13y ago

Stackoverflow is awesone and for me, it has saved me countless hours of thinking, even on non mainstream platforms like FPGA design. That said, I hope for one improvement. I would like to upload my code into a machine with a command line...and those who are on stackoveflow can with login, try their hands at it without having to ask me. This way, they will save time trying to reproduce my sandbox.

GalacticDomin8r 13y ago

Don't hurt yourself trying to pat you on the back. The vast majority of those questions have already been answered by Google. Some people just like paying. In other words, if you pay for something that you could get for free with just a bit more effort, how is that saving money?

mlangdon 13y ago

Just FYI, if you are making $10 per hour programming in the US please Google "salary entry level <your job> <your nearest metro area>" and tell your boss what you find out.

ateevchopra 13y ago

I guess the best thing about stack overflow is how helpful the community is. They will help you with anything and even virtually shout on you if required. I guess it has made me the programmer that I am today. But I still have a journey ahead of me and that isn't gonna be without stack overflow. I remember when I was using stack overflow for the first time, I asked a really silly question, and got my answer within 1 minute. I thanked that person for helping me with such a simple question, but his reply changed my thinking about the communities and why they help each other. He just said : "no probs, someone did that for me too".

Jagat 13y ago

Now that this has made it to the frontpage of HN, I'm waiting for someone to write a post on the millions of dollars lost in productivity because of HN.

sehugg 13y ago

Pretty much, yes. In fact I wonder how you can release a complicated product like a mobile device SDK nowadays without millions of eyes solving and documenting problems. I used to trace into disassembled library code to root cause issues. Now that's somewhere between infeasible and impossible. On Android I can sometimes look at the source to solve issues. On closed platforms I have to rely on cut-and-paste from StackOverflow forums. Commercial software vendors are lucky SO users are doing their documentation and testing services for free.

gabriel34 13y ago

That is a really complex matter. However much time was saved it's value for mankind, the value added depends on what the programmer does on the spare time he gained from the increase in productivity and what value does mankind puts in these activities. (note that value for the world as stated in the question is a lot harder to grasp) At the end of the day it's a matter of knowing whether the programmer was the bottleneck of the productive system he is a part of or if he had slack capability. EDIT: I was going to post a more complete answer, with references bells and whistles, on Stack Overflow, but having never created an account there I didn't have the 10 reps minimum. Kind of dumb for a question with zero answers IMHO.

evanspa 13y ago

SO has helped me tremendously in learning new languages. Java is the first language I learned really well, and it's great to be able to ask SO questions like: "What's the equivalent of an abstract class in Objective-C?" Answers to questions like this aren't exactly easy to extract from the "manual."

jackmaney 13y ago

I'm certain that Stack Exchange in general--and Stack Overflow in particular--has saved a huge amount in programmer productivity. However, what the OP hasn't taken into account is that Stack Exchange sites can also suck up potentially productive time, as well. Although this loss is difficult to quantify, I'm sure it's not anywhere near the magnitude of time saved.

Fomite 13y ago

StackOverflow saved me enough time that I ended up thanking the folks at SO and CV who helped me in the Acknowledgements section of my dissertation. Below my committee, but above the good people at Dr. Pepper.

NDizzle 13y ago

Let's not forget that StackOverflow has basically replaced ExpertsExchange for everything. That alone is probably worth $1B+.

gesman 13y ago

Nothing can beat a quick search and hitting the direct answer on even very basic question. SO saves time and nerves of countless newbies, myself included from RTFM-ing through each vendor's convoluted ways of presenting messy instructions or being abused on IRC by OP's :)

lukev 13y ago

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.

Stratoscope 13y ago
If you're feeling generous, go ahead and post the question anyway, along with the answer you found. That's very much encouraged, and very helpful to people searching for answers later.
- marvin 13y ago
  Half my SO answers are of this type. And the number of views I get on them usually indicates that the problem is very common. (I have done SharePoint development in the past).
micmcg 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
jdludlow 13y ago
On multiple occasions I've searched for an answer, found it on S.O., thought "this seems vaguely familiar," and then realized that it was my own answer from a couple years prior. Saved me time the second time around I guess.
pavs 13y ago
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.
- reledi 13y ago
  The bright side is that in such cases you'll likely have received an answer or two before the question has been closed. Or maybe someone points you to a duplicate question which got more attention.

JohnBooty 13y ago

It's probably saved my sanity more than it's saved (or made) me money. If not for SO I probably would have had a lot of 12-hour days of frustration that wound up only being 8-hour days of frustration. Which is good, like life-improvingly good, because project timelines and estimates don't often budget for the kinds of bizarro problems that sometimes only have solutions on Stack Overflow.

halter73 13y ago

I have written 85 SO answers, yet I have never posted a question of my own on SO. Even so, I think SO has made me more productive, and that's counting all my time answering questions as wasted when in reality my time spent answering questions was certainly not completely wasted. My primary reason for believing that SO has made a net positive impact on my productivity is that about half the time I google some programming problem, I end up on SO. I'm fortunate that most of my questions (or questions similar enough) have already been asked on SO. I suspect I've read thousands if not tens of thousands of SO answers, and most of those answers were far more helpful than what I was able to find elsewhere. I've often wondered why I've never asked a question myself. I think part of it is that I like searching/tinkering to find answers, and I hate waiting. I know it's not the best explanation because I know how quickly some SO questions can be answered. I guess I should just be thankful there are plenty of other programmers more than willing to post SO questions.

dreamdu5t 13y ago

Pointless speculation. Value is not the same thing as a nominal price. Individuals value things for their use in accomplishing certain ends. The notion of aggregate value derived by summing arbitrary numbers is absurd and meaningless. If I define taking a piss as saving me $10/hour in productivity, then I can arrive at a number of $2,847,000 saved by me urinating an average of 3 times a day throughout my lifetime. That says nothing about productivity and clearly my piss isn't worth $2,847,000.

dnKK 13y ago

Is this a question? Or a user with 31k points using skeptics.stackexchange as a blog host? The back of the envelope calculation was fun to read, though.

Groxx 13y ago

One hour saved per land-on-answered-question is being incredibly generous, in my experience. Generally I need a dozen or so "answered" questions to get one that's both relevant and even remotely correct. Even with that though, it has undeniably saved me time. All told though, possibly not as much as Google results for blogs talking about similar things, which usually have a lot more context so you can determine if it's still accurate or not. SO has huge bit-rot problems.

stiff 13y ago

There are two assumptions here that are untrue and changing them would change the order of magnitude of the answer: - That as soon as an answer to something is on StackOverflow, it isn't available anywhere else - That every pageview on an answer saves someone 10$. Everyone running any kind of webpage knows how small of a percentage of the views is from people really trying to use it at all, and likely even among those a large fraction does not have any particular problem, but just view those "top 100 books" etc. mini-articles.

mmgutz 13y ago

Github has been a much more productive resource for me as well as blogs. Yes, every now and then I find something valuable on StackOverflow but too many times the question I want answered is deemed not worthy or the answer outdated.

dmourati 13y ago

This first hit just got me working right away with vagrant. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14404777/vagrant-hostonlyif-create-not-working http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14404777/vagrant-hostonly... I'd pay $1

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

patrickg 13y ago

(Not read the article yet, just answering to the question for myself.) I sometimes use stackexchange network (more precisely: tex.stackexchange.com) to provide many, many answers and I have spent hours over hours there, mainly to procrastinate. So, before reading the article, I'd say it evens out. But stackoverflow really helps me a lot.

enterx 13y ago

"closed as not constructive"

MichaelMoser123 13y ago

For me StackOverflow is similar to wikipedia: - stackoverflow tends to have the most relevant answer when searching on a programming problem . - wikipedia tends to have the most relevant answer when searching for broader/more general knowledge, . Also recently I took up adding details to answers on stackoverflow that help me, or that have incomplete answers.

leoedin 13y ago

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 way and let the good ones float to the top (on the site and in search rankings).

sampo 13y ago
In my experience, when I need information, I google with some keywords, and then land on a Stack Overflow page where my question has already been asked and answered. Thus I almost never see the questions and answers by the idiots. Sometimes I ask questions, and usually receive good answers, but it may take a day or two.
rtb 13y ago
It is both! In search results it is an information-dense bible of programming knowledge. If you click on the feed of newly asked questions, it is filled to the brim with idiots with barely any understanding of programming whatsoever. The magic of their voting system and google's search algorithms converts the latter into the former.
- reledi 13y ago
  > The magic of their voting system and google's search algorithms converts the latter into the former. In addition to that, there's a lot of peer review going on. First posts, late answers, low quality posts, suggested edits, and so on are all reviewed by the community. Once you start reviewing, you'll quickly notice lots of shoddy content.
  - vorg 13y ago
    > you'll quickly notice lots of shoddy content Some programming language and software product vendors encourage quantity rather than quality in questions posted to Stack Overflow because various popularity rankings use the number of Stack Overflow questions as one criteria when calculating rank.

ma2rten 13y ago

I am always impressed by the amount of effort some people put in answering stackoverflow questions. I have sometimes been answering stackoverflow questions, that I happened to come across and that I knew the answer to. I gave that up because my answers stood next to other people's who obviously spend extensive amounts of time researching and compiling their answer.

chrisparnin 13y ago

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/ 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 http://checkbox.io/studies/?id=51fac5175ec6012222000001). Costs need to think in terms of the entire ecosystem: the time spent creating the answers, the time spent writing official documentation that isn't consulted, and the time saved finding the answer faster. Many technical writers and documentation teams from large corporations have been reaching out to me on this topic, they are definitely interested in learning how to adapt their processes based on Stack Overflow's success. But not everything is roses. Providing answers can be [slow](http://blog.ninlabs.com/2012/05/crowd-documentation/ http://blog.ninlabs.com/2012/05/crowd-documentation/), unanswered questions are rising, and [users stop doing actions](http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~scott/papers/MSR2013.pdf http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~scott/papers/MSR2013.pdf) that lead to badges as soon as they achieve them. On recent field study at a large industrial company, when learning WPF, they relied on books, and internal seminars to learn new concepts because Stack Overflow at the time did not have sufficient saturation on examples yet. As seen with [another study](http://blog.leif.me/2013/11/how-software-developers-use-twitter/ http://blog.leif.me/2013/11/how-software-developers-use-twit...) on twitter usage, in some contexts, the subject matter and available of easily accessible experts makes looking online less effective.

sklivvz1971 13y ago
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.

coldtea 13y ago

Yes, the same way a widespread virus is said to have costed "billions in lost productivity" too. That is, BS estimates of an essentially non measurable factor.

denzil_correa 13y ago

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 http://bit.ly/GFNNLm

davidw 13y ago

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.

mring33621 13y ago

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.

V-2 13y ago

Yes 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.

warmfuzzykitten 13y ago

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.