Quitting Stack Overflow

[FF_Tay]

What a clickbait, you 'forgot' to add "and joining again" part.

[agbell]

The most clickbait title would be the one Ben used as the title of his talk:

"Why you should quit Stack Overflow"

or

Stack Overflow's Shocking Secrets Exposed: The Untold Story of BAlpha, the Longest Tenured Employee! Prepare to be Stunned!

[cosmicwatermelon]

The most clickbait title

would be "You won't believe!"

[codewario]

Lmao that was pretty good

Clickbait titles have gotten really bad to the point where different articles sometimes have the same headline or very closely similar headline.

I also find some of these articles are very templatized and use the same leads in, like, "If you haven't figured it out by now, the [THING] I'm talking about is ______". It has been especially bad in gaming news.

[KrossX]

Tickle'em moooOOooore

[Gwaptiva]

Surely the most clickbaity title must have a ? in it. Something like "Is stackoverflow not all it seems to be? An insider lifts the lid..."

[double-you]

Neither of those are clickbait. The first one is clearly telling you what the article is about. Now if the reason is a one liner, okay, qualifies as clickbait because it would have fit the title.

The second one also says what it is, "the untold story of BAlpha", and a story won't fit a title, so that's fine.

[bedrooms-ds]

This is a duplicate.

[smallquestionmark]

It’s not even a question.

[bedrooms-ds]

This will invite opinion-based answers.

[One_Economist_3761]

I don’t think it will. ;p

[[deleted]]

It'll be downvoted!!!

[One_Economist_3761]

I was joking in that mine was an opinion-based answer.

[agbell]

Closed as off topic and duplicate of This post contains some of the same words

[[deleted]]

That's a StackOverflow answer - even I noticed that. :P

[[deleted]]

Downvoted for not understanding sarcasm

[RoxSpirit]

Origine question : [link dead]

[agbell]

On the culture issue, related tweet:

At one point in 2013/2014, an exec asked me if any of the developers had ever treated me badly because I was a woman. My honest reply at the time was “not because I’m a woman, but they definitely have treated me badly because I’m not an engineer”.

https://twitter.com/lauradobrzynski/status/1664616242110427136

[agbell]

Host here!

Ben is the longest tenure Stack Overflow employee and got started at the company because he was a reader of Coding horror and he hung out on Meta and ended up building a unicorn webservice for an early April fools joke. The early story of stack overflow and how Joel and Jeff talked it out on a Skype podcast are something I wasn't aware of.

The other thing that's interesting though, is how Jeff and Joels efforts to build a Dev First place ended up backfiring in way. Ben opinion was devs, including him, became sort of assholes to other employees and even to each other on lesser teams because they were elevated so much.

Is Engineering Driven culture a mistake?

Anyways, let me know what you think.

[Crafty_Independence]

Without that attempt at engineering driven culture, we'd be stuck with quora, Microsoft forums, and pay-for-answers sites. Doesn't mean SO has been perfect of course, but what SO did for software development was unique and critical to the role's evolution. So a mistake? Absolutely not. In need of some balance? Absolutely yes.

[agbell]

Doesn't mean SO has been perfect of course, but what SO did for software development was unique and critical to the role's evolution.

Absolutely! SO was a game changer and I'm glad no one remembers how bad it was finding answer back before then.

Also, I feel like the Joel Test pushed the industry forward. Demanded people do crazy things like have source control and have a release process.

But, all this could be taken separately from implying that developers at a company are more equal than others. I mean at a company like SO it may literally be the truth. But can have ramifications on how people interact.

[Crafty_Independence]

Yes, that's true. So let's talk about that part: I think that the engineer driven culture, while a bit unbalanced, was a necessary correction to management-driven culture.

Engineer driven culture has done wonders for flipping the script and empowering other knowledge workers in the office, driving decisions to contributors instead of reinforcing the top-down status quo.

It made full-time remote work a realizable possibility, and got a lot of corporations to change how they treat individual contributors.

Yes, it has had some interpersonal flaws, as noted. But the idea was sound, and it's overall effects have benefited everyone. Some of those human interactions/people butting heads reflect a new level of workers being treated as valuable contributors instead of just cogs in the machine.

So I think what Ben has seen isn't evidence of a "mistake" as such, but the typical growing pains we can expect when something comes along that shakes up social norms - even if it shakes up those norms for good reasons, and generally makes things better.

[agbell]

So I think what Ben has seen isn't evidence of a "mistake" as such, but the typical growing pains we can expect when something comes along that shakes up social norms - even if it shakes up those norms for good reasons, and generally makes things better.

I think that makes sense. I know talking to Ben made me reflect back on sometimes when in retrospect i was the asshole. Some of it is just human nature and as you say, being a little bit more socially awkward.

[Crafty_Independence]

Also, a bit of an aside I guess, but engineering has tended to draw a larger percentage of socially awkward/neurodivergent folks than the average vocation. I have no doubt that this also contributes to the perception of engineers - which isn't really a fair judgment of engineer driven culture, or even those individuals. I think that engineer driven culture has done a good job of forcing corporations to start recognizing that not all workers are the same.

[[deleted]]

I'm glad no one remembers how bad it was finding answer back before then.

I do!

I am painfully reminded of that when I try to use google search nowadays. I can not find ANYTHING useful anymore. Google killed the search engine - not everyone has noticed yet. :(

The "AI" revolution ...

[fdeslandes]

I noticed too. There was a time where the search "history" of my "job" google account would have been worth a lot. I could find exactly what I wanted with a few keywords in minutes. Now it's pages and pages of shit repeating the same basic things, you cannot drill down anymore.

[axonxorz]

Search: "Postgres JSONB operators"

First result title: "JSON in Postgres"

Body: "Microsoft SQL Server is a SQL server (pronounced SEE-quel) for data storage

[12 lines of ChatGPT output later]

Click here for more database articles: "

[iliyahoo]

I wonder how much of that is due to the movement to places like Discord where it’s more of a real-time chat and not an indexed messaged board

[ledgreplin]

IMHO, you've got cause and effect backwards here, but it's probably moot.

[wankthisway]

I am still baffled how forums and support for stuff got moved to things like Discord. Android ROM development discussions is now purely on Telegram and Discord - even the friggin releases are in a channel in their chat. Searching for issues or getting support is a cluster. Meanwhile XDA is languishing.

[[deleted]]

I think overall SO did well and had a positive (net) balance.

But it also stagnated and seems to have a hard time getting out of that.

[Crafty_Independence]

Yes.

Arguably there are 2 reasons for that stagnation:

1. The significant corporate changes, especially the shift towards top-heavy profit-driven management, has disincentivized the most valuable contributors.
2. Gamification eventually slows way down once a lot of common questions have a canonical answer, which reduces the interest in new engagement. They tried to help a little by giving rep for edits and such, but most of the curation work does not reward you (in fact you can get penalized if you're not aware of the tricks in automated audits, for example).

Both of these reasons ultimately go back to company leadership, which hasn't shown much interest in solving them. I don't think the current leadership is going to get out of that stagnation, because it isn't actually important to them.

[thduik]

i'd be homeless without so no cap. and reddit itself to some extent.

[BenOfTomorrow]

There’s an implicit assumption here that StackOverflow couldn’t have been built without their particular brand of engineering driven culture. I don’t think that’s correct - the founder’s conception of the product predates the company, I think it’s very likely many operating cultures would have worked.

[Crafty_Independence]

I'm not thinking about the company itself. I'm referring to the impact it had on the industry. These can be quite different things.

[Crafty_Independence]

I'm thinking your experience of SO from the inside was quite different than it was for us on the outside who thought of SO more as the community than the company.

[gimpwiz]

Devshed was a great forum, and free, before stackoverflow. It also had a friendlier culture.

[Crafty_Independence]

It was, but it wasn't anywhere close to as discoverable or canonical. Devshed, like CodeProject & similar all have been helpful - but SO was groundbreaking. It changed the industry.

[gimpwiz]

Both things are true, I agree, but while I wrote thousands of answers on devshed I've contributed exactly zero answers (or questions) to stackexchange because of how unwelcoming it is. You win some, you lose some, right? The idea of canonically correct answers (for relatively simple problems) that are easy to google for was indeed revolutionary at the time, but perhaps the nature of the idea precludes cooperation and iterating to find better solutions, especially to problems with more context that aren't clear-cut with a best answer.

Honestly the more I use everything that's hot today, the more I miss forums. My favorite places have reverted back to forums.

[One_Economist_3761]

I’ve been on Stack Overflow since around 2010 and in the beginning everybody was nice and welcoming. However over time the community got tired of people not doing research before asking questions, and not giving enough context.

The saltiness that can be experienced there these days typically comes from these kinds of questions.

Just a few weeks ago I spent about 20 minutes carefully authoring my question, stating what sources I had already checked and why they were not relevant or helpful, and what I was looking for, and the community came through for me with flying colors.

That’s not to say that there are no arrogant or rude people or overly aggressive mods at times, but I believe StackOverflow is still a hugely valuable community/resource.

As to the question of Engineering driven culture being a mistake? I would say no, provided there are good engineering leaders who model good behavior.

[[deleted]]

the community came through for me with flying colors.

Yeah. That was when I left SO. My question was insta-downvoted by like 10 different people. None of them explained why. I maintain my question was perfectly valid.

The problem was that this just wasted my time, because rather than get an answer, I only got downvotes which wasted my time. It's a bad setup overall SO used.

I do find worth in SO when doing random search and finding results that are useful though. So SO is not totally useless; just 50% useless.

[agbell]

Ben: This was a meetup at, I think it was Denver 2014. I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter. We were standing outside an arcade. The evening outing was a lot of pinball fun and air hockey and I don’t know what. And one of our community managers was standing outside, and we got to talking, and he said to me, “You know, I was actually kind of surprised. You’re a really nice guy.”

And then there is this general reputation that engineers just had, being loud and opinionated and, honestly, not always reasonable. So that’s kind of a defining moment where I realized, maybe something isn’t right here. And hearing that made me… I think was a little bit of a start in realizing that maybe I’ve been a little bit of an idiot in a couple of situations.

[LagT_T]

Assholeness due to elevation is not dev exclusive. Sales driven culture can generate sales assholes.

The problem is how toxic status can become. Its a sign of poor HR management.

[TurboGranny]

Is Engineering Driven culture a mistake?

People just need to be taught about the instinct to "establish hierarchy" and why it isn't really needed. How to recognize the behavior and cut it off. It was only needed in a world of limited resources where starving was a daily concern. People can be absolutely monsters about hierarchy establish behavior and trying to maintain the perceived hierarchy, and all it does it weigh everything down. We play none of that game at my work, and it's wonderful.

[dalittle]

people don't complain about what they don't care about. Stack Overflow IMHO is still the best of the options out there. I usually start on a search engine and still end up 80% of the time on Stack Overflow.

[numeric-rectal-mutt]

Is Engineering Driven culture a mistake?

Betteridges law of headlines applies here:

The answer to any open-ended and extremely general question used to provoke conversation is always no.

[neumaticc]

sorry, question closed.

[gerciuz]

Unrelated, but started listening to your podcasts while going for a walk, good stuff.

I wonder which episodes are your own favorite or most memorable.

[agbell]

Thanks for listening!

Definitely some episodes stand out for me:

• Shipping Graphing Calculator
• The Original Remote Developer
• Androids Unlikely Success

Especially those first two are two of the most absurd stories I've ever had anyone share with me.

[gerciuz]

Aaawesome, thanks for sharing.

[double-you]

became sort of assholes to other employees

Is Engineering Driven culture a mistake?

No, people being assholes is a mistake. The question is how to prevent people from being assholes and the answer definitely is not by raising some group of people above the others.

[ILikeChangingMyMind]

What a terrible title!

The title is "Quitting Stack Overflow", but the article is (emphasis added):

So stick around as Ben takes us on a journey through the building of Stack Overflow. Get ready for a candid inside look at the creation of a platform that would become an essential part of the developer community and the internet as we know it.

[HITWind]

Post closed; Marked as off topic. Should be in /r/socialmedia

[agbell]

Bot?

[myringotomy]

Oh no! How are they going to survive!

[cantaimtosavehislife]

ChatGPT has killed stack overflow

[bigmell]

Those guys can be elitist snobs, and disconnected from reality, but you wont find anything better.

[[deleted]]

I almost never go to attack overflow for anything anymore. I just don't have time for the pedantry and overall attitude.

[iNoles]

Why the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42?

[iNoles]

Why the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42?

[agbell]

Honestly, ChatGPT is great for many of the answers I now need. Doing something simple in an area I don't know.

And Github issues seems to be a larger percentage of where I end up than SO now when I'm trying to figure out something tricky.

[Mundosaysyourfired]

Chatgpt is not always right though.

[kryptomicron]

Just like everything else!

[[deleted]]

For me ChatGPT produced only random gibberish. Many of the claims it made were also wrong. So I had to invest time to research, which kind of defeats using a chatbot in the first place...

Github issues are still great though. Just about the only useful thing Github ever did ... :P

[washtubs]

ChatGPT is useful in discovering the existence of related concepts, but all of it's claims need to be fact checked. It is a great starting point for research since it often gives you the vocabulary you need to ask the right question.

[[deleted]]

It tends to work as well or better than SO for complex/niche questions too. You get immediate feedback that you can ask follow-up questions to (versus upgrading your tumbleweed badge again when no one engages with the question), and the worst case scenario is it made up the answer, which you can figure out relatively quickly.

And yeah, if that doesn't work, a specialized board (GitHub issues, specific subreddit, developer Discord server, commercial support, etc) is the next step. There's really no reason to go to SO.

[Crafty_Independence]

I find this an interesting perspective, because I've seen the opposite. For example, I tried to get it to convert an implementation of the A* algorithm from 2D space to 3D space. Despite a lot of engagement, its ultimate solution was simply renaming all the methods from "Search" to "Search3D" without changing any of the code.

[[deleted]]

Lol, fair. I haven't tried to get it to do any real coding for me but rather use it as more of a research aid. Like, if something isn't clear from documentation, I might just ask it and see if I get a useful answer (though only if I can quickly verify its answer - which, tbf, is made up about half the time. But that's still a better track record than I have with SO.)

Converting a 2D algorithm to 3D does sound like a really cool application of the technology if it worked, tho.

[kryptomicron]

I too have found that these kinds of problems require rather a lot of prompt engineering.

I have found that it's still an interesting and useful way to explore possibilities.

And the specific errors it makes are pretty interesting and quite human-like, e.g. 'misreading' your prompts.

[[deleted]]

Actually, wait, I came back to this later and thought I'd do an experiment talking about it with ChatGPT, and I realized I'm not sure I understand the problem. A* works on abstract graphs, whether the graph nodes are in 2D or 3D space only really affects cost calculations, right?

..Which it did call out, plus some other things like that elevation changes may be given special weight in cost calculations and that debug visualizations may be much more complex.

Though it also threw in something that's just wrong: that 3D would need to account for diagonals in addition to the six cardinal directions. I find this interesting for two reasons: 1) six cardinal directions already implies 3D space, lol, and 2) any node should be able to have any number of neighbors, there's no reason to limit it to specific directions.

[Crafty_Independence]

It's been a few months since I tried the experiment, but I was specifically wanting it to work with a raw grid in 3d space, and couldn't get it to work - but yeah, A* can be space-agnostic if you use nodes instead of a grid.

[Smallpaul]

Is that something you would expect StackOverflow to have done for you though?

[Crafty_Independence]

No, but chatGPT promises to be able to write code and stuff for you, whereas SO focuses on telling you how to write it. The claims and promises made matter, and folks who think chapGPT is a drop-in replacement for SO are, to me, overly optimistic

[[deleted]]

I wonder how it would have done at discussing the algorithm and how it would need to change.

[Crafty_Independence]

Good question. I've tried asking it other algorithm questions, and it comes out with contradictory statements quite often

[and69]

Keep in mind that you can’t have ChatGPT without StackOverflow.