Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18539/has-stackoverflow-saved-billions-of-dollars-in-programmer-productivity

by yitchelle • 13 years ago

285 173 13 years ago

skeptics.stackexchange.com

dccoolgai• 13 years 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.

InclinedPlane6• 13 years 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.

jc4p4• 13 years ago

Just curious, what do you think we could be doing that we aren't?

Also thanks for teaching me a new idiom :)

sklivvz19714• 13 years 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 :-)

fein• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

rrich3• 13 years 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.

BillyMaize• 13 years ago

Ego is my number one pet peeve about coworkers and I have a really hard time working with anyone who won't admit they don't know everything. I have a coworker who I can't tell that I got an answer from stackoverflow because he will instantly say "I don't care what reputation he has blah blah blah he is wrong" and won't listen to any actual research on the topic.

forgotAgain• 13 years 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.

drawkbox• 13 years ago

When you answer questions and get points though you teach and that is the best training. Many times when I answer questions I find out more details and learn as well. Anytime a question is answered this is training investment for free really. It is also something that helps your programmer brand.

With open source and sites like stackoverflow, a single programmer can become a team of programmers/knowledge very quickly. It is part of what has made each programmer better I believe. On the flip it has also made programmers more lazy possibly. Finding an answer and being able to solve and provide an answer to the question are two key pillars to providing solutions. So I'd say question answerers and associated companies are getting more out of it.

dspillett2• 13 years ago

Many times when I answer questions I find out more details and learn as well.

I've experienced this several times too. In verifying details to make sure I'm not handing out duff information, I've stumbled over a semi-related point in the documentation that triggers a "I wasn't aware of that, I'll have to look into it as it might be very useful" response.

Also I sometimes just browse for interesting questions. You occasionally stumble upon something you didn't know that you needed/wanted to know!

taspeotis• 13 years ago

    The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation ... I'm thinking of msdn as an example

The number of questions on SO that can be answered by RTFM is quite remarkable. I think that points to a lot of the documentation being just fine. The last bug of my own I spent any significant of time on was answerable by RTFM [1].

There are plenty of PHP+MySQL questions that appear where the OP is clearly learning about PHP+MySQL and the code looks something like...

    $result = mysql_query("select username, password from user where username = " . $username)

...shows that they haven't bothered to RTFM [2].

[1] I had made a new thread and was calling ShellExecute on it. It didn't work on some computers because I hadn't initialised COM (presumably they had some shell extensions installed). See the first sentence of "Remarks" http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb76...

[2] Big red box: http://www.php.net/mysql_query

ritchiea• 13 years ago

I want to float a different hypothesis: the perception of programming is so hung up on the idea of individual brilliance that most people, especially beginners, don't even realize how much value there is in reading the manual.

And we as programmers add to the problem. It's not very sexy to say that there is a lot of useful software out there written and documented by smart people and if you read that documentation, and think through a problem with great analytical detail you should be able to find a clear solution.

bottled_poe• 13 years ago

You are quite right. All of the information is in the manual, and if only everyone would spend their time reading the manual there wouldn't be so many questions on SO. However, the volume of information in most manuals is also the problem. If everyone read the whole manual, a lot of time would be collectively wasted because most of the information is not useful or relevant to what each individual developer is trying to do. In my opinion manuals should be written in several tiers of detail. Admittedly, a lot of software developers already publish documentation this way and these basic questions still get submitted to SO.

chavesn2• 13 years ago

Why do people assume that RTFM does not have a cost?

In fact, it's probably higher than searching SO through Google. This is why I'm hugely in favor of even basic questions getting answers on SO.

RandallBrown• 13 years ago

StackOverflow is just the manual in an easily searchable form. Lots of times I'm not even sure of what to even look up and that's when I post to StackOverflow. The next time someone else tries to do something similar, Google will have found it in StackOverflow and it will be easily found.

sebkomianos• 13 years ago

Not everyone learns from manuals though.

zxcvvcxz• 13 years ago

The number of questions on SO that can be answered by RTFM is quite remarkable. I think that points to a lot of the documentation being just fine.

Actually that must point to the opposite: that manuals are not information resources that are easily consumable, and hence a new service (Stackoverflow and co.) needed to be developed to "disrupt" this.

The more questions the better IMO, it's just more of a wealth of data to search through and serve to people.

I wish there were better ways of asking more general questions that one just has no idea though (e.g. "How can I send SMS messages from a web site?" Random example of which I have no clue). These are more open-ended, but provide a ton of value. At the very least, they make googling for such things that much easier and direct.

nathan_long2• 13 years ago

If you're stringing together a Unix pipe command, TFM might be for, say, awk. Would you rather stop what you're thinking about for 10 minutes and shave that yak, or get a quick answer and move on?

ako• 13 years ago

The more information is available in the documentation, the more you can benefit from somebody pointing you to the right information for your question. So I think that if software vendors were to document even more, you would need something like stack overflow even more.

And then there's also the problem of cross-technology questions, where you have a question of combining multiple technologies. These kind of questions are usually a bad fit for documentation.

derleth2• 13 years ago

The number of questions on SO that can be answered by RTFM is quite remarkable.

Every language needs two manuals: A reference text, to teach you what is possible, and a tutorial, to teach you what is tasteful. You should expect people to read the tutorial, but expecting everyone to inhale reference material is a bit much.

(Later, there should be a third book: An anti-tutorial, laying out anti-patterns, or things you shouldn't be doing but that people tend to do anyway, and how to solve the problem the right way, with pointers to other tools if necessary.)

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better.

Documentation quality had been declining for many years before SO -- I think its more accurate to say that if vendors were doing better, there would be no (or less interest in) StackOverflow than the other way around.

jgh• 13 years ago

Although the problem I've been finding recently with SO vs Apple docs (mainly since switching from developing sdks to apps) is a lot of the higher level stuff seems to get changed more frequently, so a lot of SO answers are out of date.

Edit: Somehow this reply ended up with a different parent than I intended...

cclogg• 13 years ago

I find the opposite with iOS/Apple programming. Often I'll be looking for something on Stack Overflow only to find the true answer lurking somewhere in one of Apple's guides or example apps lol. But if there's a Stack Overflow answer, it's often exactly what I was looking for, and that can't be undervalued!

droidist2• 13 years ago

True, iOS docs are really good compared to Android docs.

baddox2• 13 years ago

Much of the money saved has gone to vendors.

That's not a contradiction to the claim that wealth has been created. Of course it has to go somewhere.

GalacticDomin8r4• 13 years ago

That's not a contradiction to the claim that wealth has been created.

There was no claim wealth was created.

seiji• 13 years 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• 13 years 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".

john2x• 13 years ago

Google did this as well. It's extremely annoying. They're basically telling users to "Fuck off, we don't have time for you. Go ask your questions somewhere else."

rrich3• 13 years ago

When I first started doing Android development in late 2009 the API documentation quickly brought back memories of MSDN in the late 90's.

chavesn2• 13 years ago

Remember to take into account that doing something similar to SO but scoped more narrowly could actually hurt the help/answer community through fragmentation more than help it.

fat0wl2• 13 years ago

dead on with the cost of wasted time through gamification. And many questions on SO can be answered with ~10 mins of extra thought. It's a good reference though, as someone mentioned. Makes a manual searchable, basically, with a bit of layman explanation.

I get bitter though because any time I post a question that actually requires thought (can't be answered by checking an API) it ends up getting downvoted because you well... actually have to read a paragraph to understand it, I assume. That site has an uncanny ability to trash anything of value so a lot of the time I spend on it I wish I just spent reading programming theory instead of gleaning random bits of knowledge. I guess its enlightening though to see the level of developers & tech engagement in the different communities. It lets you see how active the community is and what level of quality the devs are, basically. (So... more questions doesn't necessarily mean better community...)

& o god lets not even get into the amount of wasted time spent wanting to claw your eyes out when someone (especially mods) say some horribly arrogant thing responding to some imaginary version of your question (i guess they read 2 or 3 words from each sentence?). or they point out some semantic reason why theoretically they're right even though in practice they're wrong and the theory doesn't actually support their argument, it's just agnostic... chills

sklivvz19714• 13 years ago

A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that.

Agreed, however one answer will help many developers, which should more than offset the initial effort

The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation.

Documentation has not deteriorated, in my opinion. In fact, a point could be made that it is now much easier for small vendors to have outstanding developer support through stack overflow. A lot of open source project use it as the main support line.

It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.

It is probably correlated to the time spent on the site, but the money saved is certainly not related, as users don't gain any reputation by reading answers or simply browsing the site.

fiatmoney• 13 years 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.

code_duck3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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_duck3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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_duck3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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!

InclinedPlane6• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Yes.

TrainedMonkey2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

Bockit• 13 years ago

I am someone who reads the man pages and does a lot of experimentation before turning to a Q&A site

I feel similarly. I'm uncomfortable asking for help on stackoverflow, a mailing list or IRC if I haven't tried everything I could think of to work something out. I always have this[1] in mind when I do end up writing a question. I almost think it should be required reading.

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

GalacticDomin8r4• 13 years ago

I feel like StackOverflow is a blade that cuts both ways.

That is a feeling, not a thought.

http://www.wildmind.org/applied/depression/distinguishing-th...

michalu• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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

EGreg• 13 years 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.

TrainedMonkey2• 13 years ago

Indeed, what a simple way to express powerful sentiment!

pavanred• 13 years 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_af2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

im3w1l• 13 years ago

Foodstamps and cat videos are the new bread and circuses

geoka9• 13 years ago

A donation should suffice (they are running a campaign now, BTW) :)

ilovecookies• 13 years 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_af2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

moocowduckquack• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

stuartd• 13 years ago

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

roryokane• 13 years 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.

wslh2• 13 years 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.

GalacticDomin8r4• 13 years 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".

wslh2• 13 years ago

Looking at your comments: 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

itchitawa• 13 years ago

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

easy_rider• 13 years ago

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

kaffeinecoma• 13 years 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• 13 years 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).

gabriel342• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

GalacticDomin8r4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

gabriel342• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

gesman• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

marvin2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

jdludlow• 13 years 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.

pavs3• 13 years 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.

reledi2• 13 years 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.

ma2rten3• 13 years ago

SO is very useful for a asking a certain type of question.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

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

What types of questions are you asking (any examples)? In the time I've been using SO (just over 3 years) I think I've only ever had one question closed (and it was a bad question so they were right in closing it).

denzil_correa2• 13 years ago

In my case, nine times out of ten my questions are closed down by overzealous mods.

You may not be following the guidelines.

JohnBooty• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

NDizzle• 13 years ago

Let's not forget that StackOverflow has basically replaced ExpertsExchange for everything.

That alone is probably worth $1B+.

dnKK• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

This first hit just got me working right away with vagrant. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14404777/vagrant-hostonly... I'd pay $1

patrickg• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

"closed as not constructive"

MichaelMoser123• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

reledi2• 13 years 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.

ma2rten3• 13 years ago

I think the main factor is that SO is very aggressive in closing "bad" questions.

Tloewald2• 13 years ago

We found a fairly highly ranked "ticked" answer to a question yesterday (it was on keeping the heading rows of tables visible during scrolling) and immediately thought: (1) this answer seems stupid, (2) we can think of better solutions. Within thirty minutes we had two superior proof-of-concepts working and had found a decent off-the-shelf solution.

What Stack Overflow is great at is SEO (not sure if this is organic or deliberate or both). This at least tends to pull interested eyeballs in a kind-of similar direction. What happens then is anyone's guess.

1) Highly ranked answers are often horribly wrong. People asking common questions are, presumably, often being pulled to these answers and treating them as gospel.

2) Once an answer gets "ticked" (even when hopelessly wrong) there's very little that can happen to fix it.

3) Stack Overflow is (actively or passively) good at appearing in Google search results, but not at converging like threads; which thread appears in a search is far from stable, so two similar searches can take you to completely different threads.

4) The depth and quality of threads seems highly language-correlated. E.g. the PHP threads I've seen seem to mainly consist of someone posting bad code they've written and having it debugged by someone else. Javascript discussions are of a much higher quality. Obj-C discussions are another level or two beyond that. (Which says something... perhaps about the awfulness of PHP's error messages.)

CodeCube• 13 years ago

re #2, that's not entirely true. There have been a good amount of times that another answer gets upvoted way higher than the accepted (ie. "ticked") answer because it's better. In those cases, even the original asker has chosen one, the community has chosen another ... so it's often worth scrolling to see the other answers that have been given.

That being said, I agree with everything else you've said :)

johnward• 13 years ago

You are always going to have people of different skill levels, including those you call idiots. Now if it's a basic question it will likely get answered but if it's incoherent rambling then there isn't much the community can do. Except maybe teach people to ask better questions.

ma2rten3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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/) 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).

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/), unanswered questions are rising, and [users stop doing actions](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-twit...) on twitter usage, in some contexts, the subject matter and available of easily accessible experts makes looking online less effective.

sklivvz19714• 13 years 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• 13 years 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_correa2• 13 years 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

davidw• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

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