Looking for a new CEO

&gt; <i>One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.</i><p>&gt;<p>&gt; <i>I care a lot about this. Being a developer gives you an unparalleled opportunity to write the script for the future. All the flak that Stack Overflow throws in the face of newbies trying to become developers is actively harmful to people, to society, and to Stack Overflow itself, by driving away potential future contributors. And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier.</i><p>It&#x27;s good to see that acknowledgement coming from Joel. I wasn&#x27;t one of those newbies facing that snark, but as an earlier contributor it was really depressing to see the general attitude shift from &quot;yeah OK this question&#x27;s not the best but it was asked in good faith so I&#x27;ll answer&quot; to &quot;you&#x27;re a worthless human being for wasting our time with imperfection&quot;.

I was pretty into SO back in &#x27;13, contributing and asking questions.<p>I recently posted a question. Here&#x27;s how it went.<p>Posted question, gave some urls to documentation, wrote up code example and asked for help on a specific point.<p>Downvoted and commented that it wasn&#x27;t what the rules specified.<p>Although I didn&#x27;t find anything wrong with my post compared to said rules, but adjusted the post. Downvoted again.<p>Adjusted again and still more downvotes and no helpful comments.<p>At this point I just deleted the question and sought help elsewhere.<p>------<p>Whereas before you would get your question edited if it wasn&#x27;t within the guidelines or perhaps people would not downvote but comment on how you could be more specific.<p>Instead it was as if I had to &quot;do the work&quot; for them to understand what was being asked or do as much as I could so it wasn&#x27;t taxing for them.<p>The help I got elsewhere was actually from reddit. Another user actually did go through my code and the solution was trivial. Being a solo developer and not having more than 1 pair of eyes can sometimes get you in the weeds.<p>Now I just use SO for reading and getting hints on what I&#x27;m working on myself. It&#x27;s good in that respect. It&#x27;s just a shame it&#x27;s gotten so toxic. I know from reading other forums when someone mentions SO, it&#x27;s just not the same anymore.<p>I genuinely feel bad for new comers.

There is a fundamental problem with StackOverflow and I don&#x27;t know they (a new CEO) can fix it.<p>Many &quot;new users&quot; of the service view (or want to view) SO as a &quot;question and answer&quot; site similar to ask.com or Quora. I don&#x27;t think this is unreasonable at all as even Google will suggest that SO is one of the most popular question and answer sites on the web.<p>This flies in the face of the desire of SO leadership, many of its moderators and, the &quot;old guard&quot; to have the site be a curated programming resource akin to Wikipedia. This is also not unreasonable.<p>The rub comes with SO desire to invite questions to be answered rather than soliciting tutorials or documentation akin to how Wikipedia works. SO even had a failed attempt at exactly this (SO Documentation) a year or two ago.<p>In essence, they (SO) want the benefits of both models while not recognizing the irreconcilable conflict. New users find the community hostile and belittling, seasoned users find questions condescendingly trivial and repetitive.<p>I look forward to seeing what their new CEO&#x27;s vision is. Cultural change is hard though.

It always saddens me a bit when I see companies looking to hire outside executives rather than promoting from within. You promote someone to CEO and that opens up a slot for someone to replace that person, and then the next person and so on. As an employee, since I often don&#x27;t see this, it makes me feel like I ought to move to a different company if I want to move up.<p>Now there are cases where hiring an outsider makes sense. Perhaps you are bringing in someone with experience to run a fast-growing company and no one internally has that experience. Or you are hiring a new CFO for a tech startup and there just isn&#x27;t a large pool of people to promote internally to that specific position. But given that stack overflow is a tool made by developers and aimed large <i>at</i> developers--and a mature company--it would be nice to see someone rise through the ranks from a developer position at the company to replace the CEO.

I was curious if they would have been listing the job on their own platform.<p>They don&#x27;t: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;companies&#x2F;stack-overflow#jobs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;companies&#x2F;stack-overflow#jobs</a>

There are a couple types of people:<p>- Those who were &quot;burned&quot; asking questions on SO and have a grudge against it now (mainly people just starting out in programming)<p>- &quot;Lurkers&quot; who mainly just drive by from Google links and don&#x27;t ever ask questions<p>- Experienced programmers with accounts that mainly lurk, occasionally ask or answer a question, and never really have problems with the site<p>- Power users with crazy high rep who who are extremely pedantic and patrol their favorite communities too zealously and aggressively, and often unsympathetically<p>I like to think the vast majority of people are in categories 2 and 3 and are very satisfied with the quality and utility of SO.<p>The problem is that:<p>- category 1, while a minority, is extremely vocal about their displeasure with the site and so that gets a lot of attention<p>- category 4 types tend to exacerbate category 1 types<p>- category 4 though also does a very good job keeping the site clean, accurate, well-edited, etc.<p>Moderation is a thankless, tedious job, and the people most willing to do it might have other undesirable personality qualities unfortunately.

SO is like Amazon, I don&#x27;t like using it, I don&#x27;t want to use it, but its so big it&#x27;s unavoidable. The culture on SO is pretty bad, while it might be better than the Q&amp;A sites of yesteryear it&#x27;s not a lot better.

Talk about increasing shareholder value!<p>The result of:<p>(num_person-hours_saved_by_SO * num_of_developers_in_world * dev_hourly_rate)<p>must be staggering. I&#x27;m sure companies around the world can point to SO for a non-trivial percentage of bottom line revenue.<p>And forget about the bean counters for a sec: as a DEV, SO saves so much pain that I have no idea what I did before it came to be.<p>SO is truly doing God&#x27;s work (and I&#x27;m not a religious man).

I was quite active in SO around 2013 and still have a decent reputation there.<p>I rarely ask and answer questions anymore because 99% of the times the question is already there with a number of answers. In many cases those answers have been updated to reflect changes in the times (browser APIs, languages, etc) which is awesome.<p>I&#x27;ve suffered from its toxicity a number of times, but that hasn&#x27;t been my dominant experience. All in all it&#x27;s a super useful tool. I guess a lot of programmers don&#x27;t remember what it was like before SO, with vague forum threads that never got to the point.

Is there something that SO can do to further segment the site and&#x2F;or the question pool without making it too hard to use or driving too many questions into total invisibility?<p>The problem with SO as I see it is that every question is part of the same pool of questions, only differentiated by topic tags. Every question is held to the same standards. This is a contrast to the actual people who use the site: askers and answerers are all using, looking for and expecting a huge variety of different approaches and responses, and have wildly varying levels of experience.<p>Reddit&#x27;s subreddits completely transforms the site for people who use them - people who browse the front-page have an entirely different experience and different expectations from those who curate. I wonder if there&#x27;s something similar SO can do.

While SO has been a great resource over the years, a significant concern as I see now is the too rapid churn in many topics like various JS frameworks, android development, etc, where things are moving fast, accepted answers are frequently obsolete and have become misleading or wrong, and I have not come across mechanisms to handle this situation.<p>Also a fragmentation into multiple subject sites also isn&#x27;t a great idea IMHO, now for some categories for example you have to think of cross-posting to get maximum responses.

&gt;&gt; ASP.NET MVC technology on a real website without too much of a disaster. (In fact .NET has been a huge, unmitigated success for us<p>No matter what other&#x27;s esp. those in start up world say, .NET stack delivers value in spades, and it has only improved with .net core.

I&#x27;ve stopped using StackOverflow too much, although it&#x27;s probably more because of my particular development needs. Namely, StackOverflow breaks down if you need an answer about something reeeally specific, say a bug in a particular library. This is especially exacerbated in ecosystems without centralized, large libraries, like Rust, as well as in ecosystems that are fairly new, like Rust.<p>Now, I don&#x27;t think StackOverflow should necessarily address this, as this problem is a little niche. But I do think it might get a little less niche as developers move off the gigantic monolith library paradigm (jQuery, Boost, etc.). Maybe there should be a way to sync GitHub issues with StackOverflow (although each side has incentive to keep the user on their end). Or maybe there should be a way of pinging important people in the ecosystem. It&#x27;s nice to @ someone in a GitHub issue if you know who has the solution to your problem.

Wow. Hard to see how you move the needle on making SO more welcoming when so much of the behavior is in the larger community. I suppose there may be some software changes that could help.<p>But I wish the next CEO luck, and appreciate what Joel and the team have brought into the world.

I answered a question and got downnvoted for answering a newbie question.

The most annoying thing about Stack Overflow for me is the multiple account system for every site on the Stack Exchange network.<p>I have thousands of points of reputation on Stack Overflow. Why can am I not allowed to edit posts or cast open&#x2F;close votes on SuperUser or WebApps or AskDifferent?<p>Many of these sites are esentially the same site and rules and user base, but with slightly different topics. Some questions would fit on any of the sites, and it&#x27;s down to the random Google search you followed as to which site you end up loading.<p>I&#x27;ll essentially never be able to gain the rep needed on the non-SO sites, even the bigger tech ones that have tons of crossover with Stack Overflow.<p>You can be a 20k rep Stack Overflow account, but land on a Stack Exchange question from Google and it&#x27;s a complete crapshoot if you&#x27;ll even be able to upvote the question.

I use SO almost daily but boy is that culture toxic. Twitter level toxic. The new CEO has a tough job ahead.

Where do they go from here? It seems every question has been asked and every new question has a 50&#x2F;50 of getting closed by MoDeRaTorS as off-topic.<p>Gamification probably got them here, but is it a recipe for continued success or a detriment to StackOverflow?

Love the jab at Quora<p>‘Oh and—hey!—we do not make you sign up or pay to see the answers.’<p>It’s sad how many companies nowadays do all they can to convert users to signups&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;app installs. Give people the chance to sign up on their own accord.

This is my opinion on what&#x27;s happening.<p>New programmers want to learn. However, they want to learn using the path of least resistance (who wouldn&#x27;t?). SO is universally known by everyone as the place where experts gather.<p>So why do newbies choose to ask questions on SO? Ultimately because they see it as the path of least resistance to accomplishing their goal of [learning, homework, etc.]:<p>- Why read a book on C++ when you just need to know how to do that one specific thing and an expert could give you a targeted response?<p>- Why wrestle for hours with compiler messages when an expert can solve it in 2 seconds?<p>- Talking to your teacher or professor is scary, vulnerable, and the very thought might make you anxious. Much more comfortable to ask an internet stranger!<p>- Homework is due tomorrow, it&#x27;s too late to ask the teacher for help! Time to ask SO, there&#x27;s no time for anything else.<p>- My programming school&#x2F;teacher&#x2F;course is complete garbage. Or I&#x27;m attempting to self-learn without formal courses. Time to lean on SO as a crutch to help me through.<p>However, this is a problem because it creates a power dynamic. Professionals want to help and get help from other professionals. Throw newbies in the mix and they are essentially a parasite - they want help from professionals and can&#x27;t give anything back (yet).<p>Honestly, I think one solution is to put asking questions behind a paywall or rep wall. People can still read everything for free, but to ask a question you need to either pony up or be a contributing member of the community. This would make a lot of newbies reconsider asking a question on SO because it&#x27;s like: &quot;Hmm, I guess I could ask SO as a last resort, but maybe... I could put in a few more hours of effort or ask my teacher, which are free&quot; This in turn would significantly reduce low effort newbie burden on the community and encourage the newbies to visit the sources of knowledge they ought to be going to in the first place.<p>This is all based on my own anecdotal observations, but I never asked a question on SO until I was a working professional. I used SO all the time in school, but read only - I leaned on my high school teacher and college TAs mainly when I needed help.

Can someone explain glitch.com to me. I looked at the website and I don&#x27;t have a clue what it does or why it would be useful? It looks like some meme game.

The biggest problem with SO now is the volume of content. This ends up trickling into all parts of the community which demands perfection from both the question asker and answerer.<p>I really hope the SO team is successfully able to move from un-versioned, free-form text based Q&amp;A into an API documentation++ platform.<p>Ideally a documentation platform that helps drive good debate and eventually consensus.

We need an improved version of StackOverflow that factor age of a reply (decaying points or something) and that groups similar answers with for same questions but at different dates.<p>Several times when I search for something (say, how to do X in Ionic) I find a reply that is old and does not apply to the current version of the library.

Part of me thinks that they should just archive SO as it is now (making it accessible and read-only from a specific secondary location) and just reset stackoverflow.com. I know a lot of programming problems are timeless, but many are not. Seems like hitting reset every few years could be useful.

Stack overflow is a 50&#x2F;50 gamble. You either get help or some self righteous jerk flags your question and tells you youre stupid. I hope the new CEO fixes this. Their brand equity is really bad but you use them because you don&#x27;t have that many options.

Stack Overflow is such a mess I prefer helping people on Reddit &#x2F; Discord &#x2F; Slack nowadays.<p>SO is becoming read-only in my opinion.

Hopefully new CEO will tame some of the extremist mafia moderators and reopened interesting discussions and questions.

if late capitalism ruins stack overflow I swear to god I will throw a fit online<p>more seriously, this is a real concern, a super useful communal website with really high traffic is ripe for commodification.

All submitted resumes will be put on hold for five days and then deleted. :-)

The idea that SO is &quot;educating&quot; anyone is laughable. It&#x27;s mostly the place where one gets information about poorly documented APIs.<p>What&#x27;s especially repulsive to me is how well trained SO users are, spending many minutes nicely formatting their questions and answers for those worthless internet points.