Joel Spolsky is kind of a hero to me. He was one of the first developer bloggers — one of the first guys to write about things that we developers were thinking about and talking about. He wrote classics like “The Joel Test” and stuck up for developer environments with “Bionic Office“. It was revelatory. It was mind expanding at a time when these things had never been openly considered.
Jeff Atwood’s “Coding Horror” blog was much the same. He wrote about how developers are more expensive than hardware, made great book recommendations, and other things that we ate up like food at a smorgasbord. I relished the arrival of a new Coding Horror entry in my RSS feed. (Remember when RSS was going to rule the world….?)
Then these two titans got together and created StackOverflow, probably the greatest resource for developers ever created. It was a huge success, currently employing 250 people and presumably making Spolsky and Atwood a (well-deserved) pile of money. Who doesn’t love doing a Google search for something and seeing a StackOverflow link right there at the top, knowing full well that the odds are very good you’ll get a complete answer to your question?
StackOverflow took off like a rocket. Tons of really good developers were answering all kinds of questions. A guy from Google, Jon Skeet, proved himself to be some sort of super-human savant, answering questions with clarity and proficiently previously thought impossible and amassing over a million reputation points. All those great answers were up-voted, and they became super easy to find. Atwood and Spolsky accomplished what they set out to do, to fix the Internet for developers. StackOverflow is the go-to place for answers.
Right now, my StackOverflow “Reputation” is 11,692. Not bad, not great. I see that it puts me in the top 3% of members. I’ve answered questions mostly on the Delphi tag, but you’ll also find that most of my reputation was earned many years ago.
That number, however, is unlikely to increase anytime soon. At this point, I’m very unlikely to either ask or answer any questions on StackOverflow. Let me tell you why.
I’m unlikely to answer any questions on StackOverflow for two reasons.
First, because it is really, really hard to be the first one to answer any questions. My main area of expertise is Delphi, and there are currently three or four guys that seem to monitor the tag with cat-like reflexes, answering questions before anyone can even read them, much less respond with an answer. It is quite astonishing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — these guys are enormously helpful and provide a great service. But it is demotivating to other folks, including me.
The second reason is more humbling: I can’t find many questions that I even know the answer to. Many questions are about Android and iOS with which I am not that familiar. I think part of the problem is that many, many questions have already been asked, and so don’t get asked again, and the ones that do get asked are a bit more esoteric. That seems like a good thing.
Now the reason I don’t ask questions is a whole different story.
I’ll be blunt: I don’t ask questions on StackOverflow because if the question is not asked exactly perfectly, people are…unpleasant. They down-vote your question, leave semi-snotty comments, and generally treat you very poorly. Woe unto a newbie who asks a question. Take a look at what happened to this guy. He’s obviously a green newbie — both with Delphi and with StackOverflow — and his introduction to StackOverflow is met with a ton of down-votes and short, curt comments. Even the answer he does get — which is helpful — is met with a negative comment. What is the likelihood that this guy will come back and ask another question?
If an experienced developer like me feels this way, I can’t imagine what courage it takes for a new developer to venture into the shark tank that is StackOverflow.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. This tweet by Rob Conery led to this response from the mighty Jon Skeet himself. It’s an issue. And sadly, there are those that actually defend the culture. Skeet explains things pretty well, and I give him full marks for seeking solutions, but he basically supports the status quo — that “bad questions” should be down-voted and that people should “take more time to ask their questions”. That all may be true, but enforcing that does have the negative effect of making StackOverflow be a place that is not exactly, well, welcoming to new members and even not that friendly to people in the top 3%.
I get what the goal of StackOverflow is — to be a repository or well-asked and well-answered questions. In that it has been amazingly successful But I also get that such a goal lends itself to snippy, short, curt, unwelcoming responses. Having your question viciously down-voted is demoralizing. Who thought that awarding the Tumbleweed badge was a good idea?
I’d like to contribute more to StackOverflow — I certainly benefit from it on practically a daily basis — but for now I’m going to continue to shy away.