It's quite sad that an environment where advanced topics are discussed somehow has to also be one where the needs of newbies (and anyone who might feel alienated by the arrogant boys club of software development) are completely disregarded.
Here's a fun fact: My Stack Overflow account is "secret". I first signed up as Ben Halpern but after a few of my first interactions I changed it to a pseudonym because I was afraid to put myself out there. It's probably not impossible to find my account, but I happily made it obfuscated.
Developers of all experience levels naturally co-exist in a healthy ecosystem. Newbies ask questions that experienced devs overlook. They also get excited about all sorts of random crap that experienced devs are usually jaded towards. Seasoned software people need the enthusiastic newbies to try and fail enthusiastically around them so that they can observe and learn. Sometimes when the junior asks the senior about the whacky AR/VR library they're working with, the senior dev helps out and realizes it's actually not so silly after all.
The junior dev, of course, needs the senior dev for guidance. They also need the opportunity to be a fly on the wall as two senior devs talk about things that go 80% over their head but where 20% sure makes a lot of sense. To get that experience where there's a word they can look up themselves afterward and maybe the whole conversation will start to make more sense. Or they look back on that discussion they thoroughly did not understand a year ago, but now they recognize they're now having having the same conversation and it does make sense.
Here's the point: the developer ecosystem can be full of incredibly symbiotic relationships and exchanges, and it's a real shame that Stack Overflow doesn't do more to support that ethos. In fact, it oftentimes feels like the embodiment of the developer who in their own day-to-day just doesn't feel like they have time for the devs who aren't already seeing eye-to-eye with them 100%.
The above tweet by Jeff Atwood is part of a twitter conversation kicked off by this tweet.
The thread is fascinating, frustrating, and everything in between. Jeff needs to understand that he helped build something world-changing, but that it has problems that he himself is completely ill-equipped to see them for himself.
I did not think much about Stack Overflow when building dev.to, but I did feel like the greater developer ecosystem had a really hard part fostering healthy ecosystems where developers of different skill levels and backgrounds could make the most out of their time and energy. Stack Overflow is a subset of the greater dev ecosystem, so it was obviously part of what I thought was lacking overall.
But honestly I had not thought about it a lot. This thread actually clarified a lot for me:
In particular, this comment:
Following the goal of collecting "high quality" questions and answers, Stack Overflow does not care about answering your question. Unless your question is useful to more than just you.
This is the main thing people don't understand about SO. If your question doesn't serve the community it will probably not be well received.
This focus makes it very good at some things (e.g. hosting fantastic solutions to all sorts of problems) and very bad at others (e.g. helping beginners). Dev.to makes a different set of design/community moderation decisions which results in a different set of tradeoffs. Both sites have their place.
I guess Stack Overflow was never about helping the original asker, but more-so about serving the community with "the truth". That clarifies a lot for me.
Obviously, it would be ideal if they could serve that goal with less alienation. Jeff's comments here, which are pretty firmly in-line with his career-long gladiator mentality, seem to indicate that Stack Overflow was born to reject, not to include. And that's a real shame.
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Just wanted to add that Atwood's claim that SO is not for beginners is utter tosh (presumably he'd love it to be just frequented by the creme de la creme of programmers).
Advanced programming topics are complicated and nuanced and require a lot of space to discuss (like we have available here for instance), mostly the answer is "it depends" and the answers certainly can't be copied and pasted.
Stack Overflow on the other hand is copy and paste central. It's where I go (via google) if I can't remember the syntax for something, or if I want to know what API options are available to me. It has a lot of dreadful code that works, but will get you in a mess later if you're not careful.
If there is vitriol there, I don't believe it's because it's full of experts, quite the reverse. Expert developers are too busy developing working features and enjoying their jobs. SO probably has slightly more than its fair share of insecure *sshole developers who love to dump on people who don't know something they know (along with others who genuinely want to help). But let's not given them all credit for being experts, there is no way I'd hire an *sshole developer like that for my team, no matter what framework they learnt last month - people like that are a total liability.
Great community you have here by the way, I'm enjoying it very much!
that is so accurate. I asked a question quite sometime ago and started receiving comments and downvotes, no answers and i thought maybe i asked a super stupid question so i deleted it and posted again as anonymous. didn't get any help either.
The annoying part is that you're half-right. SO is not, and should not, be the same kind of place as dev.to.
twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/974...
But writing in a kind style doesn't mean making things longer and more padded out. It means not calling things obvious when they actually aren't, and not jumping on the worst possible interpretation of the other poster. Half the time, the polite way uses less words.
Stack Overflow is necessarily less inviting than "a dating site", and I think a lot of its critics either don't get that or don't care about it, but don't act like it's reached its peak already. That place has a lot of outright unnecessary rudeness, and, women are raised in a way that makes them strongly abhore rudeness.
Unfortunately, I find that all too often the "truth" that emerges on SO is just someone's opinionated declarations, or something that's frozen in time and irrelevant or harmful three months later, or riddled with gotchas and bad implementation details that can lead people astray. I think SO used to be better at being what it is (exclusionary or otherwise), but has been bogged down by moderation bureaucracy, groupthink, and the calcification of "best practices" that admit no improvement.
On dev.to so far, I feel like there's a sense of hope and wonder, with a nice dash of helpfully cynical recognition of the things we (as developers in general, not just in dev.to or SO) desperately need to improve. Of course, my experience with dev.to is pretty scant so far. We'll see how my opinion of it evolves over time.
SO reminds me a lot of IRC "back in the day" (I haven't been active on IRC in almost 10 years so I have no idea if this still applies): a high barrier of entry/resistance to anyone new or who comes in out of the blue, with the usual canned "RTFM" or "read the topic" type responses almost always delivered in a condescending manner. Now, there's a reason for that system, it an easy (i.e. lazy) way to "separate the wheat from the chaff" with the goal of disincentivising those who want someone else to do their work, those who don't research a topic first, and those who don't abide by the established social etiquette, but it also has the consequence of creating an atmosphere where curt, condescending, unwelcoming, and eventually exclusionary behaviour becomes de rigueur. That sort of attitude stifles those that new to the culture, those that are shy and vulnerable and especially those that have already regularly experienced tactics of exclusion or discrimination such as women, "minorities," and LGBTQ+.
In Stack Overflow's defence to not being welcoming to first-time programmers, SO's original purpose wasn't to be a better tutorial site, it was to be a better Q & A site, out specifically to eat Experts Exchange's lunch. That label "Experts" should help put some context into things. SO was being specific, but at some point they became everything to everyone, and they should probably do a better job at guiding the new developer along the way, much like Dev.to does.
I created an account and then immediately deleted it. My main beef with SO is, of course, when it's used as a recruiting tool. You hit the nail on the head when you said it's not about answering your question, but the "quality" of the content. This leads to a system where you game the system and put up with egotism on something inconsequential.
So, I actually like mentoring and helping people starting out. More than solving problems (unless you consider their situation to be a problem). I never got anything of that sort outside of my very first programming gig. And though I don't like using terminology like "toxicity," for convenience sake I'll say my dev career had that--even (and sometimes especially) from other so-called marginalized groups, so I kinda grew without any help. So for me helping beginners and juniors is a big deal.
I thought of making something like dev.to but for mathematicians/majors/whatever a few years ago for the same reason--having a community that helped each other. I'd like to see what math enthusiasts think about that, but I think there's a similar mentality you hear about in the dev community.
Spot on.
I can't remember how many times I've googled something, clicked the top link to SO and instead of finding the answer I'm looking for, the person asking the question is being scolded for not asking the question correctly. I suppose that's one of the reasons I never really got active there.
SO isn't designed for the thing they want but perfectly designed for people fairly new to the industry, a technology, etc to ask the same simple questions over and over. Using moderators and self proclaimed experts to fight that just seems futile.
The problem with experts are that they tend to lose perspective on what is expert and what is basic knowledge.
Though it still is a good source for technical knowledge. Often I search for things that are probably considered fairly basic but I don't use often enough to bother to remember, usually takes me to SO via google or duck.
To me that's the most critical point. For better or worse, most of what I see on SO is a determined effort to ensure that the site provides valuable answers for developers. It's a valuable resource because of the standards it enforces.
The guidelines enforced on the site seem reasonable. It's the tone of the responses that often go out of line. There are reasons, such as frustration with lazy, low-quality questions, but sarcastic, derisive comments are never appropriate. It's a balance between caring so much that one tries to preserve the quality of the content and caring so much that one gets frustrated and starts lashing out. When the latter happens it's time to step away and take a deep breath. It's just a website and someone else can answer the questions, or not.
For what it's worth, a decent amount of effort goes into helping people get answers. If the question is unclear, I explain in a comment why it's unclear. Sometimes I'll edit the question.* Before someone asks their first question they're provided with a wealth of suggestions to improve its quality as well as answers that may match the question.
To summarize, I think what Stack Overflow does is working. People just need to be nicer. (Maybe there's something more going on to which I'm oblivious, maybe in areas of the site I don't use.)
*Far too often the title of the question has nothing to do with the question. It's like I'm trying to bake a cake, I get in the car to buy some flour, and the car won't start. So I ask a question titled, "Can't bake cake please help!"
Lol @ the title. Reminds me of the day someone asked a question titled "How to give free coupon code in Laravel" 😁😁
I tried to reach out to the SO community when a saw a thread on meta about it, but, as you can see from the comments and posts everywhere in that thread, they just don't seem to get it: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/365847/20...
Wow, seeing your comment after @isaacandsuch referenced the response here makes me feel like I'm in the company of a celebrity. 😊
Ha! Thanks. I am absolutely nobody, especially compared to the creator of a worldwide friendly dev community like dev.to. :) I guess though that is exactly what perplexes me. If I, as pretty much just your average developer, can clearly see the toxicity and exclusion happening at SO, then how can so many others not see it? Or refuse to see it?
I also believe that Jeff & Joel didn't sit down at genesis of their baby community and make it one of their core values to exclude people, but rather that this has happened/happens as a byproduct of some of their (what I consider) unfortunate views/opinions that have now cemented themselves into the community at large. I was, however, glad to see the response from the CTO on twitter which gives me hope for SO's future. I also think though that such thinking will need to spread to the everyday-rank-and-file in-the-trenches moderators/user-mods/and active community before we'll see real change.
A small part of me would love to see some of those types of people meet with people who feel excluded by SO face-to-face. I believe there's something about the medium of written word that emboldens many of the "old guard" of SO and I dare say that they wouldn't be so bold if having to face the people they are excluding directly.
Anyway, thanks for writing this open letter (of sorts) to Jeff and thanks for using your far-reaching voice to spread the good word, as it were. I really do hope things change. I think SO is indeed too valuable a resource to calcify and go stale.
You rock Jess, Ben & entire dev.to team!
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