This marks the end of an era in a lot of ways. Joel Spolsky's influence on software development can't be understated. Stack Overflow is a huge company with lots of decision makers, so things will carry along without him.
In the post, he acknowledges that Stack will have to keep evolving
The type of people Stack Overflow serves has changed, and now, as a part of the developer ecosystem, we have a responsibility to create an online community that is far more diverse, inclusive, and welcoming of newcomers.
It's pretty interesting to make this announcement without a successor named.
It will not be easy to find a CEO who is the right person to lead that mission. We will, no doubt, hire one of those fancy executive headhunters to help us in the search. But, hey, this is Stack Overflow. If there’s one thing I have learned by now, it’s that there’s always someone in the community who can answer the questions I can’t.
Thoughts?
Top comments (41)
Shouldn't he have just posted a question on SO for who should replace him?
Closed as off topic.
😆
This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.
This kept me laughing for a moment 🤣🤣
Why this question closed? It's completely related and on topic. (Many upvotes)
This may be because I have over 20 years of experience in software development but Stack Overflow does more harm than good I think. Now you don't have to remember much of anything. Between Stack Overflow and Google you can always find what you need. Stack Overflow also hurts peoples' research skills. I post and I get answer, no research is involved with finding out anything. I myself rarely need SO because I believe it is due to the fact that I grew up during a time when if you needed to find something, you had to read a book. :)
Joel leaving is really not all that significant. There are lots of capable smart and technical people out there that can lead the company. I wish him well. I have enjoyed his insight over the years about software development. I never 100% agreed but 90% of it was spot on.
I disagree. What StackOverflow/Google offers over books is a lot of examples of code presented as solutions to real-world problems. I've tried learning programming languages and environments from books many times before and they just can't teach the subject matter as quickly or as interestingly as searching online.
Don't get me wrong, books are great, especially as reference material, but they're just too dry for a lot of people.
But Stack Overflow also has a lot of wrong, bad, or even outdated answers.
Stack Overflow answers also often lack the reasoning around the answers.
The danger is looking at stack overflow, and copy pasting the answer from it.
I definitely think learning to filter out bad/low quality answers is a valuable skill. And of course, straight copy-pasting code is an absolute no-no.
For what it's worth, most of my SO usage comes from looking up existing answers and seeing how it relates to my code. I treat asking a question as a sort of last resort.
Yeah, I think learning to use StackOverflow to move along and find ANOTHER problem to Google is a research skill in itself.
Whether it's because you found someone else who already asked the question or whether it's because you asked the question yourself, it ...
You know what it does?
It turns higher-level programming languages even higher-level.
Does writing assembly make you a programmer who's been through the ringer and can do harder things than just writing high-level languages that take care of memory management for you?
I'd say yes!
But would we have all the nice things we have in the world of computers if everyone still had to write assembly to get things to work?
I'd say no.
Just like higher-level programming languages took a lot of the "spend a day getting one line of code to work" out of programming, while still forcing people who want to write GOOD code to know what they're doing conceptually, StackOverflow takes a lot of the "write extremely un-Pythonic loops for years until you happen to master comprehensions" out of the task of writing higher-level languages ... but you still have to know WHAT you're doing to solve your problem.
As I just wrote in an article I'm about to post this week on using Python to convert XML to CSV:
I must've used 5 different StackOverflow answers to write my 5-line-of-code example for the upcoming artice, because lordy, you're right: I don't work with Python enough to know that ElementTree comes with
.attrib()or to remember that Pandas comes with.from_dict().What I have retained over the years is a vague sense of "in Python, just get things into lists of lists and lists of dicts and dicts of dicts and dicts of lists and something will work."
Yes, I have to Google for that "something" every time.
But my 9-5 job is to MacGyver together whatever systems I'm given in whatever tools my company has bought.
Google and StackOverflow make me cheaper by saving me days/years. I'll go so far as to say that by turning programming into a just-in-time "build" process, rather than having to keep every "library" loaded in my head at all times, they make it affordable for my small company to stay in business, considering everyone now has to have the latest & greatest 3rd-party tool every year to keep up with "delivering Amazon/Netflix-like customer experiences."
I think there's as much of a need for skilled just-in-time research-based programming in the world as there is for skilled deep-knowledge-and-hard-knocks-based programming.
(Now ... are we going to run out of deep-knowledge-and-hard-knocks programmers? I suppose you could argue that. But I have always gotten the impression that even in this era, there're plenty of people out there who have that tinker-on-the-weekends drive and end up knowing a stack deeply. Many of them answer questions on StackOverflow!)
This.
@Mia - MSDN and Java docs give you code examples also. You don't see people running to those sites, do you? You don't because MSDN and Java docs give simple code examples that are meant to demonstrate a particular thing. They are not solutions to problems. Be honest people go to SO to find code answers and modify them to fit there needs.
I honestly can't see SO becoming particularly welcoming to newcomers while maintaining the moderation system that it currently has.
It was never meant to be. Which is where it all went wrong.
I only wish I had known about SO long before 2014, would have helped and saved me lot of time
However, these days, I'm mostly using it to find answers rather than answer questions and improve my knowledge/understanding. After being active for about two years, these days I find all the edit/close wars, keeping in mind all the rules and changing rules, etc detrimental than a place for learning.
Discourse, which is pretty much Stack's successor, already solves this problem:
Reality show?
He's done a lot for devs over the years. Outside of SO, he also had a successful blog with a lot of gems. Such as A Field Guide to Developers. He was hilarious on the SO podcast -- I caught the tail end of his tenure there.
So I hope he enjoys his retirement. Sincerely.
Put a half-life on it. That would be a great idea. Maybe keep a record of your peak reputation, with a timestamp. That would better show which users used to be regular contributors vs. ones that are currently regular contributors.
I guess he's no longer the...
...jack of the stack.
Jack of the Stack
Molly Struve
😄
This is big news. The influence of Stack Overflow on my day-to-day life is immeasurable.
I’m interested to see if S.O. goes the way of GitHub with more social/discovery features.
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