I have to agree with your statement. I've also used SO to ask esoteric questions about niches in technologies I work with every day. Most of the time those questions don't get answers quickly. However, after a period of time I can see they've helped others by the views and awards that come in sometimes a year or more after posting. I view SO more as a way to display example use cases of strange behavior or puzzling functionality that I discover as I'm working through issues. Especially for things that official documentation explains poorly or not at all.
Same here. I look for answers about 10 times a day I'd say and in 90% of the cases I found what I was looking for, in a few seconds, for free. I also post answers when I found old questions and the answers are outdated or not complete. I know it helps other people cause I usually get 1-10 upvotes / year for those answers on old questions. Mostly about python, sql, postgres, js, react, aws and docker, so popular topics. I rarely have to post questions on my own, usually cause it's already asked and answered, or cause I'm experienced enough to find the solutions on my own or somewhere else.
Anyway, have been using SO for 12 years and still think it's great.
It's clear that SO adds a ton of value in general, and I've frequently found it useful when I'm working with a new and unfamiliar piece of technology and can't quite figure something out. I've found it to be sort of annoying as an answerer, though, and don't really hang out there looking for interesting questions to answer anymore.
The biggest problem is that some people treat it like a game of Jeopardy, except with no penalty for incorrect answers. This is especially true when the questions are dealing with weird corner cases in languages or libraries - it often looks like there is an obvious answer, but it isn't always so simple.
I used to take the time to get the code running on my machine (if it was simple enough), figure out what was wrong, fix it, and then take the time to try to educate the person asking, rather than simply telling them what code to paste in to fix it.
This takes time, and in while I was working on it, you'd have someone come in, and blurt out some guess as to why it wasn't working, then edit their answer a bunch of times and maybe eventually get it right. I don't know why, but it always bothered me to see someone who guessed around (and maybe looked at better answers in the meantime) getting credit for really sloppy work.
I guess I don't know how you'd fix that, and it doesn't seem to be a big enough of a problem to keep the site from being useful, but it is still kind of annoying.
I am on SO and a few sister sites for 7 or 8 years now. Only 40k points or so.
I asked "dumb" questions on issues I could not really voice out as I was not understanding them clearly. In the vast majority of the cases I got helpful answers starting with "what you are looking for is called xxx". THANK YOU for these answers because I discovered new concepts.
I also asked questions with pseudo code telling what problem I have, togther with descriptions of the issue (and screenshots, tracebacks etc). I was using pseudocode because the codebase was large and it was not realistic to get a minimally working code.
But the problrm was not specific to my software, I knew it was more general but could not pinpoint the exact issue. “Post your code!" was the answer he explaining that it was notveasy was let with diwnvotes, close flags and whatnot.
So the experience really depends on the day. Still I find that the knowledge people have and share is extraordinary, especially for amateur coders like myself.
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.
I very much agree with Joel in that SO is about, at least to me, acting as some kind of centralized destination where I know that somebody has had the same problem I'm currently experiencing, has asked it before, and has been given an answer or a few by the community. If no such question has been asked, I'll ask it because chances are somebody else will want to ask it down the line. SO is unlikely EE in that anyone in the community answers a question, and popular ones generally become community wiki answers, and I know the former to be true because after much learning, I (as a self-perceived noob) started answering quite a few questions and have built up a reputation. Do I think I wasted time in doing so? Of course not, I've helped others and I've helped keep the Rails community noob friendly. That and I can show off my earned reputation to any future potential employers.
I use SO all the time for gleaning information from the answers, but never for asking questions, for this very reason. The questions that show up in search results are full of great answers and information, but mine ended up full of people who didn't know the answer to my question but were eager to tell me about something they did know. Then I'd put more and more effort into providing context and justifying the question, until eventually the answers dried up. I decided I was better off seeking help on mailing lists, issue trackers, chat rooms, etc.
It depends on the problem. Of course, I always have a decent shot at it myself first, but if the problem is easy to describe and is most likely just a case of knowing some trick I post it fairly quickly. I see nothing wrong with that - that's what SO is for and it's great at what it does.
If it would take a significant amount of effort to distill the problem to something that can be described on SO then I'd spend a lot more time trying to figure it out first. Not only would it take more time to post, but it's also less likely to get answers and those answers are less likely to be useful.
Before SO, you had to visit blogs, forums and "programming resources" websites of vastly varying quality. Most of the examples were poorly formatted and not very elaborately explained. Most forums were run by well-knit communities and had a somewhat hostile attitude to newcomers asking a single question.
This is not an issue in SO – if you write a well-formatted and clear question that may also be beneficial to other people, no one is going to look down on you for having 1 reputation point. You can also find reliable answers to common problems, since these posts become very popular and have strong peer review. An answer at the top with a few hundred upvotes is pretty much "copy-paste safe" :-)
The negative side is that people become too lazy and stop bothering with reading long documentation and articles, which can, IMO, help you build the big picture better, in case you can afford the time.
I use it as my own personal knowledge base. I only post things that I have figured out and haven't been asked before, basically answering my own questions.
I feel the opposite: SO posts are often the launching-off point for me to find the even more detailed stuff. Your feeling that things were somehow better when they were worse, is I feel, misguided. Developers learning answers to specific questions allows them to be better faster.
While I've experienced something similar too, I think it may have more to do with the fact that tech has diversified in the absolute sense. An obsecure question about your processor was easily answered in the past because everyone had tinkered with it. Today a question about a bolted-on feature in <insert tool of the year> might not receive an answer because so little experts on SO use it.(?) I've got no clue if this explains it, but it makes more sense to me than the idea that SO's attention/incentive span is so short that users are only spending time on 5-minutes-typing questions.
SO has helped me to ask questions well. It doesn't always prevent the patronizing, snippy slaps, but helps a lot.
I've asked almost twice as many questions on SO as I've answered. It's a valuable resource to me, and I appreciate it.
I do try to give back, and usually try to paraphrase questions that I'm not sure about, like "If you are trying to get X working, then here's how I did it." I've learned to try to remove as many "you"s as possible, and keep it focused on my experience and point of view, qualifying it as such. It does, sometimes lead to people accusing me of "Making it all about you," but it also removes elements of judgment.
Interesting. I have an opposite view - for me it was easier to find answers before SO. One good example is when you need to get a library recommendation (which is quite a useful thing for a programmer). "SO is Q&A site and doesn't do library recommendations" (literal quote from someone who has closed such a question). The problem is that most of the programmers nowadays hang on SO, so other sites (where such questions would be allowed) have much less audience than they did pre-SO. Sure, I can disguise the question and hope that I will get library recommendations nevertheless, but that's an (ugly) hack.
There are countless other examples where well-researched, popular and in some way contributing questions were shot down because they are unfit for SO.
And as others have pointed out, most karma comes from answers to popular questions, which rewards generic questions which probably have tons of similar answers across the Internet. Domain specific answers however are less awarding.
I cope with that in my way. I ask the questions and treat fairly all who answer / comment, but I hold myself back when I see a question I know the answer to. Why would I answer and help SO? I really hope some alternative arises so I can share my knowledge there, but until then I will just try to survive with SO. And what "if all did that"? Well, I guess the alternative would come much sooner. I wouldn't be unhappy about it, far from it.
I think you're missing the point. Sure, getting "karma" is a fun aspect of SO, but I think what's beautiful about the site is the "give and take" aspect. Every programmer brings a different set of knowledge to the site, and every programmer also brings a different set of needs. And as long as people are not just using SO as tool for consumption, then the system is mutually beneficial for everyone. So, yes, while answering questions on the site does not pay the bills, what does pay the bills is my full time job as a developer. And I have been greatly helped in that job due to people donating their time, effort, and knowledge into SO. And that is why I don't see it as a waste of time to answer others' questions on the site or contribute to this documentation.
The big benefit to me with SO is that with a question with multiple answers, the top up voted question likely works, since those votes are probably people that tried it. I also like the 'well, actually' responses and follow up, because people point out performance issues or edge cases I may or may not care about.
I only find current LLMs to be useful for code that I could easily write, but I am too lazy to do so. The kind of boilerplate that can be verified quickly by eye.
I generally agree with all your points, but I also remember the forum posts and I find that SO has at least one big advantage over those: it's really quick to pick out a good answer compared to a long thread. Just the fact that a) answers are clearly demarcated vs comments and b) the author can select a "correct" answer makes them way more skimmable than, say, a phpBB thread where every post looks the same.
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