We're humbled hearing from folks like you - your willingness to give back is what makes it all work. Keep your money. But here's how you CAN help, right now: Sign up if you haven't, create a developer story, and when you ARE job-hunting, try Jobs. We I think you'll find it to be the most developer-friendly offering on the planet.
Just an anecdote from my experience — I am really enjoying the new Stack Overflow Developer Story. Mine is at [1] for example. While I do appreciate jobs, I'm a full-time independent contractor and not looking for a traditional job right now (though I have seen quality offers through SO Jobs).
That said, Developer Story / CV has been instrumental for me and has become my canonical resume. I'm a huge fan.
If I could make one feature request... it would be a way to indicate conference attendance. It's something I give extra credibility to, for both employers as sponsors / presenters and employees as attendees / speakers / volunteers, as not everyone is willing to put in the effort to give back. [You can see on my CV that I've tried to incorporate this as an "other" at the bottom, but it feels a little out of place.]
I'm a dev in the Developer Story/CV team and we appreciate the love <3 The conference attendance item idea is great, discussing it internally with our team right now. Thank you!
Can vouch for it. I found my current job through SO Careers, and now that we're trying to hire more people, we're finding a good number of our better candidates coming through our SO Careers posting.
I would love to use developer stories but more importantly, would like to integrate my dev story with my website (as this would also keep the "recommended reading" section up to date as well). If there was some way to do this (we can discuss options) without using an iframe, I would LOVE to do so.
Just to mention...I want this on my website & stackoverflow. Updating recommended reading is of a lower priority than having it on my website in the first place.
Regarding point 1, blowing off that question was an inside joke. I get why it comes off as dismissive and rude without context - it was originally an internal presentation - but the asker was Michael Pryor. He's Joel's co-founder at FogCreek and the CEO of Trello. It was playful banter between very senior peers.
I work at SO, and we couldn't agree more. This is one reason we're so excited about our upcoming launch of [Documentation](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/303865/warlords-of-d...). We think that together with developers like you, we can do for docs what the last generation kicked off for Q&A.
To your point: Today, many of the questions devs encounter are already covered, and covered pretty well on SO Q&A. This is obviously good for devs looking for solutions. But combined with the fact that most new questions - that haven't been asked before - are answered quickly,it's hard for users trying to get involved and contribute. That'll all change with Docs.
There will be tons of need for contributions, plus the system has more checks and peer support baked in, so it'll be easier to know your contribution will help, even if you're not sure it's complete, etc. We're really excited about how Docs will let more devs like you who want to pitch in be a part of it. I hope you'll give it a try.
I have actually found questions with no answer that I eventually found the answer for myself (either from another site, trial and error, luck, or frightening insight). I have zero ability to add an answer for these tough problems.
The easy questions get answered quickly because it's a game. I don't play that game, I work for a living. I have the knowledge to contribute the long tail value of SO if I was able but I am not. I'm not sure there's a solution but that's the gripe I have.
Not sure I understand what you mean "zero ability to add an answer." Why can't you answer the question that does not already have an answer? Or ask the question yourself and then answer it yourself?
I don't have enough "karma" to do anything useful on Stackoverflow. Apparently I have to do, as I said, a bunch of piddly bullshit things to earn enough to actually add useful content to the site.
I understand why, it's a spam prevention method, but it also keeps me from contributing.
He's my boss, so I'm super biased, but I can still share a primary-source perspective. I knew him for years before working here, and would say that both as a manager and a general human being, he's one of the genuinely best people I've ever known. From when he started Fogcreek, his and Michael's whole philosophy was to create an environment and mission that makes smart people actually love working there, and then get the hell out of their way. Here at SE, we've grown a ton since I've been here, but I can tell you our exec team spends a lot of time discussing how to ensure we maintain an environment where employees are actually excited to work. (I know that sounds goofy/cheesy/like BS, but talk to any of our devs or other employees; I think you'll find that just about all of us take great pride in what we do.)
As a startup entrepreneur which don't doubt about success and growth -- how could I ? ;) -- I am very interested in the work invested by the whole team in a sane and enjoyable workspace.
What are the trade-offs ? I always feel like only the exceptional rich companies can sustain such high standard of living, the same rich which will respond that it's the only way for keeping an healthy work in the end.
Seems like a never ending chicken and egg problem that I don't have time to solve, I have hard deadlines to manage... (it's slightly exaggerated, of course, but you got the picture)
Kind of you, but the real credit goes to all the people who donate their time and knowledge to help others. We (I work at SE) are incredibly excited to be able to use this investment to do even more for them.
Credit also goes to the promoters of programming languages with bugs and bad documentation. Some of them use Stack Overflow in lieu of providing their own reliable issue tracking hosting; some even actively increase tags on SO for their own language to help along programming language ranking systems. Some of these promoters even lose their own investment, which may even have been redirected to SE in the same boardroom discussion somewhere.
It sounds like what you're mainly describing is that it's hard to ask a question that isn't already answered on the site. (You can't close as a dupe unless the duplicate has answers.) From a "helping the most people learn" perspective, this sounds like a champagne problem: There's so many answers that it's hard to find something to ask that's not already covered.
From a community perspective, we do want all devs to be able to get involved in the site, so it's not ideal if the solution set is actually so comprehensive that it raises the bar for getting involved.
But I'm not too worried. SO still gets over ten thousand questions per day, which gives devs who want to contribute to the programming community a ton of opportunities to share answers and help. Plus, and new languages like swift leave a lot of blue ocean for asking new questions.
Don't get me wrong, our two biggest product priorities are focused on how we can make it easier for new users to get involved, and how we can ensure that more active users continue to feel appreciated and find it rewarding to share their knowledge on SO, where so many others can benefit from it. There's plenty more we can do on both fronts, but I'm not too worried that we're running out of ways for devs to contribute if they want to.
Disclosure: I work at Stack Exchange. I love Stack Exchange. I am not an unbiased observer of Stack Exchange. My mom says I and my company are special, and I believe her.
> so it's not ideal if the solution set is actually so comprehensive that it raises the bar for getting involved.
This is precisely what I'm concerned about. I also love SE MASSIVELY. But it does seem like there is a natural ceiling on the service which doesn't afflict others like wikipedia or facebook where content can be generated endlessly.
> But I'm not too worried. SO still gets over ten thousand questions per day
> focused on how we can make it easier for new users to get involved
"still" seems like the operative word. My question hinted at whether new content on the site was "still" accelerating. My very hand-wavy feeling is it isn't because everybody including newcomers are getting the vibe that everything is already solved (Swift, etc. always being a drop in the bucket compared to JS/PHP questions).
I've made the transition from low rep to decent rep (>5,000), and am finding my incentive to participate go down as more questions & answers seem barren and I get increasingly thwarted by militant members of the community.
> it does seem like there is a natural ceiling on the service which doesn't afflict others like wikipedia or facebook where content can be generated endlessly.
Software development, languages, toolkits, libraries, and frameworks are constantly evolving; there will always be new questions to answer, but they will require you to develop knowledge of those systems ahead of those asking the questions.
The really good questions are usually few and far between, but that's generally because the sorts of people who ask really good questions tend to be the kinds of people who are able to discover the solution without resorting to SO.
> The really good questions are usually few and far between, but that's generally because the sorts of people who ask really good questions tend to be the kinds of people who are able to discover the solution without resorting to SO.
> Software development, languages, toolkits, libraries, and frameworks are constantly evolving
Just make sure to never ask or answer anything related to this on SO. Only copy-pasted stack traces are allowed. Otherwise your thread will be locked and the mods will disperse the crowd.
As someone who works at SE, would you consider giving a bonus to unanswered questions? Anymore, I've noticed that many of my questions don't receive responses, or if they do, I'm unable to award an answer because they often don't solve the problem. I'm either pushing the envelope too hard, or I'm too fringe and people have trouble seeing what I'm getting at. But just because a question doesn't have an answer doesn't mean it's not important. Quite the contrary, I actually find the unanswered questions the most interesting. I’ve discovered some of the solutions myself days/weeks/months later and posted my own solution, which seems like something that should also have merit.
I feel that my low success rate is hurting my reputation on the site and preventing users from posting answers (I had someone say that my low solution rate deterred him/her from answering but can't find the comment).
The other thing that hurts is that I simply get distracted and never go back to review my questions/award answers. It would be nice if other users could confirm that something works and award the answer for me so I'm not penalized (perhaps by users with a certain rep level, or if a solution gets enough points, or enough time has passed).
I love SE/SO, but maybe someone could confirm that I'm not the only one having these troubles.
EDIT: this post is grumpier than I meant it to be! Sorry.
Imagine you have images turned off. You visit one of the sites. Obviously it's unusable because images are controls, but that's okay. But you notice that they're using a font colour that is very close to the background colour (eg light-medium blue on medium-blue) and then wanting to load an image in the background (white) that would provide the contrast.
You can't tell anyone because minimum karma requirements prevent making a meta-post.
Bug reports from naive users are probably horrible, but still, how many hoops do you want bug-reporters to jump through?
See this example for a hostile response to a reasonable question where it's assumed that people visiting the site need the buttons -- they don't. Most people will be reading questions and answers and will not have accounts.
The problem here appears to be that it's hard to report that the site's readability is poor with images turned off in your browser, in large part because the interface elements needed to do so (buttons) have images associated with their containers, etc.
We never want to make it harder than it has to be to share bugs or suggestions, and we do want to help as many people as we can. We especially want to help those trying to give us feedback to improve the product. The challenge is always prioritization. Today, the number of folks browsing without images is a very small percentage. We definitely want them to be able to benefit from users content, and ideally, we'd love it if they could post and report bugs, too, but it's just lower priority than some other places (where we can surely improve as well).
stop bullshiting please. Your site is racist as hell. I am from India and just because my name is Indian my questions are downvoted.
Then I created profile with american ( Christan ) name and same question have got 50+ upvotes.
Fact is that many of American scumbags , who in reality do nothing at their jobs and just show up for $$ between 8 to 4 have been dominating site for at least two years.
Another problem is ,every new question which your stupid moderators don't agree with are closed without regard irrespective of value of the question.
Its one thing to occasionally close the question but its another when you call every question poster stupid, opinion-based and especially judge based on nationality.
I have kept proof of how same people and their tone change when I post with american name.
My honest feedback is if you want to maintain the site quality stop judging question posters.
The term "mod" is a red herring here. The engine will auto-reverse obviously targeted voting, and the community team reverses cases too subtle for the engine to handle, but that are clearly personally targeted.
