A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that.
The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation. If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better. I'm thinking of msdn as an example since a lot of the Stack questions are MS technology based. MS is far from alone though. Much of the money saved has gone to vendors.
Even given those points it has still saved a lot of money. But billions? I don't know if it would be that much. It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.
The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation ... I'm thinking of msdn as an example
The number of questions on SO that can be answered by RTFM is quite remarkable. I think that points to a lot of the documentation being just fine. The last bug of my own I spent any significant of time on was answerable by RTFM [1].
There are plenty of PHP+MySQL questions that appear where the OP is clearly learning about PHP+MySQL and the code looks something like...
$result = mysql_query("select username, password from user where username = " . $username)
...shows that they haven't bothered to RTFM [2].
[1] I had made a new thread and was calling ShellExecute on it. It didn't work on some computers because I hadn't initialised COM (presumably they had some shell extensions installed). See the first sentence of "Remarks" http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb76...
When you answer questions and get points though you teach and that is the best training. Many times when I answer questions I find out more details and learn as well. Anytime a question is answered this is training investment for free really. It is also something that helps your programmer brand.
With open source and sites like stackoverflow, a single programmer can become a team of programmers/knowledge very quickly. It is part of what has made each programmer better I believe. On the flip it has also made programmers more lazy possibly. Finding an answer and being able to solve and provide an answer to the question are two key pillars to providing solutions. So I'd say question answerers and associated companies are getting more out of it.
> If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better.
Documentation quality had been declining for many years before SO -- I think its more accurate to say that if vendors were doing better, there would be no (or less interest in) StackOverflow than the other way around.
I find the opposite with iOS/Apple programming. Often I'll be looking for something on Stack Overflow only to find the true answer lurking somewhere in one of Apple's guides or example apps lol. But if there's a Stack Overflow answer, it's often exactly what I was looking for, and that can't be undervalued!
I know programmers at microsoft who use SO as an intern.
They just post questions about strange windows problems they can't work around. Somebody on SO will respond with a 1,000 word essay with 500 lines of code about it within a day, thus solving their problem with no employee time "wasted" by thinking or researching or paying for anything additional resources.
> A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that.
Agreed, however one answer will help many developers, which should more than offset the initial effort
> The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation.
Documentation has not deteriorated, in my opinion. In fact, a point could be made that it is now much easier for small vendors to have outstanding developer support through stack overflow. A lot of open source project use it as the main support line.
> It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.
It is probably correlated to the time spent on the site, but the money saved is certainly not related, as users don't gain any reputation by reading answers or simply browsing the site.
dead on with the cost of wasted time through gamification. And many questions on SO can be answered with ~10 mins of extra thought. It's a good reference though, as someone mentioned. Makes a manual searchable, basically, with a bit of layman explanation.
I get bitter though because any time I post a question that actually requires thought (can't be answered by checking an API) it ends up getting downvoted because you well... actually have to read a paragraph to understand it, I assume. That site has an uncanny ability to trash anything of value so a lot of the time I spend on it I wish I just spent reading programming theory instead of gleaning random bits of knowledge. I guess its enlightening though to see the level of developers & tech engagement in the different communities. It lets you see how active the community is and what level of quality the devs are, basically. (So... more questions doesn't necessarily mean better community...)
& o god lets not even get into the amount of wasted time spent wanting to claw your eyes out when someone (especially mods) say some horribly arrogant thing responding to some imaginary version of your question (i guess they read 2 or 3 words from each sentence?). or they point out some semantic reason why theoretically they're right even though in practice they're wrong and the theory doesn't actually support their argument, it's just agnostic... chills
Google did this as well. It's extremely annoying. They're basically telling users to "Fuck off, we don't have time for you. Go ask your questions somewhere else."
I was always under the impression that Stack Overflow was an information-dense bible of programming knowledge. Having recently started attempting to answer some questions on there, I quickly realised that it is in fact, in line with every Q&A website, filled to the brim with idiots with barely any understanding of programming whatsoever.
What they do fantastically well is quickly push the stupid questions out of the way and let the good ones float to the top (on the site and in search rankings).
We found a fairly highly ranked "ticked" answer to a question yesterday (it was on keeping the heading rows of tables visible during scrolling) and immediately thought: (1) this answer seems stupid, (2) we can think of better solutions. Within thirty minutes we had two superior proof-of-concepts working and had found a decent off-the-shelf solution.
What Stack Overflow is great at is SEO (not sure if this is organic or deliberate or both). This at least tends to pull interested eyeballs in a kind-of similar direction. What happens then is anyone's guess.
1) Highly ranked answers are often horribly wrong. People asking common questions are, presumably, often being pulled to these answers and treating them as gospel.
2) Once an answer gets "ticked" (even when hopelessly wrong) there's very little that can happen to fix it.
3) Stack Overflow is (actively or passively) good at appearing in Google search results, but not at converging like threads; which thread appears in a search is far from stable, so two similar searches can take you to completely different threads.
4) The depth and quality of threads seems highly language-correlated. E.g. the PHP threads I've seen seem to mainly consist of someone posting bad code they've written and having it debugged by someone else. Javascript discussions are of a much higher quality. Obj-C discussions are another level or two beyond that. (Which says something... perhaps about the awfulness of PHP's error messages.)
In my experience, when I need information, I google with some keywords, and then land on a Stack Overflow page where my question has already been asked and answered. Thus I almost never see the questions and answers by the idiots.
Sometimes I ask questions, and usually receive good answers, but it may take a day or two.
You are always going to have people of different skill levels, including those you call idiots. Now if it's a basic question it will likely get answered but if it's incoherent rambling then there isn't much the community can do. Except maybe teach people to ask better questions.
I know it's fashionable in certain circles to rag on it lately, but I'm not too big to admit it has saved me a lot of time here and there over the last 4-5 years. I would bet a lot of devs use it more than they would admit to check down on things throughout the course of any given project.
Billions seems like a lot, but I wouldn't call BS on it out of hand.
What on earth is bad about using StackOverflow? You're expected to google around to find solutions anyway, if anything I would think much less of the programmer who tried to avoid it. It's stupid pride when it's such a valuable resource.
I feel like StackOverflow is a blade that cuts both ways. I find it's most useful for troubleshooting really cryptic/obscure error messages that I would undoubtably blow through huge amounts of time trying to solve on my own; those are the type of problems I'm not sure I would ever get through without help from wizardly members of community.
But for other answers, to the kind of lazy questions that save me the momentary hassle of consulting the docs, it's also kept me from the serendipitous learning that should happen in that process. Since knowledge compounds and makes it easier to learn other things later, overall I'd say the "lazy questions" on SO definitely have a significant learning opportunity cost.
Will it be a net productivity gain over my lifetime, including learning opportunity cost? Probably, but only because of those insane bugs I'd never solve on my own.
Edit to clarify: I'm not the one asking the "lazy questions" without looking around. But these SO results often rank higher than official docs for my google queries.
StackOverflow has been the opposite for me. I am someone who reads the man pages and does a lot of experimentation before turning to a Q&A site, I fully document what happened, the expected result, and the deviations between the two, and my hypotheses on why it happened, then post.
As a result something like 85% of my questions go unanswered or are eventually answered by myself. I have stopped answering my own questions on SO because some of the questions I ask and do legwork on I feel I should be paid for since it's shitty lack of documentation from the vendors, so screw them.
I believe it. And that's not even counting looking up answers or getting your questions answered.
When I am truly stumped, I immediately start drafting a comprehensive SO question. Nine times out of ten, clearly enunciating the problem leads me directly to the answer and I never even post it.
If you're feeling generous, go ahead and post the question anyway, along with the answer you found. That's very much encouraged, and very helpful to people searching for answers later.
On multiple occasions I've searched for an answer, found it on S.O., thought "this seems vaguely familiar," and then realized that it was my own answer from a couple years prior.
There are two assumptions here that are untrue and changing them would change the order of magnitude of the answer:
- That as soon as an answer to something is on StackOverflow, it isn't available anywhere else
- That every pageview on an answer saves someone 10$. Everyone running any kind of webpage knows how small of a percentage of the views is from people really trying to use it at all, and likely even among those a large fraction does not have any particular problem, but just view those "top 100 books" etc. mini-articles.
Costs need to think in terms of the entire ecosystem: the time spent creating the answers, the time spent writing official documentation that isn't consulted, and the time saved finding the answer faster.
Many technical writers and documentation teams from large corporations have been reaching out to me on this topic, they are definitely interested in learning how to adapt their processes based on Stack Overflow's success.
But not everything is roses. Providing answers can be [slow](http://blog.ninlabs.com/2012/05/crowd-documentation/), unanswered questions are rising, and [users stop doing actions](http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~scott/papers/MSR2013.pdf) that lead to badges as soon as they achieve them. On recent field study at a large industrial company, when learning WPF, they relied on books, and internal seminars to learn new concepts because Stack Overflow at the time did not have sufficient saturation on examples yet. As seen with [another study](http://blog.leif.me/2013/11/how-software-developers-use-twit...) on twitter usage, in some contexts, the subject matter and available of easily accessible experts makes looking online less effective.
I work at Stack Overflow and we are very liberal in sharing our data when it doesn't involve PII. If there is any way I can help you, I am sklivvz@ our domain name.
I think stackoverflow is more than just sum of it parts. Solutions presented there are not just provided by experts, they are reviewed by experts, and if someone has a better solution, it has a really high chance to boil to the top. Portion of experts will recognize that and adopt superior solution. This will keep driving code quality and standards of participants up.
Or at least so my reasoning goes. So to answer the question, I believe it had done much more than that - stackoverflow drove people to improve their technical knowledge, and that is priceless.
I'm still waiting for someone to coin a term for when you google around for a problem and end up at your OWN answer on SO from a year or so earlier. This happens more often than I'd like to admit.
I'm incredibly thankful for the many, many hours that SO has saved me personally.
Actually, if your question is about an obscure enough topic, you'll get your own question within seconds on Google. It's a kind of loop - search on Google desperately without finding anything; turn to SO and ask a question. Since probably nobody will answer soon, in the meantime search more on Google... and you find your own question on top (and feel just a bit more desperate).
It's simple. For every minute a developer spends writing an answer, many people read the answer. So if the best answers are voted to the top, and there is little duplication, the site has saved a lot of programmers time.
SO is a wonderful site, I remember the days before SO when I used to get annoyed by sites like Experts Exchange that required a paid membership. Though, I agree SO has saved a lot of time with a great source for common questions and best answers, great answers. But, I also have to say that for many developers, specially in their early days, it provides a lazy alternative to learning.
A lazy debugging practice is to find a question that generally has a subject line almost exactly the same as the error message and pick the first answer, without even trying to understand it. I see the difference personally when I worked on .Net/Java and when I was working on a applet for Gnome. The latter is not very popular and so I have to resort to documentation, IRC etc. I might spend more time initially but I end up reading the documentation, develop a better understanding and even create my own snippets which in turn save me time eventually. To summarize, SO saves time but one might tend to leech on to it instead of learning. I guess some metric of how many times a person revisits the same question might be a good indicator of this.
Not to mention how many times I have seen a comment like, is this homework; show me what you tried, instead of an answer.
Just FYI, if you are making $10 per hour programming in the US please Google "salary entry level <your job> <your nearest metro area>" and tell your boss what you find out.
One hour saved per land-on-answered-question is being incredibly generous, in my experience. Generally I need a dozen or so "answered" questions to get one that's both relevant and even remotely correct.
Even with that though, it has undeniably saved me time. All told though, possibly not as much as Google results for blogs talking about similar things, which usually have a lot more context so you can determine if it's still accurate or not. SO has huge bit-rot problems.
From an econometric perspective evaluating these kinds of things is fun. I would guess that any productivity gains would be concentrated in the most difficult-to-answer questions, that you can otherwise spend hours / days trying to debug or understand. "20 hours for 5% of questions" is probably a more accurate characterization, although it would work out the same.
It's probably saved my sanity more than it's saved (or made) me money.
If not for SO I probably would have had a lot of 12-hour days of frustration that wound up only being 8-hour days of frustration.
Which is good, like life-improvingly good, because project timelines and estimates don't often budget for the kinds of bizarro problems that sometimes only have solutions on Stack Overflow.
I am 100% sure that SO makes my employees and me more productive. QAOP (Question and Answer Oriented Programming) boosts the productivity significantly.
But I think in the long term, when everybody incorporates the same QAOP skills all developers will compete at the same level and new productivity horizons will came.
> QAOP (Question and Answer Oriented Programming) boosts the productivity significantly.
First Google results don't even know what this is.
Listen, I actually think your claims have merit, but the way you present them is "crap, crap, mega crap". Please cite something we can take take to the manager or test or vet in some other way. Otherwise you comment is just "ME RIGHT. ME SELL YOU SOMETHING".
It did improve programmer productivity, but Hacker News has sort of evened things out by wrecking it again through an advanced form of continuous nerd-sniping.
It is the internet and www in general that enables people to be connected and share ideas. There's no reason to credit specific sites like Facebook or eBay with connecting people, because someone else would have done it (possibly better) if they had not.
I think there's plenty of credit to go around. Stack Overflow's fundamental decisions (gamification, open content, canonicity, searchability) were very significant in releasing valuable knowledge from the arcane vaults of obscure forums and mailing lists, not to mention creating a reliable(-ish) place to go for new questions. The project also represents an interesting template for community curation (which was begun well before launch), that can be learned from by other projects and startups.
Obviously, someone will always build a better mousetrap eventually. They still deserve credit for actually doing it.
It is language and written language that enables people to be connected and share ideas. There's no reason to credit specific networks like www or the internet with connecting people, because someone else would have done it (possibly better) if they had not.
I guess the best thing about stack overflow is how helpful the community is. They will help you with anything and even virtually shout on you if required. I guess it has made me the programmer that I am today. But I still have a journey ahead of me and that isn't gonna be without stack overflow.
I remember when I was using stack overflow for the first time, I asked a really silly question, and got my answer within 1 minute. I thanked that person for helping me with such a simple question, but his reply changed my thinking about the communities and why they help each other.
He just said : "no probs, someone did that for me too".
[+] [-] forgotAgain|12 years ago|reply
The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation. If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better. I'm thinking of msdn as an example since a lot of the Stack questions are MS technology based. MS is far from alone though. Much of the money saved has gone to vendors.
Even given those points it has still saved a lot of money. But billions? I don't know if it would be that much. It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.
[+] [-] taspeotis|12 years ago|reply
There are plenty of PHP+MySQL questions that appear where the OP is clearly learning about PHP+MySQL and the code looks something like...
...shows that they haven't bothered to RTFM [2].[1] I had made a new thread and was calling ShellExecute on it. It didn't work on some computers because I hadn't initialised COM (presumably they had some shell extensions installed). See the first sentence of "Remarks" http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb76...
[2] Big red box: http://www.php.net/mysql_query
[+] [-] drawkbox|12 years ago|reply
With open source and sites like stackoverflow, a single programmer can become a team of programmers/knowledge very quickly. It is part of what has made each programmer better I believe. On the flip it has also made programmers more lazy possibly. Finding an answer and being able to solve and provide an answer to the question are two key pillars to providing solutions. So I'd say question answerers and associated companies are getting more out of it.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|12 years ago|reply
Documentation quality had been declining for many years before SO -- I think its more accurate to say that if vendors were doing better, there would be no (or less interest in) StackOverflow than the other way around.
[+] [-] cclogg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seiji|12 years ago|reply
They just post questions about strange windows problems they can't work around. Somebody on SO will respond with a 1,000 word essay with 500 lines of code about it within a day, thus solving their problem with no employee time "wasted" by thinking or researching or paying for anything additional resources.
[+] [-] sklivvz1971|12 years ago|reply
Agreed, however one answer will help many developers, which should more than offset the initial effort
> The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation.
Documentation has not deteriorated, in my opinion. In fact, a point could be made that it is now much easier for small vendors to have outstanding developer support through stack overflow. A lot of open source project use it as the main support line.
> It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.
It is probably correlated to the time spent on the site, but the money saved is certainly not related, as users don't gain any reputation by reading answers or simply browsing the site.
[+] [-] baddox|12 years ago|reply
That's not a contradiction to the claim that wealth has been created. Of course it has to go somewhere.
[+] [-] fat0wl|12 years ago|reply
I get bitter though because any time I post a question that actually requires thought (can't be answered by checking an API) it ends up getting downvoted because you well... actually have to read a paragraph to understand it, I assume. That site has an uncanny ability to trash anything of value so a lot of the time I spend on it I wish I just spent reading programming theory instead of gleaning random bits of knowledge. I guess its enlightening though to see the level of developers & tech engagement in the different communities. It lets you see how active the community is and what level of quality the devs are, basically. (So... more questions doesn't necessarily mean better community...)
& o god lets not even get into the amount of wasted time spent wanting to claw your eyes out when someone (especially mods) say some horribly arrogant thing responding to some imaginary version of your question (i guess they read 2 or 3 words from each sentence?). or they point out some semantic reason why theoretically they're right even though in practice they're wrong and the theory doesn't actually support their argument, it's just agnostic... chills
[+] [-] john2x|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] leoedin|12 years ago|reply
What they do fantastically well is quickly push the stupid questions out of the way and let the good ones float to the top (on the site and in search rankings).
[+] [-] Tloewald|12 years ago|reply
What Stack Overflow is great at is SEO (not sure if this is organic or deliberate or both). This at least tends to pull interested eyeballs in a kind-of similar direction. What happens then is anyone's guess.
1) Highly ranked answers are often horribly wrong. People asking common questions are, presumably, often being pulled to these answers and treating them as gospel.
2) Once an answer gets "ticked" (even when hopelessly wrong) there's very little that can happen to fix it.
3) Stack Overflow is (actively or passively) good at appearing in Google search results, but not at converging like threads; which thread appears in a search is far from stable, so two similar searches can take you to completely different threads.
4) The depth and quality of threads seems highly language-correlated. E.g. the PHP threads I've seen seem to mainly consist of someone posting bad code they've written and having it debugged by someone else. Javascript discussions are of a much higher quality. Obj-C discussions are another level or two beyond that. (Which says something... perhaps about the awfulness of PHP's error messages.)
[+] [-] sampo|12 years ago|reply
Sometimes I ask questions, and usually receive good answers, but it may take a day or two.
[+] [-] rtb|12 years ago|reply
In search results it is an information-dense bible of programming knowledge.
If you click on the feed of newly asked questions, it is filled to the brim with idiots with barely any understanding of programming whatsoever.
The magic of their voting system and google's search algorithms converts the latter into the former.
[+] [-] johnward|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldarchon|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dccoolgai|12 years ago|reply
Billions seems like a lot, but I wouldn't call BS on it out of hand.
[+] [-] duaneb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jurassic|12 years ago|reply
But for other answers, to the kind of lazy questions that save me the momentary hassle of consulting the docs, it's also kept me from the serendipitous learning that should happen in that process. Since knowledge compounds and makes it easier to learn other things later, overall I'd say the "lazy questions" on SO definitely have a significant learning opportunity cost.
Will it be a net productivity gain over my lifetime, including learning opportunity cost? Probably, but only because of those insane bugs I'd never solve on my own.
Edit to clarify: I'm not the one asking the "lazy questions" without looking around. But these SO results often rank higher than official docs for my google queries.
[+] [-] icelancer|12 years ago|reply
As a result something like 85% of my questions go unanswered or are eventually answered by myself. I have stopped answering my own questions on SO because some of the questions I ask and do legwork on I feel I should be paid for since it's shitty lack of documentation from the vendors, so screw them.
[+] [-] GalacticDomin8r|12 years ago|reply
That is a feeling, not a thought.
http://www.wildmind.org/applied/depression/distinguishing-th...
[+] [-] lukev|12 years ago|reply
When I am truly stumped, I immediately start drafting a comprehensive SO question. Nine times out of ten, clearly enunciating the problem leads me directly to the answer and I never even post it.
[+] [-] Stratoscope|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] micmcg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdludlow|12 years ago|reply
Saved me time the second time around I guess.
[+] [-] stiff|12 years ago|reply
- That as soon as an answer to something is on StackOverflow, it isn't available anywhere else
- That every pageview on an answer saves someone 10$. Everyone running any kind of webpage knows how small of a percentage of the views is from people really trying to use it at all, and likely even among those a large fraction does not have any particular problem, but just view those "top 100 books" etc. mini-articles.
[+] [-] chrisparnin|12 years ago|reply
Costs need to think in terms of the entire ecosystem: the time spent creating the answers, the time spent writing official documentation that isn't consulted, and the time saved finding the answer faster. Many technical writers and documentation teams from large corporations have been reaching out to me on this topic, they are definitely interested in learning how to adapt their processes based on Stack Overflow's success.
But not everything is roses. Providing answers can be [slow](http://blog.ninlabs.com/2012/05/crowd-documentation/), unanswered questions are rising, and [users stop doing actions](http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~scott/papers/MSR2013.pdf) that lead to badges as soon as they achieve them. On recent field study at a large industrial company, when learning WPF, they relied on books, and internal seminars to learn new concepts because Stack Overflow at the time did not have sufficient saturation on examples yet. As seen with [another study](http://blog.leif.me/2013/11/how-software-developers-use-twit...) on twitter usage, in some contexts, the subject matter and available of easily accessible experts makes looking online less effective.
[+] [-] sklivvz1971|12 years ago|reply
I work at Stack Overflow and we are very liberal in sharing our data when it doesn't involve PII. If there is any way I can help you, I am sklivvz@ our domain name.
[+] [-] TrainedMonkey|12 years ago|reply
Or at least so my reasoning goes. So to answer the question, I believe it had done much more than that - stackoverflow drove people to improve their technical knowledge, and that is priceless.
[+] [-] kaffeinecoma|12 years ago|reply
I'm incredibly thankful for the many, many hours that SO has saved me personally.
[+] [-] laurent123456|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itchitawa|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easy_rider|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavanred|12 years ago|reply
A lazy debugging practice is to find a question that generally has a subject line almost exactly the same as the error message and pick the first answer, without even trying to understand it. I see the difference personally when I worked on .Net/Java and when I was working on a applet for Gnome. The latter is not very popular and so I have to resort to documentation, IRC etc. I might spend more time initially but I end up reading the documentation, develop a better understanding and even create my own snippets which in turn save me time eventually. To summarize, SO saves time but one might tend to leech on to it instead of learning. I guess some metric of how many times a person revisits the same question might be a good indicator of this.
Not to mention how many times I have seen a comment like, is this homework; show me what you tried, instead of an answer.
[+] [-] TrainedMonkey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlangdon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Groxx|12 years ago|reply
Even with that though, it has undeniably saved me time. All told though, possibly not as much as Google results for blogs talking about similar things, which usually have a lot more context so you can determine if it's still accurate or not. SO has huge bit-rot problems.
[+] [-] nextstep|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatmoney|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnBooty|12 years ago|reply
If not for SO I probably would have had a lot of 12-hour days of frustration that wound up only being 8-hour days of frustration.
Which is good, like life-improvingly good, because project timelines and estimates don't often budget for the kinds of bizarro problems that sometimes only have solutions on Stack Overflow.
[+] [-] wslh|12 years ago|reply
But I think in the long term, when everybody incorporates the same QAOP skills all developers will compete at the same level and new productivity horizons will came.
[+] [-] GalacticDomin8r|12 years ago|reply
Your 100% certainty means nothing to me.
> makes my employees and me more productive.
A very strong claim.
> QAOP (Question and Answer Oriented Programming) boosts the productivity significantly.
First Google results don't even know what this is.
Listen, I actually think your claims have merit, but the way you present them is "crap, crap, mega crap". Please cite something we can take take to the manager or test or vet in some other way. Otherwise you comment is just "ME RIGHT. ME SELL YOU SOMETHING".
[+] [-] moocowduckquack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukifer|12 years ago|reply
Obviously, someone will always build a better mousetrap eventually. They still deserve credit for actually doing it.
[+] [-] arthur_debert|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ateevchopra|12 years ago|reply
I remember when I was using stack overflow for the first time, I asked a really silly question, and got my answer within 1 minute. I thanked that person for helping me with such a simple question, but his reply changed my thinking about the communities and why they help each other.
He just said : "no probs, someone did that for me too".