
Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity? - yitchelle
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18539/has-stackoverflow-saved-billions-of-dollars-in-programmer-productivity
======
forgotAgain
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.

~~~
taspeotis

        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...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/desktop/bb762153\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

[2] Big red box:
[http://www.php.net/mysql_query](http://www.php.net/mysql_query)

~~~
chavesn
Why do people assume that RTFM does not have a cost?

In fact, it's probably higher than searching SO through Google. This is why
I'm hugely in favor of even basic questions getting answers on SO.

~~~
marvin
Way higher. Technical documentation is only in rare cases easy to read,
whereas SO answers are specifically incentivized to be easily accessible. And
any comparison assumes that you can get instantly to the right page of the FM
by making a web search, which is far from reality in most cases.

~~~
freehunter
I've tried out many different programming languages in an effort to be able to
"read" any language that comes my way (as a security researcher, I've noticed
malware authors tend not to write in enterprise Java). The only language I can
think of off the top of my head where the manual is the only thing you really
need is Lua. I don't know if it's just because it's so tiny or because it's a
well-written manual (or both), but it's lucky that this is the case because
finding Lua code examples isn't exactly easy.

Many other languages I've come across have oddities that pretty much require
asking someone who already knows the answer.

------
leoedin
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).

~~~
rtb
It is both!

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.

~~~
reledi
> The magic of their voting system and google's search algorithms converts the
> latter into the former.

In addition to that, there's a lot of peer review going on. First posts, late
answers, low quality posts, suggested edits, and so on are all reviewed by the
community. Once you start reviewing, you'll quickly notice lots of shoddy
content.

~~~
vorg
> you'll quickly notice lots of shoddy content

Some programming language and software product vendors encourage quantity
rather than quality in questions posted to Stack Overflow because various
popularity rankings use the number of Stack Overflow questions as one criteria
when calculating rank.

------
dccoolgai
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.

~~~
duaneb
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.

~~~
rrich
I agree with you, but several people I have encountered don't feel this way.
For instance I had someone try to explain how using HAML made their developers
more valuable because of all the keystrokes they were saving. When you're
counting keystrokes as a developer productivity metric I can only wonder how
toxic the work environment becomes when you need to stop to look at
documentation yet alone use Google or SO.

~~~
subsection1h
Maybe that person's team is more productive with Haml not simply because of
the small amount of time that's saved by less typing, but because of the huge
amount of time that's saved by not needing to replace developers who are
institutionalized or commit suicide as a result of being forced to type HTML
tags like it's still 2005[1].

[1] The year before Haml was introduced.

~~~
rrich
I'm not saying HAML isn't of value. Please don't misunderstand me, I like
HAML. I use it for my template engine with Sinatra. But in the grand scheme of
things if using HAML to increase productivity by saving keystrokes is what the
company thinks is its competitive advantage, which is what they told me, then
how do they deal with someone spending time just researching (i.e.
stackoverflow, google) and thinking a problem and solution through thoroughly?
The two seem at odds to me.

------
jurassic
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.

~~~
icelancer
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.

~~~
tlogan
Exactly. If you have complex question (the actual problem) it will be
unanswered or downvoted to oblivion. That is logical because inexperienced
engineers don't know what they don't know and experienced ones will be wisely
silent. And the worst thing is that some answers are wrong but since they are
upvoted so they seem "right" (the joke is that all javascript questions are
answered with "use jQuery").

So in short: if you are novice engineer (or novice in certain field) then
StackOverflow might help. If you are experienced engineer, stackoverflow is
useless.

~~~
i_s
Does John Carmack count as experienced? Because he is the guy who made the
claim we're talking about.

~~~
billmalarky
tlogan was not saying SO was not valuable, he specifically said that it did
not provide much value for experienced programmers. SO can still provide value
to the masses of less experienced programmers out there and be extremely
valuable.

In my experience I have found this to be true. When first starting out
stackoverflow was crucial to my learning process, now it seems I've answered
all of my own questions the last year or so. And I wouldn't even claim to be
extremely experienced. Thus, SO has certainly become significantly less
valuable to me, but I would have never gotten this far without SO.

~~~
i_s
I know. My point was that the fact that John Carmack was the one who said this
suggests that he still finds it useful for himself, even though he is an
experienced programmer. That is not conclusive proof, of course, just
something to think about.

My take is that experience only lowers the value of SO for the particular
platform(s) you have experience in. I've found SO very valuable in the last
couple of years even though I'm (in general) not a newbie anymore, because
I've had to build software for many different platforms like ruby, mac cocoa,
ios cocoa, and windows (C#/WPF and C++).

------
lukev
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.

~~~
pavs
In my case, nine times out of ten my questions are closed down by overzealous
mods. I still find SO very useful but not for asking questions.

~~~
denzil_correa
> In my case, nine times out of ten my questions are closed down by
> overzealous mods.

You may not be following the guidelines.

~~~
pavs
It is possible that I wasn't following the guidelines at least in some cases.
But I vaguely remember is some of the cases where a simple paraphrase of a
sentence would have been enough. Questions were simply closed wasn't allowed
to edit and a link to TOS violation without any specific reasons what I did
wrong.

Its been a while since I asked questions over there. Haven't logged in for a
long time but I do find useful answer through google search quite often. I
just don't ask questions. I think its a major annoyance when you spend decent
amount of time writing questions only to get your question closed with vague
reasons. Maybe I had some bad luck and things might have gotten better? Who
knows.

------
stiff
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.

------
chrisparnin
We've been researching at what resources developers actually use when browsing
the web. The [initial results]([http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/03/api-
documentation/](http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/03/api-documentation/)) of
Android developers confirm Stack Overflow is highly consulted, often over
official documentation. We're seeing the same with data collected from [web
developers]([http://checkbox.io/studies/?id=51fac5175ec6012222000001](http://checkbox.io/studies/?id=51fac5175ec6012222000001)).

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/](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](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...](http://blog.leif.me/2013/11/how-software-developers-use-twitter/)) on
twitter usage, in some contexts, the subject matter and available of easily
accessible experts makes looking online less effective.

~~~
sklivvz1971
That's very interesting, thank you.

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
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.

------
kaffeinecoma
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.

~~~
laurent123456
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).

~~~
gabriel34
He said he ended up on his answer, therefore it's something he knew but
forgot. Nonetheless your observation still holds, as the obscurity of the
topic increases the chance of such coincidence both by the scarcity of content
on the matter and because he is more likely to forget little used information

------
itchitawa
Has Hacker News cost billions of dollars in programmer productivity? :P

~~~
easy_rider
They have probably subtracted billions of dollars of value from the world in
decreased programmer productivity. They probably level each other out.

------
EGreg
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.

~~~
pavanred
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.

~~~
the_af
What's wrong about the "is this homework" comment? Why would you (this is a
generic "you") expect someone else to answer your question _for free_ if you
haven't bothered to actually try solving it yourself? Where is the courtesy
and etiquette in that?

I think SO/SE's aggressive discouragement of leechers and high question-
closing rate makes their website better for everyone. Except the leechers and
"help vampires", that is.

------
mlangdon
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.

------
Groxx
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.

------
nextstep
There is probably a good number of visits from people not "at work" per se,
like students and hobbyists working on things in their free time.

------
fiatmoney
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.

------
JohnBooty
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.

------
wslh
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.

~~~
GalacticDomin8r
> I am 100% sure

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".

~~~
wslh
Looking at your comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=GalacticDomin8r](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=GalacticDomin8r)
it seems like you are a new kind of spell checker.

I am not writing a formal proof here in HN. I have proofs of what I said but
don't like to discuss them with you, your reply was rude.

I invented the QAOP acronym just to be funny and illustrate the concept. Your
answer reminds me of this Babbage letter:
[http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm](http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm)

------
moocowduckquack
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.

------
code_duck
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.

~~~
lukifer
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.

~~~
code_duck
They deserve credit for doing what they did, but it is for doing what they did
well, and not what some people confuse that with, which is making what people
do on their site possible.

------
ateevchopra
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".

------
halter73
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.

------
MichaelMoser123
For me StackOverflow is similar to wikipedia:

\- stackoverflow tends to have the most relevant answer when searching on a
programming problem .

\- wikipedia tends to have the most relevant answer when searching for
broader/more general knowledge, .

Also recently I took up adding details to answers on stackoverflow that help
me, or that have incomplete answers.

------
gesman
Nothing can beat a quick search and hitting the direct answer on even very
basic question.

SO saves time and nerves of countless newbies, myself included from RTFM-ing
through each vendor's convoluted ways of presenting messy instructions or
being abused on IRC by OP's :)

------
gabriel34
That is a really complex matter. However much time was saved it's value for
mankind, the value added depends on what the programmer does on the spare time
he gained from the increase in productivity and what value does mankind puts
in these activities.

(note that value for the world as stated in the question is a lot harder to
grasp)

At the end of the day it's a matter of knowing whether the programmer was the
bottleneck of the productive system he is a part of or if he had slack
capability.

EDIT: I was going to post a more complete answer, with references bells and
whistles, on Stack Overflow, but having never created an account there I
didn't have the 10 reps minimum. Kind of dumb for a question with zero answers
IMHO.

------
mring33621
I have been a professional Java programmer since 1999 and I am comfortable
stating publicly that StackOverflow can save a lot of time. In fact, I would
be willing to pay for it. However, I don't always agree with the 'accepted'
answers.

------
denzil_correa
Stackoverflow is a very good model for future Q&A websites. The aim of
Stackoverflow is not just to answer questions but in the process be the
largest software knowledge base of programming related topics. Personally, I
find Q&A based system very nice to learn and absorb information rather than
the traditional manuals/API docs.

Shameless plug - I did some analysis on closed (or low quality) questions on
Stackoverflow [0]. I owe immensely to Stackoverflow for my doctoral
dissertation.

[0] [http://bit.ly/GFNNLm](http://bit.ly/GFNNLm)

------
Fomite
StackOverflow saved me enough time that I ended up thanking the folks at SO
and CV who helped me in the Acknowledgements section of my dissertation.

Below my committee, but above the good people at Dr. Pepper.

------
sehugg
Pretty much, yes. In fact I wonder how you can release a complicated product
like a mobile device SDK nowadays without millions of eyes solving and
documenting problems.

I used to trace into disassembled library code to root cause issues. Now
that's somewhere between infeasible and impossible. On Android I can sometimes
look at the source to solve issues. On closed platforms I have to rely on cut-
and-paste from StackOverflow forums.

Commercial software vendors are lucky SO users are doing their documentation
and testing services for free.

------
hackula1
I found it hugely useful in the .Net world. With closed source, obscure errors
cannot be as easily tracked down, especially when they are not covered by MSDN
or a prominent blog. A couple years after switching to an open source stack, I
barely use it at all, and when I do finally hit a wall and ask a question, I
get an answer ~20% of the time (compared to 90%+ when I was in .Net). I am a
huge fan of SO, but good docs and readable code go a lot further.

------
rgovind
Stackoverflow is awesone and for me, it has saved me countless hours of
thinking, even on non mainstream platforms like FPGA design. That said, I hope
for one improvement. I would like to upload my code into a machine with a
command line...and those who are on stackoveflow can with login, try their
hands at it without having to ask me. This way, they will save time trying to
reproduce my sandbox.

------
ma2rten
I am always impressed by the amount of effort some people put in answering
stackoverflow questions.

I have sometimes been answering stackoverflow questions, that I happened to
come across and that I knew the answer to. I gave that up because my answers
stood next to other people's who obviously spend extensive amounts of time
researching and compiling their answer.

------
evanspa
SO has helped me tremendously in learning new languages. Java is the first
language I learned really well, and it's great to be able to ask SO questions
like: "What's the equivalent of an abstract class in Objective-C?" Answers to
questions like this aren't exactly easy to extract from the "manual."

------
patrickg
(Not read the article yet, just answering to the question for myself.)

I sometimes use stackexchange network (more precisely: tex.stackexchange.com)
to provide many, many answers and I have spent hours over hours there, mainly
to procrastinate. So, before reading the article, I'd say it evens out. But
stackoverflow really helps me a lot.

------
michalu
How can £45k per annum equal £12.5 per hour, what am I not getting? Is he
assuming average 69 hour work week?

~~~
agilebyte
Yeah, it is very rough:

a) 45k has not been the average for the years leading up to 2013.

b) 45k is pre tax, 33k is post tax.

c) I suspect that SO is used more frequently by people on the lower rungs of
the pay scale.

d) The average for "developer" (which is the biggest group in the stats) is
40k _.

As a side note, wow 45k is a massive number.

_
[http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/developer.do](http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/developer.do)

------
warmfuzzykitten
StackOverflow was indispensable for learning to code Python. Every single time
I googled a question, StackOverflow was right there at the top with a high-
quality answer. Sure, the Python docs mighta-coulda led me to the same answer,
but for searching efficiency StackOverflow won hands down.

------
dmourati
This first hit just got me working right away with vagrant.
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14404777/vagrant-
hostonly...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14404777/vagrant-hostonlyif-
create-not-working) I'd pay $1

------
GalacticDomin8r
Don't hurt yourself trying to pat you on the back. The vast majority of those
questions have already been answered by Google. Some people just like paying.

In other words, if you pay for something that you could get for free with just
a bit more effort, how is that saving money?

------
davidw
It's certainly a nice, central place to ask for help. That said, we got by
pretty well with mailing lists in the past. Stackexchange did a lot of work to
reduce the friction of asking and answering questions, but the basic mechanism
was there in the past.

------
ilovecookies
StackOverflow is good is some ways, but if you have a solid base knowledge of
programming you shouldn't really be looking there all the time in the first
place. It's a great website but it's also definitely made coders lazier.

~~~
the_af
Did you notice it was John Carmack who said what's in the title, right? Has
StackOverflow made John Carmack lazier?

Anyway, in his twitter TL he has an answer for a quip similar to yours:

> "people probably said similar things about books..."

Yup. Reading books has made people lazier, because if they had knowledge about
[topic] they shouldn't be reading about it anyway.

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mmgutz
Github has been a much more productive resource for me as well as blogs. Yes,
every now and then I find something valuable on StackOverflow but too many
times the question I want answered is deemed not worthy or the answer
outdated.

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zsombor
More likely it had merely promoted the quick and easy pop culture, where
people no longer take the time of reading a book. After all you can just use
google and look up your next short fix.

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thibaut_barrere
Oh I hear you! I can't say how much I regret all the time spent in the 700-800
pages of these Wrox or Addison-Wesley books trying to find that one line fix.
These were the good old days!

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InclinedPlane
Every Wrox book I've come across has been terrible. If I wanted to read raw
documentation I'd do that, when I spend hard money on a technical book I want
to benefit from some practical expertise and I don't want an infodump of
reference info that's already out of date by publication date.

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Jagat
Now that this has made it to the frontpage of HN, I'm waiting for someone to
write a post on the millions of dollars lost in productivity because of HN.

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V-2
Yes such is average pay in the US or the UK, but these happen to be the top
paying countries in the world. It's not average world pay for a programmer.

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dnKK
Is this a question? Or a user with 31k points using skeptics.stackexchange as
a blog host? The back of the envelope calculation was fun to read, though.

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coldtea
Yes, the same way a widespread virus is said to have costed "billions in lost
productivity" too.

That is, BS estimates of an essentially non measurable factor.

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NDizzle
Let's not forget that StackOverflow has basically replaced ExpertsExchange for
everything.

That alone is probably worth $1B+.

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enterx
"closed as not constructive"

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KaoruAoiShiho
Wikipedia, Youtube, Google, StackExchange, should all get world peace awards.

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geoka9
A donation should suffice (they are running a campaign now, BTW) :)

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stuartd
Two words you youngsters probably don't remember - Expert Sexchange..

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roryokane
What about it? I very much doubt that Experts Exchange saved billions of
dollars in programmer productivity. I was always annoyed at landing there from
searches before Stack Overflow existed. And it is/was much harder to use than
Stack Overflow is today.

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dreamdu5t
Pointless speculation. Value is not the same thing as a nominal price.
Individuals value things for their use in accomplishing certain ends. The
notion of aggregate value derived by summing arbitrary numbers is absurd and
meaningless.

If I define taking a piss as saving me $10/hour in productivity, then I can
arrive at a number of $2,847,000 saved by me urinating an average of 3 times a
day throughout my lifetime. That says nothing about productivity and clearly
my piss isn't worth $2,847,000.

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jackmaney
I'm certain that Stack Exchange in general--and Stack Overflow in particular--
has saved a huge amount in programmer productivity. However, what the OP
hasn't taken into account is that Stack Exchange sites can also suck up
potentially productive time, as well. Although this loss is difficult to
quantify, I'm sure it's not anywhere near the magnitude of time saved.

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xarien
Yes.

