Stack Exchange Is Now Stack Overflow

I probably would have found much more use for it in my first year or so as a programmer, but at least from my own experience, once I had familiarity with my tools and libraries, the kind of problems that require digging on the internet aren't the kind easily put into bite-sized Q&A.

Maybe it's different for people who did start with SO available; perhaps they're saving their cognitive load by outsourcing various snippets of information to SO, and I only internalised them because SO wasn't available.

That said, it IS good for more open-ended historical or state-of-the-art type questions; "why did language X adopt this paradigm?" or "how do people producing commercial software go about supporting multiple graphics hardware today?" kind of questions. If I get lucky, there are a handful of people with a real depth of knowledge who can give a valuable overview and insight, but those are a long way from the typical SO question.

I occasionally get and click on a Google result for the photography stack exchange, but I've rarely clicked on any results for the other Exchange sites for my non-technical searches.

It's a particular concern given they are exploring a "Documentation" site designed for such long form answers and presumably there will be more answers on the main page of the form "see this example of this Documentation page" and it will be interesting to see if some of the Rep systems and moderation policies adjust with that. On the flipside the Documentation site as proposed still encourages people to (re)create content that could exist elsewhere for Rep points and maybe to the detriment of useful community sites or existing documentation sites. Some of that will be wait and see as they move forward into the project, of course.

Finally, in a slightly different direction, as a somewhat unsuccessful game designer in a past life, I spent a lot of time thinking about point systems and incentive systems, and it's hard not to evaluate Stack Overflow's Rep through some of those filters. From those respects, Stack Overflow Rep is not bad, but sometimes concerning, largely in part from a reactionary position on myself that the "gamification" of the world is largely a bad thing, incentivizing in people sometimes the worst OCD tendencies and disincentivizing thoughtfulness or creativity. Stack Overflow Rep is definitely OCD incentivizing.

I had interviewers ask me about my Stack Overflow Rep, and for one thing its not hard to find, and for second thing many of my points are actually elsewhere in the Exchange network, which can be fun to explain. But it's also easy for me to worry what in fact they are really asking about if they are interested in such an arbitrary metric, as well known and "extensive" as it may be... (Particularly in a world of employers that forbid social media participation entirely, which would include things like Stack Overflow.)

I'm not sure whose is the better approach. I think the name change has a bigger impact on Alphabet (the shareholder shuffle, trying to get greater focus on "side projects" outside of the Google core search products) than it will on Stack Overflow. Certainly Stack Overflow doesn't seem to be doing it for outside shareholders, it seems like they are simply doing it to help coalesce their own corporate identity and how they talk about it amongst themselves. It might not directly impact the average developer in caring about their product offerings, but maybe it will help lead communications internally for them in making those product offerings better and selling those product offerings to themselves as important/core to their future. I certainly wish them luck in that case that the name change will indeed benefit their cultural stability and future.

Despite this trick, I don't remember finding any solution to my issues on this website.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch-enemy/