Stack Overflow and the Zeitgeist of Computer Programming
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Now you also need to know about theory, UI/UX, git, deploying servers, HTTP, scrum, software development process, testing.
Then you have to keep up to date with all of the trends and know which framework to use in which scenario.
So, I wrote all of that in a minute. You can just imagine how frustrating it is to learn all of that and be expected not to look at any help or reference. You have to be crazy to have expectations that high in expecting programmers not to use stack overflow.
You burn soo much cognitive resource if you don't use stack overflow. Also, it helps you learn soo much faster. If I go to AWS there is so much jargon in that documentation, which could literally be explained in a simple sentence. Oh and guess what, that simple explanation is in Stack Overflow.
I don't see it that way. I think once you've used a few frameworks and languages, you 'learn' the concepts, the patterns and the ideas. I've programmed professionally in more than a dozen languages, and a lot of frameworks/libraries/tools. 'Learning' a new one doesn't worry me, because I don't have to learn it. Tools like SO, used as use-case based documentation let me very quickly turn the concept into the syntax I need, and make it fairly easy for me to use a new tool. If I use that tool a lot, I get familiar with it, and don't have to look up as much, but the minutiae of a tool isn't what makes you productive, I don't think.
Honestly... not really. Unless you want to know everything out there. My college classmates are doing fine in their job search just knowing Java (no frameworks!) and SQL, just Python, even just one JavaScript framework, etc. Whatever else they need they'll learn in the job without much stress.
I honestly think this "need" of knowing as many APIs as possible is exaggerated online, partly thanks to blog posts or tweets of senior devs saying "X is this new good thing, Y is old and bad!" (which seem to be a weekly occurrence) and perhaps start ups since they don't have time to mentor because they have to grow ASAP. That works fine for them, but don't think it applies to every company.
Seriously, take some time off the internet and you'll quickly stop caring. Unless you enjoy learning so many new things!
No one sane is claiming that every programmer needs to know as many APIs as possible, but knowing they exist and being able to quickly find information on them is probably a requirement as you progress in your career. SO is a good place to spin up on things IMO. Is it the best way? I don't know - but it's helped me out a lot, and not for the purposes of cutting and pasting code snippets. It has literally helped me learn, syntax, paradigms, etc. in languages I use infrequently.
So they're fresh out of college with nil professional experience and very little life-experience? Pretty presumptuous for them to be passing on advice to "senior devs".
I have had to learn PHP, Ruby, Javascript, Python, CSS, LESS, SASS, Angluar, React, Zend, Magento, Wordpress (begrudgingly), OpenCart, ZendCart, Prestashop, MySQL, Postgres, NoSQL, Redis, Memcached, PHPUnit, TDD, UDD, Agile, SCRUM, half a dozen variations on the agile process, Laravel, CakePHP, CodeIgnitor and probably many more that just aren't popping into my head right now.
Then a bunch of different programming paradigms mixed in with that.
The reason? It is very rare that anyone works on one, pristinely maintained product small enough to be encapsulated in just a few technologies, for their entire career.
If you're at an agency, you're working with whatever the client walks in the door with, unless you can convince them to do a rewrite in your tools of choice. The work will be varied in quality, scope and complexity.
Old or new, the technology stack is probably a mix match of whatever the architect thought was right at the time, and then whatever the subsequent senior devs from each new agency the project has been at decides should replace it (or more likely, some of it)
If you're not at an agency, you could be at a startup. They're notorious for trendsetting technologies, but not many startups stick around and those that last probably move through a few iterations of their technology stack on their journey to a stable product.
If you're a cog in one of the tech behemoths, you probably have the best bet of staying with one stack. But not even they stand still on technology, and whilst you might be writing in the same language, you will have to interface with the different technologies popping in and out of existence around you.
The reason so many frameworks and technologies come and go isn't just because new things show up and people like shiny things, but old things often stop being maintained. Especially in open source. They don't make it, and so you can't use them anymore.
That's why people were so angry that Angular is getting a rewrite. It's a javascript framework that was supposed to have longevity, because it was backed by Google.
People could build companies upon it and know that it wouldn't change, and they did. Then Angular pulled the rug from underneath them, and there are now codebases made completely redundant and unable to move forward on the back of Angular without rewriting in the new Angular. But they can't even do that, because the new Angular wasn't out yet, but their stuff is already defunct. So they move to the new hotness. React sounds pretty cool right? Let's hope that lasts.
TL:DR;
The real world is messy, you will tumble out of the software development pipeline with SQL tech in your hair, Unit Tests under your nails and the dust of the many fallen JS frameworks in your eyes.
When one grasps that is all about Algorithms + Data Structures, it is easier to abstract over specific languages and libraries.
Personally I think the major drive to Stack Overflow is bad documentation.
Many projects have lousy documentation, so one needs to build the documentation from experience and reading source code.
The answers in Stack Overflow reflect that experience that has not been put in documentation.
Up to the early 2000's it was enough to have a pile of books with the project tech being used.
This... seeing ElasticSearch in the trending terms is a good example.
I complained about this to a friend and he suggested writing my own full-text search using Redis... I'll take Elasticsearch.
Hmm. I use none of those, being in embedded + MFC land. But I very much agree with googling API documentation and searching for examples. Google is faster than the local F1 search in Visual Studio.
I've been using the docs since I started on qbasic, and I learned theory through the years through building websites and keeping up with the latest trends (and it turned out most of the theory is how I understood code to begin with).
Stack overflow is awesome because its accessible and useful to everyone, and I don't think there's a danger that people would just fake it until they make it with SO - that's nearly impossible.
I rely on it at times for best practice concepts since I work alone and don't have real people to talk to.
It's much harder to learn stuff that isn't specific on SO. Things like working practices, what kinds of architecture are out there, and questions where what you're after is a kind of survey.
One thing I don't get is the speed with which the top answerers can get back to you. I've personally had questions answered by Hans Passant, Jon Skeet, Marc Gravell, Martijn Pieters, and probably a few others off that top list. Sometimes it's within minutes. Is their daily life substantially to answer questions about the technologies they are associated with? I work all day as a coder, and I don't have time to sit there and type out answers.
I don't think posting your homework/work project and hoping someone on the internet will complete it for you is the intended use of Stack Overflow. The people allegedly using Stack Overflow instead of learning CS fundamentals will last long in the industry. (Who are these people?)
When it's obvious that someone is fishing for homework help, I'll try to post a hint as a comment rather than handing out an answer on a silver platter. The goal is to provide a path to understanding. Unfortunately there is always someone as clueless as the OP who will provide said silver platter.
As much as I've been helped by StackOverflow, I hope I never have to work with one of those frauds who grew up asking instead of thinking.
It's not. If the question is just 'do my assignment', then it should just be closed.
> If you can't make sense out of the question, or it's simply a dump of an assignment with no context or additional detail, or an indecipherable mess vote to close it or flag it as "Not a Real Question".
At some point there is an operational advantage to having a consistent set of core technologies. If we make it so that the only way engineers can be successful is by constantly looking up answers on SO or elsewhere, then I think we've failed as an industry.
As a young engineer , I constantly get the feeling that I'm falling behind and that I can't be maintaining any single project for way too long.
One reason I think I must learn new languages is that projects written using new languages will be new stuff that's written from scratch. There's nothing wrong per-se with say Java but the odds are that if you have Java experience you'll probably be stuck maintaining some decade old enterprise app.
The same can be said today for say RoR. However if you're applying as a Go or React.JS developer you get to work on a lot of new stuff whereby you get to learn a lot more by writing whole projects from scratch.
So in such a highly competitive market people can't be blamed for being so buzzword driven.
Maintenance experience is not at all valued in the industry and people who do maintenance are looked at as lesser beings. That's the reason we keep throwing things out and reinventing the wheel.
Everyone needs to create a me-too JS framework and put it on Github so they can get hired by claiming that they're some open source rockstar.
Personally I just keep running to stay in the same place and end up learning nothing in depth because I'm spread too thin.
Our next post examines how much urine splashes back on you when you use a urinal.
The range of articles is... interesting.
Anyone have insight they could offer? Thanks
That doesn't preclude other aspects of quality of course. But it does influence how they're approached. A heavily abstracted system that hurts performance is unacceptable, but there are other ways to achieve the same ends.
You might find this article interesting... http://samsaffron.com/archive/2011/03/30/How+I+learned+to+st...
This article from Sam Saffron is very interesting. He was very reasonable testing the ORMs available, and only after realizing that none reached the performance he needed, he decided to write his own. The problem is when people do that and "reinvent the wheel" without searching if someone already solved that problem for you.
The main problem is posing as a question and answer site, yet wanting to be the go-to reference on the web for getting accurate helpful solutions.
The people asking for help are not there (most aren't) because they heard about this fantastic site that wants to be the go-to reference on the web for getting accurate helpful solutions.
The people asking for help don't want (most don't) to build the go-to reference on the web for getting accurate helpful solutions.
They want programming help.
It's a trick SO has been playing for years. Not that they'll ever realize it. The founders may not deep thinkers. Or they realize what they're doing and don't care.
After all these years, the founders have not fixed the SO problem. They have failed to address the conflict of asking knowledge-needy users to help build the go-to reference on the web for getting accurate helpful solutions without subjecting them to cruelty.
It's conceptually simple, and a bit of a bait-and-switch.
They pitch the site as a question-and-answer site. In the field of education, it is extremely counterproductive and cruel to subject someone lacking a bit of knowledge, and for whatever reason they lack it, to berating. It's just not accepted. If someone asks a question you simply do not humiliate them or berate them, or 'close the question', or edit the question they asked! It's not even the asker's question anymore if another user edits it! Curation by humiliation.
In any normal, respectful setting that promotes itself as a source to get help -- a "question and answer site" -- if an authority figure in that setting berates someone who lacks a bit of: - knowledge - or even the style or manner of how they ask questions
that authority figure would be fired, dismissed.
It's extremely unfortunate that the founders of SO are not brave enough (or deep-thinking enough?) to realize that failing to disclose to Users the truth about the potential cruelty, embarrassment, and humiliation they might suffer using the "question and answer site" -- is shameful.
If a school or university allowed any educational authority figure (like moderators, etc.) to berate and humiliate people with less knowledge than they, the institution would find itself in trouble.
Some of us believe the founders realized that if they told the truth -- "we're casting a big net, a lot of you who fall for the 'it's a question and answer site' are going to be humiliated by the moderators and other users who know more than you do" -- the founders probably realized if they had full disclosure of the "curation by humiliation" process, no one would use the site.
The fact is, the majority of SO users have been subjected to this "curation by humiliation" but are hesitant to speak out about it.
Has anyone tried?
I was pretty active in the first years of SO but over time essentially stopped answering questions and that mostly because the question became less and less interesting. Questions you couldn't easily find an answer to got more and more replaced with questions that are easily answered by just reading the manual of whatever you are trying to use or learning to code to begin with. Another factor is that I got more knowledgeable over the years and previously interesting problems now seem trivial but I am pretty sure this is not the main contributing factor.
Now it depends on what you want SO to be or what it is supposed to be. A source of solutions for non-trivial problems or a copy of or link to the manual of everything out there plus an introduction to software development? I thought of SO as a source of information that you couldn't easily get from manuals, now it looks to me more and more like a collection of manuals, so I lost interest.
EE.SO has rather brutal moderation in my opinion, but any solution has to take into account both sides of the equation.
* It's not even the asker's question anymore if another user edits it!*
Depends on how big the edit is, surely? Or are you claiming that having the readability fixed is humiliating?
They want free programming help. It's not unreasonable to expect someone you're doing a favour for to be respectful of your time and goodwill.
> But here's the concept:
> Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. [...]
The goal from day 1 has been to foster a community that would be empowered to create something of lasting value. That doesn't preclude hand-holding... But it doesn't demand it either; whether or not that happens is up to the folks who make up the site, the folks asking and the folks answering.
In the 7+ years since that was written, many thousands of people have donated their time and knowledge to help their peers, both in the immediate sense of writing an answer to address a specific question, and in the sense of leaving artifacts for future readers with the same question.
But of course there's room for improvement. And if you're willing to step up, you can be a part of that improvement. Go find someone who lacks knowledge and gently guide them; encourage your friends to do likewise. The platform is there, empowering you to create the environment you wish to see... If you aren't doing it, that's on you.