Comment by EvanMiller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EvanMiller | Hacker News Reader

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I do wonder whether Stack Overflow will become a victim of their own success. By providing a place to get answers from experts to technical questions, actually employing an expert is worth much less than before. In other words, Stack Overflow is turning knowledge into a commodity. This makes experts less valuable in the marketplace. It therefore makes running a job-listings page (or "elite CV service") less profitable.

Furthermore, since SO profiles are public, other job-listing companies in the market can easily leach off the reputation mechanism just by adding a "Stack Overflow profile" field.

Stack Overflow is a wonderful site, but I think their free services are a long-term threat to the profitability of their premium services. When knowledge is free, there's no reason to employ an expert.

Take 10 master wood workers and put them in a room, give a low-skill wood worker all the tools they need and the ability to ask any of the masters any question they like at any time and get the answer.

Do you think this will result in the same quality of work as if a master wood worker had done it?

Why would you imagine software to be so different?

Being able to get past any particular technical speed bump is a tiny part of what makes a more experienced developer valuable.

Part of being an expert is knowing how to employ that knowledge. The repository is useless if you can't figure out how to use it.

There is a wealth of knowledge on Wikipedia for instance but that doesn't mean I wouldn't rather prefer to go to an actual doctor

That's only true if being a large repository of knowledge is all that's required to be an expert. I'd say that it's probably a necessary but not sufficient condition.

I think this goes back to the "bigger piece of a smaller pie" mentality. There's a huge difference between someone capable of looking up answers to things that have been done before (SO) and someone capable of generating novel solutions to problems (an expert.) What will diminish will be the demand for people excellent at memorization while demand for problem solvers will go up. Only time will tell if it's net-0 but I think this is a healthy direction for professionals and businesses.

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