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Comment by adamhi | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind that they're really measuring pageviews to Stackoverflow, not actual data about movement. My intuition is that it's probably right, but this is suggestive at best.

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Isn't the SO pageview data skewed by the fact that most remote workers are on their company's VPN, hiding their true location?

Slightly maybe but split tunnel would avoid that. If it was full I'd expect to see an increase from popular cloud hosting regions (if it was a prod vpn) or if corporate VPN's their home offices (which would show as a net zero change)

AWS has a large data center near Portland... (And Washington DC for that matter)

Eh, maybe your company' vpn is better than mine, but I do as little work as possible on the VPN due to abysmal speed.

Are most work VPNs full-tunnel?

I thought Google didn't even use VPNs.

This data could also signal that people in less traditional areas for software development now have access to remote jobs and are starting to learn more about programming (thus visiting Stackoverflow) to try to get those jobs. The fall in traffic in the traditional places is a signal about movement, but I wonder how much the upticks in other places are a combination of multiple things.

During my first years as a developer I used regularly SO. Nowadays perhaps once per month or so.

This is the correct (and massive) caveat for everything StackOverflow posts from their own data. It tells you a lot about some developers and absolutely nothing about others.

I use it a lot for my secondary languages, but when writing a well-documented language/framework like C# .NET, I never use it. The Microsoft docs cover everything.

You’re basically a god now

Huh, I hadn’t even thought about it, but I’m in the same boat. I haven’t needed SO since switching to Go in 2014.

Also, a decent amount of SO traffic is stolen by SO-copy SEO spam sites, too. I used to frequent it, but haven't needed to in years (it seems to more rarely show up in searches for the problems I have, even though I avoid the spam sites, too).

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