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In glancing at the latest blog post, a line jutted out at me as part of the new CEO search:

One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.

Is our mission then to cater to users looking to learn programming? Are we getting a CEO that will then make that the ultimate objective of Stack Overflow?

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    If they do, it's going to alienate the vast majority of their established userbase.
    – fbueckert
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 15:58
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    Not yet, we don't. We're still fumbling around in the dark, waiting to see if SE will actually formalize their direction, and people can actually base their decision off of that, or if they'll just keep it quiet because they know what it'll do to their userbase. My money's on the latter.
    – fbueckert
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 16:00
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    If we're supposed to teach how to program, then SE has lost it's way, and I want nothing to do with it anymore.
    – fbueckert
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 16:05
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    Wording is hard. I interpreted it as: we're a useful resource for education, and answers on Stack Overflow will educate new users on subjects they're unfamiliar with, not as: we're formally going to educate programmers. I agree it's ambiguous, but we can't deny that users do learn here.
    – Erik A
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 16:05
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    @fbueckert: I learned Lua asking and answering on SO. And before that I learned Perl by answering questions on Usenet. It's a pretty good way to learn. The sort of self-protective culture you seem to be referring to is a reason I haven't participated in Usenet for, well, as long as SO has been an option. Maybe let's learn for history?
    – Jon Ericson
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 16:06
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    @JonEricson - your level of participation on the site was plenty appropriate. You came with objective questions or provided objective answers and everyone mutually benefited from it. Had you never mentioned that you used SO to learn Lua, we'd be none the wiser. I'm not opposed to people using Stack Overflow to learn how to program. I'm opposed to the mission of Stack Overflow being for us to teach them how to program. There's a difference, even if there's some nuance in verbiage here.
    – Makoto
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 16:08
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    @JonEricson Sure. As long as you can ask good questions, no issue. But here's the rub: most don't. And SE is encouraging that behaviour in all your public statements, because you don't mention our need for quality. You're actively hindering their introduction to SE by not setting expectations, either in new user onboarding, or public messaging.
    – fbueckert
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 16:11
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    @Servy: I read "as they try to learn programming" to mean "Stack Overflow is one thing we hope people will do when they are learning to program" not "Stack Overflow is how we hope people will learn programming". But in any case, it doesn't seem profitable to parse the outgoing CEO's comments too closely.
    – Jon Ericson
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 16:12
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    @fbueckert: One thing to remember about the blog is not many new users read it. Askers get many more hints on how to act from the Ask page and the first few comments they get then they ever will from a boring corporate blog post. New users don't (yet?) care about Stack Overflow. Helping them to care is in our (the community's and the company's) best interest.
    – Jon Ericson
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 16:14
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    @ErikA: I'm seeing the line In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles as a signal of policy change. You may see differently and I'd love to hear how. Genuinely not interested in getting into a fight on this; looking for an objective answer.
    – Makoto
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 16:16
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    @JonEricson The main justification for my interpretation is the whole referring to the site's quality standards as "obstacles to people asking questions" that they want to remove. This is indicating they're not looking to try to encourage people to ask well researched, clear, details, specific questions (whether they're new to programming or not), as that's currently not an issue on the site (and so doesn't require any changes), but rather to encourage the asking of questions not currently considered acceptable. We'll see if that interpretation pans out.
    – Servy
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 16:19
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    @JonEricson: Serve how?? Are we going to be teaching them how to program or are we going to continue doing what we've always done (which then sired the Welcoming initiative)? We can't keep doing this; we need to know the direction we're going or we're going to keep dancing around this problem.
    – Makoto
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 16:22
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    I'm not concerned about the "learn programming" part specifically, since programming is a life-long learning process, and this doesn't say that much about at which point we want them to come here. I am, however, quite concerned about the implication that our rules are big problems (due to the "even bigger problem" part). But the optimistic side of me thinks this was just phrased in a less than ideal way.
    – Bernhard Barker
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 16:59
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    "The way I read that sentence is that snark, rudeness, and condescension are the big problem" - I really don't see such things on the C++ tag - the only one I watch. Are they really common elsewhere, or are people using these terms when they mean "being downvoted and closed", which I do see a lot of, and are quite correct in almost all cases.
    – user2100815
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 17:43
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    @Magisch The point is, the experts have already been leaving for several years and the quality of SO is dropping, so it will end up a trashy student site no matter. SE can chose to pick up what remains of the experts or it can let someone else have them -> the product -> the income.
    – Lundin
    Commented Mar 29, 2019 at 12:18

1 Answer 1

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The mission of Stack Overflow is to help coders help each other become better coders by sharing their knowledge with one another.

That means all people who write code:

  • It means the programmers who are already here, who hang out here asking and answering questions and cleaning things up and keeping the place tidy and high-quality and generally shouldering the burden around here (and who are probably the ones reading this. Hi!).
  • It also means programmers who don't do those things yet, and maybe programmers who won't ever do those things.
  • And it means people who maybe just wrote their first line of code yesterday.

Stack Overflow is here to serve people who code and want to learn more about it, or help others learn more about it. That includes the "next generation of developers". It also includes the current "generation" of developers. And heck, it includes past generations of developers: all of our work here is built upon the shoulders of giants, from whom we continue to learn.

We haven't done a great job historically of serving the next generation of programmers. But learning to include those folks is not at odds with Stack Overflow's mission, which is to help coders help each other become better coders. It does all of us a disservice to think of that next generation as a "them" instead of as part of "us". There was a time in each of our lives when we'd never written a single line of code. But we each picked it up, somehow, and kept at it with the help of whatever resources were available to us. Books, maybe. User groups. A university department.

Eventually, Stack Overflow became a huge part of that resource landscape. It's what people turn to (or stumble upon) after they write their first script to automate some tedious part of their job and get hooked on that feeling you get when you first get a computer to do something new for you. (It's aliiiive!)

So, in short, no. Joel's not saying that the next phase of Stack Overflow's story is going to mean we require all our users to hold newbies' hands as they hunt and peck their way through their first function. He's saying that the next phase of Stack Overflow's story is going to involve us figuring out a way for that next generation, and any other coders who aren't served well by Stack Overflow today, to come join the community and find other coders to learn from and/or teach.

There's no "us vs. them" here. There's no "we'd rather help new users than require high quality content" dichotomy. No one wants to throw away everything we've built that works so well for so many people in order to serve some new audience. The goal is to help coders help each other, and that means different things to different coders.

That's a tall order and we'll need a big umbrella to fit it all in. But there's room for everyone under that umbrella--including room for the folks who are already served well by Stack Overflow today. There's no good to be found in pushing folks out from under that umbrella and into the rain. The only thing for it is to build a bigger umbrella.

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    "There's no good to be found in pushing folks out from under that umbrella and into the rain." ...Then why does it feel like that's exactly what SE is doing to us? We get constant harping on how we're being mean to new users, that we're not supposed to downvote answers to bad questions, or that we're completely wrong? SE has spent years ignoring it's established userbase, and suddenly it's implied we're the problem in the welcoming wagon? How, exactly, is this not an, "us vs them" problem?
    – fbueckert
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 17:06
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    There's a lot to parse in here but honestly, I think this is the fourth or fifth different mission that I've seen on the site. This kind of gets to what I'm trying to bring to a head; if we have one mission, one clear and unambiguous directive, then how we get there becomes more of an implementation detail and produces less hand wringing.
    – Makoto
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 17:13
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    These are both totally valid points, both of you. We have not done a good job over the last couple of years of actually communicating what's going on inside the company and how that translates to changes out here. It's getting better but it ain't good yet, and that leads to confusion and frustration for y'all. Making it clear what the one mission is everywhere we talk about it and clearing up those contradictions is key. So is making sure our current community feels valued and not villainized. We've been really bad at that lately. We want to make it better.
    – hairboat
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 17:47
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    Admit it. For whatever reasons, established users and new users absolutely are at odds with each other. It is bad enough that I'm not sure it's feasible to reconcile. Whether they realize it or not, so far SE has chosen one side at the expense of the other. At the risk of invoking some long-standing taboo, there are other possibilities that don't hurt one side. For example, if two people absolutely do not get along with each other, one way is to separate them. Or at least stop forcibly putting them in the same room together.
    – Mysticial
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 19:02
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    A moratorium on announcements doesn’t mean decisions aren’t getting made, @Makoto. It just means the community is left completely in the dark. I’m not sure how that would be an improvement. Good will is in peril either way.
    – Cody Gray - on strike Mod
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 19:30
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    @Mysticial: They're not being transparent, though. This is the fastest feature I've seen get proposed, developed and released ever to the Stack Exchange community, yet we're still stuck with broken search. They're making a push towards something, but keeping mum on a lot of stuff we've been trying to engage them on for years - and in come cases, decades. I don't doubt that they're tackling some hard problems. What I doubt is what those problems really are, but they're in a different frame of mind than we are for it.
    – Makoto
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 19:38
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    @Makoto Not to say this is the case, but just for the sake of conversation: Let's just say that SE has solidly chosen new users over the established ones and that they really don't care what happens to us now. IOW, we're worth nothing to them at this point since we don't answer Q's anymore and all we do is harass new users and complain on meta. They're not going to say that to us upfront. They will keep working towards that goal while providing just enough (mis)information to keep us from going up in arms. Then let the established users silently drop one-by-one.
    – Mysticial
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 19:59
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    @Makoto: So, um, I hope you recognize that adding the new user indicator was trivially easy and fixing search is, well, not. It's not as if that feature took away from anything else we were working on. Documentation is a much better example, I'd say.
    – Jon Ericson
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 20:21
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    That may be a prime disconnect @JonEricson: I want to see changes which actively help. A change like the Welcoming initiative may not have hurt, but I as a power user don't have the same philosophy into why it helped. I don't want to clutter hairboat's inbox any further with this discussion, though; if you want to chat, we could take this to Chat later. My position right now is that I'm quite mentally drained from this since I don't see a win for anyone right now.
    – Makoto
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 20:42
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    I understand wanting to make people feel welcome. I haven't felt welcome on the site for a while, not by the community, but by the community team and mods from other sites. That doesn't seem to matter to the network. If I left tomorrow I suspect many people would be relieved. I wonder if other long term users feel this way. There's a lack of support for people who have put their neck on the line for the site for years. It's very saddening. I don't feel there's anyone I can turn to from your organisation for any type of support. But hey I'm from one of those minority groups we need to include.
    – user3956566
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 21:27
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    @Yvette please don't leave :/. It's a shame that you feel this way, and I can only have flashbacks of Monica C.'s blog post here.....honestly 2018 wasn't a great year for SO.... And it's starting to feel like 2019 may end up being worse :/...
    – Patrice
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 21:38
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    @Patrice ironically I feel support from our community of users, it's the 'employees of the network' that I feel incredibly alienated from. There's a lot that gone on behind the scenes. Some my fault, but not all my fault. I don't like the way things are handled and there's no one to turn to to say that. I feel users like me will be thrown under the bus as disposable and replaceable. Can you give me a link to Monica's blogpost?
    – user3956566
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 21:40
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    @Magisch It really is exhausting. The trust was broken with the welcome wagon, and that's led to this incredibly adversarial relationship. I think a lot of it is that SE has taken that trust for granted, and wasn't expecting the backlash at all, so this last year's been misstep after misstep. Some of it trying to repair that trust, and some of it just breaking it further. Trust needs to be regained before that relationship can be repaired, and that's a very hard thing to do once it's been broken.
    – fbueckert
    Commented Mar 29, 2019 at 13:18
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    @Magisch There's been plenty; new contributor icon implemented in record time. HNQ questions being implemented as a result of someone on Twitter complaining, despite years of attempts at fixes on Meta. SE staff implying repercussions in response to said Twitter spat. And let's not forget yet another staff member telling us we've been completely wrong all these years. There needs to be some middle ground for both sides, but that requires SE to rebuild the trust they have lost. I wouldn't mind discussing this more in chat; don't need to clog up hairboat's inbox even more.
    – fbueckert
    Commented Mar 29, 2019 at 16:06
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    If anyone is interested, @Magisch and I discussed this a bit more here. I invite anyone who wants to read or weigh in to join.
    – fbueckert
    Commented Mar 29, 2019 at 23:05

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