How to advocate Stack Overflow at work

Question

I am thinking of doing a short presentation at work about using Stack Overflow as a resource for your day job.

What is the experience doing this?

Would you deem it a valid resource to tell you colleagues about or is it similar to telling them about Google as a resource?

Is there a better way of doing it?

I was leaning toward asking questions side of Stack Overflow rather than answering them to avoid you-shouldn't-be-doing-this-on-work-time argument.

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Just as a follow up.

Originally I didn't want to make the question to specific to my own case. My presentation will only be a quick four minute talk, which I will repeat over an hour to different groups.

I may ask a question before the talk on Stack Overflow and refer to it during the presentation. Hopefully I will get some activity during the hour.

I am also going to talk briefly about some of the other Stack Exchange sites that would fit the audience as they are not all developers. I think Super User, Server Fault and Programmers should work well.

I will not be doing the presentation for another couple of months as it has be rescheduled, but I will update on how I got on.

Answer 1

Key points:

1. Don't have to register to ask a question.
2. It's free
3. Quality answers.

I would suggest your group create a question during the presentation (do a search first.). If you don't get a response before the presentation/meeting is over, keep everyone posted via email and follow-up if necessary. They'll be impressed with the quality and speed of the responses. Compare to a Google search. You could also prepare a question in advance.

It really will be up to them whether they'll us it or not. If you find the group in a major debate, try putting it on Stack Overflow as a follow-up to your presentation. Everyone may not see the need instantly. Keep at it.

My current company was using a paid site. I never bothered to get an account because of Stack Overflow.

Time can be perceived as wasted if you spend too much time on Stack Overflow. I'd rather have people get involved. You learn just as much by answering questions in my opinion. It just may prompt you about a issue you never considered.

Answer 2

You should track down each time you find a solution on SO of a problem you had. Do that for a month or so.

For each problem:

1. estimate how much time (in hours) you would have spent solving the error yourself.
2. estimate the time (in hours) you spent looking for a solution.

Substract the sum of point 1 with sum of point 2.

Multiplicate the amount by what you cost to the company hourly (usually the double of your net salary).

That's what you saved and goes in the pocket of shareholders.

(SUM(Est. time spent solving alone) - SUM(time spent looking browsing SO)) * Hourly cost = Value SO provide

Answer 3

I think it's a great idea!

I'm always surprised at how little some of my coworkers know about or use SO. It is an invaluable tool for problem solving, and the response time and quality of answers obtained is amazing.

Some things to mention in your presentation though...

• That they should go online to look for existing answers before posting a question
• How to write good questions. Perhaps show them some bad questions as an example
• How to use SO correctly... the difference between Answers/Comments, how to Accept an answer, how to use the Code blocks, etc.

Answer 4

Since they don't seem to know what SO is, I'd say start with that.

Simply put, StackOverflow, specifically (though its other objective sisters, such as Serverfault fall under this, too), has questions and answers that are objective, and therefore, provable. Either the proposed solution works, or it doesn't.

It's targeted. StackOverflow is specifically designed for programmers to help each other. Serverfault is specifically for server admins, and so on. Therefore, it's more likely to attract people that are well-known as experts in the field (for example, Phil Sturgeon, a big contributor in the CodeIgniter community, is an active SO member) than, say, Yahoo answers. If you ask a question on SO, there's a very high chance of it getting seen and answered by the high-profile, heavy hitters in that technology. Who better to ask for help on something than the creators of the technology?

It can be a passive way of finding answers. Generally, when I ask a question on StackOverflow, it's after I've exhausted my mental pool of Google search terms (which often lead to SO questions anyway, I'm still not sure how any programmer hasn't heard of this place anymore, but that's beside the point) and my own ideas for solutions. So, once I ask a question, I move on to other problems, so I don't get stuck in "forest for the trees" mode on that one, and wait for answers to come along. In that sense, I'm more productive, because I'm not spending more time re-searching and re-digging through Google for an answer that may or may not exist in writing yet. Once someone proposes a solution (and they're generally quick), I can do the legwork of getting it in and adapting it to my specific needs.

It helps the programmer community. If you fully participate in SO (ie - you accept answers, vote on questions and answers, and submit your own answers), then you're helping any other poor sap that might come along after stumbling over the issue you once had, yourself (after all, if you had an issue, someone else is bound to have had the same, or something close enough to apply). At the very least it gets more info out there. Even if you never hear feedback from these people, remember the "silent majority" that come across these resources, but don't make themselves known, even if you did help them.

Answer 5

Caveat -- this might be orthogonal to your question but you might look into setting up a workplace specific SO clone. Although this would be more of a next step after a good majority of your coworkers know how to use SO.

Shapado is an open source clone of SO that we have setup at work. It is great for asking questions about our in house IDE, DB, and other tech. However currently it hasn't reached critical mass. There are a lot of questions with no accepted answer which I think is an effect of coworkers not knowing how q&a sites like SO work and Shapado not showing user's accept rate.

Answer 6

I haven't done this, but I have spent some time thinking about how I'd respond if challenged on my use it during work hours.

My approach would be to use examples. Here's a really nasty problem I ran into while doing this job, here's the question I asked on StackOverflow, and here's the really useful stuff I learned as a result. (Hell, looking at my list of questions, it's like a bunch of little snapshots of my career.)

I'd think it's a totally valid resource to point people towards. Everybody knows what Google is; StackOverflow, not so much.

Answer 7

I just showed one of the answers that solved an issue that I was stuck with...

Didn't need to convince managers after that. The Q&A concept of stack-overflow explains itself.