Stack Overflow User Survey Results

Re:Stack Overflow User Survey Results by dljsjr on Friday January 25, 2013 @11:03AM (#5116003)

I participated in the survey, and I don't expect anyone from SO to actually read this posting on HN, but I did find that it was extremely biased towards the idea of people who work places actually ship software based products/services, and it was also extremely biased towards people that work on the web (see the "what are you most excited about" category, which was mostly web-based technologies).

I'm a software developer by day, and I work with a team of around 20 or so other developers. But we don't ship products or create for the web. We're a robotics research laboratory, rooted pretty squarely in academia and non-profit. The closest we ever get to a "product" is a public YouTube video demo or a publication and a conference talk.

I do a little bit of web/app stuff on the side, for fun, but I took the survey from the perspective of my professional programming life, which is my day job.

I know that people like me are in the minority, and that web dev/app dev is where the growth is right now, but it seems a little silly to skew a survey like this away from "people who write software in the general case" because then you aren't really creating a survey of all StackOverflow users. I actually found it a little challenging to answer some of the questions accurately. Seeing how they tied their results so strongly in to their Careers product makes the layout of the survey self-evident in hindsight, but I was a little unsatisfied with the survey itself regardless.

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Re:Stack Overflow User Survey Results by robmcm on Friday January 25, 2013 @11:07AM (#5116031)

What language do you use stack overflow for?

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Re:Stack Overflow User Survey Results by dljsjr on Friday January 25, 2013 @11:15AM (#5116080)

I use SO in a lot of different ways. I enjoy looking for questions that I can answer in any of the languages that I have experience with. I also use it as a simple search engine for inspiration; if I have an implementation task I'll often search SO first with some of my ideas to make sure I'm not reimplementing the wheel. All of our development at the lab is in Java, which I've been using for about 4 or 5 years on-and-off, so I don't often find myself asking a lot of "how do I do this?" syntax or technicality questions when it comes to the day job stuff; it's usually a cursory search for details or an algorithmic type question.

As far as actually asking questions, I've been on SO for a few years so I've used it for a lot of different things over time. I used it when I was first getting acclimated with C and Java outside of class projects, and now I use it whenever I'm picking up a new pet language. I've been asking and searching a lot about Haskell lately.

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Re:Stack Overflow User Survey Results by robmcm on Friday January 25, 2013 @11:29AM (#5116189)

That's interesting, I teand to get to SO as a result of a Google search rather than searching directly.

Also I find most questions are simple implementation issues or bugs, rather than around complex design problems. Perhaps I am missing a trick...

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Re:Stack Overflow User Survey Results by cynwoody on Friday January 25, 2013 @02:22PM (#5117139)

>Just like the printer post above, it's incredible how many webcams are left completely unsecured.

Likewise. I started noticing that SO results to software-related queries were of sufficiently better quality that I started to qualify some searches with site:stackoverflow.com. (Similarly, I also add site:ycombinator.com with some other types of searches.)

It's too bad that SO/SX has fragmented their URL structure to make the site: qualifier less effective. E.g., it would have been better to have developer.stackexchange.com, superuser.stackexchange.com, etc. Then you could choose to do just site:stackexchange.com to search the whole corpus vs site:developer.stackexchange.com to be more narrow.

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Re:Stack Overflow User Survey Results by dljsjr on Friday January 25, 2013 @11:34AM (#5116231)

I think it's pretty accurate to say that most questions are, since SO tends to lean towards people who are still learning.

But the high-level questions are out there. Just gotta dig.

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