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Re:Joel Spolsky: A Visit to Microsoft and Google by alexgartrell on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @04:11PM (#649874)
This won't be a wide spread thing. In most corporations, people won't want to piss off the boss-man by voting his answer down. Reputation is ego and ego in the work place gets ugly.
Re:Joel Spolsky: A Visit to Microsoft and Google by gurtwo on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @11:25PM (#650504)
I disagree.

I work for a large (65000+ employees) telco company, and our in-house problem/solution reporting database is totally broken. The search function is crap (it's based on predefined keywords, not really on free text). It has a voting system, but the votes are not used to classify the quality of the problems/answers. They are only used to track how active an engineer is browsing the database. You can randomly select problems and write nonsense commnents, the net effect is the same.

With a corporate Stack Overflow there would be no employee/boss conflict, since in my company all the users on a given domain are at the same hierarchy level.

When I discovered Stack Overflow I inmediately thought how good this would be to replace our corporate tool.

Re:Joel Spolsky: A Visit to Microsoft and Google by wglb on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @06:09PM (#650094)
And in really big technical organizations, it can be worse than that. It isn't just the boss man that you could tick off. And there would be the stigma of asking a question that your peers could judge you on.
Re:Joel Spolsky: A Visit to Microsoft and Google by mixmax on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @07:27PM (#650204)
Voting should of course be anonymous, just like it is here. The effect of this would be that votes would be a good measure of reputation because there are no politics involved in the voting, only opinion on whether the answer is good or bad.
Re:Joel Spolsky: A Visit to Microsoft and Google by thorax on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @07:25PM (#650200)
I actually had some of the same thoughts thinking how StackOverflow might work in an organization. Hopefully it wouldn't get too bad, but it could bruise some egos to discuss programming problems openly.

Overall, though, I would have liked to see a Stack Overflow inside some of the larger organizations I've worked at.

We're actually pushing into the corporate space with ErrorHelp-- but there's a lot less ego involved there (everyone runs into random unknown errors, really). Answers grow passively rather than being something people have to read each day to provide answers.

Re:Joel Spolsky: A Visit to Microsoft and Google by absconditus on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @04:11PM (#649875)
Such a system doesn't necessarily have to involve voting.
Re:Joel Spolsky: A Visit to Microsoft and Google by smanek on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @06:14PM (#650108)
Yes it does. The whole point is to separate the good answers from the bad answers.
Re:Joel Spolsky: A Visit to Microsoft and Google by rw on Wednesday June 10, 2009 @02:24AM (#650661)
No it does not. Editors can pick the best answers, replacing the voting mechanism.