I’ve looked for new opportunities on our Jobs board and placed job ads when hiring great talent at companies I helped run, like Jewelbots or GDI.The thing that really connected me to Stack Overflow and its community, however, is the simple fact that I’ve been a software developer for 18 years. I’ve been an active member of Q&A, a participant on Area 51, and a lurker on Worldbuilding, Cooking, and Code Golf. Stack Overflow has been a big part of what I do for a long time. I was in the beta and one of the first people to ask a question on the platform. Yes, that includes macOS Catalina, which isnt out.A little about me: I’m Stack Overflow user #4140.Being a part of the team helping to guide the direction and growth of community is an incredible honor.We’ve been working on exciting things the past few months to make the site more welcome, diverse, and inclusive. NET foundation helping the framework build the future of the internet.I care a lot about representation in technology, and a future where people from underrepresented groups in technology are hired and succeed at the same rates as their peers. NET and on the board of the. Since joining Stack Overflow’s engineering management team in 2018, I’m back in the world of. I love JavaScript with all my heart, warts and all. NET MVP for 20 before switching to JavaScript, Node.js, and building Nodebots in 2011.As engineering manager for the team charged with working on our Talent product, I got to work closely with brilliant people I really respected. When I joined Stack Overflow almost a year ago, I was blown away by how kind and generous all my coworkers were, and the engineering team is no exception. Paying down this debt will continue to be a priority as we work to get our mods best-in-class tools to manage their communities.The second thing we are prioritizing requires a bit of a story. The thing I’ve seen our Community Managers push for the most is updating these dated tools, some of which haven’t been touched since we first launched! The team formerly known as DAG (Developer Advocacy and Growth), now part of the Community team, started by rolling out the Tag Synonyms Refresh and the improved Moderator Dashboard.I replayed everything that happened in my head and each time got more frustrated with the way people reacted. It seemed people weren’t valuing my work or my judgment.I went home for the weekend and stewed in my frustration. What had happened to my amazing coworkers that were so kind and wonderful? I felt attacked and diminished. After an afternoon of going back and forth, I walked away feeling emotionally drained. No one agreed with this policy, and they made it known over seemingly hundreds of Slack pings. What happened next was that, from my point of view, the engineering team completely lost it.
Outlook 2016 Tasks Disappear Then Weeks Later Reappear. Software Developer ForIn fact, what I found was that people had some well put together arguments about why they felt this policy was a bad idea. There was no one saying mean things about me or attacking my efficacy directly. I wanted to give them direct feedback that they had hurt my feelings.As I went back through that Friday afternoon chat log, I was shocked to see that no one had been hurling insults. In our developer survey results we read things like this: No matter how nicely they say it, when a large group of people you really respect publicly challenge something you’ve done it can feel like a personal attack.When I realized this, some of the confusion I had seen about unwelcomeness on Stack Overflow started to make sense. Even kind feedback can come off as caustic and mean when there is a mob of people behind it. The monster in this case is not one person, it was created when lots of people, even with great intentions, publicly disagreed with you at the same time. Askers are expected to have done a lot of research before asking a question (re: both question format and content), even if they are completely new to the community or topic. “ The attitude is not beginner friendly. “ P eople could be less brutal” – 6 years coding “ It feels too scary and unaccessible for new developers” – 3 years coding There is no excuse for not being kind!” – 6 years coding In the past, we’ve prioritized getting rid of unfriendly comments. That in itself can feel really bad especially as our high rep users skew toward more experienced and respected engineers.On one hand, our more experienced power users tell us they feel called out for being unfriendly even when they are just trying to be helpful on the other, our newer users and people that don’t participate tell us they think Stack Overflow is scary and they are afraid of judgement. There is also a big yellow box that gives you the names of engineers that voted your question closed or deleted. Not only does it feel terrible, but it can also be not beneficial for overall content quality, not to mention an ineffective way to get someone to improve their question. The way the system is currently built, when you ask a question that could use some editing or is a duplicate, a bunch of people come out of the woodwork to tell you you’ve done something wrong.They could say it in the most neutral possible way, but no matter how you approach it, a dozen people pointing out your errors feels terrible. Our goal is to have the question asking process be painless and beneficial for new users and Stack Overflow veterans alike.By improving the way people give each other feedback, we can improve question quality without putting the burden on our users to police the website. We will be working on new paths to improve content quality and reduce friction between people. We want to make sure people are getting necessary feedback without feeling called out or publicly embarrassed. People are using the product as it was designed and as a result people feel called out or, even worse, discouraged from ever asking a question again.Over the next few quarters, we’re going to be taking a step back and re-evaluating how we deliver feedback to users about their questions. This problem is on us and it’s because of how we designed the question asking and closing process. We all have ideas on how to make the system better. We’ll get more people involved and improve question quality.Myself and the community team are really excited to improve the experience that all levels of coders have on Stack Overflow, from new users that are learning front-end for the first time to our respected moderators who have been coding for 20+ years. By thinking hard about how we give feedback, we’ll help people learn instead of driving them away. Suunto software for macNo one likes to feel an idiot for asking questions, I certainly don’t. Too many members behave as though the same level of EQ as Sheldon of ‘The Big Bang’ fame and do not seem able to interact in a conversational manner.I answer a lot of questions in FaceBook groups where we seem able to give answers without presenting the feeling that we are ‘up ourselves’. Finding answers to questions on StackOverflow via Google is great, but asking questions is a terrible experience, and answering questions is a terrible experience. You have identified a central issue with the new user experience…I am a new user of StackOverflow, but not new to coding, as I have been coding since 1979. We’ll make sure, as always, to keep you posted.Tags: bulletin, community, public Q&A, user experienceYour blog post gives me some hope for StackOverflow future.
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