Interview with Jeff Atwood, Co-Founder of Stack Overflow
67 comments
·January 20, 2025ktallett
I enjoyed the site and found it useful to begin with however it became a playground for people who felt they were know it alls to get recognition. A little ego boost if you will and that ruined the point for me, which was to get a varied response on technical questions.
ramon156
Removed: duplicate comment
Salgat
One nice thing about ChatGPT, they won't judge you as a fool for asking an easier question.
ryandrake
It also doesn’t answer your question as if you asked a different one. So many stackoverflow conversations:
Q: I am looking for a way to do X in language Y.
A: You shouldn’t need to do that. What do you really want to do?
Argh. What I really want to do is exactly what I asked. If you don’t know, fine, but don’t try to steer me towards a question you do know the answer to. Just let someone else answer. Not everything is an XY problem[1].
belter
Get thousands of workers, to work thousandths of hours, to answer technical questions for free...In exchange for "Reputation". Sell for 1.8 Billion...The American Dream...
SnorkelTan
Stack overflow was an invaluable resource for me as a developer. I got a wealth of knowledge about a bunch of thorny problems I was encountering with out paying anything. The people who answered the questions I had were able to help far more people than they ever could have individually without SO. I’m having a hard time being upset about his financial windfall. It’s really only a bait and switch for people who answered questions with some other unstated expectation than helping others or receiving help.
belter
Your argument has nothing do to with the point I was trying to make.
kijin
In aggregate, Stack Overflow probably saved developers far more time than anyone ever put in, and saved companies all over the world far more money than the founders made in their exit.
milesward
Creating more value than you capture has ways been the jam.
fakedang
Also saved AI companies far more effort in gathering correct code for training.
LeonB
You might find this hard to believe, but I find that helping other people is genuinely rewarding all by itself. And it’s rewarding in a way that money can’t buy.
Stack Overflow helped it to scale really well, too. You could answer a question, just once, and over time it could help dozens then hundreds then thousands of people.
It’s easy to be cynical, but actually that was really awesome.
pdntspa
I remember reading Atwood's blog around the time he launched it, and from his writing, he seemed genuine in his desire to build a tool that would help developers write code. This was also right in the middle of the original gamification craze, so of course internet points lol
ktallett
That is how any social media website works including this one.
sien
But my oh my, it was so much better than experts exchange.
zem
i feel like a lot of people have forgotten that that was its initial impetus, literally "let's get together and collectively build a better expertsexchange without the dark patterns trying to monetize your need for answers"
zem
for a lot of us it wasn't the reputation, it was the idea of a gift-economy help desk and knowledge base. i enjoyed being a part of it, both helping and being helped, back when it was still good.
netdevphoenix
Isn't it fascinating how even people that consider themselves rational and intelligent like developers would be happy doing work for a company for free in exchange for internet points?
minitech
And places like Wikipedia don’t even give you internet points! What dummies these contributors are.
swalling
Except Wikipedia is a non-profit and the content produced is under a free license. The founder of Wikipedia and the few employees are the least wealthy people to run a top 10 website.
Johanx64
Many people landed good jobs that way. It was a good way for self-promo back in the day. Jobs stackexchange section was also way better than most other jobs boards at the time. It only went majorly downhill after the key people behind the site went away to work on other things and it got sold...
331c8c71
Not the least. Rational homo economicus pretty much doesn't exist in real life. The vast majority of us are driven by the essential motives and desires while the intelligence rationalizes already made decisions.
null
brudgers
Is that better or worse than the traditional route, wealth by birthright?
iterance
Would that it had been a public benefit corporation or nonprofit; maybe I would still be contributing today.
SeanAnderson
Sure was better than ExpertsExchange, though :)
bigmattystyles
Oh, it wasn't ExpertSexChange?
iterance
True enough. I guess it's probably not beyond saving, either. It does have a pretty good core idea.
anoncow
Making Stackoverflow the Wikipedia of QnA was a missed opportunity in hindsight.
epistasis
This uber-cynical and uncharitable smearing of the story is unhelpful at best.
May I never be subject to this sort of misreading, and I hope you never are either.
iterance
meh. you're probably right. I edited and distilled it down to the main point. I just wish it were a nonprofit at the end of the day, I guess. It would've been the right thing to do. That he chose not to makes me sad. That he was rewarded richly for it, sadder.
singularity2001
The fish stinks from the top
fungiblecog
Instead of worrying about how hard it is to give away their money effectively these billionaires should be working to fix a political system created specifically to funnel money to billionaires. Without fixing the actual problem giving away money is just virtue signalling.
Terr_
A fairly tame start (i.e. not overtly against their own money-making interests) would be to support voting-reform to one of the many many options that are superior to plurality/first-past-the-post voting.
Insofar as regular-businesses like predictability, this would actually be good for them. Fewer dramatic changes from slim margins every election cycle.
slg
If you click through to the original blog post[1], you will see him advocating for exactly this.
>Our status as the world's leading democracy is in question. We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote, such as making election day a national holiday, universal mail in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all votes carry more weight. We should also strengthen institutions keeping democracy fair for everyone, such as state and local election boards, as well as the Federal Election Commission.
LeonB
Jeff is specifically donating money to causes which improve the political system, enfranchise (not dis-enfranchise) voters.
null
bigstrat2003
Why would we expect someone to not only have the insight on how to fix society, but actually be able to reshape it, just because they are a billionaire? Giving resources to those who need it might be the best way to help for some.
bloomingkales
Without morally condemning them:
Accumulating that much wealth means you were in a frenzy. It’s good he snapped out of it. Take someone like Elon or Bezos, 10 billion is not enough, 100 isn’t, 200 isn’t. We have people that are still in a manic greed phase.
It’s karma that the ghost of Hitler possessed Elon’s body. Simple greed can destroy a soul too. You have no idea the supernatural forces that will dock in your soul if you make it a comfortable nesting place.
netdevphoenix
Does anyone still use Stack Overflow post-2022?
epistasis
Today I had a small amount of Google Sheets work to do, to extend somebody else's work, and I had both Claude and ChatGPT hallucinating mythical function names, and not understanding array functions with utter confidence and certainty. StackOverflow results from a web search gave me the answer faster, in the end.
bbarnett
Not to mention, such sites often have a discussion, with pros and cons of certain tacts, why some methods may be pitfalls, and more.
Such sites help you understand why, far more than a distilled down response of a LLM. Such sites help you learn.
Knowing the why, is often far more important than the how.
danpalmer
Yes, for non-work things I find it vaguely useful. My workflow is to first google search, often see Stack Overflow answers, and then move on to an LLM or actual documentation if I don't get anything through search.
I do it this way around because I can search far faster than I can write out reasonable english sentences that head-off bad LLM responses.
Sometimes when I'm confident enough that the LLM will be able to give me the "right answer" faster than search I'll do it first, but that's mostly when I have something I can copy/paste in.
recroad
My experience with LLMs has been different. I give it trash prompts and it gives me reasonable responses. I think it's figured out the space between what I type and what I want. That's great. Until we get an input which allows it to figure out the space between what I type and what I think. That doesn't even sound too bad, because now I can just think and it'll happen. I look forward to this future, sounds wonderfully efficient, which would finally give me the time to do that thing I really want to do but don't have the time right now because we're not efficient enough.
But no, my experience is different with regards to the ratio of quality of input versus output. I think we all do a subconscious ROI of whether typing that little extra will yield an output that's going to be that much better that it was worth the time and effort.
Or much more likely I'm just lazy.
magicalhippo
If I know what I want, just not exactly where, I'll go straight for a search. But if it's more fuzzy then LLMs has totally changed how I acquire knowledge.
Now I find it more productive to ask an LLM to get some keywords or similar which I might search for afterwards.
The great thing about LLMs is that, unlike a search engine, you can tell it "no, not quite like that, more like this" to guide it.
bigstrat2003
Yes, of course I do. Why wouldn't I?
Salgat
At least for me, I've found chatgpt to be a good Google replacement. It might be helpful beyond that occasionally, but it really excels in spitting out existing data.
shric
For me it depends on what I need.
Google -> stackoverflow is typically much faster than chatgpt.
If you are a fast typer and can formulate a short question then you can often get from thought to answer in well under 10 seconds.
With chatgpt there is a small thinking delay then often a long token sequence of filler before you get the few lines you're looking for.
ChatGPT shines compared to stackoverflow for something you know that requires a dialog of prompts or you're asking it to write some specific code instead of just finding out how to accomplish a small task with very clear syntax.
gus_massa
I had to write a powerscript last week. I lifted 90% of it from 2 or 3 posts in SO
Terr_
I search it for things that are outside regular documentation.
However any contributions (answers, questions) are directly related to something I'm working on. There's no community (or certainty that your work will not be marked-as-duplicate) which would justify a more-general kind of helping-out.
burgerrito
Many including me
netdevphoenix
Not that many judging by the two answers. Even 100k is too little relative to the number of English speaking devs in the world
glitchc
The answers are only 18 minutes old. Give it time.
lawgimenez
Yes, I still answer some few questions if I know the answer.
bluedino
I don't think I find any useful, recent answers
null
I encourage everyone to read his actual blogpost linked in the article, it’s pretty good.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/