Slashdot Mirror
Interviews: Ask Stack Overflow Co-Founder Jeff Atwood a Question
Jeff Atwood is an author, entrepreneur, and software developer. He runs the popular programming blog Coding Horror and is the co-founder of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network. In early 2012 he decided to leave Stack Exchange so he could spend more time with his family. A year later he announced his new company the Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. and the Discourse open-source discussion platform which aims to improve conversations on the internet. Jeff has agreed to give some of his time to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Jeff,
How does this Slashdot question thing actually work? Does some Slashdroid from Dice cold call you and ask you to do the Slashdot community the favor of answering our questions? Or, do you pay Dice for access to their community for your marketing purposes.
Many people will take this question as an offense or a challenge, I mean no such disrespect. I think that many others here on Slashdot would like to know the truth behind these community ask Slashdot posts.
As a follow up; if the answer is the latter, that you initiated the "conversation", why did you choose Slashdot and not Reddit?
Also if some question is even slightly controversial or in any way subjective, it is locked down by a gang of annoying Nazi mods. Don't these guys have anything better to do?
Almost any question about "is x better than y?" is closed. Threads should be closed only if there is some kind of abuse.
From time to time I search stackoverflow for easy answers and I would say about 20% of the time the question has been closed even though it is the reason I went to stackoverflow in the first place. In most of these instances a useful answer was also provided before closure. So my question to you is simply what gives.
The most common reason for closure I run into is that the people closing it don't have any domain clue what is being asked and appear to assume if they don't understand nobody else does either.
Another common reason for closure is the "duplicate" question meme in which nuance is overlooked and questions are marked as duplicates because the people doing the marking failed to understand or appreciate the difference. This is very annoying.
Less common but equally annoying issues are closure due to chatter about domain specific algorithms not being "programming questions" or even more amusing someone posting a question that is more specifically addressed by one of a hundred different stack exchanges even though it is still on topic.
But, there are a lot of low skill programmers and sysadmins out there who lean on these tools way too much.
The low-skill people would have been low-skill regardless. Tools do not make the person, they only help them to be slightly more useful. People said the same thing about IDEs ruining programmers, but I think they've shown to be a net positive.