This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘Why devs are collaboration experts’. To listen to the full episode, click here. We apologise for any errors.
Adam Shepherd
Hi, I'm Adam Shepherd.
Connor Jones
And I'm Connor Jones.
Adam
And we'd like to welcome you back to the IT Pro Podcast. We've been on a break for the last several weeks, but we are back in front of the microphones once again, to talk about why developers and software engineers are so great at collaboration, and how businesses can learn from their example.
Connor
It's a common joke in the world of tech that when a developer runs into a problem, their first instinct is to head to StackOverflow. While this beacon of wisdom supports a wide spectrum of communities and interests, it's most famous for being a forum where coders and sysadmins can seek advice from their peers.
Adam
However, while it's a highly useful resource, StackOverflow's omnipresent popularity within the IT community also reveals an interesting trend. It's just one of the numerous ways in which tech professionals across different companies, geographies and verticals, collaborate and share knowledge with each other.
Connor
So what is it that makes developers so good at cooperating? And are there any lessons that other areas of the business can take from them in order to improve their own collaboration?
Adam
We're joined this week by Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of StackOverflow, to discuss why devs are the unsung heroes of cross-business collaboration. Prashanth, welcome to the show.
Prashanth Chandrasekar
Thank you, Adam and Connor. Wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me.
Adam
Now, percent, I'm going to say that, conservatively speaking, roughly everyone who's listening to this podcast has at least heard of StackOverflow. Can you give us an example of how many developers and engineers roughly use StackOverflow on a daily basis?
Prashanth
Yeah, so we have, you know, a very large impact on the world. And I don't think these people sometimes don't appreciate that we're sort of the engine behind the scenes on really driving the tech ecosystem forward, right, because ultimately, all developers, pretty much all developers use StackOverflow, literally on a daily/weekly basis. So our scope is we serve close to about 100 million monthly visitors. And, you know, based on some fairly conservative statistics, we believe about 80% of that number leverages StackOverflow, literally on a weekly basis, meaning they have a tab of Stack Overflow open during the course of the week, which is, you know, quite a staggering statistic, if you think about it, right. So. So it's I think it's fairly clear to say you know, we're an indispensable part of the developer workflow.
Connor
Cool, and what kinds of questions are they asking?
Prashanth
Yeah, so you know, on the platform, we have close to 50 million questions and answers on every possible technology topic, whether that is a programming language, if it's a scripting language, if it's a cloud technology, so you name it, right, the Pythons, the JavaScripts and the AWS' of the world. And, you know, the scale which has been built up over the past 13-plus years - we've been around since 2008 - has the network effect of really solving this very large problem of sharing knowledge, technical knowledge, and has allowed it to sort of compound to that level today.
Adam
So are there any kind of patterns that you've seen in terms of the, if you like, the levels of complexity, that the questions on StackOverflow tend to sort of coalesce around? Is it kind of entry level sort of problems that that junior developers and whatnot will run into commonly? Or is it some of the really sort of technical advanced level roadblocks, that kind of really ambitious projects might come up against?
Prashanth
Yeah, it's a good question. In general, I would say it's all the things, right, it's got all of the fundamental questions that people need to get answered. And you know, that's why people just, you know, when typically the way StackOverflow is used is people encounter an issue while they're writing code in their IDE, they go and ask that, you know, they type of the error in Google, and, you know, invariably a StackOverflow question and answer pops, pops up as the number one response in that Google search. And, and so that is, again, in the context of our public platform, I'm happy to talk about how that also happens within companies through our StackOverflow for Teams software as a service product, which is effectively the same, but the the highway, so to speak, to be to be able to ask those sort of questions happens on chat ops tools, like Slack and Microsoft Teams, as an example. So but in general, you know, the content that people... we're the world's largest knowledge base of all things technical knowledge, right. So in that context, it's got, you know, basic questions, intermediate questions, advanced questions. And you know, every year there is, you know, a brand new set of languages or scripting languages or, you know, new innovations that are, that are happening on StackOverflow. So this is really a great leading indicator for where the world is going and you know, over the past 13 years, it's been fascinating to see even through our, our annual developer survey that goes out to, you know, between 75,000 to 100,000 people respond to that survey every year. It showcases the progress in the tech industry, specifically in software programming, because a lot of the inefficiencies of, of certain languages are, you know, you know, that people are constantly looking to abstract away complexity and issues from the, you know, whatever they were using predominantly into a new language as an example. Right. And that's, it's been fascinating to see what's become the most popular language at the most, you know, every year, it's been interesting to see that trend.
Connor
I mean, since you mentioned how Stack Overflow is used in, in businesses. So in a professional setting, is it is it something that's kind of like frowned upon, you know, like, almost seen like a cheat sheet, rather than something that's like, encouraged to sort of develop proper, you know, you'd you'd rather, you'd rather build good code with a cheat sheet than develop, like to develop it organically, you know?
Prashanth
Yeah. You know, I think it's, you know, there's a nuance there, right? Because what we're trying to accomplish through StackOverflow is, yes, it's a faster path to the problem, because, you know, the searchability, and the ability to get access to information is lightning quick. And that is, that's, you know, that's fantastic. Because it's, you know, you have the answer to your problem, if you're in the middle of the night at 3am, trying to debug some code, you know, which I have done when I was writing code many, many years ago, I probably spent several hours in a sort of a frustrating space, trying to figure out, you know, how to solve the problem without really a lot of help, because everybody was sleeping plus I was, you know, I had my trusty textbook, so they were useless in the context of, you know, in the practical sense of writing something that was complicated, but getting access to information and issues that other people have encountered, by the way, not just in your own circle, but literally around the world, you know, at a very large scale, is a huge blessing. So that access, which is super fast, is really, up to very high quality information is, is a you know, just a great combination, right? Now to answer your question on is that, you know, how do people utilise that information? There's a choice people make there, you know, the way we characterise ourselves is that StackOverflow provides the context for code. Right? So it's meant to be a learning tool, as in it's not meant to be necessarily yeah, there's a plenty of memes about StackOverflow about copy-paste, and we actually poke fun at that ourselves and we poke fun, fun of our, you know, we look at ourselves as that, but, but the reality is that we are, our goal is to empower the world to build technology through collective knowledge. That's our mission statement, right? So we are, we're literally saying, you know, here's the world's knowledge base, you have an opportunity to learn how best to do this, given all the ways in which people have explored this problem. And that way, you're smarter as a result of that. So of course, at some point, people, that's the right way to do it, you know, people just blindly just sort of copy paste and read don't realise what they're doing. And then you know, at some point that's going to, they're going to hit a limit, and they're not going to be able to be very effective.
Adam
Yeah. And I think that's an important point to note. While it is absolutely possible to solve a lot of problems by copying pasting code from StackOverflow, from a question that somebody else has previously asked, where the real kind of learning, I think is evident, is when you ask the question yourself, because if you actually, rather than just kind of skim reading until you find the relevant code snippet that you need to solve your problem and plugging it into your IDE, if you actually take the time to read through all of the responses to, you know, the question on StackOverflow, you will find an awful lot of context and framing and kind of additional information; people going, Okay, this is why what you've got isn't working, these are the factors that you haven't taken into account. And here's the correct way to structure it - or more, more accurately, here's one of several correct ways you can structure it. And that's where I think a lot of the the real valuable learning comes into it when you are rather than just skim reading StackOverflow for the answers, when you're immersing yourself in that kind of community.
Prashanth
Yeah, just to sort of, you know, just go go to one of the points that you just sort of referenced, I think is important, is that because we've been around for 13 years, and you know, literally the world's knowledge is, is on the platform on all things technology. It's been fascinating to see as a simple question that could have been asked and, you know, had a particular answer, let's say, 10 years ago, right? We got some user feedback over the past several years saying, hey, we'd love to also have have, you know sort of the latest answers to these questions sort of, you know, being being able to be surfaced. And so we actually launched something very recently called trending sort, which is to say, newer answers of problems that have been around for a long time. Because you know, as people progress in time, there are more efficient ways to solve problems, even though the traditional way is probably fine. It works, right, but perhaps a more elegant way to solve problems. So we actually literally launched that, very recently, in response to user feedback, to say, you know, the most recent answers, this also gives the users a choice to, you know, sort their answers based on whether that's, you know, the most voted answer, or the most trending, trending up answer as an example, to your question.
Adam
So, as you mentioned, there's a lot of knowledge and information that the developer community has shared on StackOverflow. But one thing I've noticed is that you don't really tend to see the same thing in other roles, you know, things like HR, finance, marketing, they don't have that kind of reputation for resource sharing, and knowledge sharing and collaboration. Do you think that developers are kind of naturally more inclined to share and collaborate with their peers than other types of employee?
Prashanth
Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's an interesting sociological sort of question. I think, you know, there's human nature in general. And then there, I think the developer community is definitely a very unique group, within that. I think the DNA of a developer or software engineer is absolutely to help their fellow software engineer and developer because, and this was obviously unlocked in the context of the internet, when the Internet became prevalent, I think that's what really allowed, you know, companies like StackOverflow, to really thrive as a result of being able to sort of being able to sort of, you know, capture that, that big opportunity to say, you know, how do we all collectively solve very large problems that everybody experiences? And I'll tell you why that's the case, Adam, because, you know, I alluded to this previously is that, you know, writing code can actually well at least, was a very, very frustrating experience. I mean, especially because, you know, you're, you know, you could have a syntax error, or you could have a semi colon or a bracket, open parentheses, close parentheses missing, you know, all those sort of, you know, niggles cause massive amounts of frustration. And so I think, for those of us that have written software, recognise that, empathise with that with that pain, and you know, wouldn't want to wish that on anybody else. So, so naturally, there is this sort of affinity to say, Listen, let me help out my fellow developer, because it's actually a much simpler, simpler answer than you think, you know, you don't have to spend six hours trying to figure out the flow of missing close parenthesis like here, here's the answer. And so that is the reason because of the shared, accentuated levels of pain. I think people have decided that it's probably is a good idea to share to alleviate that pain across the board. Now, do pains exist in other fields? HR? Finance? Absolutely. Right. So I think that you could extend that, you know, concept to that. But this is, I think, what's interesting about software development is that it's a very discrete, you know, the answers are very discrete, right? Most other sort of topics are somewhat subjective, you know, software development is very objective, as in, you know, here is the right answer to this problem. And that's it, like, there's either right or wrong, it's zero or one. Like, that's basically how it works. Whereas something that's more subjective, like, people management or leadership, or, or, you know, maybe legal is not as subjective, but there is still interpretation of the law as an example, right. Ironically, by the way, all those topics that I just mentioned, also exist on Stack Overflow in our StackExchanges, you know, so they do it, there's a legal Stack Exchange, there is a workplace Stack Exchange for you know, things like that. So, so it's not like, you know, those, it cannot be extended because the DNA of human nature is ultimately to help each other. I truly believe that. But of course, I think the problem and the pain is much more accentuated in software development.
Connor
It's nice to hear that even the likes of yourself and other software developers - as myself, as a hobbyist developer, I'm still learning - that you and you and I have both gone and done the 3am, three hour pull your hair out, headache kind of moments, just only to find this just this silly little syntax error. It's the worst feeling. Yeah, it's Yeah, code, code is definitely frustrating. But can you... coming from a journalism background, there is, it's quite, I'd say I would say the opposite to software development in the in this sort of collaboration perspective, because there is a lot of, in my opinion, there's a lot gatekeeping around information, just kind of like as a reporter, you're kind of just like thrown into the field and just told sort of like, find a story, right? You go to other journalists and say, Oh, how did you find that? They're not going to give you very many tips, because they want to keep the stories to themselves, right. And I'm exactly the same. So in software, in software development, I know that there is a lot of collaboration, but is there any kind of gatekeeping that goes on? And can you, can you tell me a little bit about that?
Prashanth
So if you think about how our Stack Overflow for Teams software as a service product was launched in 2017, it was actually a result of companies saying, we love Stack Overflow, like, you know, as users and companies are absolutely every company in the world leverages Stack Overflow in the context of our public platform. But then many of them said, You know what? The fundamentals, it's great to be able to share and collaborate on this public platform. And even more advanced topics, however, 60, maybe 50, or 60%, of what I want to share and collaborate information on is proprietary to my company, right? And so that's when there was an incentive for us to say, Okay, let's actually go create a private version of StackOverflow for companies to use inside their companies to share and collaborate knowledge. And that launched in 2017, was, you know, companies like Microsoft, came to us. And, you know, they now have 100,000 people from Microsoft on Stack Overflow for teams, right, they're sharing all sorts of product information, technical information, you know, people across the company are leveraging it, you know, through Microsoft Teams and Stack Overflow for Teams that are integrated. And every bank on the platform; 60, 70,000 users, each, every big tech company, or medium sized tech company, or even startups are, you know, leveraging StackOverflow for Teams. So there's to that, the gatekeeping concept is ultimately when things become proprietary to your company to the you know, what you're trying to kind of solve for; absolutely, at some point that's required. Now, the experience of Stack Overflow for Teams, if you if you know, people go use it, is that you know, when you get it, you can still go to Google and get a question, type a question, how do I do this on AWS Lambda, which is a serverless concept. And the answer coming back will be a Stack Overflow answer always. But the screen, if you're a Stack Overflow for Teams customer, will be, the top of that screen will be from the public Stack Overflow. So you get a bunch of answers from there, from the 50 million questions and answers, and the bottom of the screen will come straight from your internal proprietary, you know, kind of walled garden Stack Overflow for Teams within your company. Because you know, you know, Connor, you wrote a response to that question info that is very specific to your company as an example. Right. So that is, the idea is to allow flexibility for users, depending on their needs, whether within companies or whether it is operating on open source ecosystems.
Connor
That's cool. That's cool that it's like a really integrated platform. And I imagine that like you said, Microsoft, and all these, like really large tech firms that are operating with millions and billions of lines of code, with countless developers working on them, I imagine that knowledge sharing platform is like super, super useful, especially when you've got like, developers writing code in a different style to you, and you don't quite understand how to interpret it and that kind of thing.
Prashanth
So actually, based on what you just said, one thing to clarify, is that the way our product is used within companies is that it's not just specific just to the engineering organisation. So what I mean by that is software engineering clearly is, you know, the huge proponent of our product. And then it's also used by product managers. It's used by product marketers, it's used by product architects, SREs, all the technologists groups within data science groups within companies. And then the biggest also, the next level of benefit comes when, because, you know, when people outside of those groups are actually accessing that information in a very reusable fashion - and that's why we measure something called knowledge reuse within our product - and the benefit there is for a salesperson to ask a question on Stack Overflow for Teams, or, you know, do it through Slack or Microsoft Teams and get the answer from Stack Overflow for Teams, when they're integrated. And not to tap the shoulder of a engineer or a product person who is in the flow state, as we like to say of like, you know, doing what they're doing, right not feeling getting distracted. So the power of the product actually comes when people use it beyond the core groups, because you know, the reason to actually have all this information is to get it to be reused. And so people are not getting distracted when people outside of those groups are actually getting, trying to get information on and hopefully that makes sense, right? So that's how that's how it's used. Typically, in all these customers that we have, we have thousands of customers in the StackOverflow for Teams product, and enterprises and mid market companies and SMEs. And that's that's the use case.
Connor
Yeah, absolutely. That sounds that sounds super valuable. Are there any other barriers that prevent other areas of business from adopting the kind of knowledge sharing, as seen in the developer community?
Prashanth
No, yeah, as, based on what I just said, I think, you know, the idea is for us to unlock, you know, real value by cross functional knowledge use within companies and, you know, obviously, on a public platform, it happens in a very large scale in the technical community. But the power of something like Stack Overflow for Teams is that we have every part of the company being able to break down silos, and work cross collaboratively. So you know, in our company is an example and many other large tech companies that use our product, you got, you know, every part of the company using the solution, right, and the idea is to because they it creates this level of high levels of productivity and efficiency, where, you know, answers are coming straight from something that was, you know, that was already sort of answered a week ago. But, you know, the reality is that, there's there are, you know, we do a lot of research on this sort of subject, and there's so much evidence to suggest that the number of repeat questions that are being asked across organisations is, is very, very significant, right. And there's a lot of like, if you think about the economic impact of that, that's very substantial. So specifically, as an example, you know, our 2022 developer survey, 62% of all the respondents in the survey close to 75,000 people, they said that they spend more than 30 minutes a day searching for answers or solutions to problems, solutions to problems, right. So when you add, add up all that, you know, all the people in your company, and you add that up, or you multiply that for the month and the year, it's a substantial amount of time. And so that's why I think there is an absolute need, where people definitely are frustrated across companies, when they have to repeat repeat themselves. And this is even more compounded in the context of the distributed work environment that we live in. Because there's no more hey, I'm just gonna pop into your office, ask a quick question and like, you know, get on with my day, it's like literally thousands of Slack channels, Microsoft Teams channels being inundated with a bunch of repeat questions, and you're hiring a lot of people in your company, you know, all of them have the same questions that the previous cohort of people had, you know, about a month ago or so. And the same people have answered the same question. So that it is it is literally a productivity suck, you know, by doing it the way that people are doing it, and people are doing today, which is why again, our product solves that problem in Stack Overflow for Teams.
Adam
So how do you solve for the the, if you'd like the adoption challenge outside of the technical and technical-adjacent organisations, because obviously, developers, software engineers, product managers, kind of, you know, agile coaches, all of the kind of the, the job roles that kind of sit alongside technology? Yeah, very familiar with Stack Overflow, you know, very used to using it as a resource. Those sort of non technical functions, if you like, you know, the HRs and marketing departments of the world. Do you have any challenge getting them to fully embrace Stack Overflow for Teams when it gets rolled out into a into an organisation on a kind of wider scale?
Prashanth
To answer your question, let me add one other data point, and then I'll expand it; the one data point that we also sort of found was that 68%, or approximately 70% of developers within companies said that they encounter a knowledge silo at least once a week, right? And for people managers across these companies 73% reported encountering a knowledge silo at least once a week, right? So it's a very pervasive problem; now that that they recognise it's a big, pervasive problem. And it's very compounded in this current distributed work environment with hybrid work that's here to stay for, you know, for the, you know, absolutely not in our estimation for the future. Our product absolutely takes into account to make sure that the viral nature of the product is really sort of unleashed within companies. So if you think about why StackOverflow grew in 13 years from zero users and zero questions and answers to 100 million users and 50 million questions and answers in a period of 13 years. The reason for that is to really break down silos and get the mechanism of really recognising users: the upvotes, the downvotes, the badges, the, you know, all those elements, being recognised as the world's best software developer for JavaScript, or for Google Cloud or whatever it may be. They're all incentive incentive systems sort of baked in there.
Adam
Gamification elements.
Prashanth
Gamification elements, all those exist in our StackOverflow for Teams product. But we take that up a few notches. So I'll give you a couple examples. So what we do is, we've got several product features, as an example, something like For You, which is, quote unquote, it's for you, Adam, right, is that in the morning, when you log in to Stack Overflow for Teams, you will get a question that perhaps Connor had asked last night before he went to bed about a particular topic that you are the expert on, because we know that you're the expert on on that particular topic. So it's, it's going to be serving you that question to say, you know, Adam, you're the expert on this, why don't you answer this question. Or, if you're a brand new employee at your company, you're going to get what we call the collection on Stack Overflow for Teams, which is, you know, here are five q&a on everything you need to know about getting getting going. And here are three long form articles from the, from the HR or people department. And you know, and here's how you should, you know, think about our financials or whatever it may be, right. So this is, we're constantly looking for cross functional bits of information to be served up across individuals, across teams. And the product is doing a lot of that heavy lifting through in product nudges and prompts, that really then allow that virality to sort of take off and that network effect to really sort of, you know, gain hold. And so that, hopefully, that gives you a sense of how this is really leveraged cross functionally, and brings in multiple departments within companies to sort of leverage this capability.
Connor
So we've spoken about other business departments like HR and marketing and stuff. And so if you were to like offer a presentation to them just sort of singing the praises of the developer community, and how good it is at collaboration. Are there any specific lessons that you would include in that presentation and sort of any any advice you could give other areas of business to, to improve their collaboration efforts?
Prashanth
Yeah, I think, you know, I speak about the subject, a fair amount, you know, when we talk about what are the five, sort of tenets of building really, really powerful communities. Right. And I think it's, I think that those lessons, I think, broadly apply to, to any sort of part of the organisation. So let me just sort of give you the five. So, you know, I've been in because, you know, we're the community folks, and we've been doing this for over a decade, my own learning suggests that number one, focusing on a shared identity is super critical. So what that means is, you're all sort of having a reason to come together, you know, could be a cross functional group that's trying to solve a problem, it could be, you know, you're empathising with a very specific issue, and you're trying to sort of solve that problem, and so on. And so that's one, number two is really having an incentive and reward system for the users of, you know, as they sort of engaged together. And that's obvious, given what we do at Stack Overflow with all the, again, the the, you know, the the badges and the votes, etc. And number three is building with the community versus for the community, which is important because you can't impose this on anybody as in like, it has to be from bottoms up, it has to be that people feel incentivized, or, or engaged enough to sort of want to do this, you know, and even some of the principles that we've established on StackOverflow, the public community, thanks to our founders, a lot of the those principles were done in collaboration very much with the community, it wasn't done from just the company's perspective. And here's what we can all do. It was done very much, you know, within in very much joined at the hip of the community. Number four is breaking down silos and building bridges. So the topic that we've been discussing so far is to make sure that there are more and more ways to engage cross functional groups within the conversation of, you know, into the conversation, because the places that you get the answer from will be surprising, because you're, you'll be shocked how many people can contribute to the conversation in a productive way when you open it up. And then the last one is to be able to create virtuous cycles. And the idea is to sort of really build on the virtuous cycle of you know, kicking off a certain topic, combining it with another one and including more and more users into the conversation and that effectively feeding into more topics to be sort of solved and that sort of keeps compounding and you're solving more and more problems as a result. So I often talk about these five principles or tenets when when we when we think about building great communities and I believe this hopefully can be useful for any anybody in any part of an organisation as they think about building their own community.
Adam
There's actually one additional piece of advice that I'd like to tack onto that one of the things I think that the developer community does, which initially sounds, you know, kind of silly, but actually works amazingly well is the rubber ducky, which many listeners will probably be familiar with, but if you're not the concept of the rubber ducky is a, an old programming trick where if you're having a particular problem that you're stuck on, and you you just can't work out how to how to tackle, you have a little rubber ducky or similar kind of, you know, curio on your desk. And you explain the problem to the rubber ducky, as if the rubber ducky has no idea what you're doing and what's happening. So you explain the problem to the rubber ducky. And over the course of explaining the problem to the rubber ducky, you oftentimes end up solving it yourself. Which is, sounds ridiculous. But it's basically the same concept in some ways as pair programming, and has an anomalously high success rate for something involving a little plastic duck.
Connor
Well, I'm glad it works, because I don't ever want to be caught giving a lecture to a plastic duck on my desk at work.
Prashanth
Anybody that's been a StackOverflow user for a while might remember this concept that you just covered. Adam from our 2018 April Fool's joke. So very much, we're believers in the Pragmatic Programmer, for sure.
Adam
Well, with that, we'll have to wrap up this week's episode certainly, but I'd like to thank StackOverflow CEO Prashanth crunch Seeker for speaking to us.
Prashanth
Thank you so much, Adam and Connor. Really wonderful conversation and pleasure to meet both of you. And let me know how else I can be of use to any of your listeners.
Connor
That'd be great. Thanks Prashanth. You can find links to all the topics we've spoken about today in the show notes and even more on our website and itpro.co.uk.
Adam
You can also follow us on social media as well as subscribe to our daily newsletter.
Connor
And don't forget, subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast wherever you find your podcasts. And if you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and a review.
Adam
We'll be back next week with more insight from the world of IT, but until then, goodbye.
Connor
Bye.
