YouSaid · the spoken record

Prashanth Chandrasekar

lines on the record: 77
first: 2022-10-25
most recent: 2022-10-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Or in the middle, so to speak, right? And it was ironic me mentioning this as the Sackwolf Flosillo, where everything is fully right or wrong. The answer, especially as it relates to people and it relates to humans, is that there is typically no right or wrong answer. It's typically somewhere in between. So that's my approach. I think that if there's feedback coming from users that this is what they need specifically with things like diversity and inclusion, we want to make sure that we are actually listening to that. We stay flexible with that and we invest in the capabilities to make sure these folks feel a lot more welcome on platforms like ours.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it's making sure that there's always a way to make sure that you're balanced and that the world is not sort of binary, right? Even though I said there's a right answer and a wrong answer, I think that my own sort of leadership style is to be non-dualistic in approach, right? So just because we are an objective website, it doesn't mean that we cannot be inclusive of newer folks looking to ask questions with the right intention, right? They're just asking a question. They're trying to figure out how to solve their problem. They may not know all the rules, et cetera. So there is a way. You have to just be deliberate about investing in discovering what the way is. And in our case, we've done things like staging ground. We've done things like the unfriendly robot, et cetera, to augment that experience, to make it possible for folks. So I think it's appropriate for us to end this discussion by saying in my own personal philosophy is that there isn't actually just two extreme answers to a problem. The answer is typically always in between.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With higher and higher levels of abstraction, which is why where we are now is that we are getting sort of much closer to really sort of providing people with a lot of sort of elegant ways to solve problems while writing code all the way even to things like no code and low code, right, where you actually see it super easy for people to sort of be able to leverage coding in general. So I don't want to provide a specific answer. I just think that every year there's absolutely a new sort of leader that is making up for the last sort of years sort of deficiencies, so to speak.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A loaded question, I would say every year we see the evolution of technologies, and I would have said, if you'd asked me this question about a year ago, the proliferation of Web3 technologies on our website was very, very high. It continues to be high, by the way. It hasn't really stopped. And so I would say the number of requests coming in for new stack exchanges to be opened up on Stack Overflow were very heavily focused on Web3 in the past couple years. So we saw a lot of proposals. But in general, programming languages, it's one of those things where we start out with binary code with zeros and one assembly code, and it basically has been abstracting ever since over the multiple years, decades. And every year, there is some, as I was mentioning earlier on, there's something that is being compensated for. There's a memory issue or this elegance or something else. And each of these languages are building on each other.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And even if they go to Google, most of our customers I've got now people redirecting their Google searches through a proxy redirect back to Stack Overflow for Teams within their companies. And then within that, people are enabling a private and public version of Stack Overflow within their company. So they have the read-only public version up top and the private stack overflow teams at the bottom. Again, it's about the workflow and not disrupting the workflow. It's mostly how companies obviously have that within their organizations and outside if people use Google. They use Google. We want to be wherever people are, basically, to give them information.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't comment on Google's plans, but I would just say that for us, I don't know if it's safer. I would say it's more that we want to capture all elements of people's workflows so that they are getting access to Stack O information when they want to access it. If they're a student in university, and we've just kicked off a very large student ambassador program at 250 campuses where we're getting all this feedback from young folks, is that that's how they access it. They are going to Google and that's how they Google a question and that's how they get it. So we want to be there when they do that.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the safer side of your business, the enterprise side, the SaaS business, because any business, and I will freely admit that this is potentially our business too, any business where all the users come to you from Google is a business that is at the mercy of Google, right? So it sounds like the SaaS business, the enterprise business where you are integrated into people's workflows at work, you have stable revenue, all that stuff is safer than the sort of public Google-facing business. Is that how you think about it? Or is you just don't think Google's going to make a stack overflow clone and send all the traffic to that?”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's correct. Our job is to make sure that we are the system of knowledge, so to speak, Nile. And the system of engagement can be whatever their workflow is. So we know that the system of engagement for people generally is they're in their chat op software like Slack or Microsoft Teams, or they're going to Google and doing that. But all sort of arrows point back to Stack Overflow as a source of knowledge. And that's what we want to make sure the information is accurate. How they get to it is sort of we just want to be in the flow of their work. That's why we sort of not really push back on that or sort of try to change that workflow anyways. But we are working on things like how do we make that even more simpler? How do we remove steps from that to make sure that people have even more instant access to the information at the right place at the right time? And that's why with Stack Offer Teams, a lot of our experimentation is around that subject, which is why it integrates with GitHub. It integrates with JIRA, it integrates with obviously teams.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We absolutely think about Google as the fundamental way in which people access Tack Overflow. I think over 90% of our usage, maybe slightly even more, comes from somebody going to Google, asking a question, and then their first answer is typically Stack Overflow because of the community voted answer, and they show up on our website versus people doing it within Stack Overflow's own search or using, and now with Stack Overflow for Teams, they are leveraging asking a question just within Slack or Microsoft Teams. And the answer is going to pop up from Stack Overflow for Teams because it's integrated with Stack Overflow for Teams.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then, in terms of growth, right, you've talked about growing, you've talked about the SaaS business growing. The most basic way to think about Sack Overflow is you ask a question, you get an answer. It works. I mean, that's why the product is successful. The communities provide answers. Most people ask questions to Google. And obviously Google is a client of yours. You have Google related forums. Is Google, do they take search results away from you? Do you think of them as a gatekeeper, as a partner? It just seems like any place where there are answers to questions is a place that Google might expand its remit to cover.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but I mean, that context, yes, because people have a lot to lose in that scenario if they're leveraging something that has some nefarious behavior. But again, the power of the community, I think, is, and you've seen examples of the past 18 months where people have been completely smoked out in those scenarios, where, and again, that's the power of the group, right, to make sure that people don't take advantage of the situation.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's almost entirely to the community. Of course, the company is constantly making sure that we've got the right again frameworks, principles, there's community commons licenses, those sort of things to make sure that there's transparency in what people are using, what they're posting, what they're signing up as in terms of their privacy, those sort of things. But no, we don't sit and scan people's code snippets that they're actually posting on the website. No, we don't do that.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about the content itself. We've talked a lot about moderating the community. We'll get posted to Sack Overflow. It's often code. And there are studies saying, oh, there are mistakes in these code that ends up in shipping applications. Hey, be careful of stack overflow. You don't want to inherit a mistake that somebody made years ago and you're just pulling it down. Again, there are studies that say this happens all the time. Do you actually moderate the answers, the code that gets posted, or do you leave that totally to the community?”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I think it's something that we'll watch. I think it's something for us to just make sure that we're paying attention to. But at the same time, given this nature of our website and what we do, what the intention is behind it and our community guidelines, it's not something that we feel that is going to be a big issue in the near term.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if it's something that we sort of actively discuss, it's like this existential threat that is to our business again. I think based on the intention of the users on our website plus the content on our website, it's unlikely for us to have some nefarious activity on our website because this is about the fundamentals of Python, like how nefarious can that get is sort of the question.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it sort of depends on what element of that, right? So our community guidelines and our licensing basically govern most of what we're doing on the subject. So I think that with regards to making sure that there is no inappropriate content on our website, I mean, that part is, you know, the good news again is that we are on, again, the scale of being objective and subjective. We are in a place of objectivity. And then sort of the appropriateness of the content, et cetera, is moderated by the community principles and guidelines everywhere.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They want more around those lines, of course. So that's an interesting new piece of input relative to pre-sort of blockchain era, if you will. So that's other than that, I would say, generally speaking, the principles apply across the board.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, in terms of at some level that's true, but the abstraction at which we're operating, which is to provide this, you can call it what you call it, a forum or a knowledge base, et cetera, the fundamental principles and the rule set still apply across these. So we're not really sort of changing the way we do it. If anything, we've heard a little bit more about input from these newer Web3 sort of oriented communities saying they want to be able to engage you with more on a real-time basis beyond the asynchronous type of way, right? So that's been an interesting feedback, which we've taken on discord.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to build different kinds of products or different communities. I just imagine the needs of the Web3 development community, the Solana development community is different than the needs of the Rails development community.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And those are all, and you can see the data actually has, there's a correlation where we actually see the number of Python questions go up relative to the number of, for example, machine learning questions. And similarly with blockchain, there's a correlation. So that is how we stay quote-unquote out of the noisy conversation about a fairly sort of polarizing environment of people love it or people hate it. And we just sort of focus on the technology. And if people want to experiment, that's our job to enable them to experiment through common knowledge. And that's...”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Social site or on TikTok or anywhere else that people are talking about things. This is how do you build an application? Using this new framework. And what is so good about the intersection is that the fundamental building blocks of Call it a Web3 application is very similar to the fundamental building blocks of a Web 2 application. I'm talking about things like Python. I'm talking about Node.js.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have close to 170 websites beyond stackoverflow.com. We have all these stack exchange websites that include in that particular topic everything from Bitcoin and Ethereum and Cardano and each of those have Stack Exchanges. There's a Solana one. All these sort of topics that have been sort of in the news most recently, despite what's happening in the crypto universe, the boom and busts, et cetera, what is very evident from our data is that the number of questions, much like by the way, cloud and machine learning, which have gone up by the way 50% year over year with past decade, blockchain related questions and all these sort of related subjects have gone up 80% year over year over the past 10 years. So you're right in that there's a lot of content being generated on Stack Overflow on these subjects. But there again, very technology focused subjects and questions. They're not opinions about whether we believe this is a trend or not, any of those sort of subjective conversations, which belong to a”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technologies and developers are just a very special group. And what motivates them, what drives them is exceptionally different from, I would say, just the general populace of people. And I think that's why the incentive systems is not sort of a one-size-fits-all where we would ever, you know, in a very sort of instinctual fashion to sort of layer in some new sort of recognition system. It's just that what has been working, the reason it's been working, the network effects that have existed is because of all the things I've just mentioned to you as part of the DNA and the fundamental inherent motivations of people in this community. So are we tracking it? Absolutely, because that's just our job. But I would say, are we going to make any sort of fell swoop decisions? No, not only be able to absolutely do a lot of research before we go down those paths.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's obviously a lot of movements these days around if you think about even concepts like blockchain and you think about concepts like the quote-unquote Web3 sort of area A lot of that is based on trying to make sure that people get recognized for the contributions that they're making. So it could be in the context of a creative individual who's got a new song that they created. And of course, we can talk all day about that subject. But the point is that obviously we're tracking all elements of recognition and what is the next generation care about? What do they find valuable? We are absolutely doing that research. I think what is fundamental though in LA is the characteristics of this population. You said it really well up top. This is a very specific group of people.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You track the incentives to contribute and the incentives to moderate, and have they changed? Because it seems like even if the format isn't changing, right? It's still mostly text, the incentives and social dynamics of the community definitely change, especially as you scale, especially as you try to make it more diverse.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To provide us with input and feedback on what we should be building for this next generation of the site from their standpoint, I think they have a phenomenally influential role moderators along with, of course, our meta community, which is meta on Stack Overflow, is another really fantastic place for us to engage very directly with our power users in addition to our moderators, to get a lot of feedback on a lot of things that we're building and considering building based on input that we're seeing from our surveys and so on. So those are the motivations.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's similar in that to keep the system going, you want to make sure that the algorithm slash the principles of the site are being adhered to because you don't want to make this sort of a wild wild west. It has to work. The only way that the right answer, quote unquote, despite the earlier conversation, is surfaced, is that these principles need to be adhered to that you're not getting off-putting comments. People feel welcome, et cetera. And again, it's the incentive about, hey, you're representing this community of 100 million people to make sure that this system is propagating and moving forward and helping the next generation of developers sort of move forward and people are going to solving their problems faster and faster and faster. And they're also the interface with companies.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within their company, and introverted engineer sitting in another part of the world is answering all the JavaScript questions within this company. And that person was never known to be an expert on JavaScript until Stack Overflow for Teams was able to give that person recognition, because that's how they operate. They like to be behind the scenes helping people versus speaking up in meetings. So that, I think, is the biggest motivation recognition why people have got sort of interest and sort of the energy to do this throughout the year.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite intangible, but at the same time, it's very much it pulls on the hot strings of who we are as people, right? It's around helping people set emotional connection and the gratification that you get that you literally helped millions of people. We measure that and we tell users, this question that you answered has been accessed millions of times and it has solved millions of people's problems. That is irreplaceable. You can pay somebody $20 for an answer, but that doesn't get you very much. I think it pollutes the environment by looking at it from a commercial lens. The point is that developers, just the DNA point I mentioned, plus the gratification that they get by helping people literally all around the world is the reward. It is the incentive. And they're getting recognized for it. They're getting recognized as the subject matter expert on the subject of whatever they're focused on, whether that's within the public platform or within Stack Over 15.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Developers on Sack Overflow, the world's best Google Cloud developer is on Sack Overflow. And they are the ones that are making sure that they are helping out their fellow developers and technologists based on their own learnings of struggling through using whatever capability to build things. That's the mechanism. It's less about us hiring the right people, experts. We're not meant to be sort of a research house of people. It's all about the community. The scale that we get is because the experts in our community are able to help each other out because of that fundamental DNA trait that they have to help each other out.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did not. We do not. Yeah. So they are, you know, it's completely, they're nominated, their voted members, and typically they're obviously volunteering to do the role because they understand that ultimately this is going to be a huge public service in many ways to move the world forward. So the expertise on AI is, you know, it's less important for us to have a moderator that is the expert on AI, on the AI stack exchange side. I recently met with one of our most prolific stack overflow users, John Skeet, and he's got extremely high number of points. If you look him up, he's in the top couple users. And somebody like him is taking his time out of his day to be able to contribute to this community because that's in the DNA of a developer. We've all been there at 3 o'clock in the morning trying to debug code, so we understand the frustration of doing that without any sort of peer help. And so the fact is that you've got these experts on Stack O for the world's best AI.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think there are three components if you think about it, right? One is the people at our company, that's Stack O for the company. Then you've got the contributors on Stack Overflow who are the users and the consumers, both that's the group of users. And then you have the moderators. Effectively, they're sort of in between the company and the community of consumers and contributors.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does a little bit. I think what I'm interested in is as you add members to the stack overflow team, to the community team to understand that there's a new, more modern way to do something in JavaScript requires you to understand it. It's a community built around very specialized pieces of knowledge. Do you have to hire in those specialized pieces of knowledge? It strikes me that the world's foremost AI expert probably wants to go be writing some AI code as opposed to moderating the AI code that gets posted overflow. How do you juggle that? How do you balance that? How do you make that sale?”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The elegance of writing code and how effective, how pithy you can actually make that. So all those things are driving people to discover newer and better ways and frameworks and scripting languages that sort of solve previous inefficiencies. So that is just technology progress. And so for us, we welcome that. That is sort of very much core to what we do is to encourage that development within the technology universe. So hopefully that answers your question.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More recent, more modern way of solving the exact same problem 10 years later, somebody came up with the answer, and that's a lot more elegant of a solution than it was, let's say, 10 years ago. So we have an entire effort focused on things like outdated answers to say that, hey, this answer maybe still be appropriate, but it sort of stuck in circa 2010. But in 2022, this answer is even more sort of elegant and you would solve the problem this way because people have sort of progressed and so on around solving the problem. In that context, there are obviously multiple ways to solve a technology problem, absolutely. And there's a better, more efficient way, and that's the human progress, right? That's why every year we see a new technology language, a kind of a programming language come to the top of the list on our surveys. We have one day it's Rust, next day it's Velt. If that didn't exist, like what's the point, right? We want to continue to build on inefficiencies from prior abstractions of programming languages. It could be a memory issue, it could be”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good question. So, I want to make sure that I'm clear when I say the framework of right and wrong. I'm talking about it super macro level, right? Relative to, again, opinion-based social media sites. That's the point that I was making earlier on. I want to make sure that's not lost in the spectrum is really the point I'm making. We're a lot more objective than we are subjective. That's the point. Now, with regards to a public platform, we're not trying to be very draconian in Lay around, hey, this is the right way to do it and it's the only standard to do it. So I'll give you a very specific example. Every question, we have 50 million questions and answers. We have the ability for community users to sort their answers that they're receiving as part of their search results, both in terms of the most voted answers. So let's say there was a question asked about JavaScript 10 years ago that somebody answered has been upvoted, let's say thousands of times. That can be the answer that they look at. Or they can also sort it by what we call trending sort. So what that means is that it's the”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And next generation of developers and technologies. So, all the things that we want to build is in that spirit. And we're going to go well beyond what the site has been over the past 14 years, Q&A site, right? We want to be a lot more focused on. We're running all sorts of experiments, including things like ed tech content as an example through some of our partner companies. If we are actually solving developer problems in the moment, can we not extend that? Can we not extend their learning even beyond that moment of answering a question? Can we provide them with an appropriate, let's say, for example, a course from Udemy or Protocyte, et cetera, to say here, if you just look up a question on Amazon Web Services Lambda, here is an advanced AWS serverless course that you can take right after you answer that. So they make a metal note because it's the best way for them to be prompted to learn when they're actually in the issue. So those are small examples in LA of saying that we are very much in the”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moderators are quitting, and it was sort of a very controversial time. But through this articulation of the vision and rebuilding trust in many ways to say, like, this is what our true intention is, by appointing the right people to fulfill promises that we started making, that has taken a while. And my belief is that based on the scores that we have looked at, based on I'm constantly talking to community members all the time, and of course with our team, we have done that and of course we continue want to continue to focus on that, but we really now are in a phase where it's not only stabilizing, but we want to really delight our community. So it's going from a fairly noisy situation to stabilization to now delighting. So those are the sort of the three phases that we're in the last phase of that, which is to say, how do we make sure that we give our community members all the things that they really need to be able to really find this super useful, which is what has led us to our vision of making it the destination for both communities?”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we spent, I would say, 2020 and a good chunk of 2021 really stabilizing the community sentiment. And to your point, when I joined the company, there was a lot of vocal feedback and, you know, I walked into what I would say of fairy.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a unified approach to when we engage with the community. It's not we have a public resource on one side and we have a big bad business on the other side. It's all in the spirit of the same user. The user is who, it's the user is the developer, it's the technologist. Everything that we do should be in the spirit of serving that development technologist and communicating that vision to those users and technologists was sort of one of the most important things to disarm people, to say that, listen, there's not sort of a nefarious agenda focused on this, right? This is all about serving you. Then it's about bringing on not only at that level, but bringing on folks who in that community team that we have built out very meaningfully is that we brought in a very talented person, another VP of community who we appointed. And that person joins us from another very leading site that you know of is sort of not exactly what we do, but very similar to what we do. And that's been a huge boost because again, lessons learned from other companies that have been sort of in the deep end of the ocean around this sort of stuff.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you mentioned a few things that I think are important. First thing is that we need to have the right people with the right experience to be able to do this work. So, you know, firstly, we brought on board a really talented chief part and community officer who helped us sort of think through sort of the framework for how do we think about the community in the context of our products, how do we make sure that.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You came into the CEO role during a somewhat contentious time for this community. It seemed like that user base itself needed a culture change, not just the company at large. There was a code of conduct that was announced about a year before you became CEO. Famously, it included the line, be nice. It seems like you've left a lot of that behind. You've imposed this new community team. You've made a lot of changes. When you think about the goals you have for the community, My thesis for all large communi sites is that in order to grow, you have to moderate more. As you add more and more people, scale demands more and more content moderation. Is that what you're seeing? It kind of sounds like that's what you're having to do in various ways as well.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say the one that stands out the most is probably the gender distribution between males and females on Sack Overflow and generally the technology industry I think is just low. I think this is relative to what it should be relative to what it represents. And sometimes there's some survey data is interesting. The number of people who actually feel comfortable responding to the surveys and also the number of people and the types of folks who actually contribute and ask questions. There are a lot of people who lurk on Stack Overflow, get the answers but are not active contributors, right? So are all our efforts, as I was mentioning earlier on, in the spirit of making sure people feel like very, very comfortable engaging in the community? And that takes some work for sure. So I would say that one delay in particular is one that we're focused on, specifically the mix between males and females on Stack Overflow.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ongoing effort by us to make sure that we are constantly focused on that subject. We have several initiatives that are driving that. But in general, we are looking at both demographic data when people respond to our surveys, in addition to, of course, looking at just the score at a holistic level”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great question. So, we obviously want to make sure that people that are responding to our surveys, etc., are coming from a true cross-sectional group of people that represent truly what the industry should be like relative to the world, right? So even beyond those two surveys, we conduct obviously our stack overflow developer survey that goes out to literally the entire millions of people on our public platform, typically about 100,000 people respond to that survey every year. And we have a very crystal clear fashion. We ask these questions specifically on things like diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging to make sure that we have true representation on our community and people are using our public platform relative to the world. And of course we have a ton of work to do as it both in terms of our public platform as well as I would say the technology industry at large to increase representation across multiple dimensions of when you think about diversity and that I think is an”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How are those two metrics proxies for? This is a welcoming place, and we're initiating the next generation of technology leaders in an inclusive way because you can build a very small closed homogenous community where everyone's really happy. It's not telling you whether you're adding people or you're welcoming to new people.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specifically, we look every month we look at, of course, the community satisfaction score. So we look at that and that survey goes out to a lot of people in the community. That's one metric we look at. Thankfully, it's in a very good spot at the moment thanks to collective efforts. In addition, we also look at moderators satisfaction scores, which is a really, really”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot easier to do that on the public internet when you have hundreds of millions of people all around the world. But within your teammates, we wanted to make it even more sort of friendly. And so we basically only included upload. So those are very specific examples where we have really tried to make sure that stack is a lot more of an inclusive place, it is a lot more welcoming of the next generation of technologists and people feel comfortable to engage on it.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, right? That's one example of what we're doing with our inclusive approach. The other thing that we're doing is something called the unfriendly robot, which is literally ML technology that skims all the content on Stack Overflow to look for any comments that may be untoward or inappropriate based on, you know, it may have been the intention may have been to get it right, but to get the answer right or whatnot, but it came across as fairly harsh. But that unfriendly robot goes and skims based on patterns and flags that to both the moderator community as well as to the company so that we can actually go and sort of remediate those and sort of make sure people are appropriately engaging on the platform. So those are two specific examples where we're doing that. And of course within StackHope for Teams product, we have completely even removed the ability for people, they even downvote answers as an example, right? Because with your colleagues within your company, it's more likely that you just don't want to download your colleagues.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of place. Now, to get to your point around the team, there's a very, very specific team, both in terms of community moderation. We have obviously, in addition to that, a product team that focuses purely on community products. So what those folks do is literally build the tools and the automation and to make sure that the experience on the public platform is really, really great. So a lot of things we're doing on the subject are things like how do we make sure that our platforms are a lot more inclusive and welcoming for the next generation of diverse technologists. So from all around the world. So as an example, we are rolling out something called staging ground, which is almost the equivalent of a shallow pool in a swimming pool where people get the opportunity not to get slapped in the wrist like I did a few years ago to ask the questions, make the mistakes, get friendly feedback, and then be able to go into the deep end of the pool within Stack Overflow with the 15 million questions and answers and then go and ask your first question, really.”
2022-10-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT