<story><title>Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?</title><url>http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18539/has-stackoverflow-saved-billions-of-dollars-in-programmer-productivity</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>forgotAgain</author><text>A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that.&lt;p&gt;The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation. If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better. I&amp;#x27;m thinking of msdn as an example since a lot of the Stack questions are MS technology based. MS is far from alone though. Much of the money saved has gone to vendors.&lt;p&gt;Even given those points it has still saved a lot of money. But billions? I don&amp;#x27;t know if it would be that much. It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taspeotis</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation ... I&amp;#x27;m thinking of msdn as an example
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
The number of questions on SO that can be answered by RTFM is quite remarkable. I think that points to a lot of the documentation being just fine. The last bug of my own I spent any significant of time on was answerable by RTFM [1].&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of PHP+MySQL questions that appear where the OP is clearly learning about PHP+MySQL and the code looks something like...&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    $result = mysql_query(&amp;quot;select username, password from user where username = &amp;quot; . $username)
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
...shows that they haven&amp;#x27;t bothered to RTFM [2].&lt;p&gt;[1] I had made a new thread and was calling ShellExecute on it. It didn&amp;#x27;t work on some computers because I hadn&amp;#x27;t initialised COM (presumably they had some shell extensions installed). See the first sentence of &amp;quot;Remarks&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb762153(v=vs.85).aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;msdn.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;library&amp;#x2F;windows&amp;#x2F;desktop&amp;#x2F;bb76...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] Big red box: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.php.net/mysql_query&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.php.net&amp;#x2F;mysql_query&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?</title><url>http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18539/has-stackoverflow-saved-billions-of-dollars-in-programmer-productivity</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>forgotAgain</author><text>A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that.&lt;p&gt;The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation. If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better. I&amp;#x27;m thinking of msdn as an example since a lot of the Stack questions are MS technology based. MS is far from alone though. Much of the money saved has gone to vendors.&lt;p&gt;Even given those points it has still saved a lot of money. But billions? I don&amp;#x27;t know if it would be that much. It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dragonwriter</author><text>&amp;gt;  If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better.&lt;p&gt;Documentation quality had been declining for many years before SO -- I think its more accurate to say that if vendors were doing better, there would be no (or less interest in) StackOverflow than the other way around.</text></comment>