What did you have in place before this (wiki, Slack, Yammer or something like it) if anything?
Is this better than finding the right person to ask, or posting in slack or something?
In my org we have a wiki on topics and if that fails an "experts" list with people to contact for further help. There is also a yammer group for asking questions, but that is rarely used. I think this could be helpful, but whether or not it's worth the cost would be a question for someone else.
Our documentation is split up between markdown files in-repo and a wiki (Confluence) with lots of assorted information. Interestingly we do the same kind of thing with an "experts" list, but with a focus for on-call engineers so they know who to contact if something's broken.
A lot of people still have a natural inclination to just post their questions in chat - probably because it's lower friction than typing up a question and then posting that in chat. We've been trying to shift this by re-posting people's questions in SO and answering them there. It's been mostly helpful, but I'd say we still have a ways to go in shifting people towards SO.
About 50 programmers, yes we've found that it wasn't natural for people to start asking their questions there and that we (the team that opened the beta) tend to seed Q&A there to drive people to the tool.
Is this better than finding the right person to ask, or posting in slack or something?
In my org we have a wiki on topics and if that fails an "experts" list with people to contact for further help. There is also a yammer group for asking questions, but that is rarely used. I think this could be helpful, but whether or not it's worth the cost would be a question for someone else.