[junon]

We used an early version at Uber; I was one of the few people to help set it up in the early days.

It's literally just SO format, but for internal stuff. It's great for when you have siloed teams that have to communicate, especially when you've never met those people. It makes a lot of sense at these large companies, since Uber is just a bunch of small, isolated teams mashed together in large open floor plans. Nobody actually knows each other unless you've worked directly with them or they're notable management.

So for that, it was great (when I was there). I can't imagine this being useful for smaller teams.

Confluence is more long-form, wiki-like documentation, often written by someone with authoritative knowledge. While this isn't forbidden (quite the contrary) on SO or SO for Teams, it's not exactly what it's most useful for in my opinion.

[hadrien01]

I suppose the question was about the Q&A plugin for Confluence, not the Wiki product itself (https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions)

[yonixw]

How easy was it to find answers? Is it just the stackoverflow search engine?

[motiejus]

Yes. All SO, but with our "internal" content.

Some of the most awesome engineers contributed a lot, which made it pretty high quality.

You could also ping a person when asking a question, that's usually more polite than pinging over chat with your question.

Some high-touch teams (e.g. software networking, with whom almost everybody has something to say/ask) set up their "how to ask us a question" to post on internal slack. Works great.

Edit: also keeps people more honest when asking questions - SO taught us to ask questions correctly. :)

Current Uber employee

[junon]

Just out of curiosity, did you guys move all of your internal docs stuff to SO? I'm surprised it's still being used, I was the first mod for it and it wasn't clear if people cared. There were like 4 main KB softwares in use and a few of us wanted to push to use SO primarily. How well did that plan end up?

[nirushiv]

Really interested to learn more about how Uber scaled like that. Would you be ok if I emailed you? I’ve been thinking hard about growing teams lately - would love to pick your brain.