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by samkater
1920 days ago
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I have looked into SO for Teams in the past, but was not able to convince myself that it was worth the effort to push for its adoption (from the bottom up). I would be curious to hear more about what the journey to success looked like for organizations that were able to do it successfully. It seemed to me that it required a lot of process/habit changing that needs to be fully supported from management levels. Likely including a "ban" on project-based channels on things like Slack/Teams/etc. I imagined you would need to try to move all of the relevant project-based Q/A and chat onto this product so the necessary information is available. Then you need people to actively moderate and vote to help the SO search functionality bubble up the relevant topics. Basically, this isn't just a new tool, but a new way of interacting with teammates - if you want to get the utility from it. What else am I missing? I should mention, I really like the concept, but not sure how to get over the adoption hurdle. |
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Obviously, there are a ton of questions which happen every day in a typical company. The problem is, SO is really optimized for a very particular kind of question: I'll word them as, isolated/fungible questions which have a medium-level effort of answering.
By that I mean, firstly, the question has to be isolated from any other workflow a developer might be involved in, which involves other systems. The big ones here are Issue Management (Jira) and Code (Github). I'd estimate that 70% of the questions our developers ask one-another on a daily basis happens either in the planning phase on Jira, or in the PR phase on Github. Not only would it be burdensome to tell developers "stop asking questions in PRs, put those in SO", I'm not convinced that, idealistically, SO is even where those questions should live; Jira and GitHub are powerful, indexed, searchable tools that both have a tactile connection to the actual product. It makes sense for discussion to happen there.
And secondly; short-form questions are better answered in Chat (Slack); its where people live, and its fast. Yes/no kind of stuff. Long-form questions will always be better answered in Slack via a link to a Wiki (Confluence/Notion); there's a hierarchical organization to Wikis, not to mention full search indexing, which massively assists in organizing and archiving information. No company does their knowledge base right, but usually they're better than nothing, and better than what I could imagine a full-usage internal StackOverflow would be.
I could honestly see it being interesting as a replacement to Chat/Slack in very, very modern companies whose leadership has recognized how much of a massive time waster and burden real-time Chat has become to the development workflow. But this is very cutting edge thinking; I know of a few leaders who have verbalized concern about Slack, but none who have actually followed through on trying something different in any capacity, likely because it is addicting and their teams would revolt. I would like to work somewhere that just tries it out; throw away Slack for three months, and try a more Forum-based method of low-friction communication. Maybe SO would work for that. But that will never, ever happen bottom-up.