Community management at Stack Exchange is an… Interesting job. Parts sociologist, cat-wrangler, therapist, software analyst and cheerleader, this small band of dedicated people work daily to make sure each individual community has the tools and support you need to be as awesome as you are. Of course, we don’t do it alone: from the very start, Stack Exchange attracted some amazingly helpful and insightful folk who’ve donated their time and effort to help out – and I’m pleased to announce that we’re adding one of them, Tim Post, to our full-time staff of Community Managers.

Tim comes from a systems programming background, starting out way back in the dial-up BBS days. He’s been working with and managing communities of various sizes ever since, and describes finding Stack Overflow back in the winter of ’08 like “getting stuck in a huge spiderweb”. His fascination with the system itself (both the software and the game-like aspect that drives so much participation here) led him to become a moderator, first on Webmasters then on Stack Overflow in the spring of ’11. Since then, he’s been a constant help and guide to the many folks using Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange.

When he’s not working, Tim still enjoys programming (nowadays simply to satisfy his whims), photography, DIY projects and tinkering with whatever he can get his hands on. He resides in the Philippines, thus extending the reach of our global team into the west Pacific.

Tim’s been working with us on a trial basis for a little while now, and enjoyed our motley crew enough to sign on full-time. You’ll be seeing a lot more of him in the coming months, so please give him a warm welcome when he drops in on your site.

Think you have what it takes to manage the communities on Stack Exchange? We’re hiring community managers, and if you’re not near our NYC HQ, that’s okay – we love remote workers. You get to work with awesome people like Tim and help us guide Stack Exchange as it grows. (And on the off-chance you’re fluent in Portuguese, you should definitely apply – we have a special project for you…)

In December, we launched our 3^rd annual Stack Overflow Annual User Survey to learn more about our site demographics and user trends throughout 2012. Compared to last year, we received an even larger sample size this year with almost 10,000 respondents!

Here are a few larger trends we’ve observed over the past three years:

You like us…you really like us!

Since 2009, site traffic to Stack Overflow has grown by a whopping 261.7%! As if this weren’t enough, we’re also now the 86^th largest global site, according to Alexa. Our crazy goal of breaking into the top 50 is looking less crazy!

Mobile is on the move.

No real surprise here, but of the mobile family, the number of users who own Android devices increased 29.2% from 2010 to 2012—a bigger increase than owners of iPhones and iPads combined. Despite the rising mobile trend, we were surprised to learn that only 7.7% of you are employed as mobile apps developers and 51.8% of companies still don’t have a mobile app.

You’re getting happier at work.

Since 2010, we’ve seen a 2.2% uptick in workplace satisfaction, so 70% of you are happy in your current jobs. We’re not going to point fingers or anything, but we hope there may be some causation for those of you who found your current job from among the 10,000+ roles that were posted on Careers 2.0 last year.

Since we now have three years’ worth of data, we wanted to put together something a little special for this year’s overview, so check out the infographic below that our designer created to highlight some of our key findings.

In our effort to make all information publicly available, here is a basic report of the results or if you’d prefer to play around with the data yourself, just email [email protected] for the dataset.

UPDATED: Check out our European version of the infographic here.

We’re growing like crazy! Between launching exciting new sites, developing new features and promotions for existing ones, and branching out geographically, Stack Exchange can use all the help it can get – so we’re currently hiring for seven (7!) different positions, from developers to designers to sales to… well, just look at the list yourself:

• Product Manager – Q&A Team (telecommute or New York)
• Web Developer – Q&A Team (telecommute or New York)
• Web Developer – Careers Team (New York)
• Senior Systems Administrator (telecommute or New York)
• Product Designer (telecommute or New York)
• Account Executive – Careers 2.0 (London, Denver, New York)
• Sales Representative – Inside Sales – Careers 2.0 (Denver, New York)

We’re dogfooding Careers for these of course, since who better to help make the software running Stack Exchange more awesome than the folks using Stack Exchange. Here are a few positions that are especially appropriate to our community:

Product Manager – Q&A Team (telecommute or New York)

We’re looking for someone to help us design and build the next set of features and special projects for Stack Exchange.  We want someone with serious startup experience building and shipping products, from conception to deployment.  You’ll take ideas from us and the community, or come up with your own, and work with our designers and developers to get them shipped.

Web Developer – Q&A Team (telecommute or New York)

We’re looking for a top-notch web developer for the Core Q&A team.  You’ll work directly on the engine that powers all the sites to ship new features, fix bugs, and scale and grow the sites.  We want someone with serious front-to-back web development experience (C# not required), a track record of getting stuff done, and a history of activity in the community.

Web Developer – Careers Team (New York)

We’re looking for more top-notch web developers to work on building Careers into the best place for developers to find a job, anywhere.  You’ll work on lots of new features, fix bugs, and help us decide the future of Careers.  We want someone with serious front-to-back web development experience (C# not required), a track record of getting stuff done, and a history of activity in the community.

Senior Systems Administrator (telecommute or New York)

We’re looking for a veteran Windows / Linux systems administrator to join our team.  You’ll help build out our infrastructure and keep it ahead of the growth curve.  We want someone with experience working with both Windows and Linux systems (emphasis on Windows), and a track record of taking on big challenges and delivering blog-worthy solutions.

Product Designer (telecommute or New York)

Last, but not least, we need a product designer.  You’ll work with Jin to help our developers and product managers design new features, create and implement full brand identities for new Stack Exchange sites, and help improve user experience across the network.  We want someone with a portfolio of web design and experience working directly with developers and product managers to design products and features.

Telecommute?

Most of these positions are open to the world: we want to hire the best people, wherever they are.  However, there are a few things you should be aware of:

1. You should be awesome at working remotely — self-motivated and aggressively communicative — to make sure you stay on the same page as the rest of your team
2. We still believe in getting teams together at least once a week to talk, and that generally happens between 1 – 5pm EDT.  You’ll need to be flexible with your hours
3. There may be some countries that are legally too difficult for us to work with…sorry!

A few positions are in-office only, but don’t worry: we have awesome offices.  In fact, a few people who started working remotely moved to New York just to get access to our catered lunches.  If you do want to move to New York (or our sales offices in Denver or London), we’ll assist you with relocation but you must already have the permanent right to work in the country of the office (US or UK).

Apply!

Each job has instructions to apply, and we’re hiring immediately.  If you see a job that might be a fit for you or someone you know, apply soon.  You can also always find a list of open positions at http://stackexchange.com/about/hiring, or click the “jobs” link in the footer of any Stack Exchange site.

It’s been a few weeks now since Joel kicked off our “summer of love”. There’ve been some excellent discussions in the blog comments and on Meta, and we’ve tried to present some hard data on how objectively “nice” we are. But it’s high time to talk about what place “niceness” really has on Stack Exchange. And to do that, we need to start by talking about you:

You, sir, are a jackass.

And that’s ok.

Stack Overflow wasn’t created to be some utopian ideal of peace and love. When Jeff & Joel set out to create this system, they knew full well the sort of problems that face online communities: noisy conversations obscuring real information, preferential behavior toward those in the right cliques, bickering, rudeness…

The rules we’ve created, the tools we have at our disposal, the very nature of certain features on the sites – these are all engineered to mitigate the problems that inevitably result from throwing a bunch of jackasses together in one place.

Stack Overflow people are nice because we’re good at cleaning up after ourselves… And staying focused on what’s really important.

Civility is a tool for communication, not a weapon for order

You might think you hang out on SO because people are nice there, but if Stack Overflow was full of very nice, impeccably polite misinformation… It wouldn’t be a valuable resource for professional programmers. It’d be more like some elaborate geek troll.

It’s good to keep politeness in mind when writing, as your tone can distract readers from your message. It’s great to have something approaching real data on how “nice” we are. But in the end, this sort of navel-gazing misses the point: we’re not here to pat each other on the back and hand out gold stars, much less waggle our fingers at the jackasses – we’re here to share the knowledge of our craft.

Stop and think for a moment about the nicest person you’ve met on Stack Exchange. Chances are, it wasn’t the guy who greeted you by name when you signed on – it was the one who answered your first question, convinced you to clarify what you were asking, and calmly pointed out your misconceptions before pointing you to a solution.

Rudeness as a defense against vampires

As a traditional forum evolves over time, insular rudeness becomes the weapon of choice against the invading hordes, an immune response by the organism toward infection from outsiders. This is only marginally effective, since the most dangerous invaders have long ago developed a resistance to it. Eventually, rudeness becomes institutionalized, to the point where members start to drive away everyone – including each other. It’s a natural progression. And on Stack Exchange, it’s entirely unnecessary.

Everyone loves to quote from the FAQ’s etiquette section, particularly the first “be nice” bit. But it’s the last section that has all the action items:

Be honest.
Above all, be honest. If you see misinformation, vote it down. Add comments indicating what, specifically, is wrong. Provide better answers of your own. Best of all — edit and improve the existing questions and answers!

Tired of seeing crappy questions? Close them. Irritated by lousy answers? Down-vote them. Depressed by the meaningless junk that some people post whenever they see an empty text field? Delete it! Embarrassed by poor grammar or formatting? Edit it! See someone being rude? Flag it! All of these tools exist, and we’re working hard on making them better and more effective.

So when you can cast a vote and go on with your life, why would you waste your time ranting? It’s that old message board mentality creeping in. When you leave a comment, recognize that you’re now walking the line between a Q&A site and a traditional forum. If you aren’t actively trying to help someone learn, you’re not helping to defend the realm - you’re just being a jackass.

The choice here isn’t between being nice and being right. You can be nice each and every time you guide someone to the right answer or the correct behavior, and doing so is not only better for the community morale, it’s also more effective. That doesn’t take a welcoming committee, it’s something anyone can do. Even jackasses like me and you.

You can’t fix what you can’t measure, so the first thing we did as a part of our Summer of Love campaign was try to measure friendliness in an objective and repeatable way. We gathered 7000 comments from Stack Overflow and submitted them to Mechanical Turk. For each comment, we asked 20 people to rate the comment as Friendly, Unfriendly, or “Neutral/Unclear.”

There are different ways of massaging the data, but I do want to give you a flavor for the kind of comments we’re talking about when we’re talking about unfriendly comments. Here is a snapshot of the complete results, showing comments where 95% of the reviewers rated a comment as unfriendly (warning, if there are any kids in the area, you may want to send them away):

• Can you not google?!
• Dean, don’t be a f___ing lamer. You clearly don’t have the slightest clue of what your ass…
• Neurofluxation, haha f___ you should be f___ you kid
• try to give answers. you baby kid shut up your mouth. this is forum to share problems not …
• yea a__hole im saying send me the code
• This is not correct, for many reasons, many of which were pointed out by plinth below. I d…
• @Rich, It is clear (and always was clear) that you don;t care about what anybody else thin…
• could you please stop reposting all your questions 4 times?
• You know, I really dislike the attitude here that a question can only be asked once.
• @cee: And rolling back is not intended to solve whatever gripes you may have with me. If y…
• Now you’re just proving your douchiness.  Editing your question to hide your true intent, …
• man, you guys have no sense of humor.  I don’t see how hundreds of idiotic and non-program…
• NO. GOD. these comments are getting irritating.
• Indeed. Although demonstrating a severe lack of ability to ask questions is a bad start.
• I mean, really, WTF?
• Don’t vote down, the sooner I sabotage this the sooner we can tell the client f___ you and…
• @TheTXI: That’s exactly my point. If the person actually bothered to *google* the damn que…
• u discuss all kind of questions here but when i ask a question and if u people are not abl…
• @TStamper: If they haven’t bothered to look through the FAQ, what makes you think they are…
• It’s amusing for a while, babby, but even the funniest jokes get tedious when they’re done…
• If you’re so desperate to have your account removed why not just leave and not come back? …
• He asks lot’s of these troll questions
• Seriously? WFT Dude?
• Jesus! Start fixing your question.
• Spencer, my tone? You sir are political correctness gone mad!
• If I said your mouse sucked, are you gonna take me out to the parking lot and fight me?  i…
• This isn’t a programming question, it is a psychology question. It doesn’t ask for an expl…
• @mario why in your opinion should I not link to it? Because of the 5 pageviews the site ga…
• Rec, you are not asking a question that can be answered in the form at the bottom of this …
• @user336502, you’re pushing your luck with cruddy questions (http://stackoverflow.com/ques…
• Jebus, @AKA, did you even read your own question?  This is the worst piece of crap I’ve ev…
• Jeez dont’ people read web sites. What do you think Stackoverflow careers is for? This pla…
• Hmya, how can 4 in 5 programmers be wrong?  Or 1 in 2?  We don’t know how your brain works…
• @M.H: Don’t blame the language because you don’t know how to use it. Don’t blame the gun w…

Of course, “friendliness” can be subjective. But when we’re talking about making Stack Overflow a friendly place, we’re not talking about being terse or even snippy — we’re talking about lighting a bag of dog poo on fire and throwing it at people.

Of 7000 comments submitted, there were 161 that were rated as “unfriendly” by 75% or more of the reviewers… that’s about 2.3%. If you browse Stack Overflow for a few minutes, it’s likely that you will come across one of these extremely unfriendly comments. Of those 2.3% extremely unfriendly comments, less than 1/5th have been deleted. Most of them are still on Stack Overflow right now.

The “friendliness” situation is much better, mainly because our reviewers tend to universally interpret thank you’s as friendly.

• +1 This is a good question, as this programming practice is even used in some big projects. (www.ogre3D.com for ex.)
• @Visage Haha, thanks for that
• Great analogy, @Guffa !
• Nice find, Chad Birch!
• It was tagged javascript before Joel edited it. Clearly it is programming related :)
• Thanks much for the feedback everyone
• i wonder how did you manage to create the compoennts tag? ;) like your question +1
• Thanks for the suggestion !
• That’s nice.  Let us know how it goes!
• You’re welcome…
• hehe…that was fun!
• Thanks, see my edit.
• @Mike: Thank you.
• Cool, will do that.
• Okay, thanks all.
• O_o That’s very cool! +1
• @spudly – apologies, turns out the link I posted was a dud – sorry for wasting your time!
• Love the question.  What you’re after is domain knowledge which is exactly the type of information that a company guards because it’s a barrier to entry to blokes in garages writing television clients :)
• Cool. thank you!
• Ha! I didn’t even catch it in your post. :)
• LOVING all the images that have been added :-)
• thanks.. thats exactly what I was looking for :)
• Thanks everyone
• @meagar wow that looks awesome! I’m only about a several hour drive from there, I’ll see if I can make it. Juggling for the win!!! :)

Of 7000 comments submitted, 557 were rated as “friendly” by 75% of more of the reviewers.

I think this proves that the methodology is reasonably sound. I think everyone can agree that the Mechanical Turk reviewers, who were shown comments out of context and who probably did not know anything about our site (all they knew was that it was a “programmer’s discussion forum”), did, nevertheless, produce results that seem to agree with how we, inside the community, would judge the comments. That gives me confidence that we have a reliable measure of friendliness that we can track.

There’s a lot of other interesting stuff in the data, so here’s an Excel workbook containing the raw data and friendliness ratings.