Today, we’re excited to announce that online registration is now open for Beyond Coding, a free new summer program designed to equip emerging computer programmers in New York City with professional skills needed to help them succeed in their first job working with code. The program, slated to launch June 11, is part of our collaboration with New York City’s Tech Talent Pipeline initiative to support the growth of the city’s tech ecosystem. And we’re thrilled to be taking part, along with some other top-notch New York startups: Crest CC, Foursquare, Kickstarter, Tumblr, and Trello.

This Tech Talent Pipeline initiative, which launched in May 2014, has three objectives: Work with New York companies to help close the skills gap between open jobs and candidates to fill them, provide training and educational opportunities to New York residents, and ultimately, to build a talented and diverse workforce in the tech sector.

Since the program kicked off, we realized that while we are hiring, we’re not doing it fast enough to make a real difference for New Yorkers who want to learn to code. On the other hand, one thing that we do have (thanks to Stack Overflow) is access to a wide range of resources and knowledge that we can offer to the greater community. And several other New York startups fell into the same bucket. So we decided to team up — you know, like a less super-heroic League of Justice — and build out a formal educational curriculum for the New York tech community.

With nearly five open jobs for every available software developer, the need for qualified technical talent is higher than ever. In New York City alone, there are 13,000 firms hiring for highly sought-after skills, such as web development, mobile development, and user-interface design. To meet this demand, it’s critical to get more talented people coding, and do it fast.

Beyond Coding’s goal is not to teach hard coding skills; it’s to ensure that anyone in this city with a passion for technology can get the mentoring, training, and support they need to succeed as a developer. The curriculum is designed to accelerate the learning curve for new programmers by attacking skills gaps that often prevent talented young developers from actually landing jobs. We’ll cover professional networking, technical communication skills, the best way to prepare for a technical interview, and what happens next: how to continue learning programming skills beyond the classroom.

The Beyond Coding program is open to anybody in the New York City area with an understanding of coding and is currently looking for a job as a software developer or a related role, but lacks access to tools, resources, or a professional network they need to succeed. Once the 10-week program concludes, students will receive a formal certification and be introduced to top tech companies in New York City who are hiring junior-level developers.

This is just one of the ways that we’re working to promote inclusion both here, and in the tech community as a whole. But we’re still figuring out how we can make a positive difference, so we welcome any feedback or ideas you may have. And if you live in New York City, are learning to code and can use a little help kickstarting your new career, you can apply at beyondcoding.io.

29 comments

The Community Team’s first and most important job is to help you, the users. Every day, we hang out on meta sites and in chat, watching to make sure that someone is working on your problems. Until very recently, community managers also fielded each and every request that came through our support ticketing system.

(And before that, Jeff Atwood handled them all. The whole team@ inbox, singlehandedly.)

Our approach to customer service via email has changed as the network has grown: we’ve tried many new processes and tools over the years to help community managers handle team@ efficiently and still have brainpower left over for the rest of their jobs. (If you’re curious about it, you can take a look at Jon Ericson’s ongoing blog series.) But still, support tickets stack up and all too often lose out to more pressing issues on the sites themselves; more and more often, we found ourselves struggling to resolve problems as they came in, much less fix them in two ways.

Some companies respond to this problem by just giving up, hiding support emails and shunting requests into a poorly-monitored forum somewhere. We know this because we’ve repeatedly gotten emails from members of such sites, from people searching desperately to find anyone willing to help. But we don’t believe in treating our users – the people whose patronage we depend on – as annoyances to be brushed off and forgotten. So we decided to double down on our commitment to friendly and efficient user support: we’ve hired two new staff members to handle email support full-time. And we hired them from the communities they will be supporting.

Please join me in welcoming our two new Community Growth Operations Specialists

Kyle, aka animuson:

Kyle was an elected moderator on Stack Overflow, spending a significant amount of his time helping out others on the site. Some personal background:

• He visited Australia for 18 days as a student, which is probably longer than you’ve ever spent in Australia (unless you live there);
• He plays an obsessive amount (his words) of video games, and has over 100 platinum trophies on the PlayStation Network;
• He previously worked at his county’s Election Commission, which is (unintuitively) the most non-political job one can have.

João, aka JNat:

João was a pro tempore moderator on Anime & Manga SE, contributing greatly to the health and growth of that community. Some personal background:

• He studied Arts in high school and has a masters degree in Architecture and Urbanism, so it should be obvious how he ended up in operations for an internet Q&A community;
• He’s Portuguese, so Gabe now has some assistance in supporting the needs of our Portuguese-speaking members.
• He credits his love for anime and manga with getting him this awesome new job.

You might be thinking: “Wait. Operations Specialists? I thought they were just handling emails.” But that would be a waste of their considerable talents. Once João and Kyle have tackled team@, there’s no telling how many new and efficient ways they’ll find to help make our team better at supporting our communities.

If ever you find yourself having to contact us, it’s likely that these brave souls will be fielding your request. Feel free to say hi, or tell them what the best part of your week has been so far!

25 comments

In the time since we started working on the profile, generations of dinosaurs were born, fell in love, had families, and were killed by a comet. Or climate change, or maybe texting and driving or some nonsense like that. Anyway, as of today, it’s live on SO and about half the network, and we’ll be rolling out to the rest over the next few weeks. And it was worth the wait:

One user page isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion user pages.

Unfortunately, the designers said I could have… like two, maybe? At most. So, we went with that:

One page for you, one page for them:

1. The Profile Page lets you show others a summary of what you’re all about. Share your interests, favorite charities, or your Twitter, Github, and SO Careers activity. Or don’t. And it automatically shows off your most helpful posts and tags from the network.
2. The Activity Page lets you instantly see just how much good you’ve done here. And it provides new, individual suggestions for specific ways you can contribute next.

How many people have you helped?

• “People Reached” is a new way to see just how much your efforts here matter. For the first time ever, you can see roughly how many times an actual human being – very likely one looking for help – found your contributions here. Personally, I like to call it the “Saving-the-frigging-world-o-meter”. Which may be why I’m no longer allowed to name stuff. Whatever.

Not big on words? Stop reading this. It’s long. Just go touch it!

• Already have a profile? Go update it; you can add new Twitter, Github, and Careers links, and you’ll want to check your “People Reached” to see just how many people out there would high-five you if they could.
• Never filled out a profile? If you’ve ever gotten help here, create one today, and you’ll be ready to pay it forward the next time you run across a question you can answer. And the new layout is designed to make you look pretty great even before you post.

Sticking around for the details? Well, I warned you.

Why?!? Grimlock say NO changies! I LIKED THE OLD CHEESE!

Why the change? Well, the legacy user page served proudly for many years, but the design team got bored. And they had some long, tedious point about black never really being black, or tortoise-shell glasses or something, so we eventually just gave in. (Okay, not really.)

Because the old page was being asked to do two different things, it was okay at both, but not awesome at either:

• When you looked at your own profile , the top section was full of stuff that you A) know, B) can’t forget, and C) almost never changes. “What’s my name?” “Where do I live again?” At least “Age” was exciting roughly 0.3% of the time: “Whee – it’s my birthday today!!”
• When other people looked at your profile, the whole bottom section was full of stuff that you may care about, but others probably didn’t. (“It’s sure been a while since Jay accepted a bounty – I hope he’s doing okay!”)

So, we left all the stuff that was working exactly the way it was, and split the info into two pages. Anyone can see either page, but the default view will be the one with the info that you actually care about.

Your beautiful new Profile Page: Show others what you’re all about.

What do you want to share? What you do. What you build. Your favorite quote, or least favorite N’Sync member. (Just kidding. They’re all equally awesome.)

Let others see your best work, whether it’s here or on other sites. Not active here yet? Not a problem. The new profile has dedicated fields for links to Github, Twitter, your Rick Schroeder Fan Fiction Tumblr, or wherever you have something to share. If you never felt you needed a profile before, today just may be your day.

Already been helpful? We’ll show off your best work. Your top posts – along with the technologies or tags you’re strongest in – show others what you’re all about. And if you’re active on multiple communities, your best stuff from those sites will show in the sidebar, too.

The new Activity Page: Track your impact and find new ways to contribute.

Not sure what to do next? We’ve got you covered.
“Next Badge” helps you figure out where you can contribute next. If you’re new, it suggests badges that help you learn the ropes. If you’ve been helping for years now, it suggests badges for activities you seem to have enjoyed in the past. And for most of ’em, it links right to a half-decent place to go earn them.

Wondering what your future holds? The “Next Privilege” bar offers a slightly more realistic goal than “catch Skeet“, tells you what powers are in your immediate future, and shows you just how close you are to earning them.

Already have mod-like powers?
Not a big fan of “other peoples advice”?
Good for you! Don’t let the man tell you what’s up. The next badge picker lets you pick the goals you want to track, and shows you just how close you are to each of ’em.

And the page adapts to serve our most generous users. Once you’ve earned all the privileges, the “next privilege” bar automatically starts tracking your progress toward your closest tag badge (or another one of your choosing).

70 million humans in need land here each month. How many find your posts?

Long before I worked here, the thing I found most appealing about contributing to Stack Exchange sites was the idea that when I took the time to write something here, my efforts would help more people than they ever could buried on some forum.  An answer here doesn’t just help the one original asker, or the five up-voters. The real impact comes from the sixteen thousand searchers who land here looking for help with the exact same problem.

Every time you take five minutes out of your lunch break, or ten that you might have spent watching creepy hands open eggs to post here instead, you’re choosing to donate some of your most most valuable asset to do some good. And holy crap, have you done a lot of it. In the past, we hadn’t given you any way to even estimate just how much, though. Today, we’ve fixed that. So if you’ve contributed even a few up-voted posts, go- take a look.  I think you’ll be damn proud of what you find.

71 comments

Every year we ask our users to tell us a little about themselves. This year we asked our users to tell us a lot.

For 2 weeks in February 2015, we ran a 45 question survey. We asked where you live, what programming languages & frameworks you use, how much money you make, how much coffee you drink, and whether you prefer tabs or spaces when writing code. More than 26,000 of you responded, making this year’s survey quite possibly the most authoritative developer survey ever conducted.

A few findings:

• Only 48% of you have a degree in computer science.
• You spend, on average, more than 7 hours every week coding on the side.
• You use JavaScript. You love Swift. And you want to code in Node.
• You overwhelmingly like your jobs (especially if you live in Iran).
• Your Stack Overflow rep is a strong indicator of how much money you make.
• And you prefer tabs to spaces at a ratio of 4:3.

This is just a start. Check out the full results.

Massive thanks to everyone who shared information about themselves. There’s a huge benefit in being able to see who your peers are and what they’re interested in, and we hope this survey is as interesting to all of you as it is to us.

For those of you who want to dive into the data yourselves, we’ll be releasing a full dump of all line-by-line responses within the next couple weeks.

And if you took the survey and counted M&Ms, or if you’re just curious about how well devs can estimate packing density (spoiler: not very well), see how many M&Ms were in the jar.

Have ideas for what we should ask next year? Let us know in the comments.

58 comments

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Podcast Episode #63, recorded March 6, 2015 in front of a live-ish audience. Today’s podcast is brought to you by Cool Whip by Kraft Foods. A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.txt — learn more! Our hosts today are Joel Spolsky, David Fullerton, and Jay Hanlon… as usual.

So what’s new? David went to London. (We have an office there. It’s awesome and it has graffiti on the walls.) David flew out to meet the London marketing team, spend time with some of our European developers, and get knighted. Probably.

This story didn’t really go anywhere, so we’ll take an audience question and then move on to talking about review queues. Specifically: the Help & Improvement queue. (Let the record show that Joel asked for this feature approximately 700 years ago. [So did Jon Skeet. -Ed.])

The Help & Improvement queue (aka the helpers queue, aka the huggy queue) contains questions that were deemed “Should Be Improved” in the triage queue. The triage queue is working very well so far. (There are numbers with percentages and two decimals of accuracy, so they are obviously really good.) Instead of talking about it more, let’s just go check it out! Here’s the question Joel was working with.

Joel discusses some questions that got as much help as they deserved (if not more), including an example that got some helpful edits comments. But without better information from the askers, these questions were still never going to get good answers. User Lynn Crumbling has a new badge idea: Almost Famous — had a question closed by Joel.

After many tangents, here are the takeaways from our experience so far with the helpers queue: we need to think about how to better control what’s going into the queue, and we need to give the reviewers more ways to deal with questions that shouldn’t be in there.

Right! Let’s talk about closing. But first we get sidetracked and talk about moving datacenters and blogging about it. It’s a great post, especially if you’re into this kind of thing:

On top of NY-VM01&02 was 1 of the 1Gb FEXes and 1U of cable management. Luckily for us, everything is plugged into both FEXes and we could rip one out early. This means we could spin up the new VM infrastructure faster than we had planned. Yep, we’re already changing THE PLAN™. That’s how it goes.

(Oh, and the SRE team got snowed in and had to sleep in the datacenter. There’s that, too.)

But here’s the blog post we actually meant to talk about: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow by Jason S. It inspired David to come back from vacation to rant about it in chat for an hour. He helpfully re-creates this rant (with help from Joel and Jay) live on the podcast!

So what came out of this discussion? We changed close vote aging, for one thing. Community Manager Jon Ericson‘s meta post thought experiment about close voting was another.

Thanks for listening to the Stack Exchange Podcast, brought to you by Cool Whip — a whipped topping, NOT whipped cream.

Podcast #63 - The Plumber's Up To 67 Coins [ 51:43 ] Download

10 comments