Just to be clear: 10 million uniques is measured using analytics cookies, quantcast in this case. The exact definition varies by analytics provider, but regardles, it has nothing to do the number of user accounts.
Of course it's an estimate as there are complications in calculating it like users deleting cookies, one user with multiple browsers (ahem, programmers), etc.
Just for reference there are roughly in the region of 15-30 million professional developers in the world. However this doesn't include a fairly large chunk of people (i.e students) who are probably the group most likely to be using StackOverflow. So I think Joel might be pushing it a bit to say most software developers are using it (although they have a fairly respectable chunk of the market).
Where did you get the 15-30 million number? We believe the number is closer to 9 million.
For the United States, there are 1,336,300 programmers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The United Kingdom has 333,000 "software professionals," according to the Office for National Statistics.
In Canada there are 387,000 people working in IT according to Statistics Canada.
I haven't dug down to other countries but it's unlikely you could get to 15-30 million. Most development tool vendors report that about 40% of their sales are in the US.
I did something similar to you pick up numbers from individual countries and summing them, I don't have the underlying data to hand (I did this about a year ago). But I'll do it again as I need the data anyway and post an update.
IDC put the figure at around 12million in 2002, and at 15million in 2008 though. I assume they did a more thorough job than either of us :-)
> Most development tool vendors report that about 40% of their sales are in the US.
I'm a programmer (living in Peru) and I have never spent a dime on development tools. I use emacs, kubuntu and friends. I also wrote (with friends) the site http://shapado.com which is an open source version of stackoverflow by the way :)
FYI, the world's population is about 22x the population of the US, so 15M doesn't seem crazy. That tool sales are lower in China does not necessarily mean that there are fewer programmers.
I wonder what would happen if you changed your measure from "professional programmers" to "professionals who spend a significant amount of time programming". I know where I work a minority of the people who have to write some code to get their job done have "programmer" or something similar in their title.
Also those who are registered as software professionals with the British Computer Society or similar are least likely to be using SO - either because they know all the answers - or more likely - are too busy doing flow charts of what their perfect system would look like if they ever actually did any programming.
It will never equate to the number of user accounts because we don't require users to register. You can get in on all that hot Q&A goodness account free.
There was never a deliberate effort from TC to ignore StackOverflow, I linked to it in some of my posts there.
IIRC we simply were not in the loop on their news, announcements or tips.
A lot of the TC'ers use Quora which is why it is mentioned a lot, but in TC dev we were definitely big fans of StackOverflow, its just that the full-time writers didn't use it or notice it as much.
If you look at Techmeme, you can see that StackOverflow hasn't been getting much attention from the usual tech blogs:
I figure it is for the same reason - they weren't actively reaching out to the tech bloggers and instead using their own blogs for PR. Still worked out well for them :)
I'm not saying that with any scientific basis, but rather on the basis that a much larger percentage of the startup community seems to be active there than on other sites.
Often when you see someone ask about a random startup you'll get the startup's founder or an investor answering, something which you rarely see elsewhere.
Stack overflow has probably been the best Q&A site around, content-wise, user-experience wise and probably every other criteria a user would care about. Good work !
Agreed. I've found it especially valuable as a bit of a teaching tool lately. I spent three years in a mind-numbing COBOL-based job, and now I'm building a PHP application to try to showcase the fact that I am more than the sum of my career, and to try to find a decent job.
Since I'm doing this in isolation, I'm trying to use StackOverflow as a surrogate mentor. When I have a question about how to do things, mostly design issues, I can usually find an existing discussion (yes Jeff, discussion) on the topic. It sucks up an awful amount of my time, but I feel like I've grown a lot professionally because of it.
About the only drawback is that it's now so popular that new questions only show up on the front page for a few minutes. So finding questions to answer - or getting your question answered is becoming harder - unless you are prepared to do a very narrow subject specific search.
One of the nice things about the early SO was it was so broad, you could see interesting questions that weren't directly in your language and read those as well.
I suppose it depends on how they're counting uniques, but I doubt it has much, if anything, to do with how many accounts there are on the site.
I just checked their users page (http://stackoverflow.com/users) and they 8003 pages of 35 accounts, which comes out to be "just" 280,105 accounts in the system, including people who just stop by once to ask or answer a random question (you don't need to create an account there, they create a cookie-based one for you when you do something on the site the first time).
They're pretty much definitely identifying uniques via some combination of cookies, IP addresses, and perhaps some other methods. I seriously doubt you bother to clear your old cookies before creating each new account on the system.
Besides, I got the impression that the article was referring to the entire network, including the StackEx sites, in its totals.
I'm a bit like you too, btw, in that I have more than one account there, but for a different purpose. I've created new accounts there before to ask what I think are really dumb questions. It's bad enough that the top voted question on my account right now is "Should I find a new career?" which I created during a particularly bad time at my last job. That question is probably the single biggest reason I never signed up for their Careers service, right after the fact that there's basically nothing there for Canada.
Do you mean that you didn't sign up for the Careers service because you felt you had revealed damaging information about yourself
That's a big part of it, yeah.
potentially still edit some of that revealing information
Not really. I think the questions existence is damaging enough. The only way to get rid of it is to delete it, but I'm an inclusionist, and the question is bound to help someone down the line. I'm sort of alright with its existence now, it's a part of my past that will always be there so I shouldn't be trying to hide it.
change the username associated with the question
It doesn't work like that. I sort of wish you could dissociate yourself from certain things on that site, but you can't. I'd have to create a whole new account.
In the end it doesn't matter. I just did a search for Canada jobs on Careers.SO and it only gave me 8 responses, four of which were American jobs located close to the border. Careers offers basically nothing to be, and certainly not enough to justify paying for it.
Still a noob programmer, but I'm a huge fan of SO. I've yet to find a thread with any real bickering or pretentiousness, and 9 out of 10 times find an answer.
It seems like they dominate search results also, which is why I'm surprised that Quora, which I've never heard of, seems to get more respect?
Quora has a much smaller community mostly composed of people interested in start-ups in the Silicon Valley. They get coverage on sites like TechCrunch and HN because of that and the founders left Facebook (most likely because Zuckerberg replaced one of them as CTO with Brett Taylor).
I talked to them and they believe they can beat the competition simply by piggybacking off Facebook's social system and by using AI filtering to prevent people from being overloaded since they allow every topic unlike Stackoverflow.
Of course it's an estimate as there are complications in calculating it like users deleting cookies, one user with multiple browsers (ahem, programmers), etc.
It's still an awesome milestone.`