[HN Gopher] Stack Overflow for Teams is now free forever for up ...
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Stack Overflow for Teams is now free forever for up to 50 users
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 79 points
Date : 2021-03-17 14:10 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stackoverflow.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (stackoverflow.blog)
| dTal wrote:
| The word "forever" should be illegal to use for marketing
| purposes.
| ProAm wrote:
| Forever*
|
| * = Terms and conditions may apply.
| ballenf wrote:
| Agreed. It's one of the only axiomatically false marketing
| claims.
|
| "Unlimited" storage/data is in that category if not for
| bandwidth/throttling disclaimers.
| ladberg wrote:
| Yep, I have "Unlimited" cell data but it throttles to 128Kbps
| after 4GB. If I were to blow through the entire 4 instantly
| at the beginning of the month I'd only be able to reach 48GB
| by continuously maxing out my bandwidth until the end of the
| month. I know people who regularly go over that with "real"
| unlimited plans.
| oezi wrote:
| I guess SO for Teams wasn't very successful then so far.
| macspoofing wrote:
| There's just so much out there and this is yet another
| knowledge based system.
|
| Also, for smaller teams (say, under 50 people), there probably
| isn't enough value over a wiki and slack/teams.
| fabian2k wrote:
| I suspect it is more that they think they figured out how to
| set the different paid tiers for this. I don't remember the
| details, but there seem to be more differentiating features for
| the tiers now than when they started it.
| wisemanwillhear wrote:
| I was in an organization of 50-100 engineers and we tried
| several similar systems, but they turned out to be little more
| than "FAQs" where half the questions were "fake" questions that
| were preemptively "asked" and answered by the same team. Only
| on a few rare occasions do I remember multiple people
| collaborating to address something using the systems. It was
| rare for an answer or question to get more than 1-2 up votes.
| There just were not enough people, and people were too busy
| "doing their job."
| billpg wrote:
| Define "forever".
| nwellnhof wrote:
| "At least until the company is acquired by a tech giant."
| [deleted]
| teddyh wrote:
| I used to contribute to Stack Overflow, and even answered some
| questions about software that I wrote and maintain, but then SO
| removed OpenID, and since then I can't log in to my account
| anymore.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| They talked about this sort of on the podcast recently. Their
| login process is exceptionally complicated because originally
| they didn't have accounts of their own, they'd only allow
| external authentication providers. Then they rolled their own
| local accounts. And they need to facilitate resetting a
| password but don't necessarily know which provider you want to
| use when you "reset". Is it a local account? Is it an external
| provider? You can have multiple external providers linked to
| the same account. Which one do you want to reset? They can't do
| the reset either, all they can do is point you to where you
| can.
|
| There was more. But it's a real rat's nest of complexity it
| sounds like.
| samkater wrote:
| 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.
| 015a wrote:
| This analysis is so similar to my own thoughts on it, I had to
| double-check that I didn't write it in a past life.
|
| 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.
| dgritsko wrote:
| Has the pricing for any of the other plans been adjusted as well?
| nilsandrey wrote:
| No, about that they just enriched the Basic plan to now include
| a single sign-on (SSO) without changing the current price.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| What I fear the most with SOTeams is that valuable knowledge may
| end up confined in company-limited silos. Not only it's not
| widely accessible, but also can go away for ever if the company
| ditches the service :/
| ggregoire wrote:
| Interestingly enough, there is an internal debate right now on SO
| about how to handle outdated answers [1].
|
| I've never used Teams but I can already imagine how the same
| problem applies to Teams too. I guess it's even worst because
| technical answers usually get outdated after several years, but
| in every company I worked, processes usually changed every 2-6
| months.
|
| [1]:
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405302/introducing-...
| mgualt wrote:
| Would this be useful for an academic research group?
| benpopper1 wrote:
| Full disclosure, I work for Stack Overflow.
|
| Yes, we think so. We have academic clients using it at computer
| science departments.
|
| You can see how data scientists use it here
| https://stackoverflow.com/teams/use-cases/data-analytics
| abhinav22 wrote:
| I'm intrigued. I'm trying to develop my own Q&A software for
| client questionnaires in the investment management industry
| as the industry solutions charge too much ($10,000 per year).
| Could be a great market for SO to tap and I'm going to
| consider SO for our work
| ArmandGrillet wrote:
| Before you use SO for Teams, you need to think about one thing:
| is there a space in between your chat system and your knowledge
| base (Confluence, proposals repository, README.md in a repo,
| comments in the codebase)?
|
| From what I experienced, there is no place for SO for Teams where
| I worked (even if it's a very well designed tool). Either your
| question is broad and SO is the place to ask, or it's narrow and
| domain-based then you should store that knowledge somewhere else
| than on SO for Teams. Regarding where to ask the question in the
| first place: Slack channels, leading to a Zoom meeting if
| necessary.
|
| The last scenario I see, which is the "one-time question which
| might become a recurring question": it is also handled by Slack
| (good-enough search). And that's the ndeg1 problem I had with SO
| for Teams: Slack is good enough, especially if members of your
| org take the opportunity of such questions to improve the
| codebase/documentation/internal knowledge base when necessary.
| gitowiec wrote:
| Slack is paid for every team (small or big). Search does not
| work if using a lot #random and #general because knowledge left
| on other channels disappear
| Chico75 wrote:
| If I can believe what I've been seeing in our internal support
| channel, no one uses the slack search feature and keep asking
| the same questions over and over, I really see a space fo SO
| for Teams to fix this internal knowledge sharing issue.
| [deleted]
| foepys wrote:
| What makes you think that people not using the Slack search
| function will use the SO for Teams search function?
| spockz wrote:
| We are working on having a bot come up with results to
| stackoverflow/documentation based on the questions being
| asked. If it finds a "good" match, reply with the top X
| results.
| tn1 wrote:
| Couldn't you also just hook this up to Slack search and
| include relevant threads into the results as well?
| ryneandal wrote:
| TBH, I didn't even know they offered this. I'm surprised they
| don't do more self-promotion on their platform
| junon wrote:
| It's like a permanent widget on the side of the site, it's been
| there for a few years now.
| kenward wrote:
| Has anyone used this service? Could you tell me how it differs
| from Confluence (or similar)?
| sida wrote:
| I used internal stackoverflow at Uber. Honestly, not super
| great. (even though it is great on paper)
|
| the search function is bad and I end up using it a lot less.
| (and often can find better answers on slack)
|
| I think to make SO useful, you need a push from the leadership
| layer to have all the questions be posted on SO and answered on
| SO. If you don't push for more questions to be answered on SO,
| then slack is often better source of Q&A.
|
| And you probably need to maintain and trim the answers (since
| internal APIs / issues change a lot more rapidly and some
| answers can become stale quickly)
|
| Basically, not a slam dunk straight away but I can imagine that
| it is a good idea
| junon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I suppose the question was about the Q&A plugin for
| Confluence, not the Wiki product itself
| (https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions)
| nirushiv wrote:
| 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.
| yonixw wrote:
| How easy was it to find answers? Is it just the stackoverflow
| search engine?
| motiejus wrote:
| 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
| spockz wrote:
| For me the major advantage of SO Teams/Enterprise is the
| actually working search combined with it searching for similar
| questions when writing the title of your questions. As an SME I
| also appreciate the different queues, although at some scale
| the questions just become too much, then you actually know you
| need to improve other things like documentation or marketing.
| yonixw wrote:
| For a service like this, I only care about about the search
| feature. Will it be like the google->stack overflow experience?
| benpopper1 wrote:
| Full disclosure, I work for Stack Overflow.
|
| The product is different from wikis or intranets because it's
| not just about anticipating what someone might need and
| documenting that. Stack Overflow for Teams gives users the
| ability to ask a question and people can ask teammates to add
| knowledge to the platform right in chat. So knowledge itself
| can be either proactively added, meaning people are
| anticipating needs, or it can be reactively added, based on an
| immediate need, like a question.
|
| For your search question - it has basic and advanced search
| capabilities. You can read more about that here.
|
| https://stackoverflow.help/en/articles/4400196-search-existi...
|
| If you want to read about how it compares to using version
| control, Confluence, or wikis, there is a case study on
| switching from those tools here.
|
| https://info.stackoverflowsolutions.com/Enterprise_Elastic-C...
| peytoncasper wrote:
| I just want to say that this sounds like a really interesting
| product. Have you all considered making questions
| "publishable" in a way to public SO?
|
| Plenty of times where a smaller company has a ton of internal
| knowledge that really needs to be on a public SO as they are
| common questions. It would be incredible to say, we'll let
| internal users ask questions here and then populate a public
| set of tags based on that for new/emerging products.
| benpopper1 wrote:
| Great question. It's a feature request that comes up
| sometimes, but doing it by accident could be costly if
| we're talking about proprietary code.
|
| Having it in this format should make it easy to port Q&A
| over to the public site if a Team decides to make a certain
| project visible or open source.
| peytoncasper wrote:
| Thats fair, I'm just thinking for companies that back OSS
| projects. It can be hard to get those questions seeded
| even though they have been asked and answered a thousand
| times with their customers and internally by new hires.
| firebaze wrote:
| Honest response: whenever I read "Great question"
| (followed either by a full stop or exclamation
| mark(worse)) my mind goes to "bullshit marketing speak
| follows" mode. Especially when the answerer disclosed
| their affinity to the entity in question, in this case
| stackoverflow.
|
| I have to work hard against this impulse to continue
| reading the actual answer.
| weinzierl wrote:
| At a glance I couldn't find anything on IP rights. Do users
| retain full right on the content? Which permissions do users
| give SO in regards to content they host there and in which
| ways and for what purposes will SO use that content?
| searchableguy wrote:
| Is there any big reason to use Stack Overflow For Teams now that
| version control providers (github, gitlab) have discussions?
| afavour wrote:
| Familiarity? I've never used GitHub discussions, I use SO all
| the time.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Could you elaborate about the Gitlab discussion features? I
| know they can be threaded, but a nice advantage of SO is being
| able to upvote solutions (which may be edited for clarity), so
| we don't have to read through pages of comments. I am missing
| anything?
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(page generated 2021-03-17 23:03 UTC)