Developers, Social Media, and Why Stack Overflow Refuses to Die
In 2024, software development looks suspiciously like scrolling through TikTok and Googling answers from 2014… because, let’s be honest, who’s reading documentation?
The thing is, the number one reason people go online is to “find information”, and Googling our way out of a bug is something software developers have done since day zero.
Fine.
Yet over the hill you’ve seen what’s happening. People are using social media to find solutions to coding problems. So, when did scrolling through TikTok become the fastest way to figure out why your Docker container won’t start.
The TikToks Taking Over
I don’t think TikTok dances help anything, least of all dancing (or Kubernetes).
Yet here is a chart saying “the youth” use social networks to research brands.
Sure, that isn’t a config problem with your graphics card, but you know as well as I do that software developer content is blowing up on social media.
Since Twitch allows peer programming this isn’t actually some sort of dystopian future. It’s a dystopian now and has progressed from the #devlife rants of a few years ago.
“In our studies, something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.” Source
And we have other evidence that Gen Z rely on TikTok rather than Google.
I mean older devs get it. Documentation is boring, and nobody ever did it. It’s boring, but gives the space and oxygen needed to get complex ideas over to the uninitiated.
So perhaps the future of development is becoming clear. Aesthetics over accuracy.
Stack Overflow is Still Standing
Social media is becoming a “serious research tool”, but Stack Overflow isn’t dead quite yet.
Sure, you aren’t looking at an *influencer* but that wrong answer on Stack Overflow from 2014 might just solve your production defect.
Stack Overflow is part of a wider search engine ecosystem. People like to have anything that will help them solve their current problem. Sure, they might be using Google to look up YouTube tutorials but it all counts.
Remember when we thought microservices would solve all our problems? That’s the same as thinking TikTok will take over from Stack Overflow. It’s not going to happen especially since developers are creatures of habit.
Thinking there might be a future without Stack Overflow is tempting. But while social media seems shiny and new to many of us, but Stack Overflow is where the real magic happens in 2024.
The Future of Developer Research
Software development is typically a messy game. All that tech debt is seldom easy to shift to the right.
That means social media is becoming part of our development toolbox, and I don’t think anyone expects Insta to resolve your merge conflicts. For anything more than trivial problems you’re going to end up on GitHub, copy-pasting a repo with 4 stars and praying they knew what they were doing.
And don’t get me started on AI. It feels like it’s an open-ended opportunity that we don’t adequately exploit as software developers and that isn’t something that is necessarily changing soon.
Conclusion
If you’re “on the Gram”, doing a TikToks or whatever you’re probably not using these services to figure out why your CI is failing — and for what it’s worth you’re much better off with the passive-aggression of Stack Overflow.
The future may well be social, but the real answers are still buried on Stack Overflow and you’d be well advised to dig deep if you want good solutions to your problems.