Monetizing community talent

Most programmers know that if they have a coding problem, they will likely find an answer on Stack Overflow. WBJ Observer talked to Jeff Szczepanski, Chief Operations Officer of Stack Exchange, a company that was built on the Stack Overflow platform

Interview by Beata Socha

WBJ Observer: You have managed to build a large corporation around Stack Overflow. How, other than those pesky pop-up banner ads, do you monetize a platform that is essentially a free learning tool for programmers?

Jeff Szczepanski: It’s mostly done through sourcing tools that allow employers to hire programmers from our community. So our platform not only helps programmers learn through questions and answers, but also to find new jobs and opportunities. We think of Stack Overflow as a talent community, much like recruiters use LinkedIn to recruit people. We do that for programmers in a way that is more friendly for them.

When was Stack Overflow launched?

Originally it was launched in 2008. The beginning of building a revenue-based business out of it started in 2010.

Was it easy to scale the business up?

From the company point of view, Joel was looking for someone who was familiar with the community. He was looking for someone who wasn’t going to sell out the community he had built simply for monetary gain, but to respectfully scale a business out of the platform.

How many users do you have?

For Stack Overflow we have about 40 million monthly unique visitors. We think there are about 15 million professional programmers using the site at least once a month, many of them several times a day.

Where are they from?

Approximately 75 percent of our users are from outside the US. We operate the primary Stack Overflow in English, but there are also Russian, Portuguese, Japanese and Spanish versions of Stack Overflow.

How is the Stack Exchange developing now?

Stack Overflow was the first site that we built specifically for programmers. Once we had some success with it we started building other sites. Altogether all our sites operate within Stack Exchange. Now we have 150 other Q&A communities, from IT, through cooking, math, finance and other disciplines.

How many users do you have altogether?

About 120 million monthly unique users.

How many of your users generate content?

About 5-10 percent, while the rest are mainly consumers of the content.

How is looking for answers on Stack Overflow better than simple “Googling”?

It’s actually very common that a person types a question into Google and one of the top hits is an answer on Stack Overflow. That’s how we get most of our traffic. In this sense Google is the front-end of our product.

You used to be a programmer yourself before you became a manager. What was the transition like?

I was the founder and Chief Technology Officer of a company called Allworx Corp, and one of the early users of Stack Overflow, back when the company had only one or two employees. I was familiar with Joel Spolsky, the founder of Stack Overflow. When he decided to raise venture capital to develop a business out of it, I joined their team.

Do you miss programming?

Now that the company has almost 300 employees I don’t program anymore. I spent 20 years doing technical development. Sometimes I do miss it. There is this intellectual complexity involved in programming that you don’t find in management.

In Poland one of the common issues of the IT job market is that good programmers don’t want to be promoted. They are paid well doing the technical things and they are simply uninterested in advancing in the hierarchy. How would you encourage a programmer to become a manager?

It’s important for companies to foster their tech talent and to provide them with both technical advancement and managerial advancement. I think that there are two classes of developers: there’s the class that is basically only interested in solving the technical problems and there are also developers who are more about helping users with their problem. I have found that the latter make the best team leaders and managers.

We’ve done some psychographic persona research. We’ve found there are different types of programmers: firstly, there are innovators, who like to solve new problems that no one has solved before. Secondly, there are pragmatists who aren’t so much about the tools as they are about making a living out of it. The third group consists of ladder climbers, who see programming as a step towards to becoming a manger. Then there’s a group of technologists who love to play with different new gadgets, and finally there are those who are all about the cause, like building wells in Africa or sharing digital content etc. It is important in terms of hiring decisions to know what type of persona your company is looking for.

In your experience do non-technical people make good managers in IT?

Engineering managers don’t need to be good programmers but they definitely need to understand the system and the processes. u