The following is a conversation with Jeff Atwood.

He is the co-founder of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, websites that are visited by millions of people every single day.

Much like with Wikipedia, it is difficult to understate the impact on global knowledge and productivity that these networks of sites have created.

Jeff is also the author of the famed blog Coding Horror and the founder of Discourse, an open source software project that seeks to improve the quality of our online community discussions.

This conversation is part of the MIT course on Artificial General Intelligence and the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or your podcast provider of choice, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D.

And now, here's my conversation with Jeff Atwood.

Having co-created and managed for a few years the world's largest community of programmers in Stack Overflow 10 years ago, what do you think motivates most programmers?

Is it fame, fortune, glory, process of programming itself, or is it the sense of belonging to a community?

I think it's this idea of working on puzzles independently of other people and just solving a problem sort of like on your own almost.

Although you know nobody really works alone in programming anymore.

But I will say there's an aspect of sort of hiding yourself away and just sort of beating on a problem until you solve it.

Like brute force basically to me is what a lot of programming is.

You can do things that would take forever for a human, but you can just do them like so many times and so often that you get the answer, right?

You're saying just the pure act of tinkering with the code is the thing that drives most probably, the joy, the struggle balance within the joy of overcoming the brute force process of pain and suffering that eventually leads to something that actually works.

Like there's this thing called the shuffling problem, like the naive shuffle that most programmers write has a huge flaw.

And there's a lot of articles online about this, because it can be really bad if you're like a casino and you have an unsophisticated programmer writing your shuffle algorithm.

There's surprising ways to get this wrong.

But the neat thing is, the way to figure that out is just to run your shuffle a bunch of times and see how many orientations of cards you get.

You should get an equal distribution of all the cards.

And with the naive method of shuffling, if you just look at the data, if you just brute force it and say, OK, I don't know what's going to happen.

You just write a program that does it a billion times and then see what the buckets look like of the data.

And the Monty Hall problem is another example of that, where you have 3 doors, and somebody gives you information about another door.

So the correct answer is you should always switch in the Monty Hall problem, which is not intuitive.

If you write a program that does the money haul game and then never switches and always switches, just compare, you would immediately see that you don't have to be smart.

You don't have to figure out the answer algorithmically.

You can just brute force it out with data and say, well, I know the answer is this because I ran the program a billion times and these are the data buckets that I got from it, right?

So empirically you find it, but what's the joy of that?

So for you, for you personally, outside of family, what motivates you in this process?

Well, to be honest, I don't really write a lot of code anymore.

What I do at Discourse is like manager-y stuff, which I always kind of despised, right?

As a programmer, you think of managers as people who don't really do anything themselves.

But the weird thing about code is you realize that language is code.

The ability to direct other people lets you get more stuff done than you could by yourself anyway.

So what is it like to be, what makes, before we get into programming, what makes a good manager, what makes a good leader?

Well, I think a leader, it's all about leading by example, first of all, like sort of doing and being the things that you want to be.

Now, this can be kind of exhausting, particularly when you have kids, because you realize that your kids are watching you like all the time, like even in ways that you've stopped seeing yourself.

Like the hardest person to see on the planet is really yourself, right?

It's funny to see other people and make judgments about them, but yourself, like you're super biased.

You don't actually see yourself the way other people see you.

way that other people really aren't going to be.

So, you know, that's 1 of the insights is, you know, you've got to be really diligent about thinking like, am I behaving in a way that represents how I want other people to behave, right?

There's a lot of examples of leaders that really mess this up, right?

Like they make decisions that are like, wow, that's why would, you know, it's just, it's a bad example for other people.

The other 1 I believe is working really hard.

I don't mean like working exhaustively, but like showing a real passion for the problem.

Like, you know, not necessarily your solution to the problem, but the problem itself is just 1 that you really believe in.

Like with discourse, for example, the problem that we're looking at, which is my current project is, how do you get people in groups to communicate in a way that doesn't like break down into the howling of wolves, right?

Not like technical problems, but how do I get people to post paragraphs?

How do I get people to use complete sentences?

Although those are problems as well, but like how do I get people to get along with each other, right?

Like, and then solve whatever problem it is they set out to solve or, you know, reach some consensus on discussion or just like not hurt each other even, right?

Like maybe it's a discussion that doesn't really matter, but are people like yelling at each other, right?

Like That's not the purpose of this kind of communication.

So I would say, you know, leadership is about, you know, setting an example, you know, doing the things that represent what you want to be and making sure that you're actually doing those things.

And there's a trick to that too, because the things you don't do also say a lot about what you are.

So how do you have as a leader that self-awareness?

So you just said it's really hard to be self-aware.

So for you personally, or maybe for other leaders you've seen or look up to, how do you know that both of the things you're doing are the wrong things to be doing, the way you speak to others, the way you behave, and the things you're not doing.

1 is like processing feedback that you're getting.

Like so 1 way we do it, for example, a discourse We have 3 co-founders and we periodically talk about decisions before we make them So it's not like 1 person can make a mistake or like wow, that's you know, there can be misunderstanding things So it's part of like group consensus of leadership is like it's good to have I think systems where there's 1 leader and that leader has the rule of absolute law are just really dangerous in my experience.

For communities, for example, like if you have a community that's run by 1 person, that 1 person makes all the decisions, that person's gonna have a bad day.

Something could happen to that person, you know, something, you know, there's a lot of variables.

So like at first, when you think about leadership, have multiple people doing leadership and have them talk amongst each other.

So giving each other feedback about the decisions that they're making.

And then when you do get feedback, I think there's that little voice in your head, right?

Like, or your gut or wherever you want to put it in your body.

Like I think most people who have any kind of moral compass or like want to do, most people want to do the right thing.

I mean, there might be a handful of sociopaths out there that don't, but most people, they want other people to think of them as a good person, and why wouldn't you, right?

So you have that little voice that's sort of the angel and devil on your shoulder sort of talking to you about like what you're doing, how you're doing, how does it make you feel to make these decisions, right?

And I think having some attunement to that voice is important.

But you said that voice also for, I think there's a programmer situation too, where sometimes the devil on the shoulder is a little too loud.

So you're a little too self-critical for a lot of developers, especially when you have introverted personality.

How do you struggle with the self-criticism or the criticism of others?

So 1 of the things of leadership is to do something that's potentially unpopular or people doubt you and you still go through with the decision.

I think you have to walk people through your decision making, right?

This is where blogging is really important and communication is so important.

Again, code, language is just another kind of code.

It's like, here is the program by which I arrived at the conclusion that I'm gonna reach right it's 1 thing to say like this is a decision.

It's final deal with it Right, that's not usually satisfying to people, but if you say look, you know, we've been thinking this problem for a while Here's some stuff that's happened.

Here's our goals Here's we want to achieve and we've looked at these options and we think this of the available options is the best option.

Maybe I don't totally agree with you, but I can kind of see where you're coming from.

And like, I see it's not just arbitrary decision delivered from a cloud of flames in the sky, right?

It's like a human trying to reach some kind of consensus about goals, and their goals might be different than yours.

But if you're making that clear, it's like, oh, well, the reason we don't agree is because we have totally different goals, right?

It's not that you're a bad person, it's that we have Radically different goals in mind when we started looking at this problem

and the other 1 you said is passion so or hard work, sorry

Well, those are tied together to me in my mind Let's say hard work and passion like for me like I just really love the problem discourse is setting out to solve because In a way, it's like there's a there's a vision of the world where it all devolves into Facebook basically owning everything and every aspect of human communication, right?

And this has always been kind of a scary world for me.

First, because I think Facebook is really good at execution.

They're very competent in terms of what they're doing, but Facebook has not much of a moral compass in terms of Facebook cares about Facebook, really.

They don't really care about you and your problems.

What they care about is how big they can make Facebook.

Is that you're talking about the company or just the mechanism of how Facebook works?

And the idea with this course, the reason I'm so passionate about it is because I believe every community should have the right to own themselves, right?

Like they should have their own software that they can run that belongs to them, that's their space where they can set the rules, and if they don't like it they can move to different hosting or whatever they need to happen can happen.

But this idea of a company town where all human communication is implicitly owned by WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.

And it's really disturbing too because Facebook is really smart.

Buying in WhatsApp and buying Instagram were incredibly smart decisions.

And they also do this thing, I don't know if you know, but they have this VPN software that they give away for free on smartphones and it indirectly feeds all the data about the traffic back to Facebook.

So they can see what's actually getting popular through the VPNs, right?

They have low-level access to the network data because users have let them have that.

So, let's, let's take a small pause here.

Can you talk about, can you lay out the land of all the different ways you can have communities.

So there's Stack Overflow that you've built, there's Discourse.

So Stack Overflow is kind of like a wiki, Wikipedia you talk about, and it's a very specific scalpel, very focused.

So what is the purpose of Discourse, and maybe contrast that with Facebook?

Well, let me start from the very beginning.

So Stack Overflow is a very structured wiki style Q&A for programmers, right?

And that was the problem we first worked on.

And when we started we thought it was discussions because we looked at like programming forums and other things but we quickly realized we were doing Q&A, which is a very narrow subset of human communication.

Sorry, so when you started Stack Overflow, you thought you didn't even know the Q&A.

We had an idea of like, okay, these are things that we see working online.

Our goal was there was this site, Experts Exchange, with a very unfortunate name.

Like, and a lot of people don't remember it anymore, which is great.

When people don't remember the thing that you were trying to replace, then you've totally won.

So it was a place to get answers to programming questions, but it wasn't clear if it was like focused Q&A, if it was a discussion.

We were like, okay, we'll take aspects of dig and Reddit, like voting were very important.

Wiki style stuff of like being able to edit posts, not just your posts, but other people's posts to make them better and keep them more up to date.

Ownership of blogging of like, okay, this is me, I'm saying this in my voice, you know, this is the stuff that I know, and you know, your reputation accrues to you, and it's peer recognition.

You asked earlier what motivates programmers.

I think peer recognition motivates them a lot.

That was 1 of the key insights of Stack Overflow, was recognition from your peers is why things get done.

Not necessarily money, not necessarily your boss, but like your peers saying, wow, this person really knows their stuff, has a lot of value.

So we were sort of Frankensteining a bunch of stuff together in Stack Overflow, like stuff we had seen working and we knew worked.

And over time we realized it wasn't really discussion.

It was very focused questions and answers.

There wasn't a lot of room on the page for, let me talk about this tangential thing.

It was more like, okay, is it answering the question?

Or could it be an alternative answer to the same question?

Because there's usually more than 1 way to do it in programming.

And 1 of the patterns we got into early on with Stack Overflow was there were questions where there would be like hundreds of answers and we're like, wow, How can there be a programming question with

And we looked at those and we realized those were not really questions in the traditional sense.

It was stuff that we allowed early on that we eventually decided wasn't allowed, such as what's your favorite programming food?

You know, What's the funniest programming cartoon you've seen?

And we had to sort of backfill a bunch of rules about like, why isn't this allowed?

Such as, is this a real problem you're facing?

Like nobody goes to work and says, wow, I can't work because I don't know what the funniest programming cartoon is, so sorry, can't compile this code now.

It's not a real problem you're facing in your job.

And the second, what can you really learn from that?

It's what I call accidental learning or Reddit-style learning,

just like, oh, I'll just browse some things.

And oh, wow, did you know tree frogs only live 3 years?

But I didn't really set out to learn that.

It was more intentional learning, where you're like, okay, I have a problem, and I wanna learn about stuff around this problem having.

Right, and it could be theory, it could be compiler theory, it could be other stuff, but I'm having a compiler problem, hence I need to know the compiler theory, that aspect of it that gets me to my answer, right?

So we had to backfill all these rules as we sort of figured out what the heck it was we were doing.

And the system came very strict over time, and a lot of people still complain about that.

And I wrote my latest blog entry, what does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

Celebrating the 10 year anniversary, yeah.

Yeah, so 10 years and the system has trended towards strictness.

1 is people don't like to see other people get reputation for stuff as they view, they view as frivolous, which I can actually understand because if you saw a programmer got like 500 up votes for funniest programming cartoon or funniest comment they had seen in code, it's like, well, why do they have that reputation?

I mean, they did maybe, or the cartoon, right, they're getting a bunch of reputation based on someone else's work.

And it isn't at some level they're correct.

I mean, I empathize cause like it's not correct to get reputation for that versus here's a really gnarly regular expression problem and here's a really clever, insightful, detailed answer laying out, oh, here's why you're seeing the behavior that you're seeing here, let me teach you some things about how to avoid that in the future.

You want people to get a reputation for that, not so much for, wow, look at this funny thing I saw.

Great, so there's this very specific Q&A format, and then take me through the journey towards discourse in Facebook and Twitter.

So you started at the beginning, that Stack Overflow evolved to have a purpose.

So where does this course, this passion you have for creating community for discussion, where does that, when was that born and how?

Well part of it is based on the realization that Stack Overflow is only good for very specific subjects where there's sort of, it's based on data, facts, and science, where answers can be kind of verified to be true.

Another form of that is there's the book of knowledge, like the tome of knowledge that defines whatever it is.

You can refer to that book and it'll give you the answer.

There has to be, It only works on subjects where there's semi-clear answers to things that can be verified in some form.

Now again, there's always more than 1 way to do it.

There's complete flexibility in the system around that.

But where it falls down is stuff like poker and LEGO.

If you go to stackexchange.com, we have an engine that tries to launch different Q&A topics.

And people can propose Q&A topics, sample questions, and if it gets enough support within the network, we launch that Q&A site.

So some of the ones we launched were poker and Lego, and they did horribly, right?

Because, I mean, they might still be there lingering on in some form, but it was an experiment.

And some subjects work super well in the Stack Engine, and some don't.

But the reason Lego and poker don't work is because they're so social, really.

It's not about, you know, what's the rule here in poker?

It's like, well, you know, what kind of cigars do we like to smoke while playing poker?

Or what's a cool set of cards to use when I'm playing poker?

Say I have this hand come up, what's some strategies I could use?

It's more of a discussion around what's happening.

With Lego, same thing, here's this cool Lego set I found.

There's all these social components of the discussions that don't fit at all.

We literally have to disallow those in Stack Overflow because it's not about being social.

It's about problems that you're facing in your work that you need concrete answers for, right?

Like you have a real demonstrated problem that's sort of blocking you in something.

Nobody's blocked by, you know, what should I do when I have a straight flush, right?

Like it's not a blocking problem in the world.

It's just an opportunity to hang out and discuss.

So discourse was a way to address that and say, look, you know, discussion forum software had was very, very bad.

And when I came out of Stack Overflow in late 20, early 20, early 2013, early, early 2012, It was still very, very bad.

I expected it improved in the 4 years since I last looked, but it had not improved at all.

And I was like, well, that's kind of terrible because I love these communities of people talking about things that they love, that they're just communities of interest.

Startups would come to me and say, hey Jeff, I want to have this startup, here's my idea.

And the first thing I would say to them is, well first, why are you asking me?

I don't really know your field necessarily.

Why aren't you asking the community, the people that are interested in this problem, the people that are using your product, why aren't you talking to them?

And then they'd say, oh, great idea, how do I do that?

And then that's when I started playing sad trombone because I realized all the software involving talking to your users, customers, audience, patrons, whatever it is, it was all really bad.

You know, it was like stuff that I would be embarrassed to recommend to other people.

And yet that's where I felt they could get the biggest and strongest, most effective input for what they should be doing with their product, right?

It's from their users, from their community.

So what we're talking about with forums, what is it, the dark matter of the internet, it's still, I don't know if it's still, but for the longest time, it has some of the most passionate and fascinating discussions.

There's usually, it's linear, so sequential.

So you're posting 1 after the other, and there's pagination, so it's every, there's 10 posts and you go to the next page.

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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7