How can we recruit and retain more talent?

Question

Tangentially related to another meta post, the last discussion about this was a while back, so it may be time to revisit this topic.

The #1 answer in the chat was money, so that and fried chicken aside, how can we draw more professional system administrators to the site?

Personally, I came on board frequently last year after running into brick walls with SCCM. Even though most of my SCCM questions went unanswered, I saw that I could help others w/ their sccm problems, and got help w/ group policy and other things, so it was a valid tradeoff.

Answer 1

It's a downward spiral, at least for me.

I used to be very active. I believe I averaged 30k rep per year for the last couple years, but my participation is essentially non-existent now. I've been thinking about this since I saw this post yesterday and wanted to share my story, as it may provide insight and lead to a solution down the road.

I got busy in real life. I switched jobs a few times and I was promoted up the chain and took on more responsibility in my current workplace. This leaves less time for me to participate. Because I have less time for places like Server Fault, I get more annoyed than I used to at the influx of gimme teh codez and Halp halp, I migrated to production without testing and all of my shit broke. This causes me to value Server Fault far less than I used to, which is unfortunate since it gave me such a valuable kickstart to my career. Anecdotally, it seems like the garbage questions have increased over time, but I have no data to support this. Maybe my opinion of what is garbage has evolved as I've taken on a new perspective on IT. It's entirely possible that my perspective is the problem.

So, I dropped down to only participating in Chat, which was relatively free of the unwashed gimme teh code masses and it was good. But then the people that I interacted with most in Chat seemed to be in the room less and less. This caused me to be in the room less and less. I still pop in from time to time so that I can ask @ScottPack if he is wearing pants, but that's really about it. There are fewer familiar "faces" than there used to be.

It's unfortunate, because this site gave me so much at a point in my career where I really needed it, but now it serves no real purpose to me.

Answer 2

Warning: This is something of a though-stream, so...

The visible symptom:
Attracting and retaining people who can positively participate in the community, either both asking and answering questions, or at the least providing substantive answers on some kind of "regular" basis.

This has been an ongoing issue for the site for a long time now. I'm really not sure there is an answer, or where the root of the problem lies. But there are contributing, conflated, and correlated issues.

1. People don't vote. Some people have great voting records, but on the whole SF has less votes per user-views than some other sites in the SE network.

   Contributing factors:

   • Our subject matter is already quite wide, and we may have relatively few experts per subject field. People may not feel comfortable voting on topics they don't fully understand.

   • Many Questions show questionable effort, and many Answers are of questionable value to the OP. It's hard to test potential answers unless you are actually experiencing the same issue as the OP, or have at some point in the past.

   Possibly Related:

   • Questions that have an answer tend not to be reviews by people who may have subject matter knowledge. They tend to be viewed only by new people having the same problem. Many of those new people aren't users, can't vote, etc. At some point in the past some SE sites had a feedback mechanism to allow non-users to indicate a post was helpful - SF doesn't have this, and it didn't affect the post scores anyhow.

   Consequences:

   • We can't rely on voting to blow away bad content. We've established a number of higher-reputation users who can Vote To Close and they patrol the review queue. This leads to a "heavy handed" approach which generally works, but leaves many new users with a negative view of the site. Also, it's extremely uncommon for anyone to leave personalized feedback about what's wrong with the post. New users seem to overwhelmingly ignore the Help Center, sidebar Help, and any other automated help of any kind (perhaps we should just lie to the users and have those messages come from "Joe Blow" or whatever - not crazy about this idea, but I don't have anything better).

   • When people do vote, the reputation of the poster seems to be weighed into their decision (people with high rep tend to accumulate more rep for an otherwise equal post as compared to someone with low rep). This means new users are less likely to receive magical Internet points, and less incentivised to be gamed into SF.

2. The majority of our Question come from users who never contribute Answers. These include professional administrator who simply choose not to Answer others' question and users who have no ability to Answer others' questions (ie, Help Vampires). We certainly need Questions to keep the site vibrant, but we're tipped to one side.

   For the former group, I really don't know how to inspire people to begin contributing more than the incentives we have already. If anyone has any good ideas I'm sure we're all ears.

   For the latter group, the help vampires... There's a wonderful write on slash7 with Amy Hoy about Help Vampires. What that articles does not include though, is how to deal with those people in mass. The majority of Help Vampires don't realize what they are doing. You can point it out to them, but more commonly than not it takes some significant effort to do so. Worse, it takes more effort on their part to not be a help vampire - and the unwillingness to put effort into their problems is what made them a help vampire in the first place. Regardless, this is all individual effort, see above comment in #1 about people ignoring automated warnings.

   Actually, while I'm thinking about automated warnings - this must be some facet of human psychology. So many disasters have occurred while automated warnings were blaring of impending doom. Chernobyl, Air France 447, Target's CC Hack, and there's zillions more examples where those came from. If anyone has some sort of scientific insight it might be helpful, or at least interesting.

3. Relatively low signal to noise ratio: SF gets about 100 questions per day on average - about 30% get closed. 51% of questions asked in April 2014 have a score of 0 or less as of writing.

   Contributing factors:

   • See above about drive-by Questioners.

   Possibly Related:

   • Others have pointed out that quite a few questions come from people with some reputation on SO. I'm not aware if anyone has run the data though to see what percentage of closed and downvoted Question from from SO Users.

   Consequences:

   • Sorting through all the "noise" takes effort from people willing to provide Answers. This is effort that could be put into writing actual Answers, but is instead diverted to sorting and filtering.

     To somewhat mitigate this issue, users can setup tag filters. SO has an "Interesting" tab on the front page, which attempts to cull some of the questions you might not be interested in. I think this might help SF, though we don't have the deluge of questions that SO gets (~70x as many as SF). By selecting tags question are highlighted on SF. Though this again necessitates the User setting up these favorite tags, and the Question being accurately tagged to begin with (given that we had to ban a handful of nonsense tags because users try to use them daily, accurate tagging is still a problem).

Devs: How about some consistent formatting? WTF with the spacing after a bullet list?

Answer 3

I will chime in & basically say I do not think this is an issue with the quality of posts & interactions here as much as the state of I.T. & developers in general nowadays.

Seriously, I am far from the best says admin out there, but I have met developers & other admins out in the market nowadays who somehow have gigs yet their work is jaw droppingly bad.

My feeling us the ease at which anyone can get a VM up & running coupled with the use of canned systems make the entry point to a minimal viable product so easy suddenly the guy who was able to just download an Ubuntu image & install it--and I mean just install it; nothing more--is now seen as a "guru" in some places.

So I think the only way to "attract" better talent might need to center around the fact the benchmark of quality work is so low nowadays that... I don't know.

If it's a rushing tide that lifts all boats, the fleet that comprises the Stack Exchange network is going down as the lack of valued skills in the real world just gets lower.

My two cents. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Answer 4

We could re-examine the list of things that we shut down as "not professional", and see whether there is a community of professionals who work with those subjects we could embrace. The datacenter is changing, and if we don't update our definitions, we'll find ourselves shrunk to obscurity.

Answer 5

After reading all the answers thus far, and initially convincing myself that I had nothing to add, I noticed something that's missing from everyone's analysis thus far.

Us. We are missing from our own analysis, particularly when it comes to the signal-to-noise ratio.

The crap outnumbers the good stuff. And for sure, there is a problem of too much crap/noise (though not one I'm sure we can do much about, beyond the rapid VTC and VTD we do now). But the other side of the signal-to-noise ratio, as it is a ratio, is the signal part - more good questions would improve the signal-to-noise ratio even if we have developers herp-derping about their WAMP stacks and assorted idiots asking for halp to server. I know that for my part, I can do a better job of including more of my technical problems on ServerFault, to add some good problems, and I suspect that most everyone else can as well. Hell, even good, interesting self-answered questions would be a good thing, given our current signal-to-noise ratio.

Anyway, not sure how much of an effect that will have (if any), but I'm off to add a question or two to the main from my last couple weeks' workload.

...

And don't forget to vote. I expect lots of downvotes on those questions, people, so hop to it, once I get them posted! :)

Answer 6

Law of Diminishing Returns

I'm still a baby with SE and have been on the sites for around a year or so. I believe what is occurring is the law of diminishing returns. I believe as experience and wisdom is gained the older generation on SE begin to see the questions as "noob" or "amateur" rather than professional. The perspective is ever changing and the individuals' perspective that dictate what can and can not go on the SE sites is completely different now than it was 5 years or even 5 months ago. The scope of work that many do are becoming so focused and pinpointed that it is difficult to find specialized individuals and enough specialized questions for those individuals to remain interested. I believe this change in perspective leads to closing of topics more frequently than in the past.

Then and now

Think back many years, decades, ago and look at what the IT field encompassed. You had tech support, server admins, developers and network admins. Now you have a server admin that must have an intimate knowledge of networking and storage engineering just to properly operate a VM infrastructure but no one can know everything. A network engineer that has worked on Cisco equipment since the early 1900's (exaggeration) might have the answer the server admin needs soley based on experience the network engineer has, but the question was closed because it was too specific to a situation. Yes, I understand they can go ask that question on a Cisco forum some where and probably get the answer, but what is keeping that network engineer around when all the questions they can answer are closed? I hope the jest of my example is being understood.

I came, I joined, I tucked tail

I originally came on to SF through a Google search. I didn't sign up originally and as I continued various searches I kept being led back to SF. I took the plunge and signed up and ventured around the site, asked a couple of questions and got some answers. I also answered several as it was self rewarding for me to be able to answer at least a couple of questions. I ventured through the chats and was enamored by the plethora of intellect and knowledge exhibited in the conversation. I participated in several discussions but they were beyond my knowledge so I mostly sat in the corner, hoping to glean the knowledge spilling forth. The longer I participated in the various chat rooms I noticed the willingness to help by veteran members was diminishing. Younger, eager new comers were quick to help and less likely to chide or ignore. I was turned off by this and stopped visiting for quite some time. I only came back recently and lurk with the occasional comment. While I'm sure many IT veterans with much more experience see me as a nuisance, I am the future of SE/SF. Like @MDMarra stated, he learned so much and helped to spring board his career. Scoffing at seemingly "noob" question is what turns people off of SE and it all boils down to perspective.

Down voting

Down votes without reason is another issue I have seen, and maybe this could be part of the solution. Require a reason for a down vote, make a user accountable for the down vote and display the reason it was down voted. Some do comment the reason but many do not. This leads a person asking the question, why?

Edit for clarification My recommendation for the down vote reason is not to add a comment below that targets the down voter. It could be an anonymous remark left for the poster in some sort of "Private Message" or notification area or it could be left under the question much like the notices about the question being locked or closed, but not be something the poster can refuse or flag. Allow them to mark it abusive or spam, but that's it. This would allow for constructive criticism and limit the "your question is crap" comments. It may very well be but a simple one-liner explaining may be sufficient to allow the person asking the question to understand why it's bad. It once again all comes down to one's perspective.

Do it like we want it, or don't ask the question

Some other things I noticed and many in this post have reinforced is the idea regarding updating and running updated equipment. We all know April 8, 2014 was the end of support for Windows XP. We all know we should upgrade it. In reality though you have IT professionals that work for companies that do not value their IT like the IT professional. The common comment I see is quit and find a different place to work for. In a perfect world this may be a viable option but alas we are far from a perfect world. As an IT professional it is our job to create the best environment possible with the tools and resources we have available. Not every company is going to be able to have a $100,000 SAN and have their data replicated to a like SAN in some off-site location. Not all companies will have a warm site set up for disaster recovery. The person asking is trying to make the best of a situation with the worst of circumstances.

Answer 7

Speaking only for myself:

I got really busy at work. I think that's just something that's going to happen to everyone from time to time.

I also find that unless I spend a certain amount of time on the site, someone else answers the questions I would have answered first. (HopelessN00b, I'm lookin' at you, ha ha.)

Anyway. As things calm down I'll try to do better. In the meantime, I went and reviewed a bunch of stuff today, just to do my part and all.

P.S. I have to say that I like the statement of my yearly rank showing up on my profile page. :)

Answer 8

I think we are a little quick on the draw to close questions. I spend a lot of time looking at the close queue (I believe I am the 4th most prevalent close vote reviewer at the moment), and when I aggregate our collective requirements (as I observe, not as we intend), I get something like this:

• No abuse of terminology or use of incorrect or dated terminology. If you mention something obsolete, or use the wrong word for a basic concept, your question will be closed.
• No outdated software. Regardless of the problem you're experiencing and whether or not your use of old and out of support software is pivotal in it or even relevant, if we see you are using old software, your question will be closed.
• No theoretical questions. If your question is about how things work in a protocol, or in linux, rather than about a practical how-to application, your question will be closed.
• No how-to. If your question just asks about how to do something relatively easy or extremely complex, it will be closed (and you'll be told to read the docs or hire someone, respectively).
• Demonstrate extreme competency. If you don't point out your experience and if you even hint that you might be new to working with the thing you're asking about, you're a n00b and your question will be closed.
• Already know the right solution. If you ask about what you can apply to solve your problem, or ask how to apply the wrong solution, your question will be closed (and nobody will tell you what the correct solution might be).
• Never ask about cron, or anything else that's mentioned in a canonical question. If it is, no matter how much of a stretch it may be, your question will be closed as a duplicate.
• No crappy tools. If a crappy tool (like cPanel or phpMyAdmin) exists in your environment, whether it has anything to do with your problem or not, your question will be closed.
• No workarounds. If your question asks for a workaround because of artificial constraints, your question will be closed, and if anyone troubles to tell you why the workaround is lousy, it will come with a heavy dose of vitriol.
• No excessive information. If you include unnecessary information beyond a couple lines, your question will be closed.
• No formatting mistakes. If your formatting is messy, your question will be closed, even if you don't really know markdown yet; markdown is our shibboleth.
• No spelling or grammatical errors. Whether or not English is your first language, and especially if you speak a dialect of English associated with certain types of people, if you don't use the Queen's English (or no eagles take flight behind you when you speak), your question will be closed... and is that curry or borscht on your breath?

I don't think this list is complete. You can see, perhaps, how these de facto criteria (caricatures though they may be) are very stringent - even more stringent than the actual rules.

There is a lot of stuff we should close. But, I think we have a collective hair-trigger on some things we could easily afford to be more lenient on. Closing a question doesn't mean you won't be answering it (like a ticket) - it means nobody may answer it, ever (at least in its current form).

A lot of the questions I answer, I find in the close queue. This speaks to another, similar problem (SF should use the "interesting" home page since it is crap at showing me things I care about at the moment), but also speaks to our closure problem.

Answer 9

I'm an enthusiast for answering questions - I like to be able to contribute to the 'wisdom of the internet' in a positive way. I've answered a few questions on ServerFault, but not as many as I'd have liked.

Aside from poor initial questions, the other reason I trip up is because some questions are extremely specific. That's an artifact of the target audience - we want people to have done their own initial research. However it also means that if I haven't encountered the specific problem listed, I often can't offer much, as I may not be able to reproduce the problem.

Regarding the first point though - there's a bit of a firehose of questions coming in, and most are outside my specialist subject area. It would be useful to be able to customise and filter my 'new questions' view. I'm a storage engineer by trade - I know my way around RAID, disks, volume managers, arrays etc. I'm never likely to have anything useful to say about apache. (Well, basic questions that probably shouldn't be here in the first place; maybe).

I would also perhaps suggest an 'approval' mechanism for submitting questions (maybe reputation geared?). So we can have an 'anonymous' question queue, and a 'established user' question queue? (With the caveat that we'd expect established users to 'approve' suitable 'anonymous' questions).

This is an approach that works fairly well on PerlMonks - the 'approved' marker is one you can filter on, or not, as you wish. Established community participants can 'approve' a new post, and do so based on ... well, it's up to them.

Edit: Also, I don't know if it's been suggested before - but would setting financial bounties as well as rep also be an incentive? On one hand, it's compensating for effort, but it might server to discourage the enthusiasts/volunteers who contribute in the first place.

Answer 10

I think SF is too heavy handed on the closes and non-professional complaints. Closing a question because the OS happened to be XP? Yeah, it's not a server OS, and if given a choice I wouldn't run it. But the business side of things rarely gives you such a choice. Hell, we just managed to kill our XP server yesterday. Making an active user justify a question is inane. If there's some additions that can make it better, great, make suggestions. But the scope of what questions get pounded with Vote To Close need to go way down.

We've gotten several signals that we've gone too far on this. Hence all the Meta questions about the professionalism standard. Hence why ssl on this very topic suggested that we declare this place a non-smackdown zone. Only to get smacked down, with a comment berating him for not making a suggestion. Hell, I've found the BOFH-ness of this place stifling, and I've never had a question closed. If I had recently arrived here, I would never have come back.

The simple fact is that SF is protecting the quality of its questions at the cost of the quality of its contributors. It prevents mediocre users from ever growing into worthwhile members. It makes amateurs completely forget about this site by the time they become professionals. And it will even turn off the very professionals we want here, because being non-inclusive just isn't very professional.

Aside from the above, I also agree with what other people have said on this topic.

Answer 11

I have some ideas but you are not going to like them...

Please see my bit of amateur anthropology to get an idea of the framework I'm going to construct this around. I really believe that many of this site's issues discussed on Meta are really the byproduct of the lack of consensus between the ServerFault community and the StackOverflow community about the scope and purpose of this site.

Ban the Noobs!

The Why

Yeah, yeah, yeah. ServerFault is full of a bunch of elitist pricks (and prick-ettes?). But you know what? That's OK. Everyone's forgotten that the ServerFault community has an explicit requirement for some level of ability that we are calling professional capacity. Everyone seems to have forgotten that StackExchange is supposed to let communities have some kind of ownership of the scope and content of their respective sites ...we empower our communities to curate [content]. And everyone seems to have forgotten that all the closed questions belonging to those poor, angry and alienated folks that just got here yesterday not only are likely to get better answers on other sites but that those sites are explictly open to questions from everyone. It's like a bunch of weekend warrior Home-Depot-DIYers showed up an IBEW convention and then got upset that they were told in tones of increasing frustration that neither was this the appropriate convention for them nor that their contributions were welcome or relevant.

I'm exaggerating a bit for comedic effect so please don't take the above paragraph too seriously. You also really need to have read my previous answer about the "culture war" between the ServerFault community and greater StackExchage community.

The How

I just waded through the Review Queue. Here's what I found:

• 4 questions from SO users with at least 1000 rep that were either off-topic or lacked sufficient information, background and details to meet the professional capacity requirement. I'm an idiot and if I can figure it out so can these guys.
• 8 questions from low-rep users with less an 100 rep on ServerFault that were "I CAN HAZ CODE?" questions, off topic, unintelligible or otherwise lacked sufficient information, background and details to meet the professional capacity requirement.
• 1 question from a brand new user to StackExchange that was completely off-topic. If you can't or won't read the About/FAQ then you certainly are not meeting the professional capacity requirement.
• 7 questions that I voted to leave open as they more less looked on-topic and met the professional capacity requirement. Many of these were in the queue as duplicates but I'm generally willing to give people the benefit of the doubt unless I have a deep enough understanding of technology to know if their question really is a duplicate.

60% of those questions don't meet the "curate the content" model being advocated by a portion of the ServerFault community. 60% of these questions should of been stopped at the Help Center. A quick glance through the front page reveals a similar ratio. How do we stop them and completely invert our signal to noise ratio?

It's heavy-handed but I think this would do the trick:

1. Anonymous users can't ask questions
2. StackOverflow users don't automatically get 100 rep points when cross-joining sites. 30% of our review queue is composed of SO users that don't bother to read our About/Help.
3. Users need at least 100 rep to ask questions.

The bottom line is for years ServerFault has asked that people comply with our discretionary policies for topicality. We have tired all the manner of cajoling, FAQ-rewriting, transfer-pages without success. As the site becomes more popular the signal to noise ratio decreases accordingly.

If this site is to survive it is time to implement mandatory polices. We asked nice. Thrice. If you can't provide a few decent answers that deserve those rare and tasty upvotes then you certainly don't get to spam your help vampire questions all over the front page. Mean? Elitist? Yes. I suppose but what else are we supposed to do when 60% of our questions don't meet the topicality standards?

Vote

I've talked about this before and so have other folks notably Ward. The last few weekends I have been looking at the top voters. My estimate is that we only have about 50 users that vote at all during a week period furthermore there are only have about 20 users that cast more than a dozen votes. This is absolutely terrible considering how many views and how many questions we get a day.

I used to think that if we all buckled down and just voted a bit more we could reverse the signal to noise ratio. I now think differently. The engaged audience here is really small - I'm guessing a dozen at best. There's just not enough people interested anymore to make voting work.

However - that's the gamble. If we implement the "mandatory policies" and they actually work, we have a decent signal-to-noise ratio again, and much like animals returning to a restored ecosystem, we can re-engage or retain those people currently engaged and get some voting going.

Why is voting important? I have said this so many times but voting tells users that the community values their contribution. This has immense psychological value. I tried to put on my optimist hat at the beginning of the year and try for the rubber ducky challenge. I'm giving that up. Now my answers aren't stellar but I gave it my best shot and managed to come away with about a 1000 more rep points in six months. No way I'm going to add 10K in a year. In fact, I don't think we're going to see any more users breaking the 10k rep barrier in a long time. What I'm getting at here is without voting there is no signal to any new people in our narrow target audience that anyone is even listening. It's not surprising in the least we don't retain any new talent. If you spent an hour on a decent answer and only get one upvote would you come back?

Embrace the Subjective-Good

This is where ServerFault can really shine. I have also talked about this before. We have an incredibly wide scope in terms of content but because of our ability requirement the scope of questions that get posted is actually pretty narrow. This seems contradictory but let me explain.

Questions that lack depth are almost always closed (with increasing vitriol). Whereas people used to consider leaving these basic questions open so that new users would have something answer now we pretty much vote to close anything that looks like it could be answered by doing a bit of research or a thorough reading or re-reading of the manual. This change makes sense because there are no new users to chew through these basic questions anymore.

Questions with sufficient depth to be interesting and on-topic are rarely answered or occasionally closed as To Localized due to the deep-knowledge issue addressed by sysadmin1138 in the Why "professional capacity"? question. This again makes sense, we just can't seem to attract and retain our target audience, either because of reputation of being a bunch of jerks, our low signal-to-noise ratio, the difficulty in searching through the "noise" questions looking for "signal" questions and lack of participation (lack of voting). What deep-knowledge professional wants to come here, struggle through the low rep stage collecting those rare votes here and there and finally spend all their time complaining in Chat and closing questions. Deep knowledge professionals have no use of this site any more.

This leaves us with a pretty narrow group of good questions that we can expect to see. To increase the size of that group we should really advocate for Subjective-Good questions. Despite the small interested audience there is an absolutely mind-boggling amount of expertise on this site. For someone like myself, a lowly junior in the midst of figuring out what to do, I can only hope that ServerFault can help me and others propel our career in a similar manner to @MDMarra's.

I'm talking about things like (these are just off the top of my head, naturally to make good questions they need some refinement):

• How can I backup, secure, and support non-standard, non-network PCs used for SCADA systems?

• How can I collect metrics that will let me make good decisions about PC refresh cycles?

• How has the prevalence of cloud applications changed the in-house vs. MSP-managed equation for small/medium business?

• What criteria should I use to evaluate the suitability of cloud-based applications?

• Is it safe to put corporate secrets into cloud applications? How can I evaluate and ensure that the vendor is meeting their promises with regards to security?

  There's a lot of gold to be mined here but it is getting harder and harder to get at.

Where do we go from here?

Honestly. I don't know. If this site isn't useful for me and isn't useful for someone like MDMarra anymore I can't be optimistic about its future. I know I have proposed some drastic, maybe even draconian measures, but desperate times and all that...

Personally. I think it is the end. I think we all know it. (DRAMATIC MUSIC!)

Answer 12

Simple answer; revenue sharing.

Right now people volunteer their time while those who own the site are rolling in cash. Revenue share on a per ad impression/click-through so that the person who asked the question, and the person who's answer was accepted will receive a fraction of the revenue generated in perpetuity.

Answer 13

Perhaps instead of discussing amongst people who have been here a long time, you should ask your target audience: ie. people who are new to the site, such as myself. Perhaps this question should get some prominent screen real-estate on the site, especially on pages which are hit from google searches.

Perhaps this question/discussion area could be a non-smackdown zone. This would be an area to get information, not smack-down newbies.

Speaking as someone with a bit of experience in marketing, as well as way too much sysadmin experience..