Developer First Culture & Collectives at Stack Overflow

**Dan Lines** (0:00)
If you've ever written code, you've probably heard of Stack Overflow. Hell, some of their code is probably in your company's code. Most of us have learned from them or shared knowledge on their site.
They've also got one of the most inclusive and positive engineering cultures out there. So we've brought on their Director of Engineering, Ben Matthews, to give us the inside scoop on Stack Overflow and their new product launch, Collectives.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
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**Dan Lines** (0:45)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today we are talking about engineering and culture at Stack Overflow. Joining me today is the Director of Engineering at Stack Overflow, Ben Matthews.
Ben, thanks so much for coming on DI today.

**Ben Matthews** (1:04)
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

**Dan Lines** (1:06)
Awesome to have you. Anyone that's a developer knows what Stack Overflow is. I used it maybe seven years ago when I was developing. I don't know how to do something first place that I go to find out, probably Stack Overflow. We have a bunch of interesting topics today, but I think people will want to learn just a little bit more about Stack Overflow.
So we'll start out with some questions here. Most importantly, how much of Stack Overflow is built using copy and paste itself?

**Ben Matthews** (1:37)
It's like 99%. Yeah, it's like a self-sustaining website at this point. But yeah, everyone that's in Stack Overflow, even the founders are big users. A lot of the people that came to Stack Overflow over time came because of a love for that community. It sounds cliche, but what we really do is like we're here to help developers.
And we are a company filled with developers. We're just as passionate as users as we are as creators.

**Dan Lines** (2:01)
Yeah, that's awesome. It must be super fun to work there. How many engineers are on the staff right now?

**Ben Matthews** (2:07)
I think we're around 85
And we're still hiring. We have some more headcount. So we're hoping to get maybe to over 100 by the end of the year.

**Dan Lines** (2:14)
Great. Ending out with about 100 That's a nice size team.

**Ben Matthews** (2:18)
Yeah. Some people here at Stack Overflow, they think of us as this huge, enterprisey, big culture because we're a very visited website. We're very thankful that we have an impact on the developer community.
But we are a relatively small company. We keep things focused in a small to mid-size group.

**Dan Lines** (2:35)
That's cool. How do you organize the engineering teams? How are people broken up?

**Ben Matthews** (2:40)
It's really a realm of influence based on what you're trying to do. We have our platform engineering team, which are people like our SREs and architects that are really focused on making it a lot easier for our other engineering teams to do what they do. On the other side, we have our product engineering groups, which are also split out into other teams, mostly around what the focus of the product is. For instance, I manage the reach and relevance division at Stack Overflow, which is any ways that companies can interact with our users. Then we also have our teams division, which there's teams for Stack Overflow, a way to have your own private instance of Stack Overflow.
Then, of course, the most well-known, there's the public platform team, which anyone that interacts with Stack Overflow, you can thank them for all that you've learned and gathered from Stack Overflow.

**Dan Lines** (3:26)
Okay, very cool.
What type of methodology do you use? Are you Scrum or Combob? What are you all doing?

**Ben Matthews** (3:34)
Everyone has a little bit of freedom to tackle it the way they see fit. But for the most part, at least in product engineering, we're very focused on Scrum. And starting from that, for lack of a better term, the vanilla Scrum, and then we can deviate from there based on what the teams need, based on what people need, the product, the nature of the product. On the platform engineering side, there's a little bit less of structure. I think they have a lot more freedom to handle those things as they like, since they're more service-oriented than product-oriented.

**Dan Lines** (4:04)
Very cool, and is there anything that stands out to you that's unique about how engineering works at Stack Overflow, maybe compared to other places that you've been at?