Our sidebar prominently links to this year's SO Dev Survey. Why? We are not a programmer or developer community.
In addition, it's most certainly not an event of this site:
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The technical explanation is that someone from Stack Exchange registered it as an event on Computer Science, using a moderator tool that I'd forgotten existed, if I ever knew.
Part of me thinks that this is a mistake made by someone who saw “computer” in the name of the site and didn't read the second word — we do get many of these. And so the event should be removed.
Another part of me wants to encourage folks from outside Stack Overflow to participate, to remind Stack Exchange (oops, they renamed themselves to Stack Overflow) that the world does not consist of English-speaking programmers.
Opinions?
answered Jan 8 '16 at 22:43
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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4$\begingroup$ We did our best to reach audiences within our network that we thought would be interested in taking the survey. No harm intended. If y'all, as a community, disagree, feel free to remove the event. You have the access and the power to do so. $\endgroup$ – Adam Lear♦ Jan 8 '16 at 22:56
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2$\begingroup$ @AdamLear Ultimately, it comes down to how you see this survey. Do you want to interview people in the software-making business? (The possible answers of Q5 "What do you consider yourself?" seem to suggest so.) Then the event should only be active on sites whose scope addresses such people -- not this site. If you want to find out how predominant which programming types are on the SE network as a whole, then the event should appear everywhere, but set up in a way that allows to say "I can't/don't program" or "it's a side hobby" or "it's a housework tool like hammer and nail for me". $\endgroup$ – Raphael♦ Jan 9 '16 at 9:29
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$\begingroup$ @AdamLear I notice that the ad is still showing. Did you come to a conclusion that would conclude this thread here? $\endgroup$ – Raphael♦ Jan 12 '16 at 13:49
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1$\begingroup$ @Raphael Adam said that it's up to us to remove the ad if we want. I'd want to see more community input before I act. One argument for the relevance of the survey is that a majority of students of computer science (a significant part of our audience) will end up being programmers and hence candidates for SO Careers. If even Theoretical Computer Science (where SO Careers isn't relevant) hasn't removed the survey, I think we can keep it. $\endgroup$ – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jan 12 '16 at 15:09
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$\begingroup$ I can not form an opinion before @AdamLear answers the question of intent. With the survey as is, I don't see how to fill it in meaningfully without already being a professional programmer. (Regarding Theoretical Computer Science, I doubt they'd care.) $\endgroup$ – Raphael♦ Jan 12 '16 at 17:12
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1$\begingroup$ @Raphael I am a professional programmer, and there were questions I couldn't answer meaningfully. That's just because some questions and some answer sets were poorly chosen. $\endgroup$ – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jan 12 '16 at 17:44
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$\begingroup$ It must have been a flub, because it's not on SQA despite the fact that we directly deal with (certain types of) programming questions. $\endgroup$ – corsiKa Jan 13 '16 at 21:12
