Stack Overflow questions per yearU.S. median monthly rent
Stack Overflow questions per year and the U.S. median monthly rent have, between 2015 and 2023, moved in opposite directions at a correlation of -0.979. The site programmers used to ask for help quietly depopulated while the cost of the room they asked from climbed. Somewhere in that divergence is a developer paying more in rent and less, as it turns out, in forum reputation.
Stack Overflow question volume declined gradually through the 2015-2022 window and then fell off sharply in 2023 as a substantial share of programmer Q&A moved to ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini. U.S. median monthly rent rose from around $950 to over $1,500 in the same window, driven by constrained housing supply and pandemic-era migration to a small number of already-expensive metros. The two trends are not causally linked in any direction, but they describe the same cohort — software developers, primarily millennial, mostly in major cities — dealing with two different pressures on the same desk.
Nine years of two lines diverging can describe a programmer asking fewer questions online and paying more to live near other programmers. The forum and the lease are, for now, both quieter and more expensive.
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