Who are the users that work for Stack Overflow?

Question

I know Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky are the owners or creators because I came by the site from reading their blogs.

Who else works for Stack Overflow in here?

Does Jon Skeet? There's also a fair number of 100k+ users now.

The answers from them are quite informative. It seems that to get that many points in such a short amount of time (the site's only been online for 2-3 years?), you would need to be spending quite a lot of time, regularly on here, so either they

1. Have a ton of spare time either at work or outside of work

2. Are unemployed (seems unlikely given their breadth of knowledge)

3. Work for Stack Overflow and their job is partially to post answers.

These guys seem too knowledgeable so reason 1 or reason 2 seem unlikely, so I suspect reason 3.

Answer 1

Jon Skeet doesn't work for Stack Exchange Inc., the company that owns SO. The second place user, Marc Gravell, does, as does the user who topped the rep leagues last year, Nick Craver, but they had a ridiculous amount of rep before they were hired, not because of it.

New hires used to be announced on the blog, so if you search for "valued associate" you'll find some useful posts... and more recently some hires are announced right here on Meta Stack Exchange (mostly of new Community Team members) so you can search for this too.

Answer 2

In the Stack API you can inspect a user type to see if is_employee is true. Due to the sheer amount of users and no query option on that field calling /users for several days to get such list is a bit tedious. However, some employees are also moderator on Stack Overflow (they have a diamond). It turns out there is a /users/moderators endpoint which returns moderators (diamonds) and if we filter the ones with is_employee === true we can build that (somewhat incomplete) list of users that are staff.

Here is the stacksnippet that implements above logic:

SEApi = (function() {

  // reasonable/common defaults for API url
  function buildDefaultAPI(path, params) {
    var targetParams = {
      'pagesize': 100,
      'key': 'hkJRWvgNXW)FhOoL48kqJg(('
    };
    // merge
    for(var key in params) {
      if (params.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
        targetParams[key] = params[key];
      }
    }

    return {
       site: 'https://api.stackexchange.com',
       version: '2.2',
       path: path || [],
       params: targetParams
     }
  }

  // create a fully qualified valid SE API url
  function buildUrl(api) {
    // build query part of url
    function buildParams(params) {
      var query = [];
      for(var k in params) {
        if (params.hasOwnProperty(k)) {
          query.push(k + "=" + params[k]);
        }
      }
      return query.join('&');
    }

    return [api.site, api.version].concat(api.path).join('/')
          + '?'
          + buildParams(api.params)
  }

  // /users/moderators
  function buildModerators(site) {
    return buildUrl(
      buildDefaultAPI(
        ['users','moderators'],
        {
          'site': site,
          'order': 'desc',
          'sort': 'reputation',
          'filter': '!)RwdAtGLfBp.RCli0pG3.Beu'
        }));
  }

  // /sites
  function buildSites() {
    return buildUrl(
      buildDefaultAPI(
        'sites',
        {
          'pagesize': 500,
          'filter': '!*L6RF8XxHGK77i3m'
        }
    ));
  }
  
  return {
    sites: buildSites,
    moderators: buildModerators
  }
})();

SEClient = (function () {

  var backoffQueue = [];
  
  function get(url, callback) {
    var xhr;

    // get a workitem from the queue
    // and call it if there is one
    function next() {
      var cmd = backoffQueue.shift();
      if (cmd !== undefined) {
        cmd(); 
      }
    }

    if (backoffQueue.length > 0) {
      // we need to backoff, so push ourselves on the Q
      backoffQueue.push(function() { get(url, callback); });
    } else {
      xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
      xhr.addEventListener('load', function() {
        var payload;
        if (xhr.status === 200) {
          // callback with the response
          payload = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText);
          callback(payload);
          
          // handle throttle
          if (payload.backoff) {
            // make sure backoffQueue has an item
            // we can do a simple call to next
            backoffQueue.push(next);
          }
          // call next to process the queue
          // worst case there is nothing to do
          window.setTimeout(next, (payload.backoff || 0) * 1000);    
        } else {
          console.log('error ' + xhr.status);
        }
      });
      xhr.open('get', url);
      xhr.send();
    }
  }
  // public 
  return {get:get};
}());

function EmployeeListerApp() {
  
  var employees = {}; // holds already found user accountid's

  // create DOM elements for a given user 
  function buildUsercard(user) {
    var uc = document.createElement('span'),
        img = document.createElement('img'),
        spn = document.createElement('span'),
        lnk = document.createElement('a');
    img.src = user.profile_image;
    spn.innerHTML = user.display_name;
    lnk.href = user.link;
    lnk.appendChild(img);
    lnk.appendChild(spn);
    uc.appendChild(lnk);
    return uc;
  }

  // add a single user that is an employee to the DOM
  function processUser(item) {
    if ((item.is_employee === true) &&
        (employees[item.account_id] !== true)
       ) {
       document.
         getElementById('employees').
         appendChild(buildUsercard(item)); 
       employees[item.account_id] = true;
     }
  }

  // iterate over all users for a single site
  function processModerators(payload) {
    payload.items.forEach(processUser);
  }

  // for a main site call /users/moderators
  function processSiteItem(item) {
    if (item.site_type === 'main_site') {
      // get the users 
      // and handle the returned users in the call back
      SEClient.get(
        SEApi.moderators(item.api_site_parameter),
        processModerators
      );
    }
  }

  // iterate over all sites
  function processSites(sitesPayload) {
    sitesPayload.items.forEach(processSiteItem);
  }
  
  // get sites and process in the callback
  SEClient.get(SEApi.sites(), processSites);
}

// start
EmployeeListerApp();

a > span {
  font-family: Arial, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif
;
  font-size: 12px;
  font-weight: 400;
}

img {
  border: solid green 1px;
  display: block;
  width:64px;
}

a{
  width: 64px;
  height: 84px;
  padding:10px;
  float: left;
}

<div id="employees">
</div>

Answer 3

The full list of Stack Exchange, Inc team members used to be available under https://stackexchange.com but removed at some point due to internal reasons.