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Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
21–30 of 209 posts
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#22How many people work at StackOverflow? Seeing this post also made me realize I have no clue how the company makes money.
Do they not make money connecting people to jobs? (Take money from company taking people
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#23Why would you fire people on such a short notice? No need to hand over things? No interest in providing at least some time to look for a new job? EDIT: To clarify that a bit, I am interested in what the upsides are except for possibly saving some money. An orderly shutdown usually seems preferable to me over quickly killing the process, for both sides.
The transition is being handled with as much dignity as possible - The company is also offering to help place people through USV.
It wasn't possible to give more notice? Do you know why?
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#24I remember reaching out to them a bunch of years ago (2012 or so) in order to ask them to host a stack overflow sub-site for our product (from a sizeable company). We were willing to pay quite a lot (because they had the premier UX for this kind of thing), but they weren't at all interested. They just told us to try to grow things "organically", because they had decided to focus 100% on open stuff. We weren't really…
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Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#25How many people work at StackOverflow? Seeing this post also made me realize I have no clue how the company makes money.
I think they've been primarily monetizing with their careers section. The listings, last I checked, are entirely paid, and they have (at least had?) a sales team dedicated to them.
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#26It's been interesting watching SO try to monetize. I wonder: How would people feel if they went the Wikipedia way? It's obviously a very beneficial site, but not as widely applicable as Wikipedia. I personally prefer the Wikipedia model of being ad-free and having no additional product and doing a fundraising drive every so often. PBS as well. That said, I certainly think given the audience of SO that there are sever…
I remember seeing an article here these past few weeks talking about the business model of Wikipedia and how it's supposedly inherently flawed. Wikipedia doesn't bring in a lot of cash, but it rather sets a sad tone for itself how unfortunate that may seem.
Personally I'd be more interested in seeing StackOverflow branch out. What have they done these past few years? It seems like StackOverflow has remained stagnant, yet they have so much potential.
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I was there. There wasn't even a google. I would stumble along on deja.com in the late 90s until it died a slow painful death and got scooped up by Google [1] [1] Source: [2002] https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buys-remaining-deja-com-bus...
Bahahaha. That wasn't even the worst of it. Imagine this scenario, you have to install linux on a pc. There's no stackoverflow, there's no google. The linux distro you're using doesn't even have a package manager. And currently it doesn't have a working ethernet driver either. Also, it's the only computer that exists in your entire house.
Connecting to whatever internet connection I had at the time was always the hardest thing (if all of the other basic hardware was supported).
Maybe I was better off in that I was getting my distro (Slackware) along with the giant 'Linux for dummies' book in which it was included. It still never got me far enough to be able to remove my Windows partition.
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#28How many people work at StackOverflow? Seeing this post also made me realize I have no clue how the company makes money.
I'm sure they make TONS of money from ad revenue. Probably they tried to generate other revenue streams but it just didn't work out and hence the layoff.
Here's a crazy idea: what if Stackoverflow developed a search engine for developers? Usually I get to Stackoverflow posts through Google but perhaps Stackoverflow can provide a better experience by doing code specific web crawling.
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#29Why would you fire people on such a short notice? No need to hand over things? No interest in providing at least some time to look for a new job? EDIT: To clarify that a bit, I am interested in what the upsides are except for possibly saving some money. An orderly shutdown usually seems preferable to me over quickly killing the process, for both sides.
Likely security. It's not mutually exclusive to helping people with their future prospects.
We know nothing about severance, job assistance, etc. You can't really infer anything about this subject from that tweet.
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I was there. There wasn't even a google. I would stumble along on deja.com in the late 90s until it died a slow painful death and got scooped up by Google [1] [1] Source: [2002] https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buys-remaining-deja-com-bus...
Bahahaha. That wasn't even the worst of it. Imagine this scenario, you have to install linux on a pc. There's no stackoverflow, there's no google. The linux distro you're using doesn't even have a package manager. And currently it doesn't have a working ethernet driver either. Also, it's the only computer that exists in your entire house.
Copied ethernet driver through floppy disks from another machine.