31–40 of 209 posts
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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?
How many people work at StackOverflow? Seeing this post also made me realize I have no clue how the company makes money.
Why 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.
If SO and its related network sites die, what's going to happen to the millions of questions and answers their users contributed? Is anyone archiving them and making the archives available in any useful way?
I don't know, but you guys remember the dark times before SO?...omg.
That's not to say that SO doesn't bring value. It has nice tagging and discoverability through search engines, good moderation, and an achievement and reputation system that encourages people to make quality contributions. But the days before it existed weren't so dark.
It'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,…
I 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…
It'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…
SO is too big to go for a Wikipedia style model unless they strip off just the core SO part and relevant engineers and make only that part donation based. And I'd guess the other 90% would end up in layoffs anyway.
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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.
Getting a Winmodem to work in Linux was possibly, but not exactly easy. I couldn't afford a better modem at the time, so I just kept hacking away at it and booting back into Windows and searching the web to try to figure it out. This was 1996 or so; there was far less information on the web than there is today, and search engines weren't exactly great at finding what you needed.
I think I finally got online from Linux after a week or two. :)
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It wasn't possible to give more notice? Do you know why?
I've never heard of a company giving advanced notice of layoffs. Its always just an email the morning of.
I 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…
Good times - having to write a huge authentication / middleware layer to make sure everything is correct.