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Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

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Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#41

Post by srcmap »

danbruc wrote: post #15

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.

Maybe the pressure was slowly building up from investors/board. They wanted the returns, profit, path to IPO , VC's carry for the Nth largest site of the internet.

From the https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow, the first round was from 2010 - 7 years ago. USV will like to get their exit soon.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#42

Post by corpMaverick »

pmoriarty wrote: post #34
luis_espinoza wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but you guys remember the dark times before SO?...omg.

Now let's see.. we had Usenet news groups, mailing lists, IRC channels, and eventually web forums on every programming language, operating system, and software package under the sun. You could ask questions and get them answered. What was so cringeworthy about this exactly? That's not to say that SO doesn't bring value. It has nice tagging and discoverability through search engines, good moderation, and an achievemen…

There was something called experts exchange. Remember that? It was horrible.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#43

Post by Ralfp »

danbruc wrote: post #15

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.

Depends on country too. In EU our work laws regulate how your employee may be laid off. My country (poland) says that employee has to be notified about termination:

- week ahead if he or she was employed for less than month - month ahead if he or she was employed for less than three years - three months ahead if he or she was employed for more than three years

This goes both ways however, as employee has to notify his employeer on same basis that he or she quits. This introduces amount of games to recruitment process, where company frequently not only has to make bet by deciding to hire somebody, but also make sure that they'll wont be outbid during the three months that have to pass for person to change employeer

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#44

Post by blazespin »

valuearb wrote: post #33
danbruc wrote: post #15

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.

Why would you give notice? Leaving people dangling for weeks while you figure out who will be cut is worse than making the decision, telling them it's effective immediately and giving a fair severance package so they can immediately start looking.

The question isn't so much notice as it is severance. As long as the severance package is good, notice isn't that important.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#45

Post by fooker »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #27
InclinedPlane wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have not-so-fond memories of trying to troubleshoot PPPoE issues.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#46

Post by brian-armstrong »

nicodjimenez wrote: post #28
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #18

How 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.

Inherent conflict here - programmers don't click on ads, fullstop. I can't imagine a group I'd want to advertise to less.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#47

Post by dragonwriter »

danbruc wrote: post #39
fourseventy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of a company giving advanced notice of layoffs. Its always just an email the morning of.

Usually you will get at least a 4 week notice in Germany and this increases to up to 7 months when you worked for more than 20 years for the company. That you get fired effective immediately usually only happen if you really fucked something up.

The US has much weaker employee protections. Aside from workers in unions and certain protected scenarios, layoffs usually occur with zero notice. (And, often, when associated with public bad financial returns, shortly after management denies any layoffs are coming.)

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#48

Post by foepys »

valuearb wrote: post #33
danbruc wrote: post #15

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.

Why would you give notice? Leaving people dangling for weeks while you figure out who will be cut is worse than making the decision, telling them it's effective immediately and giving a fair severance package so they can immediately start looking.

You decide who needs to get cut and notify only those people. Then they have a few weeks to search for a new job and get their things in order.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#49

Post by weberc2 »

nicodjimenez wrote: post #28
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #18

How 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.

No doubt they could provide a better experience; the problem is probably monetizing that search engine. I have a hard time imagining an ad-based model working well.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#50

Post by gumoro »

johansch wrote: post #20

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…

If I understand correctly, they offer this now, your private instance for your own product(s) & team(s):

https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise

Edit: while interesting, this (private internal instance for your team) is not what johansch is after (separate public instance dedicated to your product, for your users)

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