Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 209 posts

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#121

Post by dragonwriter »

pkaye wrote: post #116
dragonwriter wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

The WARN act is part of US labor law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini... For larger companies with layoffs beyond a threshold, they employer must give 60 days notice. I think they can instead give 60 days severance.

Yeah, but the threshold is quite large; 500+ workers at a single site, or both 50-499 workers and over a third of the site workforce.

The Stack Overflow layoffs are 60 people and 20% of their workforce, and so wouldn't (even at a single site) be subject to the WARN Act’s 60-day notice requirement.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#122

Post by shagie »

hehheh wrote: post #117
shagie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been efforts to remove vague questions. There is a lot of them. Stack Overflow corporate tends to leave that to the community moderation... which is a bit under powered. Until recently, the elected moderator team tended to be on the preservationist side. As to removing from search? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/316881/ - remember that Stack Overflow monetization is driven by views. Deleting thos…

> Questions without a clear problem statement are not useful to other readers. I guess this is fundamentally where I disagree with SO's staff and/or moderation team. I occasionally find those questions and their answers very useful, when there are answers, and again more useful than the perhaps ideal, specific, and ignored questions that fill the site. When questions get too specific, the only person that might benef…

Other sites have optimized for other things. Slant.co does a great job (in my opinion) of the "pros and cons" for different things. Quora has a more anecdotal spin to its thing. You can ask a question, get lots of viewpoints, but may not get any real answers for the underlying problem. Trying to make one site that does everything... I'm not sure it exists.

That last comment is more elaborately written in https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... . Read it all, but it concludes with:

> We feel that the world is awash in questions, but not answers. Answers are the real unit of work in any Q&A; system. Therefore, the only logical thing to do is to maximize the happiness and enjoyment of answerers. If this means aggressively downvoting or closing unworthy and uninteresting questions, so be it. Without a community of people willing to answer questions, it really doesn’t matter if there are questions at all, does it?

This was written in the early days of Stack Overflow. I believe the philosophy there was "its easy to get questions." I'm not sure I agree with that... or at least, it is certainly not easy to get well asked questions and separating the well asked form poorly asked questions is an immense undertaking. I don't think the system that SO has has scaled well. That you have trouble finding answers that may exist show that there is too much noise in the system and unless you know exactly what you are looking for it becomes difficult. Try removing too much of the noise and people start complaining about losing internet points.

Aside from the Atwoodians and Spolskyians... there are the Zuckerbergites.

> No, Zuckerberg didn't have anything to do with Stack Overflow. The philsophy of :+1: however, is one that can be seen on Stack Overflow. The web is a social place, and Stack Overflow is too. People you interact with, you up vote. It makes them feel good and you feel good knowing they feel good. No one likes to get a dislike or unfriend on Facebook - and no one likes to get down voted or have their questions closed on Stack Overflow.

And the LinkedIn

> The world is a hard enough place to get a good job. Especially when there are scores of other people trying to that single entry level coding position that opened up and you just got out of college. So, how do you set yourself apart from all the others? You put Stack Overflow on your resume. You provided 200 answers on Stack Overflow! Opps, that one just got deleted.

And the freELance

> Did you know there is a site out there where you can pay money for people to do some work? I haven't gotten job as a programmer yet, but I took a bid on eLance for writing a facebook clone for $200 for some beer money. I know some JavaScript and php... At worst, I don't get it done but have some great material for when I get out of college (or maybe I'll drop out and become self taught on the weekends while answering phones)

All of these are competing for how the community on the site is run. Without direction you get rules and squabbles. The results of this show up in reviews (first post - everyone gets an up vote no matter how poorly written) and close / delete "wars" where people try to remove something seen as cruft and other people try undoing that... and it ends up undeleted and locked (and contributing to the noise that makes it harder for you to get an answer with a google search).

The site that you get when you don't try to have the great answers that arise from good questions, well... https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396545663&link=list

As to the narcissists? Its more of a "the people answering are trying to answer the question once." Its not to hear themselves, but so that programming problems are resolved by searching rather than by asking. Similar to the driving goal of Wikipedia - all knowledge easily available.

If answers were paid... that goes down an interesting path for philosophy and motivation. A difficult path for a web site (money is hard to handle) and motivation (you're only putting $0.05 on this question, we'll, I'll give you $0.05 of my time. "This can't be processed by a regular expression." - poor answers to poorly paid questions)

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#123

Post by flanbiscuit »

majidazimi wrote: post #93
antiphase wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only applies to permanent workers though. Contractors or temporary staff may be employed on much shorter terms.

I'm a student assistant at SAP in Germany. Even I (as a part time hourly-paid employee) have a one month notice period.

And you have to do it on the first of the month right? Because the one month doesn't become affective until the first of the month so if you quit mid-month then you actually have a month and a half left at the company. At least this is what I was told by a friend who lives and works in Berlin as a tech recruiter.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#124

Post by pkaye »

dragonwriter wrote: post #121
pkaye wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WARN act is part of US labor law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini... For larger companies with layoffs beyond a threshold, they employer must give 60 days notice. I think they can instead give 60 days severance.

Yeah, but the threshold is quite large; 500+ workers at a single site, or both 50-499 workers and over a third of the site workforce. The Stack Overflow layoffs are 60 people and 20% of their workforce, and so wouldn't (even at a single site) be subject to the WARN Act’s 60-day notice requirement.

True it could be stronger. Some states like California have more stringent versions.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#125

Post by noncoml »

colmcg wrote: post #119
mianos wrote: post #76

I tried to hire through them recently. It was a joke of a process. More like the way uaed cars are sold. Don't contact us, we'll contact you. No price displayed, we negotiate that depending on how much you can afford. The sign up system simply didn't work, saying I had already signed up but then the next button simply didn't work. They did get back to me a week later. This completely change my view. I went from wanti…

Indeed is doing a good job at hiring in the tech field. Their Prime product is great (if you live in one of the cities they are running it in). (Disclaimer: I work @ Indeed, but I've seen friends quickly hired using Prime.)

It took me a while to understand that by "Indeed" you refer to the company.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#126

Post by legostormtroopr »

Good. In the past year they have become very preachy about exact which political opinions the tech community is allowed to have, and how they are to express them.

My limit was the "Time to take a stand incident" when Joel effectively dictated that the developer community of StackOverflow must agree with the statement.

> Carving up the world into ... nations ... is both morally repugnant and frankly stupid

The follow up of mods keeping the post open, backing it up and enforcing that idea on other questions really hammered home the idea that StackOverflow belongs to them, regardless of whatever they might say.

There was no room for nuance, just an American-centric political orthodoxy you must follow or aren't welcome.

[1]https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take...

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#127

Post by colejohnson66 »

Ralfp wrote: post #43
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 hi…

A three months notice before quitting seems pretty excessive IMHO. I can kindof understand it from the perspective of the company that would need to find a replacement, but for the worker, it seems ridiculous.

Note: I am American, and most states are aren’t “right-to-work” meaning you can quit at a moment’s notice, but it’s common courtesy to give 2 weeks notice.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#128

Post by colejohnson66 »

ProAm wrote: post #118
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.

It's start up life, iterating off VC money. Fail fast also means fire fast.

Is it even possible to call Stack Exchange a startup anymore?

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#130

Post by lstyls »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #127
Ralfp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hi…

A three months notice before quitting seems pretty excessive IMHO. I can kindof understand it from the perspective of the company that would need to find a replacement, but for the worker, it seems ridiculous. Note: I am American, and most states are aren’t “right-to-work” meaning you can quit at a moment’s notice, but it’s common courtesy to give 2 weeks notice.

> most states are aren’t “right-to-work” meaning you can quit at a moment’s notice, but it’s common courtesy to give 2 weeks notice

The term "right to work" has nothing to do with employment status. It's political branding for laws that forbid mandatory union membership. It's a pretty effective union busting tool and has contributed to the decline of organized labor as a political force.

I think you're confusing it with "at will" employment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law

Post reply on HN