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

Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

jlericson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 298 posts

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#121

Post by geysersam »

bunga-bunga wrote: post #86
mrweasel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

> > Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. > More people needs to understand this. I sounds more like neither one of you has had that choice. Most people, given the chance, would rather add a zero to their savings rather than “doing the right thing for society”

Then we should not depend on people making the right choice. We should limit the opportunities people have to choose between "more for me" and "do something useful for society".

One idea here is more progressive taxation.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#122

Post by jacknews »

"from my standpoint, human-generated community content has taken us to this level, we have a large impact, but there are also so many problems we can solve by leveraging this technology."

LOL. "All your free hard work answering questions powered our profits thus far, but y'know it's expensive to keep y'all in check, and now we need to make megabucks, so we're going to replace you with machines for the next stage of our journey."

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#123

Post by luckystarr »

matsemann wrote: post #72
luckystarr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a senior dev. The only thing I found useful in the last years was the job market on SO. They closed that down recently. Now I don't even go there at all.

I'm a senior dev. Which means my knowledge and experience is often on higher level stuff. Hence I often need to look up details I don't bother to remember. I'm not ashamed to say I search for lots of stuff, and often get results from SO. If anything, pretending to be completely knowledgeable "since one's a senior" is quite junior behavior.

To each their own. I haven't had the necessity to use it, and when I searched for problems the answers were mostly not applicable. All in all it wasn't worth the effort. I just read the source code of the lib I use instead. This tends to give me more for my time.

I understand that everybody has their own unique situation and my statement wasn't meant to be generalized anyways.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#124

Post by [deleted] »

matsemann wrote: post #72
luckystarr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a senior dev. The only thing I found useful in the last years was the job market on SO. They closed that down recently. Now I don't even go there at all.

I'm a senior dev. Which means my knowledge and experience is often on higher level stuff. Hence I often need to look up details I don't bother to remember. I'm not ashamed to say I search for lots of stuff, and often get results from SO. If anything, pretending to be completely knowledgeable "since one's a senior" is quite junior behavior.

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#125

Post by dreen »

mrweasel wrote: post #6
janalsncm wrote: post #3

> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to m…

> Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

You can't talk people into not being greedy. Definietely not while living in an economic system that is built on it.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#126

Post by sgarland »

mrweasel wrote: post #6
janalsncm wrote: post #3

> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to m…

> Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

God, I wish more companies realized this. Doing one thing, and doing it well, is admirable.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#127

Post by paxys »

rahidz wrote: post #93
vouaobrasil wrote: post #7

The author is wrong. The CEO perfectly understands Stack Overflow. What the author of this blog doesn't understand is that the CEO is pursuing a perfectly valid strategy: maximize its short-term gains by squeezing it unsustainably with the latest hype, and take the money, and run. The good of the community and the well-being of the users are completely irrelevant in this strategy.

Why is this so common with tech companies? I'm not an economist by any means, but I never hear of McDonald's, Honda, Home Depot, etc. etc. pulling these kinds of stunts. They're perfectly happy being large companies that pull a constant year-over-year profit. Meanwhile tech companies seem to deliberately have a lifespan of years, not decades, with rugpulls like this being accepted as the norm.

This happens pretty frequently with all kinds of companies. Look at anything touched by private equity, for example.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#128

Post by rightbyte »

orwin wrote: post #104
janalsncm wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between 2009 and today, the US doubled GDP while life expectancies fell. In the EU, GDP is stagnant but life expectancy went up. Those who say Europe’s economy is a failure should at least consider what the purpose of an economy should even be.

Consider a city, paying two gardeners 25k each per year, and an extra 5k for two month. Spending is 55k+oil+chemicals+tool maintenance (that the gardeners usually do). Let's say the annualized cost is 75k. So this service contributions to GDP is 75k. Now, the city wants to show GDP/capita growth. Simple : let's pay a company X that will pay the gardeners. It'll cost 95k. Now the GDP is 95k+ 55k (let's say the gardene…

Is each transaction added to GDP? In that case it is a really BS number.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#129

Post by paxys »

starbugs wrote: post #34
vouaobrasil wrote: post #7

The author is wrong. The CEO perfectly understands Stack Overflow. What the author of this blog doesn't understand is that the CEO is pursuing a perfectly valid strategy: maximize its short-term gains by squeezing it unsustainably with the latest hype, and take the money, and run. The good of the community and the well-being of the users are completely irrelevant in this strategy.

I think it's about time that we no longer accept this strategy as valid.

Who is "we"? Unless you have a large financial stake in the company you aren't part of the discussion at all.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#130

Post by a_c »

hathchip wrote: post #39
janalsncm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just hope they understand the core value proposition of SO is that answers come from people. That is their product. If you want answers from a computer, you can get them from chat GPT. The best SO is going to do with that is spend a lot of money to repackage it into a feature people probably weren’t looking for on SO to begin with. I agree there are other indirect applications of ML models than just generating answ…

It's doubtful that ChatGPT would be able to answer so many tech questions, if it wasn't for the existence of SO.

I don't remember which podcast was it coming from, several years ago there was motion to shut down the US National Weather Service, or is it the NOAA I don't remember, because AccuWeather is all people need. No one seems to question where AccuWeather get the meteorological data. It is from the government service
Post reply on HN