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Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

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

#161

Post by camillomiller »

jncfhnb wrote: post #138
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.

Well… it’s not maximizing the length of life? I would not cite this as a success story. Europe does not seem to be heading in a good direction imo. The consequences are largely unrealized. Even pretending the war never happened and they continued slurping Russian gas.

Please be informed before commenting. Europe has undergone the hardest and most painful decoupling from Russian gas for quite a while. As of 2022 no gas in Europe is imported from Russia.

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

#162

Post by benterix »

glimshe wrote: post #119
mrtksn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/eur/europe/life-expect... USA: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life... I'm sure there are nuances but according to this particular source European life expectancy went from 75 to 79, US life expectancy went from 78 to 79 with a period of a decline between 2013 and 2018.

The decline in US life expectancy is more complex than a general reduction in quality of life, and mostly unrelated to the US financial culture to leads to unicorns. The American ideal of huge companies that must take over the entire market can be traced at least all the way back to the railway robber barons, and has existed even during periods of immense growth in life expectancy. At the same time, a lot of the incr…

> At the same time, a lot of the increase in life expectancy in the EU is due to improvements in medicine that are significantly driven by US-funded research.

Frankly, I don't believe it's true, for two reasons. First, the European Big Pharma is quite strong. It would be more fair - but not precise - to say the rest of the world benefits from the advances made in the West.

As for the second point, it was succinctly put by Dr. Marcia Angell from The New England Journal of Medicine in her famous book. From the blurb: "Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective."

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

#163

Post by pragmatic »

mrtksn wrote: post #132
glimshe wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decline in US life expectancy is more complex than a general reduction in quality of life, and mostly unrelated to the US financial culture to leads to unicorns. The American ideal of huge companies that must take over the entire market can be traced at least all the way back to the railway robber barons, and has existed even during periods of immense growth in life expectancy. At the same time, a lot of the incr…

Why do you think that actions of these huge institutions are not impactful to the life quality of the Americans? Also, why do you think that the European live longer thanks to the medicine developed in the USA? Maybe the USA develops medicine thanks to the free and equal opportunity education culture in the Europe? If you look closely to the researchers, you will see that lot's of the people who develop these things…

I would love for this to be true. Europeans do seem to enjoy a higher quality of life among several axis.

However the US subsidizes European defense (refer to current events) allowing European countries to spend less GDP on their military.

Talent comes to the US from all over the world. That's how it works and has since almost the beginning of the country.

Easier access to capital (and easy bankruptcy, etc), entrepreneurial mindset (less Tall Poppy syndrome), etc etc means business is generally easier in US.

Linus moved to the US. The web was possible bc the internet was funded by the US (arpanet, etc).

Europeans enjoy the Pax Americana without paying tribute to the Amerian empire.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/nato-spen...

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

#164

Post by pmontra »

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

But each CEO of those businesses would like to be the next billionaire. Furthermore if the business doesn't turn out to be as good as they hope they can leave and try to get lucky at another company. They care about the company only up to a (small?) point.

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

#165

Post by mrtksn »

glimshe wrote: post #159
mrtksn wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that actions of these huge institutions are not impactful to the life quality of the Americans? Also, why do you think that the European live longer thanks to the medicine developed in the USA? Maybe the USA develops medicine thanks to the free and equal opportunity education culture in the Europe? If you look closely to the researchers, you will see that lot's of the people who develop these things…

I don't think most of what you wrote, almost phrase by phrase. You took an extreme version of what I said and rebutted it. Just because I said that the US had major influence in European medicine and life expectancy, you took it as meaning that Europeans are bad scientists and "just drink smoothies". I think nothing of this sort. It's very safe to say that US-originated science had a major influence in life expectanc…

Of course US "originated" science had influence, just like Russia originated one or Korea originated one. Also, Science is not something you dig from the ground to claim it’s origins. Depending on what you want to claim, you can change your definition. You can claim that we are having it so good thanks to the German science from the 1940s. Pick a cut off date and ownership method to suit your argument needs.

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

#166

Post by SkyPuncher »

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

More people do understand this, but aren't in a situation to follow it.

Many tech companies are only plausible with VC funding. In order to get VC funding, you generally have to have a path towards being a unicorn.

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

#167

Post by alecco »

stingraycharles wrote: post #65
chx wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a lean and mean company doesn't make for happy investors. The company was finished in 2020 when they raised $85M in a Series E. The fall after that is inevitable. Even the $40M they took in 2015 is a questionable decision for the very reasons you detail. What did they need tens of millions in investments for?

This happens so, so often; companies raising too much money at too high a valuation, based on unrealistic “moonshot” expectations, which then fails and they’ll have to pivot and refocus and they’ll be a mere shell of their former self. Raising at too high a valuation is not a position you want to be in. Unless you’re planning to cash in sooner than the ship will start burning.

Silicon Valley HBO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZgfTarNxdY

And further explanation on revenue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

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

#168

Post by diegoperini »

nottheengineer wrote: post #10
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…

Agreed, stack overflow is the place where we stop to find an answer to a question. They should stay focused on that instead of adding useless features. But I don't entirely agree on LLMs being useless. An LLM could help with avoiding duplicate questions. It could analyze the content of the question and point out stuff like missing logs before the question is submitted to guide beginners through the basics. If someone…

Try phind.com, it's pretty much what you described. It's an AI search engine for programmers which is able to annotate its results with SO links for every paragraph it generates in case you don't trust the generated text.

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

#169

Post by chasd00 »

geysersam wrote: post #121
bunga-bunga wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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.

> We should limit the opportunities people have

Riiight. See you at the voting booth.

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

#170

Post by donatj »

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.

McDonald’s is an interesting company to mention. McDonalds corporate isn’t even really in the fast food business, they’re a real estate company. Franchisees have to rent land from corporate, that’s how they make almost all their money.

Individual McDonald’s Restaurants are barely profitable, most stores bringing in less than $100k profit per year. For how widespread they are, the restaurants themselves really aren’t a great business to be in.

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