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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

#181

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

ygra wrote: post #9
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…

> Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. This exists in the form of chat, and extended comment discussions migrate there. That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly.

Their "migrated to chat" feels alot like "wished away to the cornfield".

For one, it's almost never a chat. You go there, and the other person who might be talking last posted 12 hours ago. That's not an immediate conversation. These are still "comments". It's a clumsy interface. Then, despite no longer having to be a "comment on a question" like in the main interface, it's still this crappy pseudo-IRC that doesn't give you full markdown to work with.

> That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO

Such they claim.

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

#182

Post by ta988 »

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…

Research mostly done by underpaid researchers from China, India and Europe coming to the US in the hope to get a better life. The whole system is complex.

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

#183

Post by ta988 »

refurb wrote: post #171
orwin wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Where does the extra money come from? Out of thin air?

This is exactly what GDP means... take everything multiply by price and sum.

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

#184

Post by throwawaymobule »

Qem wrote: post #96
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…

> Thank god Wikimedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. I wonder why didn't Wikimedia have a stackoverflow-like site before stackoverflow.

There's a lot of nuance to how SO and other sites they run work. Turning programmer focused FAQs into a collaborative site was the route it kind of had to take.

Reading through the joelonsoftware blog was kind of eyeopening, since I didn't know he was one of its creators.

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

#185

Post by isaacfung »

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 use a search engine called phind. For simple problems, usually I just have to pass in a short description of what I am doing and the error message, and it would find the relevant SO posts and summarize several potential solutions. Half the time one of the solution would work and I dont even have to open the SO posts.

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

#186

Post by awb »

bloopernova wrote: post #14

If I were the semi benevolent dictator of the world, I'd make a law that said: all middle managers up to the CEO must spend 20% of their time doing entry level work in the company. Same with politicians. If you are insulated from what your company does, or constituents do, you can't effectively wield the power granted to you. Which leads me to an even more unpopular "authoritarian" opinion: the richest people are the…

> If I were the semi benevolent dictator of the world, I'd make a law that said: all middle managers up to the CEO must spend 20% of their time doing entry level work in the company.

Maybe try this rule in your own company first. If it’s an improvement over the current system you’ll have a competitive advantage. If it doesn’t work, then you wouldn’t have been benevolent.

> the richest people are the furthest out of touch and thus least qualified to wield so much power

I’m not connected to anyone above “vacation-house rich”, but at their level a lot of the power they wield is in experience, communication and connections. If I’m going to invest in a project, I want someone who’s experienced in the domain, can clearly communicate their vision and has connections in the industry. Wealthy people often tick those boxes.

Here are some alternative free market idea for you:

1. Grant all FTEs some type of ownership in the company (stock, options or profit sharing), and do so on a recurring basis as well

2. Peg the CEOs total comp to be a max of 20x the lowest earner in the company. If the CEO gets a bonus, all FTEs get a minimum of 1/20th that amount as well.

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

#187

Post by scarface_74 »

golergka wrote: post #115
arp242 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: sometimes I need to work with stuff I'm not so familiar with; no one is "senior" across the board. Even though I did Ruby full-time for a few years, it's been a while and I forgot a lot of basic boring stuff so I will end up searching things like "Ruby remove whitespace from string" (trim? strip? chop? chomp? delete? What were the differences again?) And even inside my main expertise, I will sometimes search fo…

That's where GPT-4 ate their lunch. I've never really administered servers myself before, but I was able to set up multi-container CI/CD on bare servers and monitoring with ELK, filebeat and metricbeat and public-faced services through nginx with SSL certificates and basic password authentication all in a single day. Before, I would use stack overflow and it would take me at least a week.

I work in cloud consulting and I had a project where I needed to create a CI/CD proof of concept for the customer to use that involved deploying a Docker container to ECS (AWS’s Docker orchestrator) and show how they could integrate automated testing with the pipeline.

They use Java - a language I literally haven’t used since maybe a year after it was introduced.

I used ChatGPT to create the source code for the sample based on my specifications including Junit tests, the build with Maven, the Dockerfile - everything.

Of course it got a few things wrong and missed steps and I had to keep pasting in error messages until it got it right. But it was still faster than trolling the internet.

Of course I was very up front with the client that the Java pieces were all generated by ChatGPT.

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

#188

Post by Rapzid »

donatj wrote: post #170
rahidz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Franchise owner makes 150k average on a store. Everything is purchased through corp so a tremendous amount of store revenue flows through them. The money for any land leasing comes from the fast food revenue.

That is to say, it's an overly reductive assessment that McDonald's is not in the fast food business.

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

#189

Post by collaborative »

mcv wrote: post #78
kortilla wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There should be no billionaires. This just means, “people shouldn’t be able to own large companies”. You’re going to need strong evidence that relinquishing ownership of any successful company to the government (or whoever you give the absconded shares to) is a way to run a sustainable company. What large country (50m+) has successfully eliminated billionaires without eliminating most of their own economy?

Or maybe companies should never get that big. Keep them small and human scale. Large companies represent an unreasonable concentration of wealth and therefore power. I think they're fundamentally a threat to democracy.

My pet theory is ban marketing budgets beyond a certain size

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

#190

Post by StackOverlord »

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…

> needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense.

I use GPT to implement classes with many interfaces. Even though I often have to make corrections, it's still way faster than looking up the documentation for each of these interfaces. Saves a lot of time in these cases, all the more so I don't have to ponder on which interface in the class hierarchy tree I need to implement.

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