201–210 of 298 posts
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What's the biggest impact on life expectancy in the first world that shows up at this level? Healthcare, walking culture, food options, other?
Young people dying of drug overdose.
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.
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This is a “Dropbox is just a pretty rsync”-level comment
Plenty of sites of similar scale were run on less or are to this day. SO also is technologically as basic as it gets. They don't even serve big files.
Not to mention an international presence benefiting from 24-hour on-call rotations that would benefit from international offices and other fixtures that are very expensive to maintain.
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> You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. And importantly: because you are a billion dollar company doesn't mean you bring good to the world. At all.
I'd even argue that the burden of proof is reversed. There might be billion dollar companies which bring good, but I'll be skeptical of that fact at first.
I have a hard time feeling sorry for Stack Overflow. They had most developers in the world visiting frequently. They have detailed information on exactly which languages, libraries, toolchains, and platforms those developers use and their pain points. All of their content is given to them for free by volunteers. All of their moderation is done for them for free by volunteers. The only thing they have to serve is text…
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.
> 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…
> their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense. (Un?)Ironically, one of my main uses of ChatGPT is to replace StackOverflow (it's great at turning vague guesses about what I want into fast ideas, and when it's wrong it's still less wrong than the combination of SO content and the search engines connected to it); and…
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> 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
I’ll preach it again: people need to learn that satisficing is a good and valuable end-state!
The often stated reason why C-level executives are paid so well is that they have to be able to solve the insanely hard problem of finding new growth opportunities for the company over a long(er) period of time; something few people are capable of.
Well: by this criterion, many CxOs fail to deserve this huge pay (more precisely: they build Potemkin villages to pretend growth where in reality they burn the company's substance).
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 t…
Especially the 2nd one. Linking CEO compensation to FTE pay feels like a good way to remind the powerful that their power derives from the consent of their employees. Plus I'm very against the massive inequality that has skyrocketed in the past few decades.
I just wish there was a way to get the powerful to understand that it's not a one way relationship. The 2 parts, FTEs and executives, both rely on each other to function. But so many people don't want that balance, one way or another.
> 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…
> SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management. Mods are the worst. Community moderators are ruining SO faster than the CEO.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...
What do you do with the fact that your core contributors are toxic manchildren who love the ability to push buttons at people for daring to ask a question? Build something new where they’re not the core contributors.
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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.