Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums • Hacker News Board

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#71

Post by tieTYT » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:28 PM UTC

timdev2 wrote: post #41

rattray wrote: post #4

One interesting nugget: more than half of the 200+ employees at Stack Exchange are working on StackOverflow Careers. Has anyone used SO Careers? Opinions?

I posted a employer ad on SO Careers, and also GitHub Jobs. The SO post resulted in a satisfyingly large set of high-quality candidates. I was satisfied with the value. In contrast, GitHub was surprisingly disappointing. Maybe one or two worthwhile candidates, and a ton of junk. It appears that GitHub's jobs get scraped and posted elsewhere, and the bulk of responses to my ad were low-quality (and that's being genero…

Interesting theory. What prevents other sites from scraping SO posts? If the answer is "nothing", that suggests it's just a matter of time until it's just as bad. Right?

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#72

Post by SoftwareMaven » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:29 PM UTC

k-mcgrady wrote: post #46

gdw2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When searching for the best tool for the job, I often get pointed to SE and the questions are closed as "not constructive". I seem to recall, however, that they opened a separate site for such discussions?

"Best tool for the job" doesn't sound like something that should be on SO. Far too subjective and likely to result in stupid opinionated arguments that go nowhere.

Except those are the hard questions in software engineering. "How do I draw a triangle with OpenGL?" is an RTFM question. "How do I decide between R and Python?[1]" is a much more challenging, but much more important, question.

I've said it before: SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology. The questions that are hard, for real senior software engineers, are rarely found on SE sites. Programmers.SE was supposed to fix it, but it hasn't worked, because of the same moderation.

This is a moderation problem, but the solution chosen was the easy solution: just don't allow hard questions because hard questions beget arguments. Instead, requiring people to have civil discourse, perhaps even requiring that people show they can have civil discourse before allowing them to participate, is much, much more difficult.

I'm not sure SE could survive the second type of moderation. But by not having it, it certainly makes it usefulness to somebody like me, with many years of experience learning and using various technologies, near zero.

1. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/181342/r-vs-p... [closed as off topic]

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#73

Post by loumf » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:30 PM UTC

Max_Horstmann wrote: post #49

rattray wrote: post #4

One interesting nugget: more than half of the 200+ employees at Stack Exchange are working on StackOverflow Careers. Has anyone used SO Careers? Opinions?

I found my current job, which is working on SO Careers, on SO Careers.

And I found my current job a Trello there. I wanted a remote dev position and spent a few months getting an RSS feed of remote jobs from SO -- it was, by far, the highest quality of my sources.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#74

Post by swamp40 » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:33 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #50

rattray wrote: post #4

One interesting nugget: more than half of the 200+ employees at Stack Exchange are working on StackOverflow Careers. Has anyone used SO Careers? Opinions?

> more than half of the 200+ employees at Stack Exchange are working on StackOverflow Careers. So at the end it's all about recruiting like LinkedIn?

Well, it's about monetization.

Nobody's going to give them $40M if there is no conceivable way to get their money back.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#75

Post by hyp0 » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:34 PM UTC

What will they use the money for? If they're not expanding, and are profitable (and so don't need to cover running costs), I can only guess at retiring founder debt.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#76

Post by mathattack » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:36 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #48

mathattack wrote: post #23

"Spolsky says that two-thirds of its revenues today come from recruitment services, via its Stack Overflow Careers site, and one-third from advertising." I found this very interesting. Stack Exchange is an insanely useful service, but I struggled to figure out how they would monetize it. (Similar to Wikipedia) They're received enough money that exit valuation expectations are high. I guess the cash flow projections f…

I worry about exit strategies. Stack Overflow was supposed to be "programming-question forum, done right." We've seen a lot of old people come through with the strategy of "build up critical mass of questions+answers, then enact paywall." I'll probably always be skeptical that SO is just about to become ruined, unless they explicitly move it into a long-term strategy where the careers board is all they want for reven…

I think a paywall will kill it, and they know that. Perhaps more focused ads is the way to go. The value of programmer eyeballs is a lot higher than grandma.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#77

Post by SurfScore » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:38 PM UTC

hyp0 wrote: post #75

What will they use the money for? If they're not expanding, and are profitable (and so don't need to cover running costs), I can only guess at retiring founder debt.

They said they aren't profitable, they're hiring too quickly for that. They're using the money to hire quicker, just like most other people use investment for.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#78

Post by nhzmju » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:41 PM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #51

nhzmju wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having read over 5000( yes really ) questions and searched over 100 with Google, that didn't happen once. Just to clarify, SE doesn't always have the question, but it always has the answer. It must be related to the specific field you are searching for; older ones are usually complete. I wouldn't be surprised if a more casual programming field has a larger ratio of closed answers.

It seems to happen with certain areas of interest more than others. I would say I encounter them in as much as 30% of my searches, which are web development related. While I understand the intentions of the moderators, they seem to assess the value of a question for people at the moderator's own skill level than at the people who might be asking the question or seeking an answer to a particular question. The silver l…

Thank you for your response, I will comment per paragraph:

SE has good rules which keep questions relevant. I would say that if the question is closed and there are no existing duplicates, then the question itself doesn't have much value. ( There are of course outliers. )

There is a misunderstanding here, moderators on SE don't actually close most of the questions, normal users with privileges to do that, do so by voting. So such a question doesn't have value because users decided so, not moderators.

The last paragraph shares the misconception with the previous one. Users vote on and close question. Inf fact moderators are so rare on SE, that they only do critical things that should not be trusted to users, which do the rest.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#79

Post by himanshuy » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

rattray wrote: post #4

One interesting nugget: more than half of the 200+ employees at Stack Exchange are working on StackOverflow Careers. Has anyone used SO Careers? Opinions?

I got approached by an employer through SO careers. We went for few rounds and got the offer. But I ended up taking another offer with better compensation.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#80

Post by Amezarak » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

cheald wrote: post #30

troymc wrote: post #28

I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answered. SE got my traffic, but I didn't get my answer. Isn't that broken?

Can you provide examples of some of those questions? Usually when I encounter that, it's been closed as a duplicate with a link to the original.

Sometimes that's just as bad. Often the questions I see that are closed as "duplicates" are not actually duplicates, just closely related. The answer to one is not always the answer to another.

I don't have an SO example on hand, but consider this Sci-Fi StackExchange question:

http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/79363/why-was-the-r...

The question is "Why does Sauron need the Ring to control Middle-Earth?" The correct answer is that he doesn't; he can control Middle-Earth without it, his victory is inevitable, but needs it to remove the only possible method his enemies have of overcoming him. After being correctly answered, the question was flagged as a duplicate of "What was the point of Sauron making the One Ring?" which is a very different question and comes with different answers.

This is, in my experience, extremely common across the StackExchange network. In that example, the "duplicate" question was answered before being closed, but that's not always the case.