Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found my current job, which is working on SO Careers, on SO Careers.
yay! me too!
I knew your alias sounded familiar...
Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
81–90 of 227 posts
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#82One interesting nugget: more than half of the 200+ employees at Stack Exchange are working on StackOverflow Careers. Has anyone used SO Careers? Opinions?
Used it as both an employer and job-seeker, and have been very happy on both sides.
As an employer, application quality was fantastic - for 3 different technical roles, a majority of applicants in the final round of interviewing, and the eventual hires themselves, all came from Stack Overflow.
Also, the cost was a lot lower. Typical cost from a recruitment agency would be around £3-5K for a junior developer, £5-10K for a mid-level developer. StackOverflow was £250. The results from StackOverflow were also better - the recruitment agency sent Java developers for JavaScript roles, and all those usual horror stories. The only advantage of the agencies was that they found more applicants, but typically, they sent more chaff than wheat.
Sorry if it sounds like I work for the PR team, but if you're looking to hire I can't see the downside of advertising on StackOverflow.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is an example I ran into recently: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16317075/read-anonymous-j... Although the question was framed badly it could have simply been edited to be more clear about what it was asking and what the answers are answering. It was helpful to me and I'm sure it's been helpful to others as well.
So, edit it then! Even if you don't have an account, there'll be an "improve this question" link right below the question that'll let anyone submit improvements. They'll be reviewed, and, if approved, will immediately submit the question itself to a "reopen review" - if the edits are able to resolve whatever problems existed, it doesn't have to stay closed.
It's easy to assume that every reader is able to look past a poorly-written, half-implicit question and suss out the underlying need - but that's not the case. If you're able to understand a question and it's clear that others are not, don't hesitate to share your insights - they can make the difference between a question being downvoted and deleted and one that goes on to help many others.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Good discussion of that here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/79435/what-is-stack-... (includes an answer from... a guy behind one of those paywall sites). Worth keeping in mind that, because everything contributed is licensed to us via CC-BY-SA, we essentially have to compete against our own content - if we make the user experience awful, there are plenty of other sites willing to take the same information a…
> we essentially have to compete against our own content
What requires SO to publish this information? This means someone else can legally mirror SO answers, but if that data one day disappeared from the Wayback machine and the Google cache, then what?
If there are third-parties out there actively building caches of SO, then that answers my question.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#85One 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 my job through careers. But then again, I work for Stack Exchange ;-)
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#86One interesting nugget: more than half of the 200+ employees at Stack Exchange are working on StackOverflow Careers. Has anyone used SO Careers? Opinions?
I've used it both as a Job Seeker and employer.
As an employer, we got no real prospects, only a few people who were looking for remote work, even though the description said local only. They gave us a full refund with no hassle under their satisfaction guaranteed policy.
As an employee, it brought to my attention a great job from a good local company that actually cared about developers and allows remote work.
Relatively happy with it from both sides.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except you don't have to browse to page four of a giant thread to find out a posted solution doesn't work, and you can update an old answer when the information becomes outdated, etc.
Stale is stale wherever you put it - page four or on top. Technology moves so fast that that responses from 2009 to HTML/JS question should be just ignored no matter how green the accepted checkmark.
I love old questions and answers, because if I have to rebuild something that was built in 2009, I want to see what people were saying in 2009.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 vo…
"if the question is closed and there are no existing duplicates, then the question itself doesn't have much value."
Not fitting the guidelines of SO and not having much value are two very different things. Are you sure you meant the latter?
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good discussion of that here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/79435/what-is-stack-... (includes an answer from... a guy behind one of those paywall sites). Worth keeping in mind that, because everything contributed is licensed to us via CC-BY-SA, we essentially have to compete against our own content - if we make the user experience awful, there are plenty of other sites willing to take the same information a…
> we essentially have to compete against our own content What requires SO to publish this information? This means someone else can legally mirror SO answers, but if that data one day disappeared from the Wayback machine and the Google cache, then what? If there are third-parties out there actively building caches of SO, then that answers my question.
Not sure what you're asking; we have to publish it or else it ain't exactly a website.
Beyond that, not only are there plenty of sites scraping us (the better ones use the API, the worst ones don't throttle and get throttled) but we periodically publish full archives, hosted by a neutral 3rd-party: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange - kinda hard to take back something that's been torrented.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm not sure, as I didn't dig too deeply. I forget the details, but I knew the post had been reposted, since many of the (poor quality) candidates said things like "I'm inquiring about the position posted at [some-place-other-than-github]"