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Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

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Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#11

Post by InclinedPlane »

justboxing wrote: post #10
luis_espinoza wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but you guys remember the dark times before SO?...omg.

Yes. I was there. There wasn't even a google. I would stumble along on deja.com in the late 90s until it died a slow painful death and got scooped up by Google [1] [1] Source: [2002] https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buys-remaining-deja-com-bus...

Bahahaha. That wasn't even the worst of it. Imagine this scenario, you have to install linux on a pc. There's no stackoverflow, there's no google. The linux distro you're using doesn't even have a package manager. And currently it doesn't have a working ethernet driver either. Also, it's the only computer that exists in your entire house.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#12

Post by throwaway2016a »

luis_espinoza wrote: post #6
pmoriarty wrote: post #3

If SO and its related network sites die, what's going to happen to the millions of questions and answers their users contributed? Is anyone archiving them and making the archives available in any useful way?

I don't know, but you guys remember the dark times before SO?...omg.

My first compiler was on a disk and I bought it from a video game store.

On the flip side, back then most of the programs I was writing could fit on a few screens and had almost no external dependencies besides libc and the C book was the SO for libc.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#13

Post by hyperanthony »

jbob2000 wrote: post #9
pmoriarty wrote: post #3

If SO and its related network sites die, what's going to happen to the millions of questions and answers their users contributed? Is anyone archiving them and making the archives available in any useful way?

It's not dying, I think their recent expansions in job/talent advertising isn't paying off as they originally thought.

Yeah, and it wasn't too long ago that SO Documentation was shut down as well. Hopefully Channels works out better for them.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#15

Post by danbruc »

Why would you fire people on such a short notice? No need to hand over things? No interest in providing at least some time to look for a new job?

EDIT: To clarify that a bit, I am interested in what the upsides are except for possibly saving some money. An orderly shutdown usually seems preferable to me over quickly killing the process, for both sides.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#16

Post by Selfcommit »

danbruc wrote: post #15

Why would you fire people on such a short notice? No need to hand over things? No interest in providing at least some time to look for a new job? EDIT: To clarify that a bit, I am interested in what the upsides are except for possibly saving some money. An orderly shutdown usually seems preferable to me over quickly killing the process, for both sides.

The transition is being handled with as much dignity as possible - The company is also offering to help place people through USV.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#17

Post by JosephLark »

It's been interesting watching SO try to monetize.

I wonder: How would people feel if they went the Wikipedia way? It's obviously a very beneficial site, but not as widely applicable as Wikipedia. I personally prefer the Wikipedia model of being ad-free and having no additional product and doing a fundraising drive every so often. PBS as well.

That said, I certainly think given the audience of SO that there are several opportunities for them, so it'll be interesting to see what works.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#19

Post by denzil_correa »

JasonPunyon wrote: post #4
pmoriarty wrote: post #3

If SO and its related network sites die, what's going to happen to the millions of questions and answers their users contributed? Is anyone archiving them and making the archives available in any useful way?

Nothing is dying. Our data dumps are live at https://archive.org/details/stackexchange as they've always been.

I wish your older snapshots weren't deleted. Any chance to get them back?

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#20

Post by johansch »

I remember reaching out to them a bunch of years ago (2012 or so) in order to ask them to host a stack overflow sub-site for our product (from a sizeable company). We were willing to pay quite a lot (because they had the premier UX for this kind of thing), but they weren't at all interested. They just told us to try to grow things "organically", because they had decided to focus 100% on open stuff.

We weren't really interested in their google juice, all we wanted was their actual functionality. Some non-stackoverflow domain would have been fine.

It just seemed like a missed opportunity on their end. I don't think we were the only company asking for this kind of service...

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