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Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

jlericson.com

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

#101

Post by mrtksn »

dustedcodes wrote: post #94
janalsncm wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between 2009 and today, the US doubled GDP while life expectancies fell. In the EU, GDP is stagnant but life expectancy went up. Those who say Europe’s economy is a failure should at least consider what the purpose of an economy should even be.

wow that is super interesting (although not very surprising). Do you have any sources for this?

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.

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

#102

Post by worrycue »

Dah00n wrote: post #38
qwertox wrote: post #18

I'd be fine with SO turning into the place where effectively useful AI based answers get posted, where humans have worked together with AI to obtain a valid result, proven to be correct. In that case I wouldn't care if someone posts an AI answer, as long as it is guaranteed to be valid. That's the place which SO can take in a world with AI assistants. SO should not use AI to generate content, but to organize it and m…

I wouldn't use it if it means AI will be trained on my code unless they pay me per answer or vote. I already removed everything from GitHub etc. AI on SO smells like how Google's business strategy is advertising first, search second. SO will be in the same position soon.

Frankly I can foresee reduced online participation on places like Stack Overflow. Why would anyone help train AI, that employers are eager to replace you with, without getting anything in return?

The “work together with AI” is just a transitional phrase. The endgame is to completely replace the employee.

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

#103

Post by jkukul »

stingraycharles wrote: post #67
luckystarr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why.. why did they closed this down? I remember this was my single most successful place to find good software developers / run job ads. We spent thousands and thousands on these ads, and I always felt this was their chicken that laid golden eggs.

Here's the post explaining their decision: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...

The main reason being stated as:

> Exiting this space allows us to refocus on products that build on our core strengths: knowledge reuse and building communities at scale.

A year has passed and I'm not sure what progress have we seen on the "knowledge reuse" and "building communities" front.

The post has this quote from the CEO:

> We are realigning the Talent business to focus more on customer employer branding and company awareness needs, and moving away from job slots and direct hiring. This will tie the product closer to what we offer through Stack Overflow Advertising [...]

The article linked by OP (related to generative AI) has this quoute, on the other hand:

> There's definitely a question around how we leverage [generative AI] technology to deliver on our mission of helping build technology through collective knowledge. This intersection between the power of community on one side and AI on the other side—from my standpoint, human-generated community content has taken us to this level, we have a large impact, but there are also so many problems we can solve by leveraging this technology.

Reading these CEO's quotes filled with words like "realigning" and "leveraging" makes him sound like a typical MBA executive (yes, he's a Harvard MBA) who thinks that the same rules can be applied to a business in any industry. All while completely ignoring the feedback of a business's users/customers.

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

#104

Post by orwin »

janalsncm wrote: post #79
mrtksn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the whole "Tech" economy is based on the premise that everything must grow indefinitely and indefinitely means that at some point will be a unicorn. Europe is considered economical failure because there are not enough unicorns, there are lists on Twitter with list of unicorns per country that are supposed to show the decline of Europe. No matter if Europe has some of the best living condition for large group of p…

Between 2009 and today, the US doubled GDP while life expectancies fell. In the EU, GDP is stagnant but life expectancy went up. Those who say Europe’s economy is a failure should at least consider what the purpose of an economy should even be.

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 gardeners are on the same pay and have the same work). But wait, maintenance can be done by the company Y! Now the GDP is 95k+55k+20k (maintenance fixed cost 10k+worker time 7k+ 3k profit). But wait, now during winter, our gardeners have nothing to do! That eat into our profits!

Now the GDP is 95k + 50k (what is paid to the temp company)+20k+45k, and gardeners are both paid 20k/year gor this job, and can do other stuff during winter (I hear a repair shop need temp workers during inter to fix gardener tools).

The GDP grew from 75k to 160k, a bit more than 100% growth, and we optimized the economy as now gardeners can keep specializing and do gardener stuff during winter instead of learning about motors and mechanics. Great!

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

#105

Post by rahidz »

moomoo11 wrote: post #100
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.

Washing

Can you clarify/expand on this please? Like money laundering or something else?

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

#106

Post by jkukul »

cx0der wrote: post #76
andrefuchs wrote: post #64

ChatGPT and Discord communities replaced SO for me. It's way faster to get answers.

While that was a perfect outcome for you, but when someone else needs the same or similar question answered they have to ask ChatGPT or find a relevant Discord to ask again. This was the original problem that Stackoverflow was supposed to solve, and did do at the beginning.

> or find a relevant Discord to ask again.

and AFAIK Discord is not indexed by Google, so the answer is likely never to be found. This goes completely against the idea of the knowledge re-use

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

#107

Post by cornholio »

mrweasel wrote: post #6
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…

> 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

> It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society.

It's fine, but it's no unicorn. And having such a business might be the closest and only chance the people involved have at real wealth and impact - they are 90% there, and only need a little scale, or so they think.

If you were in their shoes, you would do the same.

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

#108

Post by OwlsParlay »

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.

I'm always surprised Discourse was never integrated into SO.

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

#109

Post by zo1 »

newaccount74 wrote: post #71
luckystarr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stack Overflow job ads were the best part of the site. They were affordable enough for small companies to run them, and they were the only place that actually showed compensation info front and center. They didn't have the most job ads, but they had really good ones. Screw them for closing that.

All they had to do was leave it alone. Maybe leave a team to do moderation and keep things running operationally, and done.

Heck, spin it off as a sub company and resell the stack overflow brand and do nothing.

They actively went out of their way to get rid of it. If I didn't know any better I'd say this was backroom dealing where job ad company owners somehow pressured the CEO to stop competing with them because they were just too good.

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

#110

Post by hyperbovine »

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…

The ChatGPT answer for "how do I serialize a Java object" is spot on, better than the one I found on SO in a comparable amount of time. I encourage you to try it.
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