Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 237 posts

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#101

Post by wizzwizz4 »

xmprt wrote: post #95
bhouston wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The way we measure success is different. The history of the web is littered with companies that had a big exit and died/became-irrelevant. Given a long enough timeline every companies dies or they pivot so extreme that they resemble nothing that they were to begin with.

That might be true but it's a very nihilistic way to look at things. I believe SO had many more successful years ahead of it but decisions taken by the company and moderators sped that process up.

Criticism of the company has been done to death, but I'd be interested to hear criticism of the moderator actions. (I'm not even sure which actions you and the grandparent are referring to.)

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#102

Post by AndroTux »

inanutshellus wrote: post #90
AndroTux wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And I HATE it! Instead of just being able to use a search engine to find a related issue, I now have to look up the project I'm having a problem with, find their Discord, join it, accept the rules, assign roles, click through their onboarding, and then finally I'll be able to use the builtin search that probably doesn't return an answer anyways so I have to ask the question in an ever moving chat room and ho…

Project owners/maintainers like it because community members answer peoples' questions in Discord. In a Github bug report everyone expects the answer to come from the owner/maintiner, even if the answer is "Ugh, i answer this so often, just read the docs". It's clear there's room for innovation in this space... something that democratizes Q&A but also where the answers aren't lost to oblivion come tomorrow. I expect…

Yeah, I can understand that it's quite okay from a maintainer point of view. But still, you have to moderate the Discord server, which in itself can be quite the hassle.

Imo we shouldn't have moved away from forums. Forums offer searchability, threads and allow community members to answer questions. Not sure why we collectively decided that forums are no longer cool.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#103

Post by bryanlarsen »

Am I the only one that still finds SO to be quite useful? If I paste an error message into Google, it's still quite likely that the SO answer is the best one. And if it doesn't, I contribute an answer if/when I eventually find it because I still think I get more out of SO than I put in. I've received 21 necromancer badges doing that.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#105

Post by passion__desire »

ncann wrote: post #100

The biggest problem with SO is that it is self-conflicting in its mission. It wants high-quality answers, it wants to avoid duplicates, it wants to be wiki-like or even something that can replace official docs/man page. All those are good and noble goals, but you cannot have that and at the same time be novice-user friendly. Wikipedia has the same issue to a certain extent, but SO is much worse because it's a Q&A sit…

Why can't Stackoverflow create queues for questions?

E.g. beginners will help novices

Mid developers will help beginners

It's like that meme where top people help people below them come up

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#106

Post by wizzwizz4 »

jayd16 wrote: post #48
makingstuffs wrote: post #21

The way the redundancies were carried out were very disrespectful. People got invited to a meeting and essentially told "You'll lose access in about 30 minutes" -- from a close source who was laid off after literally receiving feedback that they were the most efficient in their department a couple days prior.

What part is disrespectful? Cutting access is pretty normal.

Note that this is culturally-specific: it's the norm with US companies, I hear, but not so much in parts of Europe.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#107

Post by matkoniecz »

AlbertCory wrote: post #58
shippintoboston wrote: post #38

It sounds harsh but I have no sympathy for the company or its community. The people running that site turned it into such a hostile and toxic place, to the point they probably pushed a lot of people out of engineering. Just completely condescending and rude jannies who were taking out their anger from being bullied in high school on unsuspecting beginners. They’re getting what they deserve and I’m savoring every seco…

also called schadenfreude . while I agree about SO culture, it's probably the case that most of the laid-off staff took no part in that behavior. The Great Reset 2.0 which might save SO: Everyone whose downvotes exceed a certain threshold has their reputation points reduced to zero. And since "sentiment" is measurable nowadays, the same would be done for anyone whose hostile comments exceed some threshold. Probably o…

> Everyone whose downvotes exceed a certain threshold has their reputation points reduced to zero.

Why it would help?

While closing random questions as duplicates of similar but different question is obnoxious, downvoting "do my homework for me" questions is very useful.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#108

Post by f6v »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #103

Am I the only one that still finds SO to be quite useful? If I paste an error message into Google, it's still quite likely that the SO answer is the best one. And if it doesn't, I contribute an answer if/when I eventually find it because I still think I get more out of SO than I put in. I've received 21 necromancer badges doing that.

It solves most of my issues. But I the problem for SO is that most helpful pages are from the past.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#109

Post by wizzwizz4 »

bombcar wrote: post #99
corethree wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not the point. The point is who cares about the mistreatment. The objective is to get the relevant info. I'm one of the highest ranked people on SO. And guess what? All I do on SO is ask stupid ass questions. One time someone scolded me, said I should know better for asking a certain question that was against policy of something given that my rank was so high. You know what I said to him? Nothing. I just didn't…

The problem isn't the people asking questions, there will always be an infinite number of those . It's the moderation scaring away the people who answer questions. Just because they haven't shooed away everyone doesn't mean they haven't had an impact. I know that I no longer browse relevant SO topics "for fun" anymore.

Funny, it's the lack of moderation that scared me away from answering. (And I say that as someone who's… kinda been scared away from asking by excessive moderation.) It's the age-old question: how can Stack Overflow be all these different things to all these different people, simultaneously?

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#110

Post by bigstrat2003 »

ram4jesus wrote: post #56
jayd16 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part is disrespectful? Cutting access is pretty normal.

Yeah in my org as soon as you put your two weeks in they send you home for the remainder of the two weeks.

That's a common practice, but very foolish. If your employee is at all trustworthy they don't need to have their access revoked (and if they aren't trustworthy they'll just do the damage before they tell you they are leaving). So your org is robbing themselves of employee time without any actual benefit.
Post reply on HN