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Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

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Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#121

Post by bachmeier »

bhouston wrote: post #53
busterarm wrote: post #40

Way back in 2014 or whatever it was I was really questioning the decision Fog Creek made to spin out Trello and Stack Overflow. It seemed to only benefit investors and I wondered how the companies could diversify their income streams with such fixed-niche products. At the time having such an opinion was very opposite of mainstream. Even though Trello was acquired, I feel like Fog Creek the company and all of its prod…

I disagree. StackOverflow grew to be many times the size of Fog Creek software. It was highly successful for a time. You can not anticipate back then that AI would train on its Q&A and then provide the same service but fully integrated into IDEs. StackOverflow is being destroyed by Copilot and ChatGPT.

> You can not anticipate back then that AI would train on its Q&A and then provide the same service but fully integrated into IDEs.

What an interesting interpretation of events. For years (almost since the beginning) users were complaining about the experience. The SO leadership took pride in ignoring those complaints. Remember Jeff Atwood repeatedly boasting, without a shred of evidence, that the lack of discussion was what made SO popular? They dumped resources into automating the closing of questions in the coldest possible manner. They had out of control mods that everyone hated, but the answer was always that those very mods were the only ones that mattered for the site. They knew about the ridiculous dup trolling, and they did nothing to prevent it. The list goes on...

Now that they're in trouble, the explanation is that a new technology came along that nobody could have anticipated. No. They lost their base of new users long ago to Reddit and Discord. They had enough existing users that put up with their crap because SO was a standard part of the toolbox, and it's where Google took you. They did everything to make the site awful and now they're attributing their problems to new technology.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#122

Post by wizzwizz4 »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #84

Stack overflow for teams with an ai bot intregation that trains on external sources would be the killer app though.

https://stackoverflow.co/labs/teams-knowledge-ingestion/ is kinda the inverse of this: processes internal sources, and outputs Q&A rather than training itself, but it's basically the same thing. Though, note:

> * Concepts are mock ups and not actual AI generated content.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#123

Post by bombcar »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #109
bombcar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's an incredibly difficult problem, and it's a people problem - as so many companies find out; they're solving people problems and the technology is really a side-note.

(This is the real answer to the "why does tech company X have so many employees" question)

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#124

Post by [deleted] »

bhouston wrote: post #53
busterarm wrote: post #40

Way back in 2014 or whatever it was I was really questioning the decision Fog Creek made to spin out Trello and Stack Overflow. It seemed to only benefit investors and I wondered how the companies could diversify their income streams with such fixed-niche products. At the time having such an opinion was very opposite of mainstream. Even though Trello was acquired, I feel like Fog Creek the company and all of its prod…

I disagree. StackOverflow grew to be many times the size of Fog Creek software. It was highly successful for a time. You can not anticipate back then that AI would train on its Q&A and then provide the same service but fully integrated into IDEs. StackOverflow is being destroyed by Copilot and ChatGPT.

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#125

Post by gregmac »

passion__desire wrote: post #105
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

I think this is a great idea.

People can learn a ton by answering questions. Trying to create a complete answer will make you realize the gaps in your own understanding. As an early SO user, I benefited from this greatly.

Sadly, I find this impossible these days. I've given up on SO as anything other than a mostly passive user. I'll vote, and make the rare comment, but that's it. The last time (a few years ago) I made a concerted effort to answer some questions, my experience was that many questions would be closed as dupe/low-quality while I was partway through answering. Flagging that it isn't low-quality (proven by the fact I can answer it) goes nowhere -- people are seemingly all too happy to yield their close hammer power, but not to re-open.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#126

Post by owenversteeg »

It feels crazy to say this, but I find StackOverflow useless in 2023. It's crazy because ten years ago or even six years ago StackOverflow was everything. There were all the jokes that you couldn't even code without it or that StackOverflow being down would halt all programmers worldwide or whatever and they were for a large part actually true. If you tried to set up a new library or framework or whatever you would eventually run into an issue that would just take way too much time to figure out by yourself and you'd find the solution on StackOverflow in minutes (or ask a question yourself and often get a good answer.) Sure, it was a bit of a hostile community but most of the time if you phrased your question well you'd get a good answer that would solve your problem. You could even use it exclusively - restrict your searches to site:stackoverflow.com and you'd be fine. I found many solutions on StackOverflow that were absolutely not anywhere else on the web.

Today, I use a combination of Github issues, documentation and ChatGPT/Copilot - and it's way more powerful than StackOverflow, it's not even close.

One underappreciated part is that the rate of change of programming has significantly increased. Two months time today brings more change in our world than a whole year in the 2000s. Not even just AI stuff but also the frequency and magnitude of change in frameworks, best practices, services, APIs... I once learned things from paper books, now by the time you've written and published one it's already outdated. Keeping a massive resource like StackOverflow up to date in 2014 or so required a similarly massive effort, but with today's rate of change it's crazy.

I hope they can turn it around but I fear it's already dead.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#127

Post by passthejoe »

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…

If I had a nickel for every SO thread that came up in my Google searches that could have answered my question if only the SO moderators had allowed it to be answered, I'd be able to buy a few steak dinners.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#128

Post by dmckeon »

matkoniecz wrote: post #107
AlbertCory wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SO/SE might benefit from a "this question smells like homework" button that could shunt questions that are posted without any code or evidence of adequate clue off to a forum specifically for homework, rather than leaving them in the general queue.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#129

Post by wredue »

this_user wrote: post #26
wredue wrote: post #3

“Stack overflow did not elaborate” A year after a major hiring push? Guessing it’s the “save money by ridding ourselves of expertise” workflow: 1) hire a bunch of fresh blood who are willing to work long hours for no money for some reason 2) get them trained up 3) lay off the expensive senior people 4) lol ceo big bonus

I think you vastly overestimate the level of planning and forethought that the average management is capable of.

It’s a pretty common workflow for big business.

Wait till you hear how businesses intentionally pit employees against each other by granting different benefits at different levels so that the majority doesn’t feel as bad about things. This is, for example, how businesses got rid of comprehensive retirement packages.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#130

Post by digitalsushi »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #35
jf22 wrote: post #16

I'm not surprised. These days, I use SO a lot less often. Github issues, first party documentation, Discords, and Copilot are much better ways to get help.

Anecdotally, every single time I’ve put effort into answering someone’s question, I got shot down by mods for various reasons despite (generally) being the only answer. Quickly stopped contributing.

reminds me if how i havent added to wikipedia since about 2008
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