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Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%

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Re: Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%

#131

Post by echelon »

guardiangod wrote: post #40
Trasmatta wrote: post #2

> This is a key moment in our company’s history, as the whole world is dealing with significant uncertainty. Know that you are not alone. We are facing this situation together. Our goal is to stay focused on living our core values and actively connect with teammates, our community, and our customers. The phrase "We are facing this together" must sound really hollow if you're one of the people who has been laid off...

This reminds me of a quote from Jack Mah, the founder of Alibaba, from a few months ago. 在阿里巴巴二十周年时，马云提及未来的一个畅想：“30年以后，我们希望每年向社会推荐输出至少1000名10年以上的阿里人，他们应该参与到社会的建设。” Translation: During Alibaba's 20th anniversary celebration, Jack Mah expressed a wish of his: "Thirty years later, I hope that we at Alibaba can export, with commendation, at least 1000 Alibaba-rians that are >10 years seniority, to society each year, so t…

Wow, so they see employees as replaceable cogs that should be changed regularly.

That's incredibly inhuman. Who would ever want to work at such a place?

If I build a company, I want it to be so interesting and fulfilling that people never want to leave.

Re: Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%

#132

Post by declnz »

jonathankoren wrote: post #108
m_mueller wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why if I may asked? Non technical people don't care, and I've gotten recognition by some hiring engineers by it. One even started an interview with "I gotta thank you, your SO answer helped me out recently".

As a hiring manager I can tell you the sad truth about this and github links. No one reads them. Seriously. No one reads them. There’s simply too many resumes to look at. Having it something extra to look at, and it’s cognitive load is a hell of a lot more than anything else, because now I’m supposed to understand some random code dropped in my lap, or whether some rando’s answers on SO are quality, or not. (Points j…

Disagree - this is "your sad truth", maybe yes.

Personally I've looked at it, even if very briefly, almost every time it appears on candidate profiles.

One of the most important traits I look for in mid or senior devs is the ability (and eagerness) to explain and teach complex concepts to people who don't have that expertise yet. Bonus points if they also do this in a rapid, friendly, and humble way themselves.

Re: Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%

#133

Post by Etheryte »

kungato wrote: post #128

Is it time for SO 2? Lets be real, many articles are out of date with answers being for older versions, the culture is getting worse and the company is looking to cash in on the thing. Could we use a blank slate?

Conceptually, Stack Overflow did something amazing for its time. I agree however that after all these years there are now visible shortcomings in the approach, and simply starting the same thing from scratch wouldn't solve the problems.

The primary format of SO is Q&A. Some Q&A is timeless, as in the answer is still relevant today as it was 10 years ago. Some Q&A invalidates quickly and would probably need to be touched up every year or so. How to account for both?

Another issue SO strongly struggles with is the same entry-level questions being asked again and again, in different wordings. I wouldn't really put the onus on the newcomers here, as they're often new to programming to begin with and thus couldn't know what's a problem other people might have already had, how to search for things etc. But the tooling to help them avoid those situations is crucial. Currently, possibly related questions are shown when writing a new question, but the problem still persists. How to better avoid this problem? Is this simply a matter of nailing down on the related questions algorithm or is there a better approach?

And lastly, the company. There are many very real cases where the change in management has hurt the SO both as a site and a community. I think the answer lies somewhere between SO, MDN and Wikipedia - with all the ups and downs it offers. Clearly, making a global knowledge base and then tacking on investor interest later doesn't work out all that well. To date, I don't think this problem is really solved, as Wikipedia also has a number of issues it struggles with. Without addressing this core issue, the rest are more or less irrelevant with time.

Re: Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%

#135

Post by foolmeonce »

throwanem wrote: post #126
egorfine wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eps. given the fact that this site is a product for developers, i.e. people specifically allergic to marketingspeak.

It's cute that people think this way, but probably not wise. How hard do you think you are to bullshit, when you go around telling people how to bullshit you? How do you think so many startups sucker so many skilled engineers into doing so much for so little and odds-on getting screwed at the end of it? How did Stack Overflow bullshit you (probably) and me (for sure, years back) and a million other people into collec…

Well, the were in a social contract involving the sharing of millions of dollars of work between engineers. Thy violated the contract and learned that they weren't getting things for free.

https://xkcd.com/810/

(Now they have a heavily trafficed landing page trafficed only by people who wouldn't recommend doing anything with them.)

Re: Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%

#136

Post by dep_b »

dan-robertson wrote: post #109
dep_b wrote: post #98

Chance of getting a meaningful reply on any technical question which answer does not simply involve providing the documentation for the given framework or language involved: - Stack Overflow: 1% - Reddit: 8% - The Daily WTF forum: 81% This is internet is broken. I want the old one back.

I think it strongly depends on the tags of the question. In particular I think you will poor quality answers on popular, high volume tags like JavaScript.

https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/27134/how-do-i-parse-this...

This is the question I'm talking about. Apart from people posting funny memes there's some genuine helping going on. Same question on SO: no response. Same question on Reddit: one serious response.

People can downvote me all they want but I see that decentralized bulletin boards seem to work a lot better even in 2020.

If I have legitimate professional questions I need to find a forum for it, because that's where people hang out that are actually interested in the community instead of rep or likes.

Re: Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%

#137

Post by namelosw »

echelon wrote: post #131
guardiangod wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a quote from Jack Mah, the founder of Alibaba, from a few months ago. 在阿里巴巴二十周年时，马云提及未来的一个畅想：“30年以后，我们希望每年向社会推荐输出至少1000名10年以上的阿里人，他们应该参与到社会的建设。” Translation: During Alibaba's 20th anniversary celebration, Jack Mah expressed a wish of his: "Thirty years later, I hope that we at Alibaba can export, with commendation, at least 1000 Alibaba-rians that are >10 years seniority, to society each year, so t…

Wow, so they see employees as replaceable cogs that should be changed regularly. That's incredibly inhuman. Who would ever want to work at such a place? If I build a company, I want it to be so interesting and fulfilling that people never want to leave.

It's a place filled so much drama, dwarfing all its peers.

Sadly, there are still countless people dream of working there.

And even more sadly, people don't want to leave, so they regularly fire people and then they can abuse the rest even more.

Re: Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%

#139

Post by TeMPOraL »

sytelus wrote: post #111
wiradikusuma wrote: post #46

I understand they had to do it (I'm sure we—their users—understand), but I can't understand the need for bullshit business-speak. Just say, "Due to circumstances you all familiar with, business is slow, so I have to let go of some people from X department." Putting up bullshit like this is like adding insult to injury. Especially, since their user demographics are mostly people who don't like bullshit.

When Spolesky brought on this guy, I was shocked. He had no profile or activity on Stackoverflow. He wasn’t even a developer and his resume indicated he was just generic management talking head. Given how much Spolesky emphasis “product person” to be in charge as opposed to white label MBAs, none of that made any sense. I’d to only imagine he was cashing out and part of the deal from investors was to place this guy w…

> Just why every beautiful startup must make their owners billionaires while getting ruined?

That's literally there in the definition of a VC-backed business model. You get a lot of money now, in exchange for some amount of ownership and expectation that the business will grow, whether it makes sense for it or not. The investors want a return on their investment, so they absolutely will push the business past the point of breaking; if they can extract their return before it burns down, then they win.

Or, in short, from investor PoV, startups are cattle, not pets.

Re: Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%

#140

Post by TeMPOraL »

Narann wrote: post #127
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> new CEO is an incompetent person who decided to use the vehicle of the covid virus to announce job cuts that he has planned a long time ago. Why would that indicate the CEO is incompetent ? Doesn’t it stand to reason that management would and should take advantage of the whatever is happening in the wider scheme of things to advance their narrative, and that doing so is indicative of competence within their frame o…

Layoff peoples can be a competent CEO decision, so is using an event to do so. But the way you do those layoff is part of the CEO responsibility. And from this perspective, doing so with marketing bullshit sounds bad as your demographics are mostly engineers. With that, CEO doesn't seems to know what peoples are using its services so it use "generic" (aka marketing) line.

I think the CEO may be smart enough to know that whatever reactions people have to their bullshitty language, this will blow over and in few months nobody will remember any of that. Unlike lawsuits that could happen if he was actually honest.

This is the general explanation for why companies keep being seemingly so bad at PR: they know that this kind of reputation doesn't matter at all.

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