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Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

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Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#181

Post by skinnymuch »

nerfhammer wrote: post #83
johansch wrote: post #20

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…

see Get Satisfaction, actually a little older than stackoverflow

Get Satifaction is far simpler in features than SO. I don't think you can compare the two at all. SO is a full proper Q&A site.

I've never personally seen a thriving Get Satisfaction instance. So maybe I'm being a little too hard on them. But I must've come across a hundred of them. I don't believe it's a well designed product.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#182

Post by always_good »

lukepothier wrote: post #104
brian-armstrong wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to turn my ad blocker off to even see the ad you're referring to. Do you know of programmers who don't run ad blockers?

Of course. I know even more who whitelist sites with ads that aren't overbearing.

I have a hard time believing anybody actually goes "lemme turn off ads on this site to see how they are."

It's just something people say they do online to feel good.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#183

Post by [deleted] »

pjc50 wrote: post #175
future1979 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make the breach cost infinitely high, how is that not a modern form of slavery?

It's not infinitely high? In practice the worst it's likely to be is "actual damages" - costs directly incurred by you quitting. http://employeradvice.org.uk/what-to-do-when-staff-quit-with... Modern slavery is things like confiscating the passports of your immigrant workers so they can't escape.

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#184

Post by pjc50 »

dogruck wrote: post #154
pjc50 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instead of terminating an employee, the company might reduce executive pay, Well that won't happen. Apart from a few cases where executives agree to take all their compensation in equity to rescue a failing business, they tend to pay themselves first, sometimes at the cost of the long term health of the business. Philip Green / BHS is the example that comes to mind.

To be fair, your example is not a counterpoint because the company also collapsed. I think you’d have to show examples where a company: 1. Was not allowed to fire employees, 2. Executives did not take a pay cut, 3. The company continued to do well.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/27/sir-philip-...

> it had found that “the main purpose of the sale of BHS was to postpone BHS’s insolvency to prevent a liability to the schemes falling due while it was part of the Taveta group of companies ultimately owned by the Green family, and/or that the effect of the sale was materially detrimental to the schemes.”

IE, Green underfunded the pension scheme in order to pay himself several hundred million pounds, and then sold the company off to escape liability for it. He "voluntarily" paid back £363 million in order to end an investigation that might have resulted in him being jailed.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#185

Post by trowawee »

skinnymuch wrote: post #180
trowawee wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I don't have a formal study saying that techies are the most likely to ad-block/least likely to click ads. What we know: - Ad-blocker users skew young and wealthy.[1] The developer community as a whole also skews young and wealthy. - If you are aware of the existence of ad-blocking technology, you probably use it.[2] - Via comparison with other sites, you can also make some extrapolations. Take IGN - not a perfec…

People can claim all they want about wanting The Deck sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, those ads are still blocked most of the time. Possibly out of laziness to completely whitelist it, but the end result is the same. The ads are blocked like any other. I don't feel as optimistic that people blocking ads even want The Deck sort of ads. But without a study I'm okay not being sure.

Yeah, that's what I was trying to get across. I think the revealed preferences of most people using adblockers is that, while they say they would be ok with unobtrusive ads, they really don't want any ads at all. And to be honest, that's not a ludicrous view, because I've found that even on sites that have ostensibly "unobtrusive ads", all it takes is one bad actor and one slip-up in the ad network's verification process and unobtrusive ads become obtrusive and/or start invading your privacy. But we're going to have to find some other way to pay for content at some point.

Also, thanks for fixing that link.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#186

Post by erikbye »

stdclass wrote: post #63
brian-armstrong wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inherent conflict here - programmers don't click on ads, fullstop. I can't imagine a group I'd want to advertise to less.

Do you have any numbers or references on that claim?

Numbers: https://pagefair.com/downloads/2017/01/PageFair-2017-Adblock...

"Adblock users in the US are 1.5x as likely to have a bachelor’s degree than the average American adult, increasing to 3x as likely among 18-24 year olds. Pronounced adblock usage among college-age respondents points to campuses as a major vector for adblock adoption."

Personally, I think being online without ad-blockers, VPN, and AV is like having public, unprotected sex with strangers.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#187

Post by fjsolwmv »

humanrebar wrote: post #169
lstyls wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most states are aren’t “right-to-work” meaning you can quit at a moment’s notice, but it’s common courtesy to give 2 weeks notice The term "right to work" has nothing to do with employment status. It's political branding for laws that forbid mandatory union membership. It's a pretty effective union busting tool and has contributed to the decline of organized labor as a political force. I think you're confusing it w…

> It's a pretty effective union busting tool and has contributed to the decline of organized labor as a political force. I think it's fair to say teachers have the right to be teachers without joining a teachers' union. I don't think enforcing that right "contributes to the decline" of unions. Organizational models should be able to handle that sort of freedom to choose. To me, the question is why unions don't innova…

Same reason that people who live in the US don't have the freedom to choose whether they want to be governed by the US government. Social contract

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#188

Post by fjsolwmv »

srcmap wrote: post #41
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.

Maybe the pressure was slowly building up from investors/board. They wanted the returns, profit, path to IPO , VC's carry for the Nth largest site of the internet. From the https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow , the first round was from 2010 - 7 years ago. USV will like to get their exit soon.

I don't know, I figure that SO's investors made billions via value SO created for their other portfolio company. Investing in SO is like building a well or a power plant.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#189

Post by fjsolwmv »

pc86 wrote: post #174
danbruc wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know the barriers are even higher for layoffs. You can not, for example, arbitrarily pick which workers to layoff but have to minimize the social impact when you have to choose between several employees doing the same work, for example take age, spousal support, and things like that into consideration. But I am totally not an expert and I am sure it is a vastly more complex topic than I can imagine.

This seems backwards to me. Because my spouse has a better job than Mike's, I'm more likely to get laid off? Because I'm younger than Bill and can theoretically make up the financial impact sooner I'm more likely to get laid off? If there are ten employees you need to cut, shouldn't they be cut based on either their recent performance, or a completely random method?

Welcome to the world of progressive taxation. The more secure you are, the more you pay.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#190

Post by bsaul »

torgoguys wrote: post #172
bsaul wrote: post #152

I think an interesting path for stackoverflow would be to provide live channels for technology support and conversation. A bit like public slacks. I remember a few technologies that officially said something like "support is provided through custom stackoverflow tags", but it didn't bring more functionalities. A company trying to launch its new technology (i can imagine asp.net core for example) could have an associa…

Do you mean something like https://chat.stackoverflow.com/

I was hoping nobody would point me to something like that :D So either my idea sucks, or they didn't do a good job advertising the feature...
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