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Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

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Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#31

Post by vasco »

Daishiman wrote: post #27
bastardoperator wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame the unpaid volunteers to some extent. Sometimes they're overly rude, not always, but we've all seen it. You never have that problem with AI. You can ask all the questions you want and it will at least try to answer them.

The moderation policies that lead to this are the product of SO's management.

Agree completely. They did the same thing with discourse. The type of thinking I classify as "I'm smarter than my users".

Draconian limits on even slightly adjacent questions in SO are basically the same thinking that led them to prevent posting on a Discourse thread _in private instances_ unless your answer has the number of words they think you should use.

And they of course justify it by saying their "research" says this will create a "healthier" community which is of course bullshit.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#32

Post by JAlexoid »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #11
schnebbau wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the fresh blood can do the same job as the seniors but for less money then why wouldn't you do this?

Probably because they can until they can't. You're (a) expecting the new folks to stick around long enough to fully learn the system and (b) that they will have access to all the knowledge around the real tricky parts of the system that they have. A senior dev who has shown he wants to be there is better than 3 new recruits, all day, every day.

I don't know where you are... but my biggest issue with the last few years, was that promotions were handed out left and right. Half of the engineering teams I worked with in the last 3 years should be demoted from being called Senior anything, considering most of them are at most 3-5 years out of college.

Just today - a Staff DBA was completely befuddled by the 5000 concurrent connections config parameter on Postgres RDS, when they had the task of making sure that the services stop dropping connections for the last month.

My previous job has a "senior" engineer that routinely blocks any attempt to move from an in house NodeJS proxy, because it would cost an extra $70 per month... and for the architectural decisions the explanation is routinely "because I like it".

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#33

Post by kalleboo »

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.

Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff. Like they’ve lost all their authors or at least they’re not being indexed by Google.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#34

Post by kaycebasques »

JAlexoid wrote: post #28
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.

SO is under serious threat from Reddit. Look at your Google results, that are now presenting Reddit much more prominently than a few years ago.

I wonder whether Reddit can be a serious medium/long-term threat. My usage of Reddit has gone to 0 ever since "the incident". I've heard the rumors that overall usage is up but I'm curious about whether the niche of developer content has gone down. The assumption is that developers are more likely to understand and be affected by the incident. Reddit won't be a medium/long-term threat if developers don't continuously invigorate it with new content.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#35

Post by jasonjmcghee »

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.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#38

Post by shippintoboston »

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 second of their downfall.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#39

Post by TIPSIO »

JAlexoid wrote: post #28
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.

SO is under serious threat from Reddit. Look at your Google results, that are now presenting Reddit much more prominently than a few years ago.

I'm not I agree if under threat from reddit, but I have noticed that Google has gotten significantly worse at showing me the correct relevant SO post I need. It usually takes a few tries.

There are even the same perfect/simple posts that I have visited tons of times over the years (small JS/CSS stuff I can never remember) that have disappeared or became near impossible to find via Google.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#40

Post by busterarm »

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 products have suffered the worst fates possible from this decision.

For years the place seemed like an idea factory where people made great products and now it's basically irrelevant.

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