Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow • Hacker News Board

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#51

Post by dijksterhuis » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 9:37 AM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #24

ygra wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. This exists in the form of chat, and extended comment discussions migrate there. That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly.

> That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly. So basically SO isn't a tool to improve your skills but one to turn you into a copy/paste monkey?

I mean, if you can copy/paste my answer here into your codebase, I would be very surprised.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52206576/write-spark-dat...

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#52

Post by fabian2k » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 9:40 AM UTC

theteapot wrote: post #37

[flagged]

Right now the moderators are prohibited by SE to remove AI-generated answers unless the users admit using AI themselves unprompted. You can see the policy here (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391626/historical-p...), and this policy is the main reason for the moderator strike.

This policy is very likely to be replaced soon, but that isn't final and the details aren't public yet.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#53

Post by layer8 » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 9:40 AM UTC

rpastuszak wrote: post #42

palata wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. And importantly: because you are a billion dollar company doesn't mean you bring good to the world. At all.

I would imagine this gets progressively harder the bigger you get.

Thus why one should rather prefer slow growth. Fast growth only means you’ll be more likely to reach the shitty state faster.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#54

Post by axus » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 9:42 AM UTC

As long as keep remembering to not do what Experts Exchange did, they'll get by.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#55

Post by mrtksn » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 9:43 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #6

janalsncm wrote: post #3

> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to m…

> Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

But the whole "Tech" economy is based on the premise that everything must grow indefinitely and indefinitely means that at some point will be a unicorn.

Europe is considered economical failure because there are not enough unicorns, there are lists on Twitter with list of unicorns per country that are supposed to show the decline of Europe. No matter if Europe has some of the best living condition for large group of people.

IMHO this thing is ideological, I even feel uneasy mentioning this because it is something we are not supposed to talk since it can start a flamewar and flamewars are how you get your account restricted.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#56

Post by somenameforme » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 9:44 AM UTC

bloopernova wrote: post #14

If I were the semi benevolent dictator of the world, I'd make a law that said: all middle managers up to the CEO must spend 20% of their time doing entry level work in the company. Same with politicians. If you are insulated from what your company does, or constituents do, you can't effectively wield the power granted to you. Which leads me to an even more unpopular "authoritarian" opinion: the richest people are the…

I don't think the problem is ignorance, but different motivations. Executive leadership often wants to maximize profit and growth. Everybody else [generally] wants to maximize the company's performance at what it does. In an ideal world the two should be pretty much the same thing, in reality they're often very disconnected, especially in any product that is offered for free. Free products completely distort normal operations because the customer is no longer the customer, but something closer to the product itself - as that's what's "really" sold.

So it seems that any solution would require having executive leadership not driven by growth+profit, or removing the disconnect between "quality" and growth+profit.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#57

Post by londons_explore » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 9:46 AM UTC

hathchip wrote: post #36

nolok wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I mostly agree with your point, I want to point out that on a financial level Wikipedia is really not that well handled. They keep increasing expenses into project that are not core to the experience, or that will never see the light of day (like when they had two different teams working on two different new text editor for the site). I have a belief that they're caught in a very bureaucratic "we need to use yo…

You're giving them money, for your own reasons, when it's well established that they don't need your donations for their core mission. They spend it on things other than their core mission. Isn't this just a problem which you have created yourself? Just stop giving them money, give it to some other project which is also doing something valuable but which needs it more. If it ever turns out the Wikipedia needs your mo…

> If it ever turns out the Wikipedia needs your money urgently to keep the servers running, start giving to them again.

If they run out of money to run the servers, I'd consider that a good thing.

Someone can start a new "wiki-2" project, starting out with a wikipedia dump as a base, and continuing to be a free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, but without the $150 million dollars of expenses - I think you could host wikipedia with 2 members of staff and 5 servers, plus cloudflare for the 99% of read-only requests - similar to how they ran it at the start of the project.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#58

Post by firstplacelast » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 9:47 AM UTC

bloopernova wrote: post #14

If I were the semi benevolent dictator of the world, I'd make a law that said: all middle managers up to the CEO must spend 20% of their time doing entry level work in the company. Same with politicians. If you are insulated from what your company does, or constituents do, you can't effectively wield the power granted to you. Which leads me to an even more unpopular "authoritarian" opinion: the richest people are the…

Hard agree, but it’s not actionable for anyone not rich.

Bottom up approaches are the only things that will solve these things, so yes you and me have to put our money and talents where our mouths are.

This board tends towards believing in democracy yet we spend half+ of our waking hours existing within non-democratic institutions…they’re not even representative republics, the thing we pass off as pro-democracy today.

If we want it, we have to build it, we have to build safe-guards, and we have to stand by and not loot as much money as possible when the time presents.

We have so far shown we are collectively not capable of doing these things.

Are there any multi-billion dollar organizations that work on the principles we so desire in our own government? Maybe democracy is just a joke and a sentiment for feel-good buy-in from the masses.

“Tech” has devolved into crony- capitalism on crack. But we’ve minted quite a few average-joe millionaires, so yay?

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#59

Post by tgv » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 9:48 AM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #3

> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to m…

> SO doesn’t need large language models.

It could use it to improve its search. However, it should be trained on SO, because the language is quite specialized.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#60

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 9:48 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #6

janalsncm wrote: post #3

> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to m…

> Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

The problem is ambitious management on all levels. When you're running a billion dollar business, you can extract far better compensation (base, bonus, stock options) than if you're running a hundred million dollar business.

The obvious solution is a compensation cap, not just because CEO comp has exploded while lower rung compensation has virtually stagnated, but also because it might put an end to the constant drive of companies to just gobble up competitors.

[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/