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Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

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Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#61

Post by justboxing »

corpMaverick wrote: post #42
pmoriarty wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now let's see.. we had Usenet news groups, mailing lists, IRC channels, and eventually web forums on every programming language, operating system, and software package under the sun. You could ask questions and get them answered. What was so cringeworthy about this exactly? That's not to say that SO doesn't bring value. It has nice tagging and discoverability through search engines, good moderation, and an achievemen…

There was something called experts exchange. Remember that? It was horrible.

Funny you brought that up. I think it was Jeff Atwood who joked about how the domain name read like Expert-Sex-change

StackOverflow was such a welcome relief to this site and Atwood also wrote about expertsexchange in a blog post.

> I never appreciated how easy Experts-Exchange makes it for us. They are almost universally loathed. We don't just have a rival, we have a larger than life moustache-twirling, cape-wearing villain to contrast ourselves with.

Source: [ 2009 ] https://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch-enemy/

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#62

Post by Xylakant »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #46
nicodjimenez wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they make TONS of money from ad revenue. Probably they tried to generate other revenue streams but it just didn't work out and hence the layoff. Here's a crazy idea: what if Stackoverflow developed a search engine for developers? Usually I get to Stackoverflow posts through Google but perhaps Stackoverflow can provide a better experience by doing code specific web crawling.

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

The thing about ads is that you don’t need to click on them to work. You can’t click on billboards or newspaper ads either. Keep the product in mind is already most of what you want to achieve.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#63

Post by stdclass »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #46
nicodjimenez wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they make TONS of money from ad revenue. Probably they tried to generate other revenue streams but it just didn't work out and hence the layoff. Here's a crazy idea: what if Stackoverflow developed a search engine for developers? Usually I get to Stackoverflow posts through Google but perhaps Stackoverflow can provide a better experience by doing code specific web crawling.

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?

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#64

Post by jxramos »

gumoro wrote: post #50
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…

If I understand correctly, they offer this now, your private instance for your own product(s) & team(s): https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise Edit: while interesting, this (private internal instance for your team) is not what johansch is after (separate public instance dedicated to your product, for your users)

this is very intriguing. Right now we use Confluence for something in this direction. I'd much rather us have a private stack overflow page for a subset of what we do on Confluence.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#65

Post by mrkurt »

brazzy wrote: post #58
valuearb wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you give notice? Leaving people dangling for weeks while you figure out who will be cut is worse than making the decision, telling them it's effective immediately and giving a fair severance package so they can immediately start looking.

The idea is to give notice after you figure out who will actually be cut, so that you can have an orderly handover of responsibility and knowledge. That's how it's done in sane countries because notice periods are proscribed by law. And no, it does not lead to people vandalizing their workplace.

You're conflating notice and severance. It might be desirable to give enough notice so people can do more work, but it might not. I actually think it's more dignified to let people off the hook immediately. When you lay them off/fire them, you've typically failed in some way as a company, and expecting people to fulfill some responsibility knowing their time's up is pretty harsh.

In "sane countries" you can have people stop working immediately as long as you pay them. That's really all the notice period is for, it has nothing to do with continued responsibilities.

Tech company severance packages are usually pretty ok, I would bet stack overflow is giving packages that would be just fine in other countries.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#66

Post by Deimorz »

Improvotter wrote: post #26
JosephLark wrote: post #17

It's been interesting watching SO try to monetize. I wonder: How would people feel if they went the Wikipedia way? It's obviously a very beneficial site, but not as widely applicable as Wikipedia. I personally prefer the Wikipedia model of being ad-free and having no additional product and doing a fundraising drive every so often. PBS as well. That said, I certainly think given the audience of SO that there are sever…

I remember seeing an article here these past few weeks talking about the business model of Wikipedia and how it's supposedly inherently flawed. Wikipedia doesn't bring in a lot of cash, but it rather sets a sad tone for itself how unfortunate that may seem. Personally I'd be more interested in seeing StackOverflow branch out. What have they done these past few years? It seems like StackOverflow has remained stagnant,…

I'm not sure where you got the idea that Wikipedia doesn't bring in much. Their annual plan from last year [1] says that they expected to raise over $60M during the year. Unless anything's changed recently, they also try to keep over a year's worth of operating expenses in reserve, which means they're likely also sitting on almost $100M.

The complaints I see are usually related more to thinking that they really shouldn't need to spend so much (the FY17-18 plan for expenses is $76.8M [2]), and that their fundraising drives always make it seem like they're on the brink of death when they actually have a huge amount of money in the bank.

[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

[2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia...

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#67

Post by tryingagainbro »

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.

Let's say that the law requires a 90 day notice. Maybe you can fire them today--as long as you pay them for 90 days while they sit at home. The spirit of the law is that you have sometime to look for another job so it's all covered.

My point is that we don't know the details, a tweet is way too short.

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#68

Post by InclinedPlane »

h1d wrote: post #30
InclinedPlane wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bahahaha. That wasn't even the worst of it. Imagine this scenario, you have to install linux on a pc. There's no stackoverflow, there's no google. The linux distro you're using doesn't even have a package manager. And currently it doesn't have a working ethernet driver either. Also, it's the only computer that exists in your entire house.

Copied ethernet driver through floppy disks from another machine.

For values of "another machine" possibly equal to "a system in the campus computer lab at school".

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#69

Post by brian-armstrong »

tudelo wrote: post #51
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.

Not true, I've clicked a few on accident.

Ah, fair point. Maybe I should have said "don't click on ads intentionally"

Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%

#70

Post by antiphase »

Ralfp wrote: post #43
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.

Depends on country too. In EU our work laws regulate how your employee may be laid off. My country (poland) says that employee has to be notified about termination: - week ahead if he or she was employed for less than month - month ahead if he or she was employed for less than three years - three months ahead if he or she was employed for more than three years This goes both ways however, as employee has to notify hi…

This only applies to permanent workers though. Contractors or temporary staff may be employed on much shorter terms.
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