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Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

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Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#61

Post by busterarm »

chatmasta wrote: post #54
busterarm wrote: post #40

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 prod…

Fog Creek is now known as Glitch, and was acquired by Fastly last year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(New_York_company)

I'm aware of this but also who cares? It's was down to 14 people. That's a bad exit.

Fastly is also kind of a struggling company itself.

Many years back, Fog Creek was the first company that I learned of that put up fake job openings to portray more success than they were really having.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#62

Post by busterarm »

bhouston wrote: post #53
busterarm wrote: post #40

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 prod…

I disagree. StackOverflow grew to be many times the size of Fog Creek software. It was highly successful for a time. You can not anticipate back then that AI would train on its Q&A and then provide the same service but fully integrated into IDEs. StackOverflow is being destroyed by Copilot and ChatGPT.

The way we measure success is different. The history of the web is littered with companies that had a big exit and died/became-irrelevant.

SO destroyed itself several times over (first by its own moderators and then by the company itself). ChatGPT just nailed the lid shut.

Success to me looks like a lot of real users paying a lot of real money. SO never really had that. It tried to be a VC unicorn and was acquired by Prosus. Most of Prosus' other investments also look really questionable if we're headed for a global recession like it looks like we are...

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#64

Post by dehrmann »

ram4jesus wrote: post #43
shippintoboston wrote: post #38

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 seco…

They pushed me out when I was a student in Uni struggling with Java 101. And my experience left me shocked that an industry could be so cruel to people trying to learn the ropes and be just another programmer. Luckily, I persevered, and I give back to the programming community by always being kind to the folks that ask me for help; but I always help others offline and not in hostile web forums.

I've answered a lot of Java questions on SO. One of the themes is beginner questions, and a lot are essentially "do my homework for me," poorly researched, or poorly asked. What have you tried? What have you researched? Explain your understanding for why you think what you're doing should work.

Even if you're asking good beginner questions that don't already have an answer, you get tired of reading all the bad ones.

I just signed on and saw this one (#3 in my personalized "new questions"):

https://web.archive.org/web/20231016163745/https://stackover...

The person asking the question put in minimal effort and showed no concern for people answering. Why am I sifting through your merge sort code when you're asking "why can't it open the file?"

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#65

Post by rgoulter »

maldev wrote: post #57
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.

I'm a boomer, how do I find Discords of people coding?

I think Discord is typically used for domain-specific chatting.

e.g. the QMK website links to a Discord server; but you'd only join that if you were interested in QMK.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#66

Post by willsmith72 »

makingstuffs wrote: post #21

The way the redundancies were carried out were very disrespectful. People got invited to a meeting and essentially told "You'll lose access in about 30 minutes" -- from a close source who was laid off after literally receiving feedback that they were the most efficient in their department a couple days prior.

Beats the infamous twitter layoffs.

Sadly being "the most efficient in their department" doesn't always mean anything in layoffs. Whole departments and teams come and go, and salaries are also a concern (e.g. 20 year vet vs 5 year mid level with half the salary)

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#67

Post by ram4jesus »

corethree wrote: post #59
ram4jesus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need to grow skin on the internet where mistreatment is abundant. I just don't engage. Offline people can't treat you like shit because then they're gonna get treated like shit. Respect begets respect and good manners beget good manners. The way SO folks talk to you ... I'll just say: try that offline and I'll pull your card no ifs or doubts.

Thats not the point. The point is who cares about the mistreatment. The objective is to get the relevant info. I'm one of the highest ranked people on SO. And guess what? All I do on SO is ask stupid ass questions. One time someone scolded me, said I should know better for asking a certain question that was against policy of something given that my rank was so high. You know what I said to him? Nothing. I just didn't…

I care. And it's not "in my head." Read the comments here, others have had similar experiences to mine: I'm not just making it up; it's a real downside with real impact.

Now as for me: I don't mind being stupid (look at how often I get downvoted here in HN: water off a duck's back). I want to be treated in a dignified way. And if that's not happening and there are better sources out there, then I don't have to play the game of reading someone's snark or passive aggressive bs.

I don't want to read it not because it affects me in some psychological way (the internet is full of cruelty and I can handle it ok), but because it's tiresome: I've seen it before and have had it happen to me so many times that it's just boring.

If you treat me like shit but help me solve the problem, ok thank you. The problem is solved. Now on to the next. But if you treat me like shit and don't solve my problem, well then, I'll look elsewhere for the solution.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#68

Post by AlbertCory »

dehrmann wrote: post #64
ram4jesus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They pushed me out when I was a student in Uni struggling with Java 101. And my experience left me shocked that an industry could be so cruel to people trying to learn the ropes and be just another programmer. Luckily, I persevered, and I give back to the programming community by always being kind to the folks that ask me for help; but I always help others offline and not in hostile web forums.

I've answered a lot of Java questions on SO. One of the themes is beginner questions, and a lot are essentially "do my homework for me," poorly researched, or poorly asked. What have you tried? What have you researched? Explain your understanding for why you think what you're doing should work. Even if you're asking good beginner questions that don't already have an answer, you get tired of reading all the bad ones.…

Yes, indeed, it takes a superhuman amount of patience and empathy. I don't particularly have those, and it sounds like you don't, either.

So your course is just to avoid those, not downgrade them.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#69

Post by eastbound »

bhouston wrote: post #53
busterarm wrote: post #40

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 prod…

I disagree. StackOverflow grew to be many times the size of Fog Creek software. It was highly successful for a time. You can not anticipate back then that AI would train on its Q&A and then provide the same service but fully integrated into IDEs. StackOverflow is being destroyed by Copilot and ChatGPT.

> AI would train

No, Google made StackOverflow live and StackOverflow die by stopping its referencing.

SO should really pivot to the search business. They have everything: The culture of how to build a website that answers users’ questions, the culture to index pages, the culture to get an invested community. The only faulty mechanism here is Google, and SO would be a much better steward of how people want webpages to look like, than Google.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#70

Post by bryanlarsen »

kalleboo wrote: post #33
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.

A lot of people say to use Reddit instead of StackOverflow, but IMO Reddit is even worse for this than SO, since most old threads are locked.
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