No notice? That seems a bit weird, no?
Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
91–100 of 209 posts
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Same in France and the majority of EU countries.
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Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm a student assistant at SAP in Germany. Even I (as a part time hourly-paid employee) have a one month notice period.
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I was there. There wasn't even a google. I would stumble along on deja.com in the late 90s until it died a slow painful death and got scooped up by Google [1] [1] Source: [2002] https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buys-remaining-deja-com-bus...
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.
The installation CD for SuSE back in the 1990s had a big how-to PDF, plus another documenting all the kernel compilation option flags ( we didn't have enough RAM then to run fat-and-happy kernels with everything included ).
I printed-out both of those over a long period on the work printers, using the reverse side of single-sided pages recovered from the paper recycling bins. And then settled in for a weekend...
I still remember choosing to include AX.25 in the kernel because it seemed like a cool thing with which I'd want to experiment at some point. Never got around to it!
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#95I would advise people to stop comparing US workers rights to their countries. Just because you think your country gives you extra leverage and protection it does not mean it is a universally applicable law
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#96Earlier 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.
>I'm sure they make TONS of money from ad revenue. An old news article said they only get ~33% from banner ads. Most revenue comes from from job listings: http://fortune.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-40-million/
Right, although I personally would consider job listings ads
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#97It's undeniable that their main developer Q&A site is a really great thing that saved me many hours of work. However, it was somewhat hostile to its more export users from the very beginning: the reputation system favors quickfire replies to grab the first upvotes, and they seem to put a strong emphasis on "cookbook" answers where many of the more nuanced discussions were closed as "opinion based". I think there are…
>many of the more nuanced discussions were closed as "opinion based" This is also something I don't like, but I wonder if they went on, if the website would become another place for flamewars - something that happens a LOT when you have low moderation.
The thing that separates SO from forums is the focus on quality answers. There are more than enough locked examples of the opinion bickering if one wants to see what happens.
They may be interesting to read. They may be popular. But most of the time by page 2 and even worse at page 5, it’s crap. And that crap requires an excessive amount of community moderation work to keep clean and try to avoid having more people add answers to the bottom of page 7 that are already stated 6 times on previous pages.
If the moderation tools are less powerful than the popularity keeping it there, there isn’t much reason to moderate.
And thus the culture by those who shovel crap daily to try to shut down opinion based questions early - so they don’t have to do more work later.
Every attempt I’ve seen at an opinion oriented SE alternative has failed to get sufficient expert answering. It’s not fun as a ${Lang} expert to have a newbie argue with you regularly about some feature or design choice.
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#98Earlier 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?
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 perfect proxy, but a reasonable one, with a core audience that is probably fairly demographically similar to the core audience for most developer-oriented sites. Approximately 40% of their traffic was using ad-blockers in 2015.[3] A Wired statement posted in 2016 has 20% of their traffic using ad-blockers.[4]
- Anecdotal evidence: every dev I've worked with has at least one ad-blocker installed. The vast majority of dev-adjacent people I've worked with - PMs, technical writers, designers - have ad-blockers installed.
Put it together and I think it makes a fairly compelling case that techies are the last audience on earth you'd want to orient your online marketing towards. I used to hope that something like The Deck[5], which was explicitly targeted towards "web, design & creative professionals", would be a good solution to this, and I even permitted their ads on Metafilter, but they shut down last year, presumably because they just weren't making enough money. They did everything that people claimed they wanted: the ads were unobtrusive, mostly text and optimized images, they didn't engage in tracking, they didn't sell user data (as far as I know), and they still couldn't make it work.
1. https://marketingland.com/ad-blocker-usage-highest-among-key... people-and-high-earners-143546
2. https://digiday.com/media/survey-80-percent-know-ad-blocking...
3. http://adage.com/article/digital/websites-hit-hardest-ad-blo...
4. https://www.wired.com/how-wired-is-going-to-handle-ad-blocki...
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#99It's undeniable that their main developer Q&A site is a really great thing that saved me many hours of work. However, it was somewhat hostile to its more export users from the very beginning: the reputation system favors quickfire replies to grab the first upvotes, and they seem to put a strong emphasis on "cookbook" answers where many of the more nuanced discussions were closed as "opinion based". I think there are…
Their Q&A site was vastly better than what existed at the time, and that's how they won the market. Now, though, it is full of people looking for quick points (as you suggest) -- people that think that the original poster was asking for someone to search Google for 'em -- and I'm convinced that the truly helpful people have moved just given up.
One thing I've noticed, that drives me crazy, is people demanding more information in response to a question, without any intention of using that information to help find an answer. Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. I don't mean to suggest that more details aren't useful, only that it isn't helpful in any way to ask for more information if you don't intend to follow up. (Perhaps that could be improved by allowing those sorts of requests to be sent privately, and without any chance of generating points?)
Re: Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
#100If SO and its related network sites die, what's going to happen to the millions of questions and answers their users contributed? Is anyone archiving them and making the archives available in any useful way?
I don't see why this person's post is downvoted. That was a good question.