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Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

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Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#91

Post by alangibson »

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…

I'd you think the SO is bad, you should check out the EE board on StackExchange. I've never seen such aggressively unhelpful behavior by people performing excellence in my life.

ChatGPT may have killed it, but it was already severely weakened by them allowing a-holes to run the place.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#92

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

corethree wrote: post #44
ram4jesus wrote: post #41

Good. Lay off everyone. Only reddit beats SO in terms of being made to feel inadequate, stupid, etc. when asking others for help on technical issues. SO made their bed. Enjoy the snark, mistreatment, and power trips while it lasts. There are definitely gentler and better communities out there.

Grow some skin. Other then the snark it's a good resource. I agree that the snark shouldn't be there but stack overflow is a good resource for lurkers and people who don't care and aren't so hurt by online mistreatment. It's just randos on the internet.

Spoken like someone who lurked in #Linux on EFNet.

There's a way to foster new people who are interested in your field. There's a time to explain something, and a time to say you're at a point where you should be able to grasp this, and point them in a direction, and wish them well. There's never a time to make someone feel stupid for simply asking a question, even if it really is a stupid question.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#93

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

bastardoperator wrote: post #25
ddtaylor wrote: post #12

How do you mess up where your product value is massively derived by unpaid volunteers?

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.

AI can do the same thing - it'll probably pretty up the words more, but it's perfectly capable of fuzzy matching a "duplicate" question, passive aggressively telling you to sod off, and telling you that some questions are wrong to ask.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#94

Post by jrumbut »

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.

I've noticed that for a lot of quick/common stuff ("how do I change font color with JavaScript?") the question that comes up is old and talks about jQueryUI, but there are 400 answers that cover every library and framework since then.

It's really not convenient to search through those answers even though the knowledge you need is there.

For a long time they argued that duplicate questions were a problem because they weren't trying to be a Q&A site but rather a knowledge database. But it turns out that the duplicate reduction effort has made the knowledge database harder to access for many common queries.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#95

Post by xmprt »

bhouston wrote: post #79
busterarm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Given a long enough timeline every companies dies or they pivot so extreme that they resemble nothing that they were to begin with.

That might be true but it's a very nihilistic way to look at things. I believe SO had many more successful years ahead of it but decisions taken by the company and moderators sped that process up.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#96

Post by bombcar »

busterarm wrote: post #51
alternatex wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone doing full-stack PHP in 2014 I'm not sure about that. SO was filled with bad advice for PHP and JavaScript. It was so bad you could use it as a guidebook for writing outdated insecure code.

Agreed. I've always viewed SO as being just slightly better than w3schools. Worse than useless. It has benefited my career significantly that I never got in the habit of using it.

For many domains, it was perfect - how do I adjust the margins in LaTeX or how do I reverse the output of ls.

But for programming, you'd get a similar "it works" answer ... eventually. And even if you read the comments under the answer, you still might get burned by side effects/security issues you'd not thought through.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#97

Post by ozr »

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…

> 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.

I was at Fog Creek (FC) while some of these decisions were made. There are a few missing pieces here that may help it make more sense.

The model was for FC to act as an incubator and fund other projects on the backs of FogBugz and Kiln. I'm more familiar with Trello, but with SO I'm sure the idea was the same: when you take VC, you are committing to a very specific model: burn cash on getting as large as possible.

The goal with Fog Creek was to _not do that_. So, rather than having FC take funding, Trello was spun out and raised as it's own entity.

FC employees received equity (in lieu of profit sharing) in these products.

The last product to come out of FC was the result of a few competing teams working on different projects. Glitch (nee Hyperdev) was.. not a great idea, with not a great team on it.

A leadership change shortly after the focus on Glitch led to (more-or-less) the complete collapse and acquihire of it by Fastly.

> 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.

I guess it depends on your measure. FC employees made money. I regret what FC was turned into at the end.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#98

Post by code_runner »

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.

I don’t understand how redundancies can be carried out respectfully. Redundancies suck. Someone will always be on the list that didn’t expect to be and quite honestly shouldn’t be.

People will say they know the right answer and some aspect that helps them would’ve been considered (tenure, peer feedback, # of commits). It always sucks no matter what.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#99

Post by bombcar »

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…

The problem isn't the people asking questions, there will always be an infinite number of those.

It's the moderation scaring away the people who answer questions. Just because they haven't shooed away everyone doesn't mean they haven't had an impact.

I know that I no longer browse relevant SO topics "for fun" anymore.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#100

Post by ncann »

The biggest problem with SO is that it is self-conflicting in its mission. It wants high-quality answers, it wants to avoid duplicates, it wants to be wiki-like or even something that can replace official docs/man page. All those are good and noble goals, but you cannot have that and at the same time be novice-user friendly. Wikipedia has the same issue to a certain extent, but SO is much worse because it's a Q&A site, and yet because of the above goals it in effect prevents novices from asking questions because of duplicate, because they don't know what to ask (since they are novice), etc. If they want to be truly useful to question askers, perhaps there should be some spin off part of SO where people can ask question freely to their heart's content but somehow doesn't affect the main site's quality...
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