11 ms·
Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%
- paulcole 7y agoPretty tone deaf. > We are facing this situation together. Well, approximately 85% of you are.
- ChainsawTom 7y agoI definitely read this as Stack Overflow was responsible for there needing to be 15% less developers/techies.
- Trasmatta 7y ago> This is a key moment in our company’s history, as the whole world is dealing with significant uncertainty. Know that you are not alone. We are facing this situation together. Our goal is to stay focused on living our core values and actively connect with teammates, our community, and our customers. The phrase "We are facing this together" must sound really hollow if you're one of the people who has been laid off...
- nimchimpsky 7y agowe are facing this together, except for you and you, and you etc
- KingOfCoders 7y agoI would have thought better of Stack Overflow than this business speak.
- abiogenesis 7y agoThey've been like this since Joel left and the new CEO stepped in. Obviously their mission is nothing but to increase their valuation by tenfold now. Edit: This is not my guess, it has actually been said by Joel Spolsky, the founder and the previous CEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMfxd9y0cMY&t=952 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMfxd9y0cMY&t=952
- dehrmann 7y agoHopefully they're careful going down this road. Remember SourceForce? Experts Exchange? If I were them, my secret (because what gets measured gets gamed) metric would be how many tech workers list their Stackoverflow profile on their resume/website/Linkedin. It's a proxy for reputation, and that's the thing they need to protect.
- jaxn 7y agoThat seems like a terrible thing to list on a resume to me.
- dehrmann 7y agoI doubt recruiters would even look at it, but if you're trying to land your first job, it can signal areas you might already know. The interactions are also a lot like a job--how you ask questions and how you answer questions.
- m_mueller 7y agoWhy if I may asked? Non technical people don't care, and I've gotten recognition by some hiring engineers by it. One even started an interview with "I gotta thank you, your SO answer helped me out recently".
- jonathankoren 7y agoAs a hiring manager I can tell you the sad truth about this and github links. No one reads them. Seriously. No one reads them. There’s simply too many resumes to look at. Having it something extra to look at, and it’s cognitive load is a hell of a lot more than anything else, because now I’m supposed to understand some random code dropped in my lap, or whether some rando’s answers on SO are quality, or not. (Points just tell me about how quickly it was answered, not necessarily quality.) Finally, assuming I did all that work, now I have to compare this to someone that didn’t list it, because they don’t care enough about SO to create an account (raises hand), or simply have hobbies outside of coding. It’s easier — and fairer — to simply judge the resume based on the the actual resume, and then follow up with interview questions if appropriate.
- nickcox 7y agoYou haven't been paying attention then. Check out the ridiculous series of non-apologies over the Monica Cellio debacle. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/340913/627733 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/340913/627733
- mattigames 7y agoIt's becoming a meme, like a viral tweet said > I like how ads have gone from “buy a toyota” to “this is a difficult and uncertain time for us all...buy a toyota” Like when ever company says how we are in this together or how emphatetic they are in these difficult times it just fills me with dread, the opposite of what they were aiming for, it's clear that talking about the crisis is now just another trick in the PR department of almost every single company so there is no way to make those words not feel empty, so I rather don't hear them say anything about it at all.
- dylan604 7y agoIt quickly became the new "Thank you for your service"
- johnvanommen 7y agoWelcome to Costco, I love you.
- dylan604 7y agoyeah, but that's just funny and was meant to be satirical. the other phrases are just empty words used in a way to fake sincerity. (maybe fake is too harsh for "thank you", but if you were really sincere, you wouldn't be using a catch phrase)
- gorgoiler 7y ago“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film) This comment isn’t a rebuttal — I agree with you and every time I mull on these things I am reminded of the memorable saying from the movie Network.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoI’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore. I'm buying a Toyota! On edit: wait, I don't even have a driver's license!
- jaynetics 7y agoAlso the 15% layoff is mentioned pretty much like a side-note between tons of text about new features, free basic tiers, the dev survey, usage stats, and what not. Spin-doctoring can go too far at times.
- guardiangod 7y agoThis reminds me of a quote from Jack Mah, the founder of Alibaba, from a few months ago. 在阿里巴巴二十周年时，马云提及未来的一个畅想：“30年以后，我们希望每年向社会推荐输出至少1000名10年以上的阿里人，他们应该参与到社会的建设。” Translation: During Alibaba's 20th anniversary celebration, Jack Mah expressed a wish of his: "Thirty years later, I hope that we at Alibaba can export, with commendation, at least 1000 Alibaba-rians that are >10 years seniority, to society each year, so that they can participate in the building of our society." If you think Jack Mah was talking about annual layoff, you aren't the only one. Needless to say, people are impressed (sarcastically) that he even made layoffs sound so patriotic.
- echelon 7y agoWow, so they see employees as replaceable cogs that should be changed regularly. That's incredibly inhuman. Who would ever want to work at such a place? If I build a company, I want it to be so interesting and fulfilling that people never want to leave.
- namelosw 7y agoIt's a place filled so much drama, dwarfing all its peers. Sadly, there are still countless people dream of working there. And even more sadly, people don't want to leave, so they regularly fire people and then they can abuse the rest even more.
- scarface74 7y agoEvery big company sees employees as cogs. Most just wont admit it. But see Netflix. “We are a professional sports team not a family.”
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoThe whole letter is really tone-deaf. First paragraphs of guff about "stay focused on living our core values", "Let’s all continue to take care of each other", and then whoops, we just fired 15%! Then again, they've got a solid track record, in a previous moderation kerfuffle they pulled their initial "apology" after they racked up north of 2000 downvotes. http://web.archive.org/web/20191208001413/https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to-our-community-and-an-apology http://web.archive.org/web/20191208001413/https://meta.stack...
- oefrha 7y ago“We’re laying you off. The whole world is dealing with significant uncertainty, we’re not alone in layoffs, you’re not alone in being laid off, so you probably won’t find a job elsewhere either. Good luck.”
- edo 7y agoSo painful to read a fluffed up speech about standing together while firing 15% of workforce during a crisis. If you need to fire people, own it.
- unishark 7y ago85% of us are in this together.
- foolmeonce 7y ago(Until next round.) It is hard to imagine a company like SE being more relevant once people can meet again.
- s9w 7y agoI will totally fulfill that HN clichee of people in disbelief that any tech company has employees... But: TIL they have 250 of them. It's a fully automated site, huh.
- duxup 7y agoI'm usually wondering about what everyone does at a company. But 250 doesn't seem like an high number to me for what SO has for products.
- KingOfCoders 7y agoWhen I was at eBay, I wondered what 35.000 were doing.
- dylan604 7y ago<non-sequitur> 35 whole people with no fractional people isn't that large o a number. If you use a period for the thousands mark, what do you use for the decimal part a semi-colon?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cyberferret 7y agoIn Europe, the "." and "," characters in a number have the complete opposite meaning to when used in US/UK/Australian etc. numbers.
- dgellow 7y agoNot everywhere in Europe, it’s something country specific. Also, a funny note: In Switzerland we have 3 formats depending if it is a currency, not a currency, or hand written :p
- dgellow 7y ago
- mysterEFrank 7y agoI don't get it, how are they affected by COVID
- dvhh 7y agoadvertising revenue seems to be down for a lot of company
- sky_rw 7y agoSource? The article clearly states the opposite in two separate sentences.
- nikanj 7y agoCompanies are cutting down on advertising and non-mandatory spending. Plus paid job ads are probably not making much money right now
- BoysenberryPi 7y agoThe post directly says they are seeing growth in their advertising business.
- irrational 7y agoDoes stackoverflow have ads? I would imagine that a large percentage of their technically savvy user base would be using an ad blocker.
- tim-- 7y agoYou would be surprised how much Stack Overflow charges for job pages :)
- MauranKilom 7y agoThey have job ads and "normal" ads. You get an opt-in if you have enough rep.
- syntaxing 7y agoI was kinda confused why covid-19 is effecting StackOverflow. After reading it, a good portion of layoffs is the Talent team with the reason of planned long term hiring freeze so they won't need (edit) this product offering for the near future. Side note, the original title of the posts is "A message from our CEO: The Way Forward"
- kcole16 7y agoThis is referring to StackOverflow's Talent product, which is a software engineering focused hiring platform. Seems like they furloughed the sales and marketing team for this product, due to an expected slowdown in market-wide hiring.
- syntaxing 7y agoOhh I misunderstood, I thought that's what they call their recruiting team
- yaakov 7y agoYes, this is what happened. Though only a portion of the team related to Talent was furloughed, not the whole team. It is still an active product, but sales has taken a big hit related to the downturn of the overall hiring environment due to Covid19.
- davidjnelson 7y ago> These actions primarily affected sales and customer success teams within our Talent business, which is dependent on the hiring environment.
- noncoml 7y agoI have some karma to burn, so here it goes: Be shitty to people and they will turn their back to you. I am ashamed to admit it, but I am happy to see companies that embrace being shitty to users, fall like a house of cards. Yes, SO embraced being shitty to users and creating a toxic environment for far too long, despite their latest weak attempts to fix it. I hope eBay, Paypal and Yelp are next. Also somewhat Reddit. They are ok for consuming data, but if you try to post anything it's pretty user hostile.
- goatherders 7y agoWhat are you talking about?
- Karunamon 7y agoIf I had to guess, Stack*'s opaque moderation and user hostility.
- shadycuz 7y agoMost likely this https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...
- abiogenesis 7y agoAgreed. I have been an active SO user for years, but I significantly reduced my contribution after the latest screwups and their attempts to fix it with corporate/legal speak.
- all_blue_chucks 7y agoYou think mean comments are a SO or reddit problem? The fact that anonymous online discourse gets rude and heated has been known since the days of usenet. There was even some of this on BBS forums, but that was a more civilized time, likely because we knew the people we were talking to were within our local calling area in most cases. None of this is new. It's a humanity problem, not a technology problem.
- wiradikusuma 7y agoI understand they had to do it (I'm sure we—their users—understand), but I can't understand the need for bullshit business-speak. Just say, "Due to circumstances you all familiar with, business is slow, so I have to let go of some people from X department." Putting up bullshit like this is like adding insult to injury. Especially, since their user demographics are mostly people who don't like bullshit.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoImagine you’re on the CEO career path. What behaviours are you going to exhibit in order to pad your resume for the next position? You don’t really care about the company or the people who work there, you care about the next CEO position that pays more.
- Traubenfuchs 7y agoExactly, no one wants to be the odd one out when doing things that could be bad for public image.
- scarface74 7y agoI’m just thinking about the big tech companies and which CEOs would think long term. Out of the big 6 tech companies, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix are still run by their founders. Microsoft is not run by a founder, but it’s run by a company man with deep understanding of their culture and market. Apple’s CEO is not really technical, I don’t think he has a clue about what customers want, but at least he’s efficient and understands the operations side. But I do think he is more numbers and investor focus than Jobs was. He does know his weaknesses and it seems like he defers to his VPs - a good thing. I think he at least cares about the company. Google has never been able to execute outside of advertising so I’m not sure whether it would matter if the founders were still in charge.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
- foobarbecue 7y agoFurloughed, mostly
- rdslw 7y agoplease, don't drink their kool-aid. it's fired, not furloughed. it's to be able to not lose ability to generate profit, not "to be able to serve our customers" it's to save 85% who we think are more worth, not "we are all in this together"
- maltelandwehr 7y agoNot losing the ability to generate profit is a key requirement to be able to serve their customers. They are not a charity but a for-profit company.
- foobarbecue 7y agoI'm confused. You think they're lying when they say the employees were furloughed? They might be lying but I don't see any reason to belive that. Having been furloughed during government shutdowns myself I understand the situation a bit.
- cvaidya1986 7y agoAssuming there was enough runway for a rainy day, this could be a great time to invest in some R&D projects that will pay off dividends when the sun starts to shine again.
- vkou 7y agoIf those projects are worth investing in, why weren't they invested in before COVID? It's not that the engineers have nothing to do - it's that there is little revenue, and no amount of features they ship is going to change that.
- scarface74 7y agoOn a related note, I see big tech still hiring and picking up a lot of the best people who are either laid off or taking a pay cut.
- megadeth 7y agoHate to see this business speak from a company I admire. Bad market to be in as a software engineer, with so many talented folks available.
- kahlonel 7y agoThat's a whole lot of bullshit for a proactive backlash protection.
- villgax 7y agoSO is gonna be gobbled up by Github Issues altogether.
- adventured 7y agoThe only certainty with Stack Exchange, is that it's going to end up in the belly of one of just a few possible tech companies: Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Salesforce, etc. They'll slash most of the communities away (even if they initially lie about their intentions and pretend they won't do that) and keep the focus on the tech part of the network. Knowledge services are not great businesses, they're almost entirely incompatible with the venture capital model. Those that take VC all eventually get force-liquidated, without exception. Stack Exchange is still pretending to be a knowledge service. As they took on more venture capital they pivoted to being primarily HotJobs 3.0. The only way they were going to avoid that outcome, is to 1) never take major venture capital 2) stay super thin operationally; they did neither, so they get liquidated, it's only a question of time now. The Internet will need to replace Stack Exchange with a new platform in the near future, as it'll combo rot and most of the communities will be killed off after SE is sold. I'd advise someone/s out there to get started on replacing SE right now, as by the time you get a new platform up to speed (assume a few years), SE as it has been thought of over the prior decade will be on its last legs and the new platform will be in prime position to step in. And please, do it right, do not take venture capital, which is a devil's bargain for knowledge services: they will kill you in the end, guaranteed, every single time. I've been closely watching this stupid story repeat in the knowledge space for over two decades now. Go the non-profit route ideally, or alternatively go with the wikiHow approach and stay thin (it's the sole viable option to survive long-term as an independent knowledge service business).
- MauranKilom 7y agoCodidact (https://codidact.org https://codidact.org) has been born out of all the recent (and not so recent) drama over at SE. It is looking to do exactly the things you describe.
- neonate 7y agohttps://www.businessinsider.com/stack-overflow-reduces-workforce-furloughs-layoffs-2020-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/stack-overflow-reduces-workf... http://archive.md/8mjey http://archive.md/8mjey
- dang 7y agoIs there a good third-party article we can change this to? Bad-news press releases are notoriously difficult to read.
- psankar 7y agoI do not have data to back this claim. But the tone of this blog post makes me feel that, the new CEO is an incompetent person who decided to use the vehicle of the covid virus to announce job cuts that he has planned a long time ago. With the crap ton of marketing buzz in the post, and the casual mention of the layoffs, I don't think the CEO or the new board seem to care all that much about the laidoff employees. Again, this is my personal feeling and may not be the truth.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago> new CEO is an incompetent person who decided to use the vehicle of the covid virus to announce job cuts that he has planned a long time ago. Why would that indicate the CEO is incompetent? Doesn’t it stand to reason that management would and should take advantage of the whatever is happening in the wider scheme of things to advance their narrative, and that doing so is indicative of competence within their frame of reference?
- apk-d 7y agoTake a look around this comment section. This move isn't being received well by anyone and nobody is buying his bullshit. That, and mass layoffs are typically an excellent indicator of incompetence.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoI think you’re missing my point. The CEO likely doesn’t give a hoot about HN’s opinion. They probably care about their bonus and how it all advances themselves on their career path.
- apk-d 7y ago> They probably care about their bonus and how it all advances themselves on their career path. That doesn't sound anything like the priorities of a competent CEO. I think you're missing my point, too.
- 7y ago
- FpUser 7y agoSo many words for a very simple thing - we just cutting down headcount
- sdepablos 7y agoIn this time of uncertainty, wouldn't be more humane to just reduce the salary 15% to everyone?
- maltelandwehr 7y agoFrom a business perspective it would be a bad idea. If you have three revenue streams (Advertising, Enterprise communication product, hiring product/marketplace), of which two are doing very well and one is not doing well (hiring) you need to continue investing in what is working and stop burning money on what is not working. Otherwise you will lose your competitive edge in the areas that are working well. In the end, the responsibility of the CEO is not to give every employee the best life possible but to ensure the long-term success and survival of the company. If this is ensured, it also means job security for everyone not laid off!
- teddyuk 7y agoThis is a one off shock, they don’t need to do this
- nathanaldensr 7y agoOne of, if not the, largest shocks in history. Already bigger than 2008. This time in history isn't a minor outlier.
- scarface74 7y agoI agree with the other responses. But to add on, when you do an across the board cut, your best people can find another job leaving only your lower performers at the company. This is true even during a normal recession. This time it’s different though. The entire job market has collapsed except for big tech and a few other companies.
- yobert 7y agoAm I the only one who interpreted this headline as: The global workforce of programmers would be 15% bigger if it weren't for Stack Overflow. ?
- qppo 7y agoI don't really know much about this guy or his business, but I can't help but comment that the tone and phrasing he uses comes off as "I'm an asshole." I know that's less than civil, but that was just what I gleaned. It struck me as someone who doesn't care but wants to sound like they do.
- ryanwaggoner 7y agoSorry, but can you explain why? Impugning someone’s character like this seems unfair if you can’t point to anything more concrete than a vague feeling. What makes you think this guy is an uncaring asshole? Also, to be clear, this is a quarterly update on the entire business, not a lay-off announcement. I highly doubt that anything related to the layoffs was news to anyone in the company. That was likely covered in internal communications over the past few weeks.
- alkonaut 7y agoHow is StackOverflow negatively affected by the Pandemic? Is it that their customers go under, or see the services as nonessential so they get less revenue? It seems like it should be one of those Netflix-type companies that do better when everyone is remote, than they do otherwise.
- SimonPStevens 7y agoTheir main revenue is from two things. Firstly from their job boards which will be significantly reduced as few companies are hiring. Then secondly from advertising which will also be reduced during times of recession. The product you think of as stack overflow that will probably is really just a way for them to drive the right kind of traffic to those revenue sources.
- novaRom 7y agoVery plausible reasons indeed, but is it probably the same for many other companies? Just wondering if a chain reaction has already started.
- toyg 7y agoThat chain reaction is called “recession” and yes, it has already started. Expect more and more similar announcements from here to Christmas.
- vkou 7y agoSO gets most of their revenue from companies doing hiring. Nobody's hiring. Hence, no revenue.
- zulgan 7y agoi guess ads are down this makes me reflect that almost everything online functions only because of ads, which is quite sad either ads, or selling PII to companies that do ads
- gforz 7y agoCould not finish reading through it. Could have kept it straight to the point rather than convoluting with unnecessary details.
- acid__ 7y agoWould it be uncharitable to suggest that perhaps that was the goal?
- ecmascript 7y agoSO has really become a toxic place which is run by politically correct people. Just look at this corporate speak blog. I don't understand how the corona virus would impact them so hard they have to cut jobs, seems like a bullshit reason to just cut people off imo. Every company should be prepared for bad times. I have no sympathy for the management. They have obviously done a poor job.
- maltelandwehr 7y agoAt first, I did not understand either how Corona would affect them. But they explain it in the article: a big part of their revenue comes from job listings. Since very few companies are hiring right now, that revenue is down significantly.
- commandlinefan 7y agoThe only thing SO was ever good at was SEO. They muscled their way into the niche that Usenet was filling and did a worse job of that to begin with.
- dep_b 7y agoChance of getting a meaningful reply on any technical question which answer does not simply involve providing the documentation for the given framework or language involved: - Stack Overflow: 1% - Reddit: 8% - The Daily WTF forum: 81% This is internet is broken. I want the old one back.
- dan-robertson 7y agoI think it strongly depends on the tags of the question. In particular I think you will poor quality answers on popular, high volume tags like JavaScript.
- dep_b 7y agohttps://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/27134/how-do-i-parse-this-crap-json https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/27134/how-do-i-parse-this... This is the question I'm talking about. Apart from people posting funny memes there's some genuine helping going on. Same question on SO: no response. Same question on Reddit: one serious response. People can downvote me all they want but I see that decentralized bulletin boards seem to work a lot better even in 2020. If I have legitimate professional questions I need to find a forum for it, because that's where people hang out that are actually interested in the community instead of rep or likes.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- krzyk 7y agoI don't get it. It is as if Zoom would announcing job cuts "because COVID-19". Stackoverflow is an internet service providing answers to questions, why would they get lower counts of traffic?
- Traubenfuchs 7y agoLess advertising / business deals maybe? But there will be countless companies that will use the virus as a scapegoat.
- lordgrenville 7y agoPeople pay for Zoom, StackOverflow is free.
- sokoloff 7y agoIf Zoom had a division that went around doing Zoom room installs in offices, I can easily imagine them having cuts or furloughs in that group.
- MauranKilom 7y agoThey aren't getting lower counts of traffic. But QA traffic is not their primary revenue source. Job ads and SO for teams are.
- scarface74 7y agoIt doesn’t matter if the traffic is lower or higher if advertising revenue is down. Yahoo was struggling as an independent company from the initial dot com bust until it was acquired and it was one of the top ten most visited websites.
- shultays 7y agoWhat is stack overflow's work force? The devs of website? Admins?
- teddyuk 7y agoI think any company that lays off people at this time are scum, they should be embarrassed and rescind this. There are loans available in the us and uk to keep people employed. I won’t use stack overflow for the rest of may, it isn’t much but fuck them. They know the people they let go can’t get another job at the moment.
- kalesh 7y agoHave they hired a alien attack movie scriptwriter? - Since then, we have entered a new era, and societies in every corner of the globe face a historic challenge. We are reminded that for all of our advances as a civilization, nature can be a powerful force which we must adapt and innovate around.
- LandR 7y agoI find most answers on stack overflow to be useless and a lot are just garbage. I feel the whole site needs a big banner "PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS IN PRODUCTION"
- sebleon 7y agoFor a second, I thought this title claimed that stack overflow reduces the need for software engineers by 15%. Now I’m curious what the actual number might be, given the productivity boost that it provides...
- chx 7y agoYeah, they brought this guy in to be the hatchet man. Executes just as expected.
- AJRF 7y agoAn aside: Anyone else finding themselves adding site:github.com rather than site:stackoverflow.com to their Google searches more now?
- unglaublich 7y agoOr !gh instead of !so with DuckDuckGo?
- jkhaui 7y agoYes. As a frontend developer, my default mode now is to almost always go straight to searching issues in the GitHub repo of an npm package I'm using. I only end up on SO when googling very generic questions about React, TypeScript or JavaScript (and sometimes CSS). Also, the top Google results from SO are often from ~2017 or earlier which puts me off
- kungato 7y agoIs it time for SO 2? Lets be real, many articles are out of date with answers being for older versions, the culture is getting worse and the company is looking to cash in on the thing. Could we use a blank slate?
- Etheryte 7y agoConceptually, Stack Overflow did something amazing for its time. I agree however that after all these years there are now visible shortcomings in the approach, and simply starting the same thing from scratch wouldn't solve the problems. The primary format of SO is Q&A. Some Q&A is timeless, as in the answer is still relevant today as it was 10 years ago. Some Q&A invalidates quickly and would probably need to be touched up every year or so. How to account for both? Another issue SO strongly struggles with is the same entry-level questions being asked again and again, in different wordings. I wouldn't really put the onus on the newcomers here, as they're often new to programming to begin with and thus couldn't know what's a problem other people might have already had, how to search for things etc. But the tooling to help them avoid those situations is crucial. Currently, possibly related questions are shown when writing a new question, but the problem still persists. How to better avoid this problem? Is this simply a matter of nailing down on the related questions algorithm or is there a better approach? And lastly, the company. There are many very real cases where the change in management has hurt the SO both as a site and a community. I think the answer lies somewhere between SO, MDN and Wikipedia - with all the ups and downs it offers. Clearly, making a global knowledge base and then tacking on investor interest later doesn't work out all that well. To date, I don't think this problem is really solved, as Wikipedia also has a number of issues it struggles with. Without addressing this core issue, the rest are more or less irrelevant with time.
- scarface74 7y agoSome Q&A invalidates quickly and would probably need to be touched up every year or so. How to account for both? I’ve seen answers regarding my two major areas of interest - AWS and .Net Core being updated by the original authors as new features came out and new versions of the framework are released.
- demarq 7y agowhen the guy firing you says "We are facing this situation together." how distant from reality can someone be?
- namelosw 7y ago> Closed. This message is off-topic.
- ciconia 7y agoFwiw just how many of the people posting negative comments on here are paying SO users? It's still a business that needs to make money. Just saying...
- Markoff 7y agoDoes this mean more or less rude comments on this toxic website?
- cosmodisk 7y agoI could probably understand why they did this,as hiring will be non existent for the upcoming months,but pages upon pages of BS about core values,culture, viruses,and whatever else comes along just left bad taste in my mouth.
- ryanwaggoner 7y agoCan one of the many commenters decrying this as "bullshit business-speak" explain to me what is so terrible about this? I'm genuinely asking. My theory is that this is a good example of why HN discourages editorializing in titles. The current title here ("Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%") sets you up to think that this is a layoff announcement by SO. But from reading the first paragraph, I think this is just an externally-facing quarterly update on the business overall. I suspect that nothing about the layoffs here was news to anyone in the company, and they had plenty of internal communications around it already. And even here, the language about layoffs seems fine to me: This has been a tough week at Stack Overflow, and taking care of each other is more important than ever right now. Like companies large and small, we have had to make difficult choices in order to reflect the market conditions. This week, we reduced our global workforce by approximately 15%. Most of the affected employees were furloughed, except for employees and contractors in regions where furloughs were unfortunately not an option. These actions primarily affected sales and customer success teams within our Talent business, which is dependent on the hiring environment. We made these decisions with great care and only after assessing and leveraging all other options. We’ve paused all non-critical hiring, suspended our travel budget for all of Q2 and Q3, and cut marketing and software costs significantly. Reducing our headcount was a painful but necessary decision, of no fault of the employees affected, and one that I take full accountability for as the CEO. We did this in order to ensure that we can serve our customers and community in the long-run. What is the problem with that, specifically? The rest of the post reads like a perfectly normal update, written in a slightly formal tone, which seems appropriate to me. If you're running a business with hundreds of employees, tens of thousands of customers, tens of millions of readers, and other stakeholders like partners, vendors, and investors, you probably are going to be a little more formal with your tone. It takes uncommon skill to write the kind of updates that Buffet or Bezos manage to pull off. Just because this is anodyne doesn't make it "bullshit" or this guy "incompetent" or "an asshole". Can someone point out anything specific that they found so off-putting about this quarterly update on the business?
- cutemonster 6y agoPersonally I don't think it was that bad -- however it's so much text and words so I couldn't read all of it. It could have been 1/4 it's length?
- adingus 7y ago"We're all in this together..." Except you, because you're laid off.
- bluedino 7y ago>> Fireside Chat How did this term make it to the buzzword bingo? What does it even mean?
- reiichiroh 7y agoCome sit on my lap and let me be patronizing
- techslave 7y agoit’s a quite famous US historical reference.
- techslave 7y agodon’t understand the complaints. this is a quarterly news update. hence the tone. there’s nothing wrong with it. the defect is that the layoffs are just a paragraph in passing. on its face it appears highly insensitive, but come on. i’ll give benefit of the doubt that it was dealt with internally much better. it only gets an inch of print in this report because it’s a very small factor in the general news of the company. actually the main defect here is that the HN title is highly editorialized.
- scarface74 7y agoHe could have stopped with everything before... “Despite the impact to our Talent business...” Why mix in a lay-off announcement with a marketing spiel?
- ykevinator 7y agoWho's going to do all the flagging as duplicate now?