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Stack Overflow CEO announces 10% reduction in force (58 employees)
- latchkey 3y agoI'm starting to notice a trend of mentioning AI in these layoff notices.
- gumballindie 3y agoWhat’s a ceo supposed to do? Admit incompetence? Lack of skill in growing a company? Instead they blame [insert current media story arc].
- kevviiinn 3y agoHow about not lay people off to pad profits
- missedthecue 3y agoIf there's a decrease in workload do you suggest paying people to sit on their hands?
- kevviiinn 3y agoYes, if the company has the money then they shouldn't put people's lives at risk to benefit a few CEOs and stockholders, that's insane and it hurts society at large
- missedthecue 3y agoI think the waste involved in having a chunk of the workfoce sit around unproductive is worse for society. Locking in stasis to keep the paychecks flowing? How is that a good thing? Yes, change happens, companies hire and lay off. Businesses start and businesses go bankrupt. Sometimes change is uncomfortable. But policy designed to prevent change in society is a bad thing in my opinion.
- kevviiinn 3y agoBut the point is that these businesses aren't going bankrupt, they continually report record profits while laying people off
- disruptiveink 3y agoThis doesn't feel like it's about competence or lack thereof. Reading that post, the cynic in me couldn't help but think that the CEO of Stack Overflow just wanted to do "the hip thing" these days, which is to lay off people for no reason and write a blog post taking "full responsibility". What best way to polish your CEO CV in 2023 than to be in the company of Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and etc? Of course, the fact that people are getting fired over the performance is a tiny detail easily glossed over.
- fatfingerd 3y agoI was expecting something about competition from AI or potentially customers deciding to wait and see. This just mentions it is one of their own R&D priorities, so presumably no one laid off was working on that.
- jstarfish 3y agoIt's typical corporate doublespeak. I guarantee you this is going to be a batch of older workers and PIP candidates. AI is new and fresh. It is the domain of younger employees.
- cableshaft 3y agoI'm older (old enough that I should be shot according to the movie Primer). I'm using AI in my workflow with success. It's not that difficult.
- cnasc 3y ago> (old enough that I should be shot according to the movie Primer) I think you mean Looper! Both are great movies though
- jtimdwyer 3y agoI think it's a reference to this scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN-VAdAnoZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN-VAdAnoZ4
- cableshaft 3y agoYep, that's the one.
- jstarfish 3y agoMy point was less "old people can't" and more "a new grad using AI can function at a senior level for a fraction of the cost."
- spacephysics 3y agoObviously the definition of “senior” is loosely agreed upon at best. However, I consider the jump from mid level to senior less about programming in general, and more about architecture, collaboration, and requirement gathering in the context of the business. I don’t think AI will make junior devs into senior. That may fool some business folks, but senior, staff, and even fellow junior devs in the field (vs newly grad) will catch on. Like any tool, it’s great to work with until it isn’t. To say, once the guardrails of what the tools designed to do are broken, you must revert to fundamentals to solve the problem. I agree that with AI, the guard rails become far wider, for sure. But I think a tool like this is better at making a senior dev more efficient than actual skill bump of say an entry level to junior or higher.
- turtleyacht 3y agoReduction in Force (RIF)
- brycewray 3y agoMade that change. Thanks.
- WWLink 3y agoWouldn't be more accurate to say they fired 58 people? Laid off? Sacked? Sent off to greener pastures? I don't care what form of corporate speak they use, it's all just another word for "fired" lol "Today we are embarking upon an Employee Enrichment Initiative - we are sending 58 people on a journey for a better future - by releasing them from their current obligations"
- garbagecoder 3y agoA RIF has a legal meaning under the WARN act[1]. AFAIK, that's the origin of the term and it's (for once) not a comms team coining. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
- garbagecoder 3y agoI'm sorry, you don't have enough reputation points to keep your job. This job is already performed in another thread (that's 8 years old but totally not out of date). I also have an irrelevant pedantic objection to your job that I will couch in sneering dismissals of your question and fake brags about my credentials, but please make sure to upvote this answer on your way out of the building.
- voxelghost 3y agoBut the things you are complaining about is mostly a problem with SO users and moderators, and not employees?
- fabian2k 3y agoThis is a rather disrespectful way to comment on the announcement of people losing their jobs.
- garbagecoder 3y agoI don't think so at all.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- noncoml 3y ago-1 please see guidelines and provide minimal reproducible example
- nolawi89 3y agoIts purely archive site.. if you can write the question... chat GPT can answer it better. Obviously the learning experience writing the question in a way everyone understood was a learning thing.. i will miss that... RIP Stackoverflow
- gjvc 3y ago"sharing"... Please.
- diversionfactor 3y agoHere's an idea for those who want to achieve a fast high ranking on Stack Overflow: 1. Use their API 2.3 to get the latest questions for your area of interest (Javascript/React, whatever): https://api.stackexchange.com/docs https://api.stackexchange.com/docs 2. Feed the questions into your LLM of choice such as Huggingface StarCoder: https://huggingface.co/blog/starcoder https://huggingface.co/blog/starcoder 3. Review the answer manually to make sure it's legit and not a hallucination or just plain wrong: ideally writing some nice UI so you can see, say, the SO Q on the left, proposed answer on the right, and a bottom terminal where you can run the proposed solution code to verify. With enough self-verification loops you could cut out the wetware middleperson, but this manual step is crucial to avoid incorrect answers and to keep with SO policy: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-chatgpt-is-banned https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po... 4. Parley #3 to quickly up your ranking to be one of the top users in your area of expertise: https://stackoverflow.com/users https://stackoverflow.com/users 5. Submit a Y Combinator application to create a company doing 1-4 above to solve real world software problems posted online, like Mechanical Turk meets Stack Overflow meets Upwork. https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ 6. Bonus points if you are the first "post-code" startup whose code for doing #5 above is actually written 100% by transformer agents: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/transformers_agents https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/transformers_agents
- fatfingerd 3y agoThis kind of reminds me of the joke about building micro services and moving to a more reliable API for some data you are dependent on, only to realize it is sourcing data from you.
- ggorlen 3y agoI'm not sure if this comment is a joke or not, but please don't do this. Stack Overflow is trying to curate a resource of high-quality questions and answers. The rule is that content is created by humans, generally subject matter experts. LLMs are banned for a reason. I flag dozens of LLMs answers a week for removal. These answers are a serious problem for accuracy and cleaning them up is a waste of time for moderators and normal users. Most of these answers are flat out incorrect. People using this technique or are interested in rep farming generally don't know how to review the answer, or they'd write it themselves. If OP wanted an LLM answer, they'd just ask an LLM directly. They're there to ask human SMEs. It seems to me one's time in life is better served by actually learning useful technical skills rather than trying to game systems to the detriment of the commons for fake internet points, although I guess in this day and age the latter gets you further (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35885342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35885342 "My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted"). Anyway, parent comment has nothing to do with the linked topic and seems inconsiderate of the people laid off.
- rvz 3y agoHere it comes, lots of human programmers deprecated and replaced. Both seniors and juniors affected. Learn to adapt and migrate to Copilot, Ghostwriter and AI assisted programming with assisted code documentation and less of a need for programmers in general.
- roflyear 3y agoCertainly only developers are using these tools
- thenerdhead 3y agoOr just stack overflow has a bad business model and not so great leadership. Look at the events for the last few years and are those still right?
- atraac 3y agoAh yes, let me tell my manager (who barely handles Excel formulas) that he can just whip out vscode with Copilot and ask ChatGPT to set up an API with SPA frontend in local Docker environment. We're doomed.
- andrewedstrom 3y agoYeah…this one makes a lot of sense. I don’t know about y’all but my visits to Stack Overflow have probably gone to about 1/10 of what they were before ChatGPT.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoI've gone back to actually reading official documentation. It tends not to be full of pompous douchebags and infantile downvoters the way SO is.
- toadi 3y agothink last time I consulted it almost 10 years ago. Was fed up with it anyway. Best thing for your career is read the documentation of the tech you are using. Most of the stuff is just right there. Heck even on IRC 20 years ago first remark on Qs was RTFM.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoI think back to the early '90s and how much we got done with the Microsoft TechNet CDs. I feel that I was much sharper then, with a better handle on compiling, linking, debugging...
- toadi 3y agoFor me it was installing redhat and finding the linux hoiwtos. For example networking was awesome and detailed going deep into TCP/IP etc. At those times to do shit you had to learn it properly. Not just copy and paste it from stackoverflow...
- lawgimenez 3y agoI hope my Stackoveflow key cap reward is still a go.