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Stack Overflow announces 28% headcount reduction
- d3w4s9 3y agoReminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37660630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37660630
- smartis2812 3y agoWhen you put all your money into a already hated product so no money is left for your employees. Great Work Stackoverflow executives!
- rightbyte 3y agoWhat product? Their B2B stuff? Seems useless to me but is it hated?
- malfist 3y agoProbably OverflowAI
- smartis2812 3y agoExactly https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426432/overflowai-search-is-now-available-for-alpha-testing-september-13-2023 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426432/overflowai-s... https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766/preview-of-search-and-question-asking-powered-by-genai https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766/preview-of-s...
- gemstones 3y agoYou would think that companies would take the easy step of not using internal company nicknames in these press releases (Stackers.) Just “employees” would make it sound less tone deaf.
- torgoguys 3y agoI didn't bump up against "stackers" but I certainly did bump up against the post pretty explicitly saying their community members were not their customers. (I assume their advertisers are).
- neilv 3y agoAgreed, and I say "people" more often than "employees". "Employee" has come to mean transactional and disposable, and I don't know how many leaders still feel obligation towards employees. Maybe thinking of people as people, rather than as what "employee" has come to mean, will activate feelings more like "our people" or "my people".
- Dachande663 3y agoIt always amazes me how stackoverflow became expertexchange, the very thing it replaced. Is it just inevitable as something grows?
- robertlagrant 3y agoThe bigger something gets, the more likely it is to hire people who turn out to do things that don't add value.
- aleph_minus_one 3y agoThe problem with Experts Exchange was that the answers were put behind a paywall (I am aware there existed some tricks to circumvent it), and were thus hard to access. I am not aware that Stack Overflow is currently on its way to become like that.
- rpigab 3y agoYou mean expertsexchange.
- tyingq 3y ago"You've been marked as duplicate".
- moffkalast 3y ago"Employing people is no longer considered best practice"
- honksillet 3y agoInstead of just iterating on a solid business another case of promising infinite growth, which in reality is just a different form of pump and dump. Fire the executives.
- kfk 3y agoSince I have been running my company 2.5 years now, a quick reminder: employees expect yearly salary increases, tech employees have very high salary growth expectations. You can explain to me how to make employees happy without "infinite growth", as you are there, please also help me understand how a company is to secure their sustainability without growth with expected positive inflation.
- brianwawok 3y agoOP can’t and obviously has never run a business.
- nicce 3y agoI would argue that the salary is not following the infinite growth, not even close for employees. Sure, for startup there is a path ahead for increase, but I bet Google, Amazon, Meta or any big company are not increasing the salaries anymore as much as these companies are generating increased revenue over every year.
- CraigJPerry 3y agoWould the prices you charge not also track inflation?
- carstenhag 3y agoEfficiency increases could lead to less person hours being necessary, thus allowing to do the same with less people, or the same amount of people working less per week.
- gumballindie 3y ago> You can explain to me how to make employees happy without "infinite growth" Autonomy so they dont get a do nothing manager that wants meetings to discuss upcoming meetings. Treat them like adults - also hire adults in the first place. Throw out well poisoners early on. Bullies, sexists, racists, over-competitive twats, ass kissers, boot lickers, etc if you somehow hired such types - throw them out too. Pay must be market rate but doesnt have to be 500k for an api plumber. Remote work so they buy a property they afford, settle down and raise a family. And so on.
- wildrhythms 3y agoLayoff announcement. 2 paragraphs. 3 mentions of AI.
- malfist 3y agoMight explain why the moderator strike never ended
- smartis2812 3y agoLike a bad apology video on YT where the artist try to sell you his product while crying.
- pylua 3y agoNot much much empathy in that announcement.
- salex89 3y agoBut there's AI!
- lando2319 3y agoI've noticed searching the recent questions, the answer count and views are really low, there just seems to be not a lot of people on the site answering questions anymore There is a big message telling users not to use AI generated content for answers I'm starting to wonder if the no AI answers rule is a good idea
- pasc1878 3y agoIf you have AI answers then you get incorrect answers - why would this be good?
- mahkoh 3y agoHow would this be different from not allowing Ai?
- sbarre 3y agoI think because the effort bar becomes too low when providing answers. The gamification of the Stack Exchange sites is a double-edged sword, and I think it relies on an assumption about the effort threshold required to provide an answer. Typing out an answer, even a wrong one, takes time and effort that the system then rewards through points and badges. If you can just copy a question to Copilot and then paste the answer back, the effort threshold is likely then low enough that too many (or at least lots) of people will do only that in order to engage with the gamification and get points, rather than do it to try to help out the asker.
- pasc1878 3y agoVolume. Most SO answers tend to be near the correct way as they explain why they answered. A good answer should also gove references as to why the answer is correct.
- baq 3y agoModeration got extremely out of hand, to the point people are demotivated to ask questions. No questions, no answers, no traffic.
- danpalmer 3y agoI sometimes teach those new to software development. ChatGPT seems to have supplanted Stack Overflow. It's the same behaviour of course, blindly copy/pasting errors into ChatGPT, unquestioningly copying output back, and as far as I can tell the results don't seem to be that much better, just quicker.
- contravariant 3y agoBest use case I've found so far for ChatGPT is using phind.com to search Stack Overflow and integrate the answers with whatever other relevant documentation it could find. Sometimes it's a 1:1 copy of stackoverflow, sometimes it's a bit more. Either way it saves me a few minutes searching for the relevant post.
- willsmith72 3y agoI definitely find them better, with gpt4 at least. The main hiccups are with the latest libraries/versions of things. It beats searching various SO questions, some of which don't have answers, some are too old, some are hard to read. The best part is being able to ask for further clarification, or feeding the answer into a fresh context chat to help find problems
- basisword 3y agoI used ChatGPT recently to develop an iOS app (I'm an iOS dev, but I wasn't proficient with SwiftUI at the time). ChatGPT astounded me. When I copied something that didn't work, I could tell it "hey I get this error" and it would reply with the necessary changes. I was able to get an MVP together this way. I learn by doing and I learnt much more quickly using this method than reading guides/watching YouTube/reading docs. Until that point I didn't fully get the AI craze.
- Wherecombinator 3y agoI’ve been interested in using chatgpt to learn SwiftUI but chatgpt’s cut off date scared me away. Did you face any issues?
- jalapenos 3y agoNo wonder. If I ask ChatGPT a question, it answers it. If I asked Stack Overflow a question, they made sure I wished I hadn't.
- leetrout 3y agoAnd people white knight for that behavior left and right. I refuse to interact with the platform after these encounters.
- hardware2win 3y agoHow is it that I asked like 100 questions in last 5 years and hostile behaviour was visible in maybe 2 or 3, yet people act as if that was the most toxic place on the internet? All I was doing was just: putting effort into my questions
- pbowyer 3y agoProbably because your brain works in the same way as the mods think, and so you ask questions that fit the expected format. Or your questions are focused with one right answer, because IME SO hates any question which assumes - unintentionally or intentionally - there are grey areas or more than one way to do it.
- pasc1878 3y agoThe answer here is that "putting effort into my questions" A lot of questions show people have not done that by either reading manuals or searching SO. Why should a answereer put effort into writing a good answer when the questioner has not shown any effort?
- gilleain 3y agoA broader problem is that some people do not really want one answer to one question but basically some tech support to solve their problem. Either they then ask a series of separate questions (not always fun times) or try to engage in the comments (which then get deleted!).
- infecto 3y agoThe story of SO is pretty interesting. Looks like they only had raised $153M with the last round prior to the acquisition at $1.8billion. I was not even aware that Prosus has purchased them, must have missed it during Covid. Given that news by, I don't find this entirely surprising. Time to squeeze out as much performance as possible from the purchase.
- nicce 3y agoThey still haven't admitted that LLMs have taken their users and the usage of site is dropping?
- xrd 3y agoIs this a canary in the coal mine? I've been following layoffs for the last few years, and it generally seems like ~10% is normal, with larger companies doing a smaller percentage, while startups often layoff 10% or slightly more. 28% is a scary number. I'm betting that everyone on this site has visited StackOverflow at least once. If they cannot figure out a way to weather an incoming storm, then this makes me even less hopeful about tech employment in general. But, then again, SO did get purchased in 2021 by Prosus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosus). Scary times ahead? Or, just more evidence that private equity ruins everything good? Or, an entirely new story that AI is going to rapidly destroy all businesses?
- malfist 3y agoI wouldn't try to read the tea leaves from a single company
- sbarre 3y agoContext matters. We are coming out of a ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) period where debt was effectively free and lots of companies borrowed and grew very quickly (some/many/most probably knowing they might eventually need to shrink back down some amount if the financial climate changed). I have no idea if this was the case with Stack Overflow, do we know how many people they hired in the last 3 years, leading up to this cut?
- contravariant 3y agoAI is a red herring, you would be hiring people to work on that not just firing people working on something else. A common trend in these lay-offs is that I can't for the life of me come up with what those employees would be doing. That combined with a sudden lack of easy money due to rising interests rates and more uncertainty about pretty much everything seems like a simpler explanation for these lay-offs.
- struant 3y agoStackOverflow have already lost completely to ChatGPT. Hiring people to work on AI would just be throwing away that money.
- neilv 3y agoIn this market, can they also expect some people to resign soon, as a direct result of the layoffs?
- neilv 3y agoHow much did the Stack Overflow corpus contribute to the training of GPT-4? (I'm thinking contributed directly, not indirectly, from all the copy&pasting answers into Git repos.)
- icegreentea2 3y agoAm I reading this properly? > As we finish this fiscal year and move into the next, we are focused on investing in our product. As such, we are significantly reducing the size of our go-to-market organization while we do so. Supporting teams and other teams across the organization are impacted as well. This means they're cutting down on new product introductions, and are focusing on generating profit from their existing/deployed products?
- trey-jones 3y agoMarketing in 2023 is truly hilarious. I can't decide whether it's better to get ahead of the news media by announcing your own failure, or to just be as good as you can be to the employees that you have to let go, and not write blog post about it. I know it's the current trend to make a big fuss with a tweet and everything about how much we're going to miss you and all. Somehow I don't think it's really helpful for the newly unemployed. If someone can offer some insight on why we're paying somebody to spend a week thinking about what to call the layoffs ("headcount reduction" lmao), and not continue to pay the actual contributing members of a software team, and especially what the angle is in writing a blog like this instead of quietly taking care of your people, I'm all ears. Is it marketing trying to justify their continued existence? Are we helping the people we're letting go by announcing the flood of (probably experienced) talent into the marketplace? I'm only disparaging this practice a little bit. I genuinely am curious about what the psychologists and market analysts have found about how this is beneficial to the company.
- lionkor 3y agoIt's incredible how this community here, which is mostly against Discord as a Forum because it's not indexed and publically searchable, are so into ChatGPT as opposed to an indexable platform like SO. Yeah, as someone who moderates a 200,000 member community, moderation is difficult. They do a pretty good job considering what amount of shitty, low value, googleable questions they get. What do you all do if ChatGPT's prices rise? Or you're using a technology it knows nothing about? Back to IRC channels and reading docs? Where will you copy paste your code from? Cling to it and hope an alternative comes along, all the while shoving more money into closed models?
- nprateem 3y agoJust keep using 2 year old versions of software it knows about.
- jalapenos 3y agoBack to working out the solution yourself?
- lionkor 3y agoThat's how most of my work and hobby projects go, but I hear there are people copy pasting code and refusing to read documentation. Working it out yourself is always going to be a good way, IMO
- wink 3y agoI think that depends on the problem. My main use of SO is figuring out badly documented DSLs or configurations or magic annotations that have nothing to do with programming per se. I can dig into a language I don't actually know and change a value or fix a trivial bug, as long as it has variables, methods and loops. But I can't guess if @Zorpify is the magic incantation on a method that does something I don't know the name of.
- deltree7 3y ago[dead]
- fmsf 3y agoStackoverflow not having a public whitelabled version was their demise, not having something for a public community that is sellable without having to go through the Area51 provess was their demise. Discourse has been eating their lunch. https://www.discourse.org/customers https://www.discourse.org/customers
- francisofascii 3y agoInteresting given that Jeff Atwood co-founded SO and Discourse.
- xnorswap 3y agoThe post mentions the "successful launch of OverflowAI" which is something I had forgotten existed. For context the HN post for it is below, in which most people here are cynically dismissive of it or just confused about what it is supposed to offer. Is it cynical to wonder what "successful launch" means in this context, or just HN being overly dismissive or out of touch? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36892311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36892311
- PedroBatista 3y agoJust like "the war in [insert country], is responsible for our woes", I feel that "AI™ is making StackOverflow redundant" is very incorrect and short-sighted. Even before this renewed AI frenzy StackOverflow has been failing to build a solid business. They tried ( and apparently failed ) to capitalize on job postings, which IMO is a miss on their part because given the traffic and eyeballs it's the perfect place for that. But either way.. The anal retentive people that we complain about, are the same ones who fed the AI. When they don't have a home to torment us, where will the AI get the answers? Training on code is "cute", but not enough.
- rogerthis 3y agoFor some OSS projects, Q&A has moved to its issues system. Some recommend to ask in SO, but the number of others that are ok with questions seems to be increasing. ChatGPT 3.5 started giving me wrong or not so good answers. So I rarely use it these days.
- A1kmm 3y agoIt looks like they've had quite a few large scale rounds of layoffs: 15% in 2020 (https://www.businessinsider.com/stack-overflow-reduces-workforce-furloughs-layoffs-2020-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/stack-overflow-reduces-workf...), 10% in March this year (https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/05/10/a-message-from-prashanth-chandrasekar-ceo-stack-overflow/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/05/10/a-message-from-prashan...) and now another 28%. That seems like far more than other companies that their employees could choose to work at in total. I imagine that people are now going to demand a premium to work there - they might only be able to attract the kind of people that want to treat it like contract work and expect a premium for insecure work to cover their expenses while they look for the next contract. I imagine this will put the company at a significant disadvantage compared to where it was before. Finding any marginally profitable use for their surplus employees (even if it is building a different product or even taking on some contracting) while they wait for the workforce to shrink through attrition would probably have been better for their company long term.
- francisofascii 3y ago> To our community members and customers reading this note: you are foundational to our success. I love SO, but I really wish it would have become some community funded / non profit entity. Who wants to help these private equity firms?
- cmcaleer 3y agoReally feels like Stack Overflow lost a huge bet for their cultural relevance in how late they were to embracing AI. An idea I saw at the time when ChatGPT was picking up steam was to generate an automatic AI to every question, then have contributors edit/vote up/vote down the AI response - basically treat it like any other response but have it built in. Wonder where it would be if that approach was taken. Instead of anything that, they let mods use a bullshit sniff test, then changed their mind on that and got into an embarrassing war with their mods. Obviously there's a little bit of empathy to be had for the mods in terms of dealing with generated answers, but the answer of banning them outright seemed very kneejerky and a plainly bad idea and entirely ignorant of where the winds were blowing. An awareness of how the mods were responsible for turning SO into the... interesting place it was at the time and being prophylactic about fixing the culture they had created towards the end of the 2010s would have helped prevent this. Instead here we are, a year removed from the beginning of this and it really feels like the Stack Overflow is a much, much smaller part of my life than it once was. Sure, in a few years the training data for GPT will be worse, but it's not like I don't still find Python 2.x answers when clicking on SO links, and I can paste in the new docs, and not worry about whether some random moderator is having a good day or not. It's sad, really. In time we'll see Stack Overflow's decline as preventable (at least to an extent), and view it as a case of what happens when the strong leadership that's needed to disagree with a loud minority is absent. Whatever you think SO should have done, I'm sure that you think what they did end up doing was not what was the best play for them.
- qwertox 3y ago> Over the last 15 years, _we’ve_ built Stack Overflow into an industry-crucial knowledge base for millions of developers and technologists. If you continue reading, he doesn't mention the community as the most important part of the "we" at all. Added as a side-note to not be so obviously greedy: > To our community members and customers reading this note: you are foundational to our success.
- nologic01 3y agoOn other news copilot is uneconomic [1] so one wonders where all this will land. [1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ais-costly-buildup-could-make-early-products-a-hard-sell-bdd29b9f https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ais-costly-buildup-could-make-ea...
- baggachipz 3y agoIn seeking profit, what comes next? Blue checkmarks, paywall, "free speech"?
- TheRealDunkirk 3y ago"The CEO of Stack Overflow reassures the millions of developers who rely on it to do their jobs that its $1.8 billion sale to an investment firm will only help it grow and 'take things up a notch.'" https://www.businessinsider.com/stack-overflow-acquisition-prosus-tencent-shareholder-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/stack-overflow-acquisition-p... Whew! I was really worried that selling out to private equity was going to hurt the company in the relatively-short term. Seriously, American capitalism is increasingly persuading me to be a socialist.
- wink 3y agoEvery time I read something like this I am wondering if I am just missing out or using products the wrong way. Sorry to anyone from SO reading this, but I have been using the site for.. probably 10 years (or how long it has existed) as mostly a reader and there are 2 features. Have the answer to my google search ready. (It's two and not one because I also need to find it) Why the hell does this company even have so many employees? It's a forum and I've not used any new feature. Person A asks questions, Persons B-Z answer. Someone fixes the bugs, updates the dependencies and someone else keeps the hardware and network running. I suppose it's me. I don't need exciting new features, I don't need growth, I don't need an experience. For my needs SO could be run by 3 dude(tte)s in a basement, and as long as it's profitable enough for them, all is fine.
- nojvek 3y agoThey could deny any of the AI bots crawling their content and build their own AI. The way things are going, there’ll be islands of content and AI trained on it. Like how Reddit and Twitter closed crawling of data.
- lawgimenez 3y agoIf SO just invest in their chat feature it could be the Discord of today.