18 ms·
Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%
- sprynr 3y agoAfter 10% back in May, another round is coming through at 28% today.
- gnicholas 3y agoIt's unclear if today is 28% or if that's the whole year. TFA says: > Stack Overflow has laid off 28 percent of its staff over a year after doubling its employee base in a massive hiring push. and > Coding help forum Stack Overflow is laying off 28 percent of its staff as it struggles toward profitability. The linked letter from the CEO says: > This year we took many steps to spend less. Changes have been pursued through the lens of minimizing impact to the lives of Stackers. Unfortunately, those changes were not enough and we have made the extremely difficult decision to reduce the company’s headcount by approximately 28%.
- wredue 3y ago“Stack overflow did not elaborate” A year after a major hiring push? Guessing it’s the “save money by ridding ourselves of expertise” workflow: 1) hire a bunch of fresh blood who are willing to work long hours for no money for some reason 2) get them trained up 3) lay off the expensive senior people 4) lol ceo big bonus
- sprynr 3y agoSounds like engineering caught a break on this one, but overall I wouldn't be surprised.
- schnebbau 3y agoIf the fresh blood can do the same job as the seniors but for less money then why wouldn't you do this?
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoProbably because they can until they can't. You're (a) expecting the new folks to stick around long enough to fully learn the system and (b) that they will have access to all the knowledge around the real tricky parts of the system that they have. A senior dev who has shown he wants to be there is better than 3 new recruits, all day, every day.
- JAlexoid 3y agoI don't know where you are... but my biggest issue with the last few years, was that promotions were handed out left and right. Half of the engineering teams I worked with in the last 3 years should be demoted from being called Senior anything, considering most of them are at most 3-5 years out of college. Just today - a Staff DBA was completely befuddled by the 5000 concurrent connections config parameter on Postgres RDS, when they had the task of making sure that the services stop dropping connections for the last month. My previous job has a "senior" engineer that routinely blocks any attempt to move from an in house NodeJS proxy, because it would cost an extra $70 per month... and for the architectural decisions the explanation is routinely "because I like it".
- ahi 3y agoBecause they can't do the same job as the seniors. An org will crumble if it can't maintain institutional knowledge.
- hanniabu 3y agoAge discrimination
- imchillyb 3y ago> If the fresh blood can do the same job as the seniors but for less money then why wouldn't you do this? Brain Drain, it's a real phenomena that has real economic impact on a surrounding locality, local economy, and state economies. Brain Drain affects companies as well, but by the time they notice Brain Drain has occurred, it's too late to rectify. Hiring for bottom dollar, instead of experience, will increase the the outflow, decrease supporting services in the area, and decrease the available pool of potential employees. It's a cycle that once begun is almost impossible to stop, even with legislation. Here's what our Federal Government, and several States have done to discourage the BD effect. > https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019/4/losing-our-minds-brain-drain-across-the-united-states https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019...
- this_user 3y agoI think you vastly overestimate the level of planning and forethought that the average management is capable of.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoManagement is obviously capable of long-term planning - there just aren't incentives in place for that.
- this_user 3y agoMost of them aren't Machiavellian masterminds though. Most of them are barely passable managers who are mostly just reacting to what is right on front of their noses. Company is growing? Extrapolate linearly, and hire enough people to cover the projected growth over the next 12-18 months. Growth didn't increase linearly, costs have gone up due to inflation, and we can't borrow more cheap money? Lay off a bunch of people to stem the bleeding, hope the company makes it through alive.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago> Most of them aren't Machiavellian masterminds though. They also aren't squirrels. They're capable of foresight.
- wredue 3y agoIt’s a pretty common workflow for big business. Wait till you hear how businesses intentionally pit employees against each other by granting different benefits at different levels so that the majority doesn’t feel as bad about things. This is, for example, how businesses got rid of comprehensive retirement packages.
- VirusNewbie 3y agoSO has languished so much, it’s really sad. There is a definite need here, and yet they seem happy to provide the same service they did 10 years ago while people migrate to LLMs and copilot and GH search and the like.
- BobbyJo 3y agoRight? They were perfectly positioned to profit from the rise of LLMs, and somehow missed the boat (and continue to do so).
- seanthemon 3y agoIt's the Yahoo boogaloo
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- corethree 3y agoThe irony is that for LLMs to continue to exist and stay relevant stackoverflow needs to be used and still exist. If everyone migrates to LLMs then the training data no longer gets updated. The current crop of LLMs will get less and less relevant as things change.
- mywittyname 3y agoPeople will eventually learn how to LLM-optimize their documentation so that questions can be readily answered using it. We might get to the stage where the ability of LLMs to write code / answer questions for a library becomes the primary driver of adoption.
- brycewray 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37898199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37898199
- ddtaylor 3y agoHow do you mess up where your product value is massively derived by unpaid volunteers?
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoThere’s precedent, see CDDB/Gracenote.
- jarym 3y agoMany ways, for instance you could ask Reddit for advice :-)
- slg 3y agoElon might also have some good suggestions on the topic.
- bastardoperator 3y agoI 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.
- Daishiman 3y agoThe moderation policies that lead to this are the product of SO's management.
- vasco 3y agoAgree completely. They did the same thing with discourse. The type of thinking I classify as "I'm smarter than my users". Draconian limits on even slightly adjacent questions in SO are basically the same thinking that led them to prevent posting on a Discourse thread _in private instances_ unless your answer has the number of words they think you should use. And they of course justify it by saying their "research" says this will create a "healthier" community which is of course bullshit.
- yieldcrv 3y agoso long, it was an okay to good decade but that’s it. really good at the beginning. LMs are going to get dated pretty quick if they cant update their models fast enough, completely unknowledgeable of newer frameworks and it becomes more obvious every week in faster moving communities. Really good at the beginning
- jf22 3y agoI'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.
- jasonjmcghee 3y agoAnecdotally, every single time I’ve put effort into answering someone’s question, I got shot down by mods for various reasons despite (generally) being the only answer. Quickly stopped contributing.
- rezistik 3y agoYeah, the moderation became insane. Every question is a duplicate, every answer is moderated out. The answers on github and across the web are always much much better and more up to date. I can't remember the last time SO had the answer I wanted or needed.
- digitalsushi 3y agoreminds me if how i havent added to wikipedia since about 2008
- JAlexoid 3y agoSO is under serious threat from Reddit. Look at your Google results, that are now presenting Reddit much more prominently than a few years ago.
- toddmorey 3y agoI was really thinking they’d be able to train a high quality coding model and connect it back to the community better than anyone since it’s their platform & data.
- tommek4077 3y agoThe source is open in the internet. Everyone can train with the SO-data.
- makingstuffs 3y agoThe 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.
- jayd16 3y agoWhat part is disrespectful? Cutting access is pretty normal.
- ram4jesus 3y agoYeah in my org as soon as you put your two weeks in they send you home for the remainder of the two weeks.
- bigstrat2003 3y agoThat's a common practice, but very foolish. If your employee is at all trustworthy they don't need to have their access revoked (and if they aren't trustworthy they'll just do the damage before they tell you they are leaving). So your org is robbing themselves of employee time without any actual benefit.
- ram4jesus 3y agoYou're preaching to the choir here. The most depressing thing is that people leave, like a forest fire, behind echoes of their impacts but we never really get to give them their flowers. The turnover is so rote and frequent that when the best guy in the team leaves, it's not only just a 'I'm so proud to have ... Thank you guys...' email or slack message, but everyone else is like 'Just Another Monday in Corpo Hell.'
- wizzwizz4 3y agoNote that this is culturally-specific: it's the norm with US companies, I hear, but not so much in parts of Europe.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- miohtama 3y agoStackOverflow peaked in 2014, and has been in decline ever since. This is not related to the recent AI boom, although it may accelerate the decline.
- alternatex 3y agoAs 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.
- busterarm 3y agoAgreed. 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.
- bombcar 3y agoFor 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.
- shippintoboston 3y agoIt 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 second of their downfall.
- ram4jesus 3y agoThey pushed me out when I was a student in Uni struggling with Java 101. And my experience left me shocked that an industry could be so cruel to people trying to learn the ropes and be just another programmer. Luckily, I persevered, and I give back to the programming community by always being kind to the folks that ask me for help; but I always help others offline and not in hostile web forums.
- dehrmann 3y agoI've answered a lot of Java questions on SO. One of the themes is beginner questions, and a lot are essentially "do my homework for me," poorly researched, or poorly asked. What have you tried? What have you researched? Explain your understanding for why you think what you're doing should work. Even if you're asking good beginner questions that don't already have an answer, you get tired of reading all the bad ones. I just signed on and saw this one (#3 in my personalized "new questions"): https://web.archive.org/web/20231016163745/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77303460/code-cant-find-file-even-though-the-path-is-correct-how-do-i-fix-it https://web.archive.org/web/20231016163745/https://stackover... The person asking the question put in minimal effort and showed no concern for people answering. Why am I sifting through your merge sort code when you're asking "why can't it open the file?"
- AlbertCory 3y agoYes, indeed, it takes a superhuman amount of patience and empathy. I don't particularly have those, and it sounds like you don't, either. So your course is just to avoid those, not downgrade them.
- busterarm 3y agoWay 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 products have suffered the worst fates possible from this decision. For years the place seemed like an idea factory where people made great products and now it's basically irrelevant.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bhouston 3y agoI disagree. StackOverflow grew to be many times the size of Fog Creek software. It was highly successful for a time. You can not anticipate back then that AI would train on its Q&A and then provide the same service but fully integrated into IDEs. StackOverflow is being destroyed by Copilot and ChatGPT.
- busterarm 3y agoThe 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 Prosus. Most of Prosus' other investments also look really questionable if we're headed for a global recession like it looks like we are...
- bhouston 3y ago> 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.
- ram4jesus 3y agoGood. 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.
- corethree 3y agoGrow 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.
- ram4jesus 3y agoI 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.
- corethree 3y agoThats 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 give a shit. Stackoverflow is one of the few places on earth where you can ask the dumbest questions with zero consequence. The consequence is just in your head. Better to launch that dumbass question in stackoverflow than on your company slack. I probably have 10 questions with negative points. My highest ranked question was likely the stupidest one I ever asked.
- ram4jesus 3y ago
- NicoJuicy 3y agoStack overflow for teams with an ai bot intregation that trains on external sources would be the killer app though.
- TheRealDunkirk 3y agoI'm absolutely certain that the private equity monstrosity that paided almost $2B for it a couple years back is fervently working on this to recoup their investment.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wizzwizz4 3y agohttps://stackoverflow.co/labs/teams-knowledge-ingestion/ https://stackoverflow.co/labs/teams-knowledge-ingestion/ is kinda the inverse of this: processes internal sources, and outputs Q&A rather than training itself, but it's basically the same thing. Though, note: > * Concepts are mock ups and not actual AI generated content.
- ncann 3y agoThe 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...
- passion__desire 3y agoWhy can't Stackoverflow create queues for questions? E.g. beginners will help novices Mid developers will help beginners It's like that meme where top people help people below them come up
- gregmac 3y agoI think this is a great idea. People can learn a ton by answering questions. Trying to create a complete answer will make you realize the gaps in your own understanding. As an early SO user, I benefited from this greatly. Sadly, I find this impossible these days. I've given up on SO as anything other than a mostly passive user. I'll vote, and make the rare comment, but that's it. The last time (a few years ago) I made a concerted effort to answer some questions, my experience was that many questions would be closed as dupe/low-quality while I was partway through answering. Flagging that it isn't low-quality (proven by the fact I can answer it) goes nowhere -- people are seemingly all too happy to yield their close hammer power, but not to re-open.
- _the_inflator 3y agoI side with you. On the other hand, there seems to be no business case left. You mentioned Wikipedia. I think that WP is highly profitable and even in the times of ChatGPT still is. And does not need such a high staff count.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoAm I the only one that still finds SO to be quite useful? If I paste an error message into Google, it's still quite likely that the SO answer is the best one. And if it doesn't, I contribute an answer if/when I eventually find it because I still think I get more out of SO than I put in. I've received 21 necromancer badges doing that.
- f6v 3y agoIt solves most of my issues. But I the problem for SO is that most helpful pages are from the past.
- mellosouls 3y agoChatGPT generally solves stuff quicker and more precisely for me. I have yet to receive a badge but could add that to the prompt or custom instructions as an alternative to its encouraging words when I'm nearly there.
- radicalbyte 3y agoIt does now. If StackOverflow stopped then it would certainly not be as useful in several years time.
- injidup 3y agoIt will just learn directly from the code suggestions it gives you. Did you use the suggestion it gave you? Did you fix it manually? Did you generate or write a test case that passed for the suggestion. There are many ways for such a system to learn.
- radicalbyte 3y ago..until the next generation comes along who have only ever learned to code with AI doing most of the work....
- sremani 3y ago
- mupuff1234 3y agoWhat I don't understand is why the board never calls for a significant paycut for the CEO alongside layoffs.
- bigstrat2003 3y agoThe same reason the board never does anything to punish CEOs, even when they run the company into the ground. It's a good old boys network where the people on the board are themselves an executive somewhere else, and they want their own boards to take care of them.
- msie 3y agoDid anyone ever interview those harsh SO moderators to see what's their problem?
- motbus3 3y agoThese CEOs are not the brightest. They are seeing their businesses being menaced by AI "stuff" and what they do? They cut on the powerhouse of change. Then they come back with a "let's do more with less etc". Well, to be honest I do not expect them to be that unaware of the situation. They will get their fat check and go away anyway.
- owenversteeg 3y agoIt feels crazy to say this, but I find StackOverflow useless in 2023. It's crazy because ten years ago or even six years ago StackOverflow was everything. There were all the jokes that you couldn't even code without it or that StackOverflow being down would halt all programmers worldwide or whatever and they were for a large part actually true. If you tried to set up a new library or framework or whatever you would eventually run into an issue that would just take way too much time to figure out by yourself and you'd find the solution on StackOverflow in minutes (or ask a question yourself and often get a good answer.) Sure, it was a bit of a hostile community but most of the time if you phrased your question well you'd get a good answer that would solve your problem. You could even use it exclusively - restrict your searches to site:stackoverflow.com and you'd be fine. I found many solutions on StackOverflow that were absolutely not anywhere else on the web. Today, I use a combination of Github issues, documentation and ChatGPT/Copilot - and it's way more powerful than StackOverflow, it's not even close. One underappreciated part is that the rate of change of programming has significantly increased. Two months time today brings more change in our world than a whole year in the 2000s. Not even just AI stuff but also the frequency and magnitude of change in frameworks, best practices, services, APIs... I once learned things from paper books, now by the time you've written and published one it's already outdated. Keeping a massive resource like StackOverflow up to date in 2014 or so required a similarly massive effort, but with today's rate of change it's crazy. I hope they can turn it around but I fear it's already dead.
- bdcravens 3y agoYou are probably correct, but that perspective can be skewed by becoming a better developer and learning more about your language's documentation and how to research.
- ge96 3y agoIf SO indeed does go down as people seem to suggest. At least those copy/mirror sites will be useful now (sad smile). I'm still pro SO over chatGPT
- saos 3y agoThat’s much.
- d357r0y3r 3y agoStack Overflow is really a relic of the past at this point. Libraries and tools change so fast these days, I almost never find what I need on SO. You've got to go into Github issues, get in a discord, or go to some other source to actually find root causes. If you do find something, it's likely to be from 8 years ago, and it's rarely still the "best" answer. I think developer troubleshooting will be reinvented, and almost nothing that SO has built is needed for troubleshooting in 2024/2025. Some leaner or more capable solution will come along that fully leans into LLM-supported search.
- tarokun-io 3y agoSO was such a great tool when it was created and for a long time, but now we have so many options. Collaboration improved in every front, both due to tech improvements and to becoming the default human behavior in all of IT, rather than minorities. And the whole industry has better standards now.
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoSir, you work as a sales representative, we have your employee records here... oh wait, you've been marked as duplicate, there's a guy doing purchasing already employed, you've been deleted!
- pornel 3y agoIt's such a shame they've closed their job board. It was the only decent developer-centric job site. Having a CV connected to SO profile was one place where the Internet Points were actually worth something.
- smsm42 3y agoI can't help but wonder why did they have a massive hiring push recently? I don't remember any huge functional upgrades, the site is pretty much how I remember it being for years. Why double the staff? What were they trying to do? Did they just convert from engineering org to a massive sales org with engineering on the background?
- karmasimida 3y agoStack Overflow can solve one of your problem, but ChatGPT can interactively solve the problem with you. SO bootstrapped ChatGPT but now there is no way going back