It's undeniable that their main developer Q&A site is a really great thing that saved me many hours of work. However, it was somewhat hostile to its more export users from the very beginning: the reputation system favors quickfire replies to grab the first upvotes, and they seem to put a strong emphasis on "cookbook" answers where many of the more nuanced discussions were closed as "opinion based". I think there are some missed opportunities here to make the Q&A site even more useful.
However, perhaps that wasn't their focus. My impression is the Q&A site was supposed to be mostly a gateway to their other services, and for that to work, the Q&A part simply had to be "good enough". It's an interesting strategy that perhaps didn't work out quite the way they had hoped it would.
Their Q&A site was vastly better than what existed at the time, and that's how they won the market. Now, though, it is full of people looking for quick points (as you suggest) -- people that think that the original poster was asking for someone to search Google for 'em -- and I'm convinced that the truly helpful people have moved just given up.
One thing I've noticed, that drives me crazy, is people demanding more information in response to a question, without any intention of using that information to help find an answer. Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. I don't mean to suggest that more details aren't useful, only that it isn't helpful in any way to ask for more information if you don't intend to follow up. (Perhaps that could be improved by allowing those sorts of requests to be sent privately, and without any chance of generating points?)
Why would you fire people on such a short notice? No need to hand over things? No interest in providing at least some time to look for a new job?
EDIT: To clarify that a bit, I am interested in what the upsides are except for possibly saving some money. An orderly shutdown usually seems preferable to me over quickly killing the process, for both sides.
Depends on country too. In EU our work laws regulate how your employee may be laid off. My country (poland) says that employee has to be notified about termination:
- week ahead if he or she was employed for less than month
- month ahead if he or she was employed for less than three years
- three months ahead if he or she was employed for more than three years
This goes both ways however, as employee has to notify his employeer on same basis that he or she quits. This introduces amount of games to recruitment process, where company frequently not only has to make bet by deciding to hire somebody, but also make sure that they'll wont be outbid during the three months that have to pass for person to change employeer
This probably depends a lot on the industry but my mom works at a grocery store and the reason they give short notices (as short as allowed by law) is because of the work moral. In Germany, there is no such thing as sick days, you can take off as long as you need if you are sick and have a doctors notice (which is mostly free or very inexpensive because of public healthcare). Most of the time someone is laid off, this person will suddenly become sick for most of their remaining time. When they come to work, they often procrastinate a lot more and get little to no work done. This means, once they have been given notice, they barely work and the employer can do very little. They cannot get fired (because they already are) and have to keep paying them for that duration. The same also often happens when the employee gives notice.
While the employer can take legal action and sue them, proving that someone is sick is rather difficult (and frowned upon by most judges). There are many cases where my mother's employer could have easily proven that (because witnesses same him partying or there are even pictures online where he partied on that day) but it is generally not worth it because a trail is more expensive then paying one month's pay and also not worth the time and overhead.
Not everyone takes work very seriously, unfortunately, which makes the process suck for everybody. When my mother's boss has an opportunity to fire them eithout notice (because they are late or caught steeling), he generally does that, which is super unfair for the employees who would have worked until their very last.
Maybe the pressure was slowly building up from investors/board. They wanted the returns, profit, path to IPO , VC's carry for the Nth largest site of the internet.
Correct. Remember ROLES are made redundant, not people. If the role no longer exists then by definition there's nothing to handover.
If there is a handover then there better also be a big chunk of cash to the departing worker in return for waiving the right to sue, because if there isn't, it's tribunal time.
Let's say that the law requires a 90 day notice. Maybe you can fire them today--as long as you pay them for 90 days while they sit at home. The spirit of the law is that you have sometime to look for another job so it's all covered.
My point is that we don't know the details, a tweet is way too short.
Why would you give notice? Leaving people dangling for weeks while you figure out who will be cut is worse than making the decision, telling them it's effective immediately and giving a fair severance package so they can immediately start looking.
The short notice is if the work is going away. It's an independent decision from how well they'll treat people going away. My most recent fund was similar - once they decided someone should go, they preferred to pull the trigger very quickly even if the severance was generous. (There's a toll on the org for having people stick around with negative attitude)
I tried to hire through them recently. It was a joke of a process. More like the way uaed cars are sold. Don't contact us, we'll contact you. No price displayed, we negotiate that depending on how much you can afford. The sign up system simply didn't work, saying I had already signed up but then the next button simply didn't work. They did get back to me a week later.
This completely change my view. I went from wanting to use them to advertise for people to work here with like minds to a detractor.
I had the exact same experience recently. I was credit-card-in-hand ready to pay $500+ for a job posting on their site, but there was no way to do so. Then when they finally called me back, they gave me this story of how they were "didn't want to be thought of as a job postings site as they were far more than that" and said the only thing they would sell is subscriptions of multiple job postings a year. I ended up posting on some competing sites - I'm surprised they're willing to lose out on willing customers like this!
Surprised no one has mentioned StackOverflow Docs, which was recently shut down as a failure. I unfortunately panned it at launch but it seems they devoted significant resources to the dead product.
I remember reaching out to them a bunch of years ago (2012 or so) in order to ask them to host a stack overflow sub-site for our product (from a sizeable company). We were willing to pay quite a lot (because they had the premier UX for this kind of thing), but they weren't at all interested. They just told us to try to grow things "organically", because they had decided to focus 100% on open stuff.
We weren't really interested in their google juice, all we wanted was their actual functionality. Some non-stackoverflow domain would have been fine.
It just seemed like a missed opportunity on their end. I don't think we were the only company asking for this kind of service...
Edit: while interesting, this (private internal instance for your team) is not what johansch is after (separate public instance dedicated to your product, for your users)
I'm doing project in a similar vein right now, but in a totally different space. We call it the "Spotify model" where you host your stuff intermixed with ours, with the option to query just ours or just yours.
Good times - having to write a huge authentication / middleware layer to make sure everything is correct.
It's been interesting watching SO try to monetize.
I wonder: How would people feel if they went the Wikipedia way? It's obviously a very beneficial site, but not as widely applicable as Wikipedia. I personally prefer the Wikipedia model of being ad-free and having no additional product and doing a fundraising drive every so often. PBS as well.
That said, I certainly think given the audience of SO that there are several opportunities for them, so it'll be interesting to see what works.
Very sorry to hear SO is financially in trouble. Also sorry for the people who lost their jobs. SO offers a valuable service. Sad to hear they can't monetize enough.
Edit: Reminds me of the situation of SoundCloud (company offering a service loved by their consumers, still can't monetize enough to satisfy investors, let alone cover the costs (huge headcount))
I'm sure they make TONS of money from ad revenue. Probably they tried to generate other revenue streams but it just didn't work out and hence the layoff.
Here's a crazy idea: what if Stackoverflow developed a search engine for developers? Usually I get to Stackoverflow posts through Google but perhaps Stackoverflow can provide a better experience by doing code specific web crawling.
I think they've been primarily monetizing with their careers section. The listings, last I checked, are entirely paid, and they have (at least had?) a sales team dedicated to them.
Of all questions I've asked on Stack Overflow, 50% were eventually answered by myself (and some became pretty popular after that) and 5% was answered by someone else. 45% is still open.
Good to see them back to a focus. I guess hiring could be a good cash cow but all of the sub communities are a bit much.
I think an interesting path for stackoverflow would be to provide live channels for technology support and conversation. A bit like public slacks.
I remember a few technologies that officially said something like "support is provided through custom stackoverflow tags", but it didn't bring more functionalities.
A company trying to launch its new technology (i can imagine asp.net core for example) could have an associated community channel to talk about it, with automatic links from tags. That would be a nice addition.
Good. In the past year they have become very preachy about exact which political opinions the tech community is allowed to have, and how they are to express them.
My limit was the "Time to take a stand incident" when Joel effectively dictated that the developer community of StackOverflow must agree with the statement.
> Carving up the world into ... nations ... is both morally repugnant and frankly stupid
The follow up of mods keeping the post open, backing it up and enforcing that idea on other questions really hammered home the idea that StackOverflow belongs to them, regardless of whatever they might say.
There was no room for nuance, just an American-centric political orthodoxy you must follow or aren't welcome.
[+] [-] codeflo|8 years ago|reply
However, perhaps that wasn't their focus. My impression is the Q&A site was supposed to be mostly a gateway to their other services, and for that to work, the Q&A part simply had to be "good enough". It's an interesting strategy that perhaps didn't work out quite the way they had hoped it would.
[+] [-] hehheh|8 years ago|reply
One thing I've noticed, that drives me crazy, is people demanding more information in response to a question, without any intention of using that information to help find an answer. Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. I don't mean to suggest that more details aren't useful, only that it isn't helpful in any way to ask for more information if you don't intend to follow up. (Perhaps that could be improved by allowing those sorts of requests to be sent privately, and without any chance of generating points?)
[+] [-] danbruc|8 years ago|reply
EDIT: To clarify that a bit, I am interested in what the upsides are except for possibly saving some money. An orderly shutdown usually seems preferable to me over quickly killing the process, for both sides.
[+] [-] Ralfp|8 years ago|reply
- week ahead if he or she was employed for less than month - month ahead if he or she was employed for less than three years - three months ahead if he or she was employed for more than three years
This goes both ways however, as employee has to notify his employeer on same basis that he or she quits. This introduces amount of games to recruitment process, where company frequently not only has to make bet by deciding to hire somebody, but also make sure that they'll wont be outbid during the three months that have to pass for person to change employeer
[+] [-] Matt3o12_|8 years ago|reply
While the employer can take legal action and sue them, proving that someone is sick is rather difficult (and frowned upon by most judges). There are many cases where my mother's employer could have easily proven that (because witnesses same him partying or there are even pictures online where he partied on that day) but it is generally not worth it because a trail is more expensive then paying one month's pay and also not worth the time and overhead.
Not everyone takes work very seriously, unfortunately, which makes the process suck for everybody. When my mother's boss has an opportunity to fire them eithout notice (because they are late or caught steeling), he generally does that, which is super unfair for the employees who would have worked until their very last.
[+] [-] rando444|8 years ago|reply
We know nothing about severance, job assistance, etc. You can't really infer anything about this subject from that tweet.
[+] [-] srcmap|8 years ago|reply
From the https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow, the first round was from 2010 - 7 years ago. USV will like to get their exit soon.
[+] [-] Selfcommit|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogruck|8 years ago|reply
Labor seeks regulations that makes it difficult to be suddenly terminated. The primary downside is that companies are reluctant to hire employees.
[+] [-] gaius|8 years ago|reply
Correct. Remember ROLES are made redundant, not people. If the role no longer exists then by definition there's nothing to handover.
If there is a handover then there better also be a big chunk of cash to the departing worker in return for waiving the right to sue, because if there isn't, it's tribunal time.
[+] [-] tryingagainbro|8 years ago|reply
My point is that we don't know the details, a tweet is way too short.
[+] [-] valuearb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ProAm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mianos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwenderlich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colmcg|8 years ago|reply
(Disclaimer: I work @ Indeed, but I've seen friends quickly hired using Prime.)
[+] [-] doublerebel|8 years ago|reply
StackOverflow Sunsetting Documentation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14917765
Why I think they targeted the wrong market:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12399438
tl;dr:
- it doesn't make sense to donate open-source docs to an offsite corporate service that might shut down
- also, the very common complaint that SO has poor moderation, groupthink doesn't work for docs like it does for one-topic answers
[+] [-] johansch|8 years ago|reply
We weren't really interested in their google juice, all we wanted was their actual functionality. Some non-stackoverflow domain would have been fine.
It just seemed like a missed opportunity on their end. I don't think we were the only company asking for this kind of service...
[+] [-] gumoro|8 years ago|reply
https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise
Edit: while interesting, this (private internal instance for your team) is not what johansch is after (separate public instance dedicated to your product, for your users)
[+] [-] dyeje|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] baud147258|8 years ago|reply
https://stackoverflow.com/channels
[+] [-] NDizzle|8 years ago|reply
Good times - having to write a huge authentication / middleware layer to make sure everything is correct.
[+] [-] nerfhammer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JosephLark|8 years ago|reply
I wonder: How would people feel if they went the Wikipedia way? It's obviously a very beneficial site, but not as widely applicable as Wikipedia. I personally prefer the Wikipedia model of being ad-free and having no additional product and doing a fundraising drive every so often. PBS as well.
That said, I certainly think given the audience of SO that there are several opportunities for them, so it'll be interesting to see what works.
[+] [-] submeta|8 years ago|reply
Edit: Reminds me of the situation of SoundCloud (company offering a service loved by their consumers, still can't monetize enough to satisfy investors, let alone cover the costs (huge headcount))
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|8 years ago|reply
Seeing this post also made me realize I have no clue how the company makes money.
[+] [-] nicodjimenez|8 years ago|reply
Here's a crazy idea: what if Stackoverflow developed a search engine for developers? Usually I get to Stackoverflow posts through Google but perhaps Stackoverflow can provide a better experience by doing code specific web crawling.
[+] [-] jlericson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexobenauer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rando444|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h1d|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dep_b|8 years ago|reply
Good to see them back to a focus. I guess hiring could be a good cash cow but all of the sub communities are a bit much.
[+] [-] the_common_man|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsaul|8 years ago|reply
I remember a few technologies that officially said something like "support is provided through custom stackoverflow tags", but it didn't bring more functionalities.
A company trying to launch its new technology (i can imagine asp.net core for example) could have an associated community channel to talk about it, with automatic links from tags. That would be a nice addition.
[+] [-] legostormtroopr|8 years ago|reply
My limit was the "Time to take a stand incident" when Joel effectively dictated that the developer community of StackOverflow must agree with the statement.
> Carving up the world into ... nations ... is both morally repugnant and frankly stupid
The follow up of mods keeping the post open, backing it up and enforcing that idea on other questions really hammered home the idea that StackOverflow belongs to them, regardless of whatever they might say.
There was no room for nuance, just an American-centric political orthodoxy you must follow or aren't welcome.
[1]https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take...
[+] [-] pmoriarty|8 years ago|reply
Is anyone archiving them and making the archives available in any useful way?
[+] [-] JasonPunyon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luis_espinoza|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbob2000|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] submeta|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baud147258|8 years ago|reply
-The failure of the documentation (which failed for various reasons)
-VCs who want their return on their precious dollars.
[+] [-] rusk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jmkni|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badhombres|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sklivvz1971|8 years ago|reply
So sorry to hear this. My thoughts to everyone, it is a very difficult day.