Am 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.
Way 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.
> Way 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.
I was at Fog Creek (FC) while some of these decisions were made. There are a few missing pieces here that may help it make more sense.
The model was for FC to act as an incubator and fund other projects on the backs of FogBugz and Kiln. I'm more familiar with Trello, but with SO I'm sure the idea was the same: when you take VC, you are committing to a very specific model: burn cash on getting as large as possible.
The goal with Fog Creek was to _not do that_. So, rather than having FC take funding, Trello was spun out and raised as it's own entity.
FC employees received equity (in lieu of profit sharing) in these products.
The last product to come out of FC was the result of a few competing teams working on different projects. Glitch (nee Hyperdev) was.. not a great idea, with not a great team on it.
A leadership change shortly after the focus on Glitch led to (more-or-less) the complete collapse and acquihire of it by Fastly.
> 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.
I guess it depends on your measure. FC employees made money. I regret what FC was turned into at the end.
I 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.
I'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.
Anecdotally, 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.
Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff. Like they’ve lost all their authors or at least they’re not being indexed by Google.
The 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...
I agree. It can be a Q&A site where you ask a question and get an answer, or it can be an FAQ style reference wiki where all the questions and answers are perfect and people edit any answer. It can't be both, but it seems like they just can't decide which it should be.
I 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.
The 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.
Sadly being "the most efficient in their department" doesn't always mean anything in layoffs. Whole departments and teams come and go, and salaries are also a concern (e.g. 20 year vet vs 5 year mid level with half the salary)
I 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.
Grow 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.
It 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.
You 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.
As 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.
It'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.
SO 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.
Sir, 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!
It'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%.
The 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.
I 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?
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shippintoboston|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] busterarm|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ozr|2 years ago|reply
I was at Fog Creek (FC) while some of these decisions were made. There are a few missing pieces here that may help it make more sense.
The model was for FC to act as an incubator and fund other projects on the backs of FogBugz and Kiln. I'm more familiar with Trello, but with SO I'm sure the idea was the same: when you take VC, you are committing to a very specific model: burn cash on getting as large as possible.
The goal with Fog Creek was to _not do that_. So, rather than having FC take funding, Trello was spun out and raised as it's own entity.
FC employees received equity (in lieu of profit sharing) in these products.
The last product to come out of FC was the result of a few competing teams working on different projects. Glitch (nee Hyperdev) was.. not a great idea, with not a great team on it.
A leadership change shortly after the focus on Glitch led to (more-or-less) the complete collapse and acquihire of it by Fastly.
> 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.
I guess it depends on your measure. FC employees made money. I regret what FC was turned into at the end.
[+] [-] bhouston|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chatmasta|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(New_York_company)
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jf22|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonjmcghee|2 years ago|reply
Quickly stopped contributing.
[+] [-] kalleboo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JAlexoid|2 years ago|reply
Look at your Google results, that are now presenting Reddit much more prominently than a few years ago.
[+] [-] latchkey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huytersd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maldev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncann|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] passion__desire|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] IshKebab|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _the_inflator|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makingstuffs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willsmith72|2 years ago|reply
Sadly being "the most efficient in their department" doesn't always mean anything in layoffs. Whole departments and teams come and go, and salaries are also a concern (e.g. 20 year vet vs 5 year mid level with half the salary)
[+] [-] ddtaylor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarym|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bastardoperator|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notsurenymore|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loloquwowndueo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wredue|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ram4jesus|2 years ago|reply
SO made their bed. Enjoy the snark, mistreatment, and power trips while it lasts. There are definitely gentler and better communities out there.
[+] [-] corethree|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] matkoniecz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] owenversteeg|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miohtama|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alternatex|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pornel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VirusNewbie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BobbyJo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corethree|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sprynr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|2 years ago|reply
> 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%.
[+] [-] mupuff1234|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigstrat2003|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ge96|2 years ago|reply
I'm still pro SO over chatGPT
[+] [-] brycewray|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sprynr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|2 years ago|reply