StackOverflow is bleeding money and for some reason has over 500 employees, a big number for a Q&A forum with an interface that's barely changed in a decade.
AI has cut into their profits so they're attempting to integrate it into their own search (ask a bot a question and get an answer). Sadly this hasn't helped much and so they've just fired 28% of their staff, only a few months after firing 10%.
Included in the layoffs are community managers (aka paid jannies), who are surely happy to be freed from what must be the worst job in the world (interacting with the insufferable unpaid jannies who hate every decision that their overlords make).
The announcement of the firings is on -197, let's see what the unpaid jannies think:
"The community isn't going anywhere." Well, they might go somewhere else if you keep firing all their beloved community managers and other Q&A teams... everyone left on the Community team now has, what, 3 years of experience with this community or less?
Oh no how can anyone be expected to moderate a Q&A forum with less than 3 years experience?
My favourite SO user Zoe is on strike (before you ask, yes they are) has a lot to say even though they're still meant to be on strike:
why, over the past two firings (and previous rounds), have you eliminated the CMs and other employees who were among the largest advocates for the community and who, in some of the worse periods, were the only communication channel with the company?
All these CMs do is get shit on by people like Zoe, arguing over pointless metadrama that doesn't impact any of the site's actual users in any way.
Someone thinks the world is ending:
It's worth considering that the biggest project that's set back is trust. Trust built over years - lost, points of contact we were familiar with no longer exist.
The practical effects are very much loss, sorrow and frankly a loss in confidence
From our vantage point, things look bleak. Really bleak. This dystopian view is not just a view, it's how we are living this relationship with SO. And this is very real, it's not simply a fleeting moment.
What will become of the development projects that Catija and other devs were involved in? There were some initiatives (such as mod tooling) she was acting as liaison on in the SO mod room.
How can I do it for free without tools?
Stack Overflow became what it is today because it was able to attract top-tier talent across all areas, both as employees and as volunteer content creators on the site. Top talent is choosy about where they work, and will choose to work where they feel respected and working on things they love. I hope that the company treated all laid off employees with the respect and compassion they deserve, and this is one important measure of that.
lol "top-tier" unpaid jannies, sure sure.
Meanwhile millions of people are Googling "how to sort list python" every day and copying the top answer from SO, unaffected by all of this meta-nonsense.
I hate SO jannies so so much, I can't believe SO hasn't realised that it would be easier to get rid of them and hire a small number of paid jannies. The site moderates itself with flags + downvotes, unpaid jannies are irrelevant.
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What's going on with tech companies lately. Are they all really losing money, or just pooping themselves over The Event which they're expecting to happen soon
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Interest rates as set by the Fed were very low this past decade-ish. This meant debt was cheap so venture caps were throwing cheap money at tech companies hoping one would actually be a good investment eventually
Now that interest rates have risen and debt is more expensive, the money tap has stopped and these companies have to tighten the belt and try to actually turn a profit now.
And of course there is the larger context that the stock market is going to
any day/week/month now
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Easy money and good times cause malinvestment, malinvestment causes recessions, and recessions kill off the bad ideas and spare the good.
But we keep intervening with inflationary easy money during the recessions and don't let them fulfill their purpose.
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Surely this time Drumpf is finished! Any year now...
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There's been a culture of waste for a while. Companies hired massive pools of engineers, mostly in the hope that one of those bros would stumble across the next big thing. Once growth starts to decline r&d is the first thing to go.
Couple that with workers doing non-jobs where they do little work and the bloat became extreme. Twitter demonstrated that you can toss all that out and lose very little, so the rest are following suit.
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