StackOverflow: Sunsetting Jobs and Developer Story by April 2022
meta.stackoverflow.com
meta.stackoverflow.com
Every hiring manager I talked with shared how SO Jobs was the best place to reach developers. I reached out to a few people at StackOverflow to get a sense of why they are shutting down this product that did very well.
I didn't get real answers beyond "we don't think job boards are the future" which I don't fully buy, given the success on both the employer, and the candidate side. What might be the case is the growth in profit was not what Stack Overflow hoped for, and this is why they are retiring these parts.
My suspicion is that Stack Overflow expects to make 10x more revenue with enterprise branding services (effectively not allowing just job posting, but you need to buy a large package that has other things bundled that you need to get if you want to access something like this job board).
Note that with this change Stack Overflow effectively locks out all small and medium-sized businesses from working with them. Starting from the middle of 2021, I heard they were not onboarding companies with less than 1,000ish employees to the job board either.
It makes perfect financial sense for Stack Overflow, if they are indeed making the change to maximise revenue collected from employers. However, there will be a large gap on the market for startups, small and mid-size companies who will not qualify - and will not have the budget - for the "employee branding services" SO will keep providing (but does not share details on).
[1] https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1457665269267116034?...
Whatever the reason they shut it down, that's not it
99% of people use LinkenIn and job postings shared there from company job sites. Recruiters I know want fewer things to interact with and search. And I’ve seen great talent from good sourcers just using LinkedIn to find people…
I ghost job offers on LinkedIn because it’s a dumpster fire. I’ve applied to jobs on StackOverflow because I know I’m cutting through the entire bullshit process. Those companies might ghost me, but the point remains that it’s insane to think there’s no value in being a job advertising platform people actually want to apply to adverts on.
Recruiters in tech are worse than useless, they don’t know anything and shovel useless candidates into a pipeline that has to develop Byzantine things like white boarding and other performative hoops to filter the junk candidates out. Between Stack Overflow and GitHub I shouldn’t need more than one interview maybe two if it’s a large company where you can’t get everyone relevant into one meeting, and the only point of that meeting should be a basic culture fit appraisal and working out that Im not a dog or three cats in a trench coat pretending to be a human.
A desire to have an electric roadster used to be extremely niche, but Tesla Motors had trouble fulfilling all the orders for their new and rather raw $70k car. If those craving it only had $15k as a rule, that likely won't fly.
Some recruiters are useless, but those few I worked with were very good and clueful, and landed me a great job.
I met some of them on LinkedIn. I had to filter through some slack, but the efficiency of that was far from negligible.
I also applied to a few jobs via SO Jobs; they were reasonably interesting, but none worked, alas. The amount of interest which my SO Jobs profile attracted was an order of magnitude lower than what I received via LinkedIn, and even lower than the number of direct emails from people finding my resume on the internet.
Most likely this statement is a proxy for "it doesn't make enough money." Which is reasonable, but I think that is more difficult to say publicly.
While a small group of users liked it, it clearly did not have traction in the greater community.
as a job seeker being told “you’re gonna have the upper hand here” is amazing, as a recruiter it makes it very difficult to sell to unless you really own the market.
Turns out that developers really appreciate a no-bullshit approach with: - mandatory salary brackets
- full tech stack and easy filtering
- our own dev maturity test (what tests do they write, do they have dedicated QAs, etc)
It enables us to quickly grow to over 60'000 monthly visitors (combined) and the companies are also more than happy to advertise.
For anyone interested:
- US: https://devitjobs.us
- Europe: https://devitjobs.uk, https://swissdevjobs.ch, https://germantechjobs.de
Companies would do basically everything to reach the developers, so I this would be a perfect match.
What I never understood about SO is that there are so many ways to help companies & contributors connect. Why stop at job boards?
What if you're a company that really needs a certain type of developer and you wanted to send a targeted email/notification/etc to those in the top 5% answering those questions? I know from being in the top 3% myself I'd love to opt-in to this feature.
Or perhaps a referral system in which somebody might come across your profile via an answer, comment, etc and would have an option to say "Ask if interested in work?". Again, would love to peruse offers.
What about a bounty system that allows companies to sponsor / put real money on questions instead of imaginary internet points? Bounties always were so unrewarding. I'd answer a question for $25-50 instead of 50/500 internet points if it didn't take too long.
Stack Overflow has somewhat failed the contributors just like other big platforms like YouTube/TikTok/etc have in the past. If 90% of people consume content on the site, 9% contribute, and 1% create, why is there not even consideration for incentivizing those in the 10%? Job boards was a start, but sadly now it is an end.
- mostly good companies putting their ads
- often salary transparency
- nice visually and on whole UX level
- integration with SO tags and profiles of existing workers
SO was a page that naturally felt to fit this kind of use case. I'm kinda sad.
I like that the ads list comp (god, that saves a bunch of everyone's time) but I never checked them again after that. Dunno if they knocked that off or kept doing it.
And from his LinkedIn bio: Lead an amazing global organization of Stackers who are passionate about making a difference in our community.
This kind of corporate language ("growth for us as a company", "leverage our unique position", "passionate about making a difference in our community") is how you know SO is run by some outside executive who came in after the company was already a success.
I'm now stuck with linkedin, which is frankly poo
I don’t think that employers, these days, actually spend time researching applicant bona fides, instead, relying on background check contractors (that probably avoid sites directly recommended by applicants), and interview-time whiteboard tests.
At $500 an ad a small company needs to justify that purchase - especially when finding someone may take six months and 8 ads. Of course StackOverflow Jobs won't be the choice for that sort of talent search at $500 per ad.
They should have made job ads $50 each and advertised the price up front.
It is worth noting that in the current economic conditions job ads are dramatically less effective because there is a shortage of developers and because recruiters are now contacting candidates directly. That said, job ads are not dead - job ads need to adjust to the market conditions. Job ads used to be worth $500, now they are worth $50 - that's how the recruiting market has changed.
At the moment it is extremely hard to find developers - this results in lots and lots of job ads.
StackOverflow management are clearly inexperienced/incompetent in the recruiting field if they can't capitalise on this in the current environment.
What a waste.
But companies do not equate the $20,000 recruiting fee with the cost of ads.
Small companies - startups and also large companies and HR departments actually look at the price of their recruiting tools.
To find someone I would ideally like to advertise across every available channel - that means ads on 3 or four job sites such as SO, LinkedIn and also local board.
Simply not possible to include SO in that sort of campaign at $500/ad.
Seems they are not buying them..... not enough anyway.
> I wish this post would include some bold warning, like "Hey, go to your https://stackoverflow.com/users/story/current and export it, because you know, we're killing CVs".
Too bad, they are shutting down the first place I would have looked for a new job.
I got a really nice job through it once by searching for niche technologies.
In recent times I had a look and the first job I see was from my first company, which I never thought would be advertising there. I phoned my ex-boss to complain: this is like going to a party and having your ex girlfriend opening the door.
They are right abou something: it's hard to find interesting jobs. Maybe we are asking too much. Maybe we just feel so much untapped potential.
And the notifications that you could define were nice, also attaching to your already established profiles is decent too.
Shame to lose it, just wonder was the maintenance costing more than the income from it. But that would seem strange!
Stack overflow = dictionary for developers. Very few would be visiting it with a job hunting mindset.
Recruiters/headhunters are predominantly on LinkedIn, they won't bother with other platforms. Company employer branding teams will use it though as long as the cost isn't as gouging as it was.
Unlike "expertsexchange", SO is really useful though.
"experts" "exchange" was a site like stackoverflow but created before SO and had horrible ads and that very unfortunate name.
And heaven forbid you need a less than normal use case, you'll get people who ignore that you have external limitations and respond with "Well, I know you asked about using stupid library in X, but that's been deprecated and you need to use smart library in X, or really just switch programming languages."
The most highly rated questions, there are some real nuggets, would just get closed today.
That generates traffic and reinforces the dominant position.
But +1 on "stupid library". Most of the time the poster must use it, company standard or big legacy system. Once in a while it's useful advice.
What alternatives are there?