RIP Stack Overflow Jobs | Hacker News Reader

RIP Stack Overflow Jobs

blog.tdwright.co.uk

122 pointssigna1156 comments

Oh no! This makes me sad. I got my first job (what started my whole career) using SO Jobs. It was brand new back in the day (Feb 2012). I was a self-taught kid from an underdeveloped country (Argentina) and had the "audacity" to apply for a job at an American company. It COMPLETELY changed my life (had a salary in US Dollars, learned about startups, started my own company and sold it years after).

I am still very grateful to my first employers, coworkers and, at some extent, grateful to StackOverflow for such a simple and nerd-oriented platform back then.

> While Talent & Jobs helped us get to where we are over the past decade, the talent acquisition space is not one where we have a strong competitive advantage.

Ah, I'd consider the arguably most visited site by software developers would have a strong competitive advantage in advertising jobs for software developers.

SO is owned by some equity firm that owns a third of tencent. It’s a blip to them.

Elaborating on the parent's info - the PE firm is Prosus, which is owned by Naspers.

Naspers is a South African conglomerate / investment firm that has been dabbling in tech investments for decades and started out initially in publishing a century ago. They bought 46.5% of Tencent in 2001 for something like $34 million.

They've gradually sold some of the Tencent and still hold around 1/3 of it. And now they're up to this:

"[May 2021] Prosus, the European-based technology listed subsidiary of South African giant Naspers, has bought 49.5% of its parent, in a move widely considered a means of moving the hugely valuable one-third stake of mobile giant Tencent from Africa into Europe. ... The Amsterdam-based Prosus would remain under Naspers control, through its controlling stake in Prosus, but both firms believe it will increase both of their valuations. Prosus is Europe’s largest internet company and believes this transaction will also double its free float to $100 billion, which it argues will increase its liquidity, market index weightings and trading dynamics."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tobyshapshak/2021/05/13/prosus-...

I feel like. Job seeking / sourcing seems to be one of those problems that are never "solved" very well by tech. Does anyone have any idea or summary of why that is? just out of curiousity

Would you really like it solved by tech the way other problems were "solved" by tech?

Do you really want a couple of large tech companies to control your ability to get hired for most jobs with no customer service and automated bans at their discretion?

Tinder for jobs!

You liked a company which liked you in return, now you both can go to interview.

Any VC's there? I need a few millions to make it reality.

I think I read somewhere a story about someone actually finding a job on actual tinder.

It's that basically Hired?

No. I cannot like companies where I want to work, so I will be spammed by recruiters with sheety jobs which are hard to fill.

Now, we need a Tinder for investments.

Because mostly it's still 1-1 interactions that can't be automated.

Exactly. We have a 1-many model for hiring people as well… body shops that are both inhumane and rife with fraud and abuse.

The people who pay for ads are recruiters and Stack Overflow is not the most visited site by recruiters.

The loss of Jobs is terrible. I don't know of other platforms where you can easily filter for showsSalary && isRemote, has such detailed tech stack per job posting, such little friction to make a CV and apply - and most importantly, so many real postings from worldwide companies.

I can't fathom how they could not make a profit out of this, on freaking SO.

itjobswatch.co.uk isn't the same, but isnt terrible.

Is it UK only? I couldn't easily find how to filter by what I'd mentioned on mobile.

Yes, UK only sadly

Actually we have all the features that you mention - I posted the links to our job boards in another comment.

I was actually referring to developer story with that CV thing, sorry, but most importantly it's not clear to me how or on which of your websites to apply if I were, say, a Colombian developer, and how to filter for jobs who'd accept such workers.

Also on mobile there's a few CSS overlapping items, just FYI it hurts the image of the site a lot.

Thanks for the feedback, working on fixing it!

As for the first question: it depends on which country do you target, essentially on each site you can filter to find remote roles and some roles that offer Visa Sponsorship (which is important in case you would like to move to Europe)

Stack Overflow Jobs is one of the great quality sources for curating remote jobs for my job board.

It's unfortunate that they are killing the Salary Calculator[1].

If any company looking for alternatives for featuring the remote job openings, I'm happy to onboard you [2]

[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary

[2] - https://twitter.com/abinaya_rl

What would be your recommendations for the other side of the table?

I'll finish university in November and was starting to get ready for job hunting...

Thank you!

What I always liked about SO jobs was it was tech centric, so you could filter on language or tool. It also seemed to have more "transparent" posts in terms of salary, benefits, and dev practices. What are good alternatives to SO jobs?

We run a few Developer-dedicated job boards[1] with focus on transparency and:

- mandatory salary information (with real brackets and no $1 - $1M)

- our own engineering test (do they have proper CI/CD, write tests, have QAs, etc.)

- full tech stack information

[1] The sites are per country:

- US: https://devitjobs.us

- UK: https://devitjobs.uk

- Netherlands: https://devitjobs.nl

- Switzerland: https://swissdevjobs.ch/

- Germany: https://germantechjobs.de/en/

- Romania: https://devjob.ro/en/

There is also this site (not affiliated) which lists over 70 alternative job boards:

https://stackoverflowjobsalternatives.com/

I don’t see an option for filtering by salary. Unless it’s just missing from mobile web

It's not there yet but planned to be added in the future. Convincing companies to publish real salary brackets is not an easy task and therefore we also want to balance it a bit.

So you don't have the same features.

We have a different approach: we require each company to publish salary brackets - which was not the case for StackOverflow - it was voluntary there.

I see you guys don't list Clojure under tech stack, which is a bit absurd as it's consistently one of the highest paying and highest job satisfaction languages year after year in software engineer surveys.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-top-p...

It is available in the advanced filters. The reason it is not in the main filters: there are too few jobs with Clojure.

I couldn't help but notice how similar those sites are to this Polish one:

https://justjoin.it/?tab=with-salary

are you in any way affiliated with them?

No, not affiliated.

I used to like SO jobs for the same reasons. Otta https://otta.com/ seems good to me, no recruiter spam, more salary ranges than other sites.

Bad move.

It was a perfect fit for SO, and I used the dev story as a CV replacement. Helped me get my last three jobs. I was hoping to find out why they're doing this from the article, but I really didn't, and I don't get it. Oh well. Still not getting a LinkedIn.

Discussion on the SO meta announcement:

"StackOverflow: Sunsetting Jobs and Developer Story by April 2022" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023343 (9 days ago | 78 comments)

Stack Overflow says [1] they're going to focus on helping companies execute their Employer Branding Strategy [2] through advertising.

This makes sense on one level:

* Employers are paying Stack Overflow, not candidates. Employers are therefore the real customers.

* Employers want to look unique to candidates, not like "just another job posting"

* Employers want to feed candidates into their recruiting pipeline directly, rather than let Stack Overflow manage more steps of the recruitment process.

[1] "Sunsetting Jobs & Developer Story" https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...

[2] "How to Build a Successful Employer Branding Strategy for Your Organization" by Shani Jay: https://www.aihr.com/blog/employer-branding-strategy/

A while back SO jobs helped get me and my partner a footing in the industry, so I felt like I owed it back something and begged the new bosses to try it out, as I believed it was where the real good candidates were looking

I stopped using the website after I tried to get our company on there, and they decided that we weren't 'big shot' enough to have listings

Now that StackOverflow Jobs is shutting down I am building a list of alternatives to the best job board for developers in the word!

https://www.stackoverflowjobsalternatives.com/

Please let me know if you know any missing ones :)

Hope it help lots of developers out there searching for a job

Thanks, Rod.

That's a shame. I've landed two jobs on SO jobs and in my opinion it was extra motivation for maintaining a SO profile and being active in the community - a real one-stop-shop. Sad to see it go. It was the first place I looked when thinking about changing jobs. I particularly liked the 'remote' checkbox, and the fact that you could filter by salary range.

One real, unique competitive advantage they had was that it's a site devs use at work all the time.

Therefore job posting were getting in front of actively working devs who seem to be the group most companies want to hire.

All of our good hires were through this and I'm not sure if there's another way to find good people so easily

It’s really too bad; I found the tagging alone to be far more descriptive than any other site, e.g. I can literally tell in an instant if a job is using: this IDE, that language, that build environment; and ultimately I can tell in seconds if the job makes any sense for me.

I get it. They've never found a way to successfully compete with LinkedIn, it's probably about time to stop throwing good money after bad. A shame in that the timeline view is actually really nice and well done from a UI perspective, but "worse is better", I suppose.

Damn, am I the only one that used SO pretty much daily and never realised they had a Jobs board?

That is unfortunate

Just when I had updated my dev story to search for my first non-academics tech job

The new CEO does not impress with the killing off of jobs.

Instead, he should have cut the price from a stupid $500 per ad to $50 per ad.

Companies have money to spend on job ads, but not if it’s a $500 rip off price gouge.

StackOverflow doesn’t really understand it’s own business and how to make money, despite having the eyeballs of millions of developers.

I found great developers through the original SO jobs site where you could post a single job listing. Then it switched to some kind of recruiting/headhunting/partnership thing where only big companies that were constantly hiring could apply. Why?

If you think $500 is expensive, do yourself a favour and never take a look at what your company's sales department is spending on Salesforce.

I don't get your comment. Paying $500 to reach many candidates is not expensive in headhunting and they didn't claim to have a problem finding enough clients. $50 would make vetting more necessary and cover less of it as well. (SE did respond to specific questions about the legitimacy of ads when I asked them.)

In my country, $500 is more than an average HR employee earns in a month. A proposal to pay this much for a job posting would be laughed away.

If 10% of engineers in your country end up working for a foreign firm, wont SE make more money and have less costs vetting remote postings?

There's plenty of opportunities they left on the floor because they didn't like the best deals of that business, sure they could have grown and lowered their average return.

US companies aren't really interested in selling their services at such a low price. They have US salaries to pay.

Then why they are outsource driven from famous Asian consultancies?

500$ for post on single site. And there is probably half-dozen of them around... That really starts to add up in long run.

$500 is a very low estimate of how much value a company steals from society every time it adds an additional posting to get people into its permanent hiring funnel and uses them more to tune that funnel than for serious consideration. Interview 10 candidates and pick one or demonstrate that you at least are willing to pay 1/10th the costs of your folly.

$500 is super cheap. Here in Germany, you easily pay above €1000 for an advert in major portals (i.e. Stepstone [0]) for software developers that runs 30 days. There is special (read: more expensive) pricing for all kind of jobs in IT, while unskilled labour adverts are cheaper.

I remember NGO noyb.eu tweeting a couple of weeks back, that they were quoted €4000 to post a fullstack dev advert (which as an NGO they can't pay).

[0]: https://www.stepstone.de/e-recruiting/wp-content/uploads/201... (german)

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