The company was finished in 2020 when they raised $85M in a Series E. The fall after that is inevitable. Even the $40M they took in 2015 is a questionable decision for the very reasons you detail. What did they need tens of millions in investments for?
Raising at too high a valuation is not a position you want to be in. Unless you’re planning to cash in sooner than the ship will start burning.
And further explanation on revenue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
https://law.gmnz.xyz/2023/06/08/stackoverflow-keycap-reward....
The design of that keycap on the other hand is ridiculous.
However, it does make a nice little trophy/trinket. It's merit based, so getting one could become a goal for contributors. It's branded. It fits on a desk.
If they made it twice as big and called it a trophy, it'd probably make more sense. But then costs would be higher and it'd be more formal.
A company needing that many rounds deserves to die. Sorry to have known you SO.
The main reason being stated as:
> Exiting this space allows us to refocus on products that build on our core strengths: knowledge reuse and building communities at scale.
A year has passed and I'm not sure what progress have we seen on the "knowledge reuse" and "building communities" front.
The post has this quote from the CEO:
> We are realigning the Talent business to focus more on customer employer branding and company awareness needs, and moving away from job slots and direct hiring. This will tie the product closer to what we offer through Stack Overflow Advertising [...]
The article linked by OP (related to generative AI) has this quoute, on the other hand:
> There's definitely a question around how we leverage [generative AI] technology to deliver on our mission of helping build technology through collective knowledge. This intersection between the power of community on one side and AI on the other side—from my standpoint, human-generated community content has taken us to this level, we have a large impact, but there are also so many problems we can solve by leveraging this technology.
Reading these CEO's quotes filled with words like "realigning" and "leveraging" makes him sound like a typical MBA executive (yes, he's a Harvard MBA) who thinks that the same rules can be applied to a business in any industry. All while completely ignoring the feedback of a business's users/customers.
But was it? Did they ever report on whether it brought them any profits? Potentially, its pricing was too low to make a good profit, but increasing it to reach profits or even just break even would have turned too many customers away.
Screw them for closing that.
Heck, spin it off as a sub company and resell the stack overflow brand and do nothing.
They actively went out of their way to get rid of it. If I didn't know any better I'd say this was backroom dealing where job ad company owners somehow pressured the CEO to stop competing with them because they were just too good.
If anything, pretending to be completely knowledgeable "since one's a senior" is quite junior behavior.
And even inside my main expertise, I will sometimes search for an answer just to verify that my thinking is correct and that I didn't miss anything (which is not a strong guarantee that I didn't, but better than nothing).
Before, I would use stack overflow and it would take me at least a week.
They use Java - a language I literally haven’t used since maybe a year after it was introduced.
I used ChatGPT to create the source code for the sample based on my specifications including Junit tests, the build with Maven, the Dockerfile - everything.
Of course it got a few things wrong and missed steps and I had to keep pasting in error messages until it got it right. But it was still faster than trolling the internet.
Of course I was very up front with the client that the Java pieces were all generated by ChatGPT.
I'm guessing you mean trawling the internet rather than trying to upset and annoy the internet:)
> the act of searching among a large number or many different places in order to find people or information you want
> It takes me 45 minutes of trolling on the internet and I’m still confused.
— https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/trolling
I see as well that the US English spelling for "trawl" (as in fishing) is troll. Again, mainly US.
And I assume trawling vs trolling is one of those things that you feel the urge to point out just like I hate when someone says “jive” instead of “jibe”.
That last sentence was not meant to be passive aggressive at all. It was just an observation.
I certainly didn't read it that way. It just stood out because British English is my native language.
I understand that everybody has their own unique situation and my statement wasn't meant to be generalized anyways.
Finding work there was a dream, and while there weren't many roles available, they were usually great quality roles. Finding candidates was also great, and all of them were solid candidates that met the basic bar of "can you write some basic code in a language of your choosing".
To be honest, it felt like SO went downhill when Jeff Atwood left.
Mind boggling that they shut it down.
Sounds like you could do with learning something new!
My 30+ years experience doesn't matter for shit when I say... want to fix an annoyance in an open source tool using an unfamiliar language. I'm back to "how do you deserialise json" level query. Offical docs are typically either useless auto-generated placeholders or over-detailed rabbit warren not to mention there are usually five ways to do anything and I need to know the blessed approach not just any approach. I want a few lines of sample code and some confidence that it's the approapriate method and not 10 years out of date. It's what a QA site should excel at and exceed ChatRoulleteGPT answers given social proof from real people.