Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%
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I have yet to receive a badge but could add that to the prompt or custom instructions as an alternative to its encouraging words when I'm nearly there.
If there is an experienced C++ developer around who is happy to answer questions, great. Otherwise you are stuck with having to figure it out by using trial and errors and Google-fu. If you post it to a forum, it could take a while for anyone to respond. If you post it to stackoverflow, very likely nobody wants to look at your horrible code (natural for a beginner, you know), and your question gets downvoted.
By contrast, ChatGPT can look at your code and explain very clearly what is wrong with it within seconds.
This is just one example. And it's not only for beginners. I have found that ChatGPT can answer high-level questions in programming very well. The alternative would be searching for the Internet and sift through all the noise to find the answers as well.
This is why reddit and twitter both locked down their APIs, due to the data being very high quality and immensely valuable for training.
Too bad they all did it too late, no one saw ChatGPT coming. And since all the data was already scraped from Stackoverflow, it no longer has any value for OpenAI. Stackoverflow is rapidly declining in volume, so future data from it is irrelevant.
Or, when searching for answers, you keep chasing your tail because the mods kept killing off the variants of the question you cared about, and you have to cobble together answers from the comments because those will often be all you get.
Or (and arguably worse), you'll find a relevant question but the answers are inundated with "like the real answer, but variation for situation X" because people are posting to the main question because they know the almost-but-actually-not dupes will all get closed out.
Their moderation doesn't prevent duplicate questions it just makes it more frustrating when the question you find has been marked as duplicate.
I don't see how all the people complaining about moderation don't look at all the low quality questions and see why moderation is what it is.
I guess you and any experienced user know the "meta game" of allowed questions. Survivorship bias, kinda.
What happens when this training data is 10 years old? Where will we get new data?
In the meantime we'll get used to functioning with these models with assumption the "knowledge cutoff" will just be moved. But if there is little new data, how? Furthermore, how do we prevent feeding ML generated data to ML training in the first place?
That is mostly as it should be. The primary original intent of StackOverflow is to curate a good Q&A, not to provide an interactive support/mentoring service. Questions are (supposed to be) evaluated by what they add to the repository of questions and answers.
That being said - there has certainly been a culture of harshness in relating to newbie question askers on large parts of the SO.
"In theory" - I think at least - answers should be updated when new things become possible. A lot of answers used to be "you can't do that with X, do Y instead" and should now be updated to either, "You can do that with X" or "You have to use Z"..
Anyway, have been using SO for 12 years and still think it's great.
But, generally, yes, I tend to know the details of what I'm doing already. If anything I might check some API docs for a library.
I used SO a lot when I was a junior engineer. Most of my issues now stem from biz logic or internal design that really can't be googled for.
For example, "how to insert multiple multi-columns rows dynamically using psycopg2" It is trivial if you are writing sql everyday but may take longer to find the right postgres docs. StackOverflow gives you the answer in 5 minutes: several variants with different tradeoffs (readability, performance, security).
Maybe it’s the bias of being there since the early days and really getting how to ask and answer questions.
Kind of ironic considering how the Rust community prides itself so much on being welcoming.
https://stackoverflow.com/q/11635/265521
It's the top result for "case insensitive string comparison in C++". It has 372 votes and a ton of useful high quality answers. But it was closed 5 years ago for being "opinion based". Presumably because the author made the foolish mistake of asking for the best way to do it, rather than just a way to do it.
I don't see how anyone could defend that.
That's not cherry picked, and actually the situation is worse than it might seem to a casual observer because when you do occasionally manage to reopen a question (quite difficult) it leaves no evidence that it was ever closed.
The question doesn't show research effort, it's just two sentences. Sometimes that's all it takes, but if you add a requirement "without converting to lower/upper case", I think it should come with an explanation? I often encounter questions like that "How do I drive my car without using a steering wheel?" - and upon a confrontation I usually hear "well just for fun" or a similar answer - SO is a bad place to ask questions like that. If you're e.g. interested in performance, describe your situation, paste your current code and explain how you're concerned about the efficiency of your current approach.
Also originally the post wasn't not even properly written… Just a low quality post, so why bother improving a question (editing away the "best") that is so bad to begin with, especially as that doesn't guarantee you will avoid the critique (instead of critique of bad moderators who close a question, I would be reading about bad moderators that modify a question changing its meaning).
As I hinted at the beginning, we might be from different worlds: it's beyond my understanding how you could think of pointing out the example is not cherry picked, as if it was some beautiful post, with images, thoroughly explaining the issue, perhaps even addressing (preemptively or as an edit) the "opinion-based" flag, and yet was unfairly closed. Meanwhile it's shit. The revision history doesn't show any real OP's effort to fix the question, other than that meta exists to discuss such things, and if you're not satisfied with answers, you can write a real question describing your case.
So we might be from different worlds, and I'm happy SO/SE exist, because I find them, and their policies - for the most part - useful. You don't, and it's fine, you can use the alternatives.
> when you do occasionally manage to reopen a question (quite difficult) it leaves no evidence that it was ever closed.
you can see it in revision history: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/11635/revisions
The "closed" revision won't disappear when you reopen a question.
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.
Luckily, I persevered, and I give back to the programming community by always being kind to the folks that ask me for help; but I always help others offline and not in hostile web forums.
Even if you're asking good beginner questions that don't already have an answer, you get tired of reading all the bad ones.
I just signed on and saw this one (#3 in my personalized "new questions"):
https://web.archive.org/web/20231016163745/https://stackover...
The person asking the question put in minimal effort and showed no concern for people answering. Why am I sifting through your merge sort code when you're asking "why can't it open the file?"
So your course is just to avoid those, not downgrade them.
It takes a lot of guts to ask for help. And being put down when you're vulnerable: exposing an ignorance or a lack of understanding, is not a good feeling at all. For me, it always sticks for a long time until I forget it.
Among coworkers you know, yes, but among internet strangers?
I got so good at Java that I became a Lab/Teaching Assistant my last two years in college. And I helped folks the best I could in person: always kind, always patient, never blaming the student even if they didn't want to learn and just wanted to pass the Lab; that is an obviously wrong student attitude to have, but whether they cheat or want the answers without learning is between the student and god. I can only try my best to help.
Who cares if someone wants an answer to some test or project? Who cares if their question is not deep enough or poorly written? Just answer their question or don't. You don't need to impose your moral sense of fairness unto them: it's not that deep. And you especially don't need the snark and the putting down of others. Again, the simpler thing is to not engage at all which is obviously not what happened or happens under the sludge and grime of SO answers.
It's a more pleasant interaction when someone is polite. -- Whereas, if you get rude answers, you'll be discouraged from participating.
Asking good questions is pro-social. People are going to be more willing to help if the questions are well thought out. -- Whereas, asking in an anti-social way discourages people from helping out.
It's still possible to ask questions even if you get snarky responses back; and it's still possible to answer lazy questions... But in either case, it's easy to see why people might not like that.
Expectations vary; in some settings, it's going to be more acceptable for questions to be a more raw "I'm stuck and I need help" than in others.
There is an asymmetry: people giving answers are more able to help those who are asking questions. If the people learning don't like the teachers, they'll have to go elsewhere (& learning is harder). If the teachers don't like the students, they don't have to teach.
Please link them! They should still be there, and we should be able to analyze them. The strength of Stack Exchange is that it is factual, like on Wikipedia, users are discouraged to be emotional and encouraged to to prove their theories.
> who cares if someone wants an answer to some test or project?
A visitor from Google, who doesn't want to search through dozens of "too localized" problems, that don't apply in his case. There are other places to ask such questions, and the strength of SO/SE lies in its ruleset.
I know from experience that when I'm frustrated, I need to keep trying something smaller (or otherwise get more information) until it becomes clear what's not working.
The kind of steps it takes to ask a good question goes hand in hand with the kind of steps you'd take to solve the problem yourself. (Similarly: with domain knowledge, you know what to look for; without domain knowledge, you don't know what to ask about).
If I put too high a value on other people's time, I'm never going to ask questions, and may be slower than if I'd asked a question at a suitable time. (Whereas, putting too little value on other people's time ... can cause friction).
"Why won't my docker container build?" Well, because there's a typo in your instructions and it says so clearly in the error output. Of course we get tired of answering these types of questions.
Those who answer questions want good questions but those who ask good questions probably solve them on their own. Leaving things as they are.
while I agree about SO culture, it's probably the case that most of the laid-off staff took no part in that behavior.
The Great Reset 2.0 which might save SO:
Everyone whose downvotes exceed a certain threshold has their reputation points reduced to zero. And since "sentiment" is measurable nowadays, the same would be done for anyone whose hostile comments exceed some threshold. Probably other behavior would be similarly penalized.
Do you lose some valuable expertise? Undoubtedly, but making an example out of people is a warning to the rest.
Why it would help?
While closing random questions as duplicates of similar but different question is obnoxious, downvoting "do my homework for me" questions is very useful.
Addendum: please tell us how many points YOU have on SO.
In what way? Who really cares if it's homework or a newbie question? Are you such an expert in everything that you never ask newbie questions?
This arrogant attitude is toxic, spreads quickly, and poisons far too many communities. I'm grateful to dang et al that HN hasn't become like this.
Just ignoring the newbie questions is best, unless you want to answer honestly.
On the r/jazz and r/classicalmusic, almost every day there's some question like "I'm just getting into <genre>. What are some top albums/artists I should listen to?"
Someone does answer those questions. Props to those saintly people.
Answering "do my homework for me" is helping cheaters.
> Everyone whose downvotes exceed a certain threshold has their reputation points reduced to zero.
This could be reasonable or not, depending on the "threshold". SO/SE already have mechanisms (which aren't perfect) to deal with emotional up/down-voting. It already 'punishes' with a 2 rep cost for downvoting an answer. It doesn't for downvoting a question.
ChatGPT may have killed it, but it was already severely weakened by them allowing a-holes to run the place.
Q: I have this problem.
Mod: This is a dup of this.
Me: Goes to read the other ticket. It's from 8 years ago, and the answer was "This is solved in version X."
Me, on something many versions after X, and having the hindsight of knowing that no, it was not solved in X, shakes my head. I find the solution someplace else.
I do not go back to SO because I can't be bothered to fight an uphill battle.
I haven't asked a question on SO for over 2 years now, mainly because I just got sick of the hostile environment that the mods created.
A 'high' (just not a new one) reputation user (not necessarily a moderator) opens a review queue. He sees a new question. He searches the SO if a similar question has been asked. He finds a similar question, and without reading and testing it thoroughly, he marks yours as a duplicate of that.
Now, you couldn't be bothered writing a comment about how the the duplicate flag is wrong, but another user who already spent some time cleaning up the site is supposed to thoroughly analyze both questions to begin with?
People on Stack Exchange tend to try to not be emotional like you, so they don't fight a battle with you. You just resign from a discussion, and then complain how a mistake has been made, that you didn't care to even point out.
extremely popular network (stack exchange) of wisdom sharing websites?
this comments are ignored
people closed my questions in past for being duplicate - despite that I linked that question and described why it is not a duplicate
> He sees a new question. He searches the SO if a similar question has been asked. He finds a similar question, and without reading and testing it thoroughly, he marks yours as a duplicate of that.
that is wrongheaded and bad idea leading to predictably terrible results
she/he should not close it as duplicated without proper check (it is better to have some duplicates over bad closures)
I don't care.
> Now, you couldn't be bothered writing a comment about how the the duplicate flag is wrong
Right.
> but another user who already spent some time cleaning up the site
"Cleaning up" by mislabeling stuff. Sounds like they are making a mess. But go on...
> is supposed to thoroughly analyze both questions to begin with?
Yes, they should completley read questions before closing them.
> People on Stack Exchange tend to try to not be emotional like you
I hope they care about being accurate rather than being apathetic about it.
> , so they don't fight a battle with you. You just resign from a discussion, and then complain how a mistake has been made, that you didn't care to even point out.
There was no discussion. I didn't resign, I never engaged in any discussion in the first place. I just found a question and a closed question.
And I can't even comment on how it shouldn't have been closed. It's closed. That's it.
Your entire comment is about how SO fails, and rather than work to overcome it, it just blamed the people for "not holding it right."
Accidents are inevitable.
> Yes, they should completley read questions before closing them.
Do you know the concept of a triage?
> And I can't even comment on how it shouldn't have been closed.
Either you don't have some very minimal reputation in the network (I don't know, 100 points?), which limitation is there, I think, do protect from bots and similar abuse, or the question was *locked* for other reason than just being a duplicate. You could still open a question on meta to discuss that.
I don't even want to defend SO, I'm just frustrated by how terribly bad the arguments criticizing SO are.
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.
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.
SO destroyed itself several times over (first by its own moderators and then by the company itself). ChatGPT just nailed the lid shut.
Success to me looks like a lot of real users paying a lot of real money. SO never really had that. It tried to be a VC unicorn and was acquired by Prosus. Most of Prosus' other investments also look really questionable if we're headed for a global recession like it looks like we are...
Given a long enough timeline every companies dies or they pivot so extreme that they resemble nothing that they were to begin with.
Questions and answers both got moderated out of existence with high frequency with it being clear that the moderator didn't understand either. I remember this behavior becoming rampant throughout the community around 2012 and the moderators being incredibly toxic in Meta SO. I removed my profile and never looked back then.
The end game of successful businesses is to become a conglomerate of sorts. Once a company owns enough brands/products across enough markets, they can shed the under-performers and expand into new segments and industries.
Or you follow the lean engineering model, like Whatsapp did. Millions of users paying a $ each are still millions of $, and Whatsapp prior to FB acquiring them had very very low operating costs - similar to Stackoverflow by the way. Both engineered their systems to run on incredibly low resources.
No, Google made StackOverflow live and StackOverflow die by stopping its referencing.
SO should really pivot to the search business. They have everything: The culture of how to build a website that answers users’ questions, the culture to index pages, the culture to get an invested community. The only faulty mechanism here is Google, and SO would be a much better steward of how people want webpages to look like, than Google.
Maybe that as well. But I have definitely reduced my Google searches for technical answers and focus them on ChatGPT. So to me it doesn't matter if Google stopped referencing them or not. ChatGPT is phenomenal at answering technical questions with context specific answers and code snippets.
It's decent, but most often DuckDuckGo gives more relevant stack overflow answers than stack overflow itself does for the same query. Even though SO has far more information to tune the results on than DDG.
Another "proof" of how bad their search is, can be witnessed in the millions of duplicates. SO basically got an army of volunteers who know how to operate this search within their niche, to close duplicates, something that a decent search result would solve for a big part.
What an interesting interpretation of events. For years (almost since the beginning) users were complaining about the experience. The SO leadership took pride in ignoring those complaints. Remember Jeff Atwood repeatedly boasting, without a shred of evidence, that the lack of discussion was what made SO popular? They dumped resources into automating the closing of questions in the coldest possible manner. They had out of control mods that everyone hated, but the answer was always that those very mods were the only ones that mattered for the site. They knew about the ridiculous dup trolling, and they did nothing to prevent it. The list goes on...
Now that they're in trouble, the explanation is that a new technology came along that nobody could have anticipated. No. They lost their base of new users long ago to Reddit and Discord. They had enough existing users that put up with their crap because SO was a standard part of the toolbox, and it's where Google took you. They did everything to make the site awful and now they're attributing their problems to new technology.
Fastly is also kind of a struggling company itself.
Many years back, Fog Creek was the first company that I learned of that put up fake job openings to portray more success than they were really having.
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.
Look at your Google results, that are now presenting Reddit much more prominently than a few years ago.
There are even the same perfect/simple posts that I have visited tons of times over the years (small JS/CSS stuff I can never remember) that have disappeared or became near impossible to find via Google.
SO had various communities and they were quite helpful for the time, and if you hung around for a bit you got quite a good group.
Most of that has (sadly, imo) migrated to Discord.
This is particular annoying when it comes to CLI tools. Often the search top result will show outdated SO post that the command arguements are depreciated, it took me hours to find this out after couldn't figure out why the command are not working. If I search the problem with site:reddit.com, the answer are usually relevant and current with a working command.
SO's overaggressive moderation are preventing the new information from being relevant. That's why people flocks to GitHub, Discord, Reddit, and Steam forums because they don't share the SO moderation philosophy.
I think their algorithm is the problem, answers should be slowly deprecated over time. Who in real life would trust an answer written 10 years ago when languages, OSes and frameworks change every year?
I've also seen the trending sort automatically applied on certain questions.
It's really not convenient to search through those answers even though the knowledge you need is there.
For a long time they argued that duplicate questions were a problem because they weren't trying to be a Q&A site but rather a knowledge database. But it turns out that the duplicate reduction effort has made the knowledge database harder to access for many common queries.
Quickly stopped contributing.
The answers on github and across the web are always much much better and more up to date. I can't remember the last time SO had the answer I wanted or needed.
e.g. the QMK website links to a Discord server; but you'd only join that if you were interested in QMK.
For real, though, who though this is a good idea to do project documentation and issue tracking? It's stupid.
It's clear there's room for innovation in this space... something that democratizes Q&A but also where the answers aren't lost to oblivion come tomorrow.
I expect a tailored per-project chatgpt would help here. Let it read your discord, let github (or myproject.com) users search its knowledgebase directly: voila. curated user-generated answers to project-specific questions.
Imo we shouldn't have moved away from forums. Forums offer searchability, threads and allow community members to answer questions. Not sure why we collectively decided that forums are no longer cool.
There are also dedicated Discord search engines like disbord.org.
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
People can learn a ton by answering questions. Trying to create a complete answer will make you realize the gaps in your own understanding. As an early SO user, I benefited from this greatly.
Sadly, I find this impossible these days. I've given up on SO as anything other than a mostly passive user. I'll vote, and make the rare comment, but that's it. The last time (a few years ago) I made a concerted effort to answer some questions, my experience was that many questions would be closed as dupe/low-quality while I was partway through answering. Flagging that it isn't low-quality (proven by the fact I can answer it) goes nowhere -- people are seemingly all too happy to yield their close hammer power, but not to re-open.
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)
People will say they know the right answer and some aspect that helps them would’ve been considered (tenure, peer feedback, # of commits). It always sucks no matter what.
Draconian limits on even slightly adjacent questions in SO are basically the same thinking that led them to prevent posting on a Discourse thread _in private instances_ unless your answer has the number of words they think you should use.
And they of course justify it by saying their "research" says this will create a "healthier" community which is of course bullshit.
"Yes, that was a duplicate question, but that's absolutely fine! I'm here to help with any questions you have, whether they're duplicates or not. If you have any more questions or need information on any topic, please feel free to ask."
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
You're (a) expecting the new folks to stick around long enough to fully learn the system and (b) that they will have access to all the knowledge around the real tricky parts of the system that they have. A senior dev who has shown he wants to be there is better than 3 new recruits, all day, every day.
Just today - a Staff DBA was completely befuddled by the 5000 concurrent connections config parameter on Postgres RDS, when they had the task of making sure that the services stop dropping connections for the last month.
My previous job has a "senior" engineer that routinely blocks any attempt to move from an in house NodeJS proxy, because it would cost an extra $70 per month... and for the architectural decisions the explanation is routinely "because I like it".
Brain Drain, it's a real phenomena that has real economic impact on a surrounding locality, local economy, and state economies.
Brain Drain affects companies as well, but by the time they notice Brain Drain has occurred, it's too late to rectify.
Hiring for bottom dollar, instead of experience, will increase the the outflow, decrease supporting services in the area, and decrease the available pool of potential employees.
It's a cycle that once begun is almost impossible to stop, even with legislation.
Here's what our Federal Government, and several States have done to discourage the BD effect.
> https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019...
They also aren't squirrels. They're capable of foresight.
Wait till you hear how businesses intentionally pit employees against each other by granting different benefits at different levels so that the majority doesn’t feel as bad about things. This is, for example, how businesses got rid of comprehensive retirement packages.
SO made their bed. Enjoy the snark, mistreatment, and power trips while it lasts. There are definitely gentler and better communities out there.
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.
The way SO folks talk to you ... I'll just say: try that offline and I'll pull your card no ifs or doubts.
And guess what? All I do on SO is ask stupid ass questions. One time someone scolded me, said I should know better for asking a certain question that was against policy of something given that my rank was so high. You know what I said to him?
Nothing. I just didn't give a shit. Stackoverflow is one of the few places on earth where you can ask the dumbest questions with zero consequence. The consequence is just in your head. Better to launch that dumbass question in stackoverflow than on your company slack.
I probably have 10 questions with negative points. My highest ranked question was likely the stupidest one I ever asked.
Now as for me: I don't mind being stupid (look at how often I get downvoted here in HN: water off a duck's back). I want to be treated in a dignified way. And if that's not happening and there are better sources out there, then I don't have to play the game of reading someone's snark or passive aggressive bs.
I don't want to read it not because it affects me in some psychological way (the internet is full of cruelty and I can handle it ok), but because it's tiresome: I've seen it before and have had it happen to me so many times that it's just boring.
If you treat me like shit but help me solve the problem, ok thank you. The problem is solved. Now on to the next. But if you treat me like shit and don't solve my problem, well then, I'll look elsewhere for the solution.
What better source is there? Stackoverflow is the best IMO. I'm up for a better resource if a better one actually exists.
It's the moderation scaring away the people who answer questions. Just because they haven't shooed away everyone doesn't mean they haven't had an impact.
I know that I no longer browse relevant SO topics "for fun" anymore.
(This is the real answer to the "why does tech company X have so many employees" question)
Here's a prototype of an average tone-deaf user of SO who think their imaginary internet points actually count. The point being raised here is the difficulty new users (with no imaginary internet points, but with dignity and self-respect) face while submitting a questions/answers to SO. Not people like you who've normalized the bullying for "getting info". Guess what, now with ChatGPT you can get answers that are on average of much better quality than average new SO answers without tolerating pricks.
if you ACTUALLY read the post you'll see that I literally said I asked the stupidest freaking questions ever. My entire post is trying to prove to him that asking dumb shit questions on SO is harmless and can even net you empty worthless points to be one of the top posters.
I don't even answer questions or ask smart questions on SO. I direct all the stupidest and most embarrassing questions I've ever had to that platform.
There's a way to foster new people who are interested in your field. There's a time to explain something, and a time to say you're at a point where you should be able to grasp this, and point them in a direction, and wish them well. There's never a time to make someone feel stupid for simply asking a question, even if it really is a stupid question.
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.
But for programming, you'd get a similar "it works" answer ... eventually. And even if you read the comments under the answer, you still might get burned by side effects/security issues you'd not thought through.
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.
We might get to the stage where the ability of LLMs to write code / answer questions for a library becomes the primary driver of adoption.
> 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%.
I'm still pro SO over chatGPT
LMs are going to get dated pretty quick if they cant update their models fast enough, completely unknowledgeable of newer frameworks and it becomes more obvious every week in faster moving communities. Really good at the beginning
Libraries and tools change so fast these days, I almost never find what I need on SO. You've got to go into Github issues, get in a discord, or go to some other source to actually find root causes. If you do find something, it's likely to be from 8 years ago, and it's rarely still the "best" answer.
I think developer troubleshooting will be reinvented, and almost nothing that SO has built is needed for troubleshooting in 2024/2025. Some leaner or more capable solution will come along that fully leans into LLM-supported search.
SO bootstrapped ChatGPT but now there is no way going back
> * Concepts are mock ups and not actual AI generated content.
Then they come back with a "let's do more with less etc".
Well, to be honest I do not expect them to be that unaware of the situation. They will get their fat check and go away anyway.