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Stack Overflow Cuts 28% Workforce as the AI Coding Boom Continues 36

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Coding help forum Stack Overflow is laying off 28 percent of its staff as it struggles toward profitability. From a report: CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar announced today that the company is "significantly reducing the size of our go-to-market organization," as well as "supporting teams" and other groups. After the team doubled its employee base last year, Chandrasekar told The Verge's Nilay Patel in an interview that about 45 percent of those hires were for its go-to-market sales team, which he said was "obviously the largest team." Prosus acquired Stack Overflow in a $1.8 billion deal in mid-2021.
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Stack Overflow Cuts 28% Workforce as the AI Coding Boom Continues More

Stack Overflow Cuts 28% Workforce as the AI Coding Boom Continues

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  • Don't worry! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Calydor ( 739835 ) on Monday October 16, 2023 @11:43AM (#63929091)

    AI won't take your jobs, pinky-swear!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      > Stack Overflow did not elaborate on the reasons for the layoff, but its hiring push began near the start of a generative AI boom

      So just wild, baseless speculation from The Verge then and likely absolutely nothing to do with AI, more to do with SO becoming less and less useful due to it's appalling moderation, increasingly dated content and general slide into the abyss.

      • Re:Don't worry! (Score:5, Informative)

        by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Monday October 16, 2023 @12:54PM (#63929317)

        > Stack Overflow did not elaborate on the reasons for the layoff

        Well, here is the reason:

        Prosus acquired Stack Overflow in a $1.8 billion deal in mid-2021

        The new owner wasted two billion dollars and now they are looking for a way to save money. Unfortunately, companies still refuse to learn from the past: No company has ever cut their way to success.

        • I about shit when I saw someone paid almost $2B for a forum.

          • Stack Overflow and Reddit have two major advantages over most forums: they appear at the top of Google search results for thousands (maybe millions) of questions. When you're in the business of harvesting eyeballs, that's worth quite a lot.

            • It's worth a lot until they ruin it, anyway.

              Mass-firing staff from a website which is already poorly managed is going to make it worse, not better. They will inevitably cut people they need and also decrease morale for the remainder.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by znrt ( 2424692 )

                "go-to-market" clowns don't manage websites. this has nothing to do with the regular stackoverflow forum, but with a failed vision from the ceo. it's in one of the links:
                https://www.theverge.com/23421... [theverge.com]

                he had this idea of stackoverflow for teams, which was basically private instances of stackoverflow for the enterprise. if the idea sounds stupid is because it is, however they tried to sell it. that 45% of the workdorce's task was to convince companies to pay for that. i'm guessing nobody fell for it, so go

        • The new owner wasted two billion dollars and now they are looking for a way to save money. Unfortunately, companies still refuse to learn from the past: No company has ever cut their way to success.

          See Twitter. The new owner wasted $40 billion and looked for a new way to save money. The headcount plunged but it's still bleeding money [theguardian.com].
    • to jump on the AI bandwagon followed by firing blitz. In this case the story is probably that they have enough "Big Data" to know who to keep and who to let go. Unlike in the .com boom when everything just got thrown at the wall.

      This is the "efficiency" that people have been clamoring for for decades. Funny that it's not lowering prices.

    • I wouldn't mind if AI took my job, so long as it gave me in return everything that I need a job for.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by laktech ( 998064 )
        unfortunately, the efficiency gains will be funneled to c-suites for their innovative thinking.

    • Just blame AI (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Comboman ( 895500 ) on Monday October 16, 2023 @12:55PM (#63929325)

      So they doubled their employees (+100%) last year (mostly in sales) and this year they fire 28%. Sounds to me like they made an overly optimistic hiring push and are now walking it back and blaming AI for bad management decisions.

    • it didn't take any jobs, not at Stack Overflow nor anywhere else. Baseless claim. AI write mediocre buggy code at best.

  • Good, they deserve to wither and die (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16, 2023 @11:48AM (#63929107)
    Stack has built their entire business on the labor of unpaid volunteers. But the Company's Management's only answer to any controversy or problem is to backstab those same volunteers, shoving them under the bus at a moment's notice. Whether it be to publicly smear a volunteer Mod as bigoted for asking clarifying questions about a poorly thought out CoC, or accusing mods of racism for trying to enforce Stack's own rules against AI content (whose low quality is obvious to any competent reader), Stack has repeatedly shown that they don't deserve to enjoy the benefits that they've reaped for free.

    Support Codidact instead. https://codidact.org/ [codidact.org]
    • They deserve everything you decided to give them for free. Or you could just ask for you money back... Either way good luck with that codidact thing - which I keep reading as codeaddict...

    • Re:Good, they deserve to wither and die (Score:4, Informative)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Monday October 16, 2023 @12:29PM (#63929223) Homepage Journal

      > Support Codidact instead.

      I just clicked through several links to find the first question I've ever read there and it was closed as offtopic on the most narrow of grounds. It was quite a detailed and well-articulated question that would have taken a competent answerer three minutes max.

      "Unfriendly" first impression.

    • I wonder how many AI coding tools are using Stack Overflow for a chunk of their training set. I bet pretty much all of them...

  • SO now vs. SO 15 years ago reminds me of the old "Eternal September" meme. The traffic is up 1000% and the number of reasonable questions (not the fraction of traffic) is down 90%.

    That said, it's sadly predictable that, every time a company gets sold, the new owner decides profit margin is too low and clearly it's the fault of all those no-good slacker employees.

  • Not surprising. I did some image editing two months ago. The AI (midjourney) took less than a minute for a job that I would've needed at least an hour for on a good day. And I'm experienced with image editing.

    Same goes for coding. We are likely only 12-18 months away from ChatGPT and Co. taking most coding jobs. I've seen it happening in the last 6 months and have been exploring my next career change since be I left my last gig back in may. I wouldn't be surprised if after 37 years of programming and softwa

    • 37 years, it's time to retire.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by keltor ( 99721 ) *
      > We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. This is you. If you are a real programmer, LLMs aren't going to make any different to your job except for possibly assisting you in doing it. LLMs aren't sitting in requirements meetings. But if your job is mostly fixing bugs, then yeah, you probably should be afraid.

    • We are likely only 12-18 months away from ChatGPT and Co. taking most coding jobs.

      No we're not. ChatGPT is sometimes a useful tool, but don't get carried away by the hype train. It's most useful when correct results are optional.

    • no, chatgpt writes buggy mediocre code, even at version 4

      It's not a threat to anyone coding

  • I've hated stackexchange ever since my answer to "Implication and equivalence arrows, when to use them?" was voted down with no explanation on its maths forum. https://math.stackexchange.com... [stackexchange.com]

  • What fraction of "AI coding" model's content is based on SO discussions? I suspect a great deal.

    Today a lot of what had gone on in SO is bottled up in tar pits like Discord. These are less easily scrape-able by the various coding models.

    So I'm not sure this can work well going forward.

    • What fraction of "AI coding" model's content is based on SO discussions? I suspect a great deal.

      That's exactly what I have been thinking, if SO declines just how good will future chatGPT be ad coding?

      And there's a sign to that as well as if you ask chatGPT about something really modern it can struggle, just as StackOverflow is not getting nearly as many good new questions these days...

      It makes you wonder if the capabilities of an AI based on public data have peaked and going forward only AI's based on priva

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        if the capabilities of an AI based on public data have peaked and going forward only AI's based on private data stores will grow in capability.

        I think the answer is they have not peaked yet but I agree this has to be where it is headed. Right now there is still general improvement to modeling going on. Watching the progress from GPT3 -> 3.5 -> 4.0 and the great leaps the image and audio generators have made I think we can still expect better models trained on the same public data - or public data regurgitated by prior models and publish to give us better results. Then we will hit wall, where the general English/French/Spanish models are op

  • This job position has been filled before and another assignment already made. If that worker does not address your salary concerns, please rewrite your resume and submit again.

  • My love affair with SO ended when their mods started mass-editing my posts.... changing the tone, my words, and most egregiously IMHO removing where I had typed "please" and "thank you". When I brought up my displeasure to the mods, I was told that my posts aren't mine, they belong to SO and they are free to make them into whatever they want.

    While they may be true, I can't imagine the outrage if say Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, or /. started changing users' posts to read according to how a bunch of self-anoin

  • The sweet irony of using SO for a decade+ to get answers in making product for AI stronger so that the AI product can now threaten the business of SO -- a chef kiss.

    ... about 45 percent of those hires were for its go-to-market sales team, which he said was “obviously the largest team.”

    Pretty much sums up all the business problems. Hiring to market and make it sound like you are doing better than you are, rather than actually DOING BETTER so you can keep paying people once the music stops. 2K Silicon Valley baby companies finally coming to rest because the valley money is dried up. They should have sold and moved to Tahoe li

  • Why did you feel the need to add extra information?

    I could've said "Stack Overflow Cuts 28% Workforce as my roommate continues to shirk her dishwashing duties."

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