After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff
After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff
After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff::The popular developer forum is still hunting for a "path to profitability."
I've seen so far on Leemy today that a bunch of people have been laid off from Bandcamp, Stack Overflow and Linked In. What the shit. Did the industry just decide to shrink today or something
I'm afraid I don't have any good sources to back this up, but I've seen it said multiple times in other threads on similar layoffs that investment capital has dried up in tech, investors are starting to demand a return, which leads to companies doing layoffs to cut costs etc. I'm sure smarter people can come along and explain it better (if they so choose).
It's a result of the cheap (and during the pandemic, literally "free") borrowing hayday of the last few years being over (they ended around 2022, when the Fed started jacking up interest rates and banks had to also increase rates in order to cover their loaned to liquidity ratios as required by law). As such, investors and businesses can't just borrow a shitload of money cheaply, so what they choose to invest in is much more conservative and/or the ROI tantalizing.
Also, in my opinion, the frenzy to dump millions into tech is mostly kind of over. The big dogs have gobbled up all the promising start-ups and potential disruptors and then some. AI is the "new" hotness, but all the companies that really have immediately viable products/services are already heavily invested in. There isn't really anything that's poised to come in and become the next OpenAI that's not already owned by the bigger companies.
Lastly, due to the first thing I mentioned, many folks believe we're A) already in a recession or B) about to enter one in earnest. In either scenarios, investors tend to pull their funds into safer pots while they ride out bumpy economic waters.
The rich have way too much cash and desperately want another recession so they can buy cheap assets. Consumers, the overall job market etc. Are trending the other way and messing up the cycle of boom/bust. In this particular instance, I am fine with the layoffs... as long as they keep paying the people they laid off. Paying people whose jobs are automated should have started at least as early as the industrial revolution.
Q3 just ended. These layoffs are because the books are not looking good. Everyone is hurting with inflation and higher interest, tech being particularly vulnerable to high interest rates.
I can only hope the execs cut correctly. A second round of layoffs at a company can destroy morale enough to sink the company. Who wants to continue working at a place that fired your close peers, wondering if you're next?
You can already tell they didn't cut correctly, as they didn't cut themselves.
Why is tech particular vulnerable to high interest rates?
Right? How is Machinima doing these days? They were once the biggest YouTube channel in all of esports. They had a few rounds of layoffs back between 2010 and 2013. Closed up in 2019. I mean it was more than morale, but it was writing on the wall.
The whole year. Companies who lied off (meta, google, Microsoft) and did stock buybacks had a huge boost on the market.
Stock market is demanding layoffs, from even before chatgpt took over. That's it. AI is just another keyword to push market price even further
You'll always see the stories of popular companies doing layoffs.
But you rarely hear stories of tech companies going on massive hiring sprees. Because those stories don't get clicks.
laid off from Bandcamp
Fuck Epic for many reasons, but for this one in particular
I can also ask basic, repetitive questions framed exactly to my use case without getting yelled at that the question has been asked and answered before.
and then be provided with a solution of a 10 years old tech that is barely applicable today. But if you read all the answers you may find an up to date suggestion in the comments of a non-accepted answer.
But if you read all the answers you may find an up to date suggestion in the comments of a non-accepted answer.
Honestly this is not bad, if it solves your problem and it took less than 10 minutes of reading overall.
Plus you gain some understanding along the way, about why the other answers aren't going to solve your problem, which is also valuable.
Then if you try to provide a modern solution, get yelled at because 'not everyone is using the latest version' even though the modern solution works on everything newer than about 8 years.
The answers on SO are from unpaid contributors.
As if that excuses their behavior on a forum dedicated to learning and solving problems?
Everyone gets annoyed at oft-repeated questions. But the answer is moderation, which is also unpaid.
Not vitriol and skullduggery.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Stack Overflow used to be every developer's favorite site for coding help, but with the rise of generative AI like ChatGPT, chatbots can offer more specific help than a 5-year-old forum post ever could.
While no chatbot is 100 percent reliable, code has the unique ability to be instantly verified by just testing it in your IDE (integrated development environment), which makes it an ideal use case for chatbots.
Today, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar announced Stack Overflow is laying off 28 percent of its staff.
Of course, the great irony of ChatGPT hurting Stack Overflow is that a great deal of the chatbot's development prowess comes from scraping sites like Stack Overflow.
OpenAI is working on web crawler controls for ChatGPT, which would let sites like Stack Overflow opt out of crawling.
As we've seen with chatbots convincing each other that you can "melt eggs," Chandrasekar has argued that sites like Stack Overflow are essential for chatbots, saying they need "to be trained on something that's progressing knowledge forward.
The original article contains 276 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 39%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
As we've seen with chatbots convincing each other that you can "melt eggs," Chandrasekar has argued that sites like Stack Overflow are essential for chatbots, saying they need "to be trained on something that's progressing knowledge forward.
Or, you know, fact check before you feed it to the AI. You don't tell a child 'go google it' to everything and hope it somehow works out, right? "But then AI could never be profitable!" Oh the irony.
Btw, would a common language model be possible?
I don't get all the hate and vitriol for StackOverflow. Sure, some people are assholes. Welcome to humanity. At least the system provides for voting to suppress the shit takes and general assholery.
SO combined with Google is usually enough to help me find an answer that either gives the context I need to make a solution or a straight up solution. If people are posting and expecting a super detailed, correct answer in a matter of hours, I think their expectations need adjustment.
I've posted very few questions and had decent responses for the majority of them. Is my experience uncommon?
But yeah, layoffs suck, and I hope they find a way to be profitable. Hell, if they do a Patreon-esque model where people can just throw money at them because they appreciate the service, I'd subscribe. (If a similar thing exists that I don't know about, please link)
Hate is often meme-based today. Now people who never even thought of that site are suddenly against it because it's being talked about.
Not exactly what I was hoping for, but that works. I can also do a bit of answering, per the comments. Thanks!
At-least Chat GPT doesn't yell at me for asking a question
Angry nerds are a valuable untapped resource if you're willing to tolerate our impatience
“Apologies for the oversight, here is the corrected version that includes what you were asking for…”
28%? Why, that's 7 people!
Great. So once Stack Overflow is dead, where will ChatGPT get actual, correct answers from?
Comment Closed: Duplicate Post
See other comment about different company going out of business for totally different reason.
Perfectly toxic, as all stack overflow comments should be.
They also went out of business 10 years ago and the market has changed since then.
An actual problem to worry about too. I think there will always be people looking to contribute but as less people do AI may actually get dumber until they figure out how to train AI with AI
That won't work because machine learning doesn't actually understand what it says. It needs real human knowledge underlying it. It can't just learn things on its own out of nowhere.
I mean, the AI can memorize the programming documentation, sweep different github repositories, and the programming itself is already learned behavior.
That's for programming. As for fault finding, that might get more challenging for the AI without stack overflow.
I’m skeptical that an LLM could answer questions as effectively just with documentation. A big part of the value in stack overflow and similar sites is that the answers provided come from people who have experience with a given technology and have some understanding of the pain points. Often times you can ask the wrong question and still get a useful answer because the context is enough for others to figure out what you might be confused by.
I’m not sure an LLM could do the same just given the docs, but it would be interesting to see how close it could get.