CEO Blog: The Way Forward

Question

Hello members of the Meta Community - Hope you all are staying safe during these unprecedented times. I wanted to share my quarterly blog post that I wrote today: The Way Forward:

Three months ago, I wrote a message to our Stack Overflow customers and community, the first of what will be regular, quarterly posts. At the time, I reflected on the fact that we were entering a new decade, a period where tremendous technological forces are reshaping the world. Since then, we have entered a new era, and a historic challenge is facing societies in every corner of the globe. We are reminded that for all of our advances as a civilization, nature can be a powerful force which we must adapt and innovate around.

In this post, I write about how Stack Overflow is reacting to COVID-19, how this worldwide crisis is affecting us as individuals and as a company, and how we are trying to respond and support our Community and customers through this trying time. I try to give some more depth and background on our company’s core values, mission and vision, as we have spent a good deal of work on these over the past several months. I also describe our progress with the community and with all of our products. Even in these trying times, I believe Stack Overflow can make a significant positive impact through transformative technology.

I very much value the feedback that we received from the community in response to my first quarterly blog post, and the positive community interactions that followed. Some of this feedback has led directly to new initiatives that we have kicked off since that post. Please give the blog a read and let me know what questions you have. I appreciate all of your feedback and my team and I will read your responses and will look for ways to include them in our planning moving forward. Thank you.

Answer 1

Just a comment on some of the wording: in amongst all the "Teams sales are up, ad sales are up, traffic is up, and we just signed our biggest ever enterprise sale", I found it surprisingly hard to figure out the actual reason for the layoffs:

This has been a tough week at Stack Overflow, and taking care of each other is more important than ever right now. Like companies large and small, we have had to make difficult choices in order to reflect the market conditions. This week, we reduced our global workforce by approximately 15%. Most of the affected employees were furloughed, except for employees and contractors in regions where furloughs were unfortunately not an option. These actions primarily affected sales and customer success teams within our Talent business, which is dependent on the hiring environment.

I think this means, "job ads are down"? Maybe just confusing, because "Talent" in many companies means HR/Recruitment, but I guess at SO it means "job ads".

There's just something...odd...about using "the market conditions" as the reason for lay-offs, then immediately describing a bunch of ways in which market conditions have never been better for StackOverflow.

Answer 2

Having vocally expressed disappointed by SE management's handling of the Monica Cellio issue and its fallout - all disastrously bad - I'm at least happy at long last to see the CEO post on SE Meta, where, IMO, you should have been visibly leading throughout those problems. Caesar led from the front at the crisis, not the back. Red cloak optional. But better than it was.

Going forward your blog post did seem more informative than the awful "friendly upbeat interview" post I last read. This has real content and a proper sense of trying to inform us of the good and the bad without the heavy-handed spin that was so repulsive before. So a great improvement.

I am sorry to hear of the layoffs. I'd prefer to see companies in this crisis carry staff they can't furlough and furlough people they need to and can to keep the others from being unemployed. It's out of my hands, but that's something that needs saying for those who helped​ members in the past. Good luck to all of them.

I am extremely happy to see a continued statement of support for heavier moderator involvement in decision making, especially with regard to moderator reinstatement (and ideally dismissal). My view is that moderators who are elected by the community should be only removed by the moderators acting on behalf of the community and not by SE management except in the most extreme conditions. Still, the current proposals are an improvement on what was on offer before (nothing). More trust is needed by SE management in the community and its decision making for the sites' good.

For me, as one of the members who went "on strike" and is now back active (which I of course always wanted to be), these are positive signs in difficult times. More and continued change would be good. For members like me, we consider SE's management "on probation" pending results.

The bottom line for me is how the (elected) moderators feel about the changes when they are finalized. Fight those management instincts to have control of all things - SE moderators need to be trusted by you, because they're the people we ordinary members trust. Good managers delegate. Bad managers cannot let go of control. That's my philosophy.

So, much better than it was, but work still needed.

Answer 3

Thank you for the blog post and for talking with us here. It's greatly appreciated. Furloughing a large portion of the company had to be a hard decision and those of us who care about the company's employees appreciate the transparency. This seems more appropriate than what happened a few years ago when 20% of the company was laid off and the community found out via Twitter messages from the ex-employees. Nobody likes to deliver bad news, but I'm glad you have taken that responsibility.

I trust that the People Team is helping furloughed employees apply for government benefits to bridge the gap between now and a (hopefully) brighter future. As you can see from the Talent business, this is not the best time to be looking for a new job. Even if there is promise to return to their previous job, I imagine many people are stressed out this week.

Prashanth, I wanted to thank you for the way you tweeted out the post and referenced "technologists" in addition to developers. Back in 2015 when Andreessen Horowitz invested in Stack Exchange, Joel said:

And we did such a good job of serving programmers that a few smart non-programmers looked at us and said, “Behold! I want that!” and we thought, hey! What works for developers should work for a lot of other people, too, as long as they’re willing to think like developers, which is the best way to think. So, we decided that anybody who wants to get with the program is welcome to join in our plan. And these sites serve their own communities of, you know, bicycle mechanics, or what have you, and make the world safer for the Programmer Way Of Thinking and thus serve programmers by serving bicycle mechanics.

Somehow in the last five years that message got lost and it sometimes felt like Stack Overflow had become Steve Ballmer on a loop. By last year Community Managers were told that the 100+ communities that weren't serving developers directly were not assets, but liabilities. It's good to see the blog post call out Biology, Medical Sciences and Academia as communities that provide value. It's too bad the company was caught flat-footed on benefiting financially, however.

I'm particularly frustrated with the way network ads were implemented last year. Stack Overflow long had a community-friendly approach to advertising. The community team assumed that philosophy applied not just to Stack Overflow, but to all the communities. Unfortunately, we were told to remove the link to that blog post because the author, Steve Feldman, is no longer the Senior Ad Ops Manager at Stack Overflow. (This was communicated to me third-hand, so I might not have the full story.) In my opinion, this was a wasted opportunity.

Before this becomes a rant, I want to encourage the people working at Stack Overflow to look for opportunities outside of the confines of developers or even the tech industry. All sorts of people have questions and are looking at Stack Exchange for answers.

Answer 4

We plan to update the Moderator Reinstatement policy in May to potentially include the Moderator Council’s proposed involvement in the process.

I don't understand why you would do that. Every site has a moderation team that should have a say, and with all due respect to the current council members (and they deserve a lot), they are not representatives of the community where a moderator might be reinstated. Their obligation isn't to serve that community - it's to represent moderators from across the network. Why would they be involved AT ALL in a decision to reinstate or not a site moderator? It should be the company, the site's moderation team, and the "trusted" users in the community (if it makes sense, which in most cases it probably wouldn't).

Answer 5

You said:

Along with the surge in traffic to our sites, we have also seen an encouraging lift in new users signing up for accounts. You can see the spike and continued lift that has been happening in 2020

How do you measure the number of new accounts? How do you know which accounts are new users coming to this site?

From what I was able to observe a large chunk of new accounts created on Stack Overflow are spam accounts. These are not new users. I do not know exactly the purpose of these accounts, but I assume it is for SEO purposes.

I do not see a Y label on the graph, so it's difficult to understand the true meaning of this data. Does it mean that there's more posts from new accounts? Does it mean there's more spam accounts being created daily?

Even if there's plenty of new users signing up, it doesn't mean they contribute anything useful. A better metric would be the number of users reaching a certain privilege level. e.g. Close voting of delete voting. Users gaining privileges means that they are active and post helpful content. These are the valuable contributors, not blank new accounts.

Answer 6

status-completed

And there has been a massive jump in traffic on Academia, up 245%, as students and teachers work to navigate this new world of remote learning.

While I appreciate your appreciation of our efforts on Academia, I fail to see this jump in traffic on the site-analytics tools for 10 k users and moderators. Instead, I see a considerable dip lasting from the middle of March to the middle of April.

I thus wonder:

• Did I not look at the right numbers or not in the right way?
• Are the site-analytics tools broken?
• Did whoever produced this number make a mistake somehow? (Mind that it cannot be mistaking the end of the dip for a peak, as that was smaller.)

Update: This has been solved an corrected now. The traffic boost was on Meta Academia.

Answer 7

Frankly - it's happened before, and while we hope it won't happen again, it could. That's not counting the "realignment" which ostensibly moved resources to the very parts of the company now affected.

Each time, it feels like we're a little diminished, and that the community is a little bit less than it was, like we lost an essential part of who we are.

The critical test isn't just how the company weathers the storms - but in shoring things up, and doing right when things are good so the storms have less of an impact - to not merely survive and pick up the wreckage, but thrive.

We've basically seen Talent go boom and bust more than once. While it's been pushed as the great hope for revenue - I'm kind of unsure what's a unique value preposition in a really crowded market, and it's possible customers might feel so too. The only value is in the Stack Overflow name I guess, but I'd suspect that pretty much everyone has their own equivalent on that front.

As far as furloughs go - it may be better than getting fired, but it's still probably a pain.

As someone who was let go from what felt like a perfect job - it sucks, and I feel that it's probably essential to work out what's a sustainable way for the business units that're supposed to fuel the company's growth in the long run. Shedding staff every so often when things are bad is not a great way to go. In the long term - maybe it should be a goal to avoid that, even in bad times. So I guess - I'd ask, is Careers/Talent sustainable, and at least internally suggest maybe it's worth examining why it's failed to live up to expectations more than once in the company's history.

All storms pass. The question isn't just "how do we weather the storm?" but rather to understand where things went wrong - and try to do right by the community - both of users and of the folks working to ensure the business runs and grows. And well - the community's been patient, and has tried to stand by the network where its been possible, and got taken for granted a lot. When things get better - it might be worth remembering that.

I also do hope that in trying to trim things in lean times (I'd hardly call it fat at this time), that the good work that's gone on lately doesn't take a back seat. In trying to get back in touch with the community, in new features (Following posts - was pretty much a polished version of my first feature request , and somehow Lisa listened to my 3 am ramblings (and others) and turned a feature I hated (tag synonyms) into something I use.) It's been a decent start at rebuilding things.

While I guess it's good to go "We're doing ok! Honest?" We've... heard that a lot. That more resources were just around the corner, when things work out.

One can go through a problem, one can go around it, or one can get ready, and laugh at it mockingly, standing tall. Can we be the last next time?

Answer 8

I'm just going to throw this out there for the meta readership:

Having met you for an evening, you strike me as a thoughtful, kind, compassionate, curious, and serious person. I can't imagine stepping in to captain a company as, unknown to all of us, three months later a Great Depression-level of economic upheaval slams into the world, but I suspect those qualities will only help.

Good luck.

Answer 9

I liked this post by the CEO.

It feels more like a community member is writing. The posts before this one felt distanced having a mostly professional and impersonal tone. I think this communication was more in accordance with how the community prefers to be addressed by management.

Answer 10

It's great to get some overview on what's happening, but this particular part of it kinda... disappointed me a bit, I guess?

On the public platform side, we have made a number of important updates. We released a beta version of a feature that will give users more control of what they experience on our network by allowing them to report ads they don’t like, and we launched version 2.0 of our Unfriendly Robot which automatically flags unwelcoming comments. We made it possible for users to follow questions and answers that they did not author, giving folks an easy way to stay up to date with changes to posts that they are interested in. We are excited to share plans for a long-awaited overhaul to review queues. And we shipped the first in a series of changes to the “close question” experience that we hope will make life easier for moderators and more pleasant for users.

This reads way more like the old "we built, we shipped", whereas in reality, there has been some dialogue from the team to Meta (thanks to brilliant initiatives such as the work Lisa Park did - and is still doing? - on the review queues), which was only really mentioned in the form of a link to the post.

The people aren't important - well, they are, but it's more the direction that is: this build/launch process, as highlighted in this blog post, had a step beforehand: plan. And this planning part seems to be an implementation detail in that paragraph.

Answer 11

I'll add to the other thoughtful replies here that, while pleased to see the update, and with your posting it here on meta, I am wondering why you could not also share...

• More information about the company's finances, especially after these layoffs/furloughs.

  • Is SE Inc. balanced-or-better w.r.t. income and expenses, after the layoffs/furloughs?
  • If not, do you expect to be in the near future?

• More details on the impact of the personnel cuts on the Stack Exchange network. You mentioned the layoffs/furloughing impacted your "Talent business". Is the network (a.k.a. "Public Q&A") un-impacted?

• A link to a description of your "Talent business". Most people on Stackoverflow.com only know about the recruitment ad mechanism (SO Jobs); elsewhere on the network, people may be completely unaware of it.

Answer 12

They say that such harsh times often amplify the best and worst in humans. I am really glad that SE Inc. and you, as the CEO are trending towards the positive side!

I think your post does an excellent job:

• it gives a good summary of the current situation of the company
• you are honest about the financial impacts of the crisis
• and you have a good way of outlining all the positive developments that are going on within the company, but also together with your users (and customers and partners).

From that point of view, you said all the right things, hitting the right "tune".

Sure, not all disagreements that arose in the past can be resolved so that everyone is happy. But me personally, I get the feeling that contributing on Stack Overflow became meaningful again.

There isn't too much I can do to help those facing existential problems, but it feels good to support those that want to learn new things these days.

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And a really personal thought: I am with IBM for 20 years, always developing stuff around the mainframe. So it was extremely touching to listen to that podcast, and get to know two amazing coworkers I didn't know before. So, extra appreciation from me for hyping that podcast and our "call for code" this way.

Answer 13

Please give the blog a read and let me know what questions you have

Why don't you post on meta?

I personally hate SO blog and simply ignore anything written there. It has lots of flaws including the one why you are here - to give feedback. The comment system is terrible, no Stack Exchange user integration, no up/down-votes, etc.

Do you want feedback? Simply post a question on meta targeting us (users of network) and not them (potential partners or whatever the blog is targeting). That would even make it easier to write, because you can completely skip marketing language (if you don't - expect downvotes).