Known Issues with MVP Stack Overflow Jobs Launch

Question

December 4, 2024 Update:

We recently made a small update allowing users to search for remote jobs more effectively. "Remote" is now a recognized option when typed into the location field, so users no longer have to use the work around of searching for "remote" in the keyword field.

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June 3, 2024 Update:

Since launch (on May 8, 2024) we have made a few updates to begin to improve the quality and relevance of jobs listed on SO Jobs.

We are now excluding job listings that:

• have a description with fewer than 75 words
• were originally posted over 90 days ago
• have specific titles or key words which are not relevant to SO and SE technical communities, but were previously showing up on the job site

We will continue to update the community when further improvements are made.

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May 15, 2024 Update: Issue resolved. We are aware that the issue of jobs not appearing on the site has recurred.

May 10, 2024 Update: Issue resolved. We are aware that jobs are not currently appearing. We are working this issue.

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As mentioned in the announcement last week, the Stack Overflow Jobs launch today is a MVP (Minimum Viable Product). We are aware of, and working on fixes to, the following issues:

May 8, 2024 (original issues):

• May 13, 2024 Update: this issue has been resolved. Ad blockers currently block the whole site from loading - for now, consider disabling your ad blocker if you want to use the job site
• October 10, 2024 Update: this issue has been resolved. Only city and country, not state, are listed and searchable in the location search field
• When you search “C#” or “C++” in the keyword search field, the search renders to just “C”, and jobs associated with all three languages show up in search results
• May 13, 2024 Update: this issue has been resolved. If you open a job in a full screen view and then click on the Jobs logo to go back to Stack Overflow Jobs the page does not format correctly
• October 10, 2024 Update: this issue has been resolved. Avatars for job listings without a logo generate a background color on page load, these colors change every time a new job listing is selected from the list in the left panel

If you notice other issues or bugs as you begin to explore the job site please post them here as separate answers, so that we can get them fixed as soon as possible.

For simplicity, it would be best to have one answer per issue, so if someone else has already posted the one you notice please just post comments below their answer if you want to add any nuance.

Answer 1

Rather than responding to each answer and comment I am making one consolidated reply here.

Thank you for all the bugs and other issues mentioned on this post. We are keeping track of what has been reported here and will follow up as improvements are made. You can continue to use this post to report new issues if they arise.

(posted by me so it can be accepted and pinned to the top)

Answer 2

Looks like many of the job postings are stale, like this one that a former employee points out is 4 years old:

https://twitter.com/jlericson/status/1788266614330368193

My understanding is that this is a pretty common problem with scraping sites like Indeed, and was not a problem with the previous iteration of Jobs here because that product was not a junky scraping site like Indeed.

Answer 3

Do these companies actually exist?

I looked at jobs in San Francisco, and there are a bunch of jobs from a company called "Unreal Gigs". Neither California nor Delaware (a common state for companies to be registered in) appear to have heard of any entity by this name (and the California tool appears to list at least the couple of out-of-state businesses with workers in the state that I checked). No US trademark is registered for that name. San Francisco has no fictitious business name registered containing the word "unreal". A Google search for the company name finds pretty much only job postings, and nothing about the company besides the job postings.

It's conceivable that some of these things might not find a real company, but a company having none of them seems quite surprising.

How are these postings vetted for accuracy?

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Note: All of these links (except the first link to a screenshot of a jobs search) are to the search tools and not specific searches, because, annoyingly, none of these tools support linking to specific searches.

Answer 4

The link to the new site in the left menu has a new activity highlight that we can't dismiss and doesn't go away after clicking it.

Answer 5

These keywords give inaccurate results.

• "VBA" results include "DBA" jobs.
• Having two keywords seems to be treated as an OR search, not an AND search, even when you put quotes around a phrase or use the word "AND".
  • "Technical Writer" results include "Technical Architect" and "Technical Product Manager"
  • "writer AND remote" includes jobs with either term but not both

Answer 6

We really need a "Saved jobs" feature to collect the posts we're interested in. The alternative is make a new browser tab or bookmark for each one.

EDIT: I clicked "Apply" on one job, and discovered that it took me to the posting in my Indeed account - where I can add it to my Saved Jobs. So there actually IS a "Saved Jobs" feature; we just need a button on the SOJ posting that we can click.

Answer 7

On mobile (can't test desktop at the moment) when i enter my city/state, it only displays city name in the results, and doesn't display state anywhere... How am I to be sure it has the correct city, given there are dozens of cities across the country with this name?

I can't even search by state... seems like this would be fairly useless outside of a few large cities.

Answer 8

The page isn't responsive. On small screens, the entry doesn't appear anywhere, nor do the list entries open a new tab.

Fine:

Borked:

According to the CSS, the details disappear at 991.98px, but nothing seems to take its place, nor does clicking any of the listings result in the listing being opened as a link. Middle-clicking/long-tapping and "open in new tab" works, but that should really happen by default on small screens.

Answer 9

The footer is broken on mobile

Answer 10

When using Brave (my usual browser), https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?source=so-banner just hangs, showing https://dy793rr2xtptx.cloudfront.net/images2/topic/new/jobbio-logo-1559215894139.gif

The site loads fine with Chrome, though.

Answer 11

In the nav bar, this job lists its location as "Sunnyvale", but the description says it's 100% Remote.

https://stackoverflow.jobs/job/learning-experience-and-design-technical-writer-at-genesis10-2

Answer 12

The "search cities" text box does not handle keyboard input correctly. The "home" and "end" keys are completely ignored. Once a city has been selected, the behavior of the field completely changes for some reason. Pressing "delete" or "backspace" will clear the entire field instead of merely deleting the character next to the cursor. Typing anything will clear the field, actually. After a city has been selected, you cannot move the cursor or highlight text using either the keyboard or the mouse. Accidentally select "Bronson" instead of "Branson"? Too bad, no way to fix it, you have to nuke the whole thing and start over. A very bad user experience.

By contrast, the "keyword" search field next to it behaves exactly as expected.

Answer 13

Do a search and select the first result. Place the mouse cursor anywhere other than inside the job description box, then start slowly scrolling down the page. Once the header jumps back into view, scroll down a few more mouse wheel clicks and then stop. Scroll up one mouse wheel click. The job description box will jump around (flicker?) for a second, then end up a couple of pixels lower than where it was a second ago. Scroll down one mouse click and it will jump again, ending back up where it started.

You can scroll up, down, up, down, one click at a time and the job description panel will flicker continually. If you continue scrolling past that first click it behaves as expected, but any time you change scroll direction you get that jarring flash of the page moving unexpectedly. This isn't limited to the mouse, you can also reproduce it while scrolling with the keyboard. It does not happen, however, at the top of the page when the header bar is still visible, or when the header has scrolled out of view and not yet re-appeared. It only occurs after you've scrolled far enough for the header to pop back into view.

Answer 14

The page's fancy scrolling effects are a bit odd. After doing a search, start slowly scrolling down the page. The page header will scroll up out of view. The list of jobs on the left will scroll up with it, but the job details panel just stops with a big awkward blank space above it:

Then if you keep scrolling farther, the header jumps back into view and fills that space. I find this very confusing. Why move the header off the page for ~200 pixels, only to throw it right back on? Do you want to show me the header or not? I'd prefer if the header remained out of view after scrolling the page, since it takes up way too much vertical space and serves no purpose at that point. If I want to do another search, I can easily hit "home" and jump back up to the header.