Current state of the stack ignores user needs

Question

I read the blog, I re-read it, I made notes and re-read it again, I walked away and then re-read it for a fifth and sixth time. I still found none of my concerns addressed (see end).

First, there will always be a part of me that loves Stack Exchange. It has been therapy for me and given me the opportunity to meet the characters of the Python room. Even if many of the ones I worked with, many of those closest to my field, have left - I still have fun with the Data Scientists, Physicists who claim not to be programmers (even if their Py knowledge is insane), and Human or Canine Ninjas, and it has directly help me progress in my own education.

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I have sssooo many points, I cannot make them all. So I will simply start with Jobs: I have never, in all my contract work, found a single job using SO and only two leads, from the start of SO.Jobs, offering in my area/field. I'd wonder if that's just my area but I still see nothing for developers, no data scientists, no data engineers (again, my field), no jobs, no anything in the technical field within your own job posting - linked within the Blog. The jobs are primarily marketing people and sales peoples. So, I'm sorry SE is not likely a place you would find us applying - those of us in the actually field of computer science, information systems, and information technology. Have you forgotten your heart? Have you forgotten you were built by developers? engineers? IT people? IS people? those of us who live, breath, and on good weeks even taste what it is to be in the industry of technology?

I am now in my 20th (not consecutive, there was a break for war) year in the IT/IS industry. I have begun teaching others just starting on their journey. A question I keep finding myself asking is: "Should I point them towards SO?". I don't mean this in the sense of "will they use SO to cheat?" but in the sense that I will give my students as many advantages as I can and "IS SO AN ADVANTAGE?". Once, this would be an easy call - now? The welcoming initiative, the way it was conducted, the lack of calls for developers in a system that almost begs for data people, for web developers, looking at a system that is losing questions more rapidly than has been acknowledged (2018: a year in asking and answering) - why would I point them towards SO? Just why would I point them to something that is losing its prominence and not even looking for people within the fields they aspire to and I live in. None of these are addressed.

Finally, I still have seen nothing from higher up on how it is treating its current userbase. Until I see that or a change within posts like this which truly acknowledges this (not with words - we are long past that and I will not forget - but within hiring, within corporate structure) it is impossible to trust anything said by the company.

TLDR;

SE no longer represents developers, data engineers, data scientists, or other coders. Its sub-sites (including SO) may but SE as a corporation has lost its connection with the IT/IS/Technology community and posts like this which link to Job offerings by SE which completely lack mid or higher technical positions (with only one entry-level IT position listed) - just point to how far away they've drifted from their original audience.

I tried to post this to the blog but comments are either disabled or otherwise filtered such that this will not get through, so I have posted here. If there is a question it is this:

How will SE address its disregard to current users and lack of focus on the IT/IS industry which was once its heart?

Earlier stated Concerns about SE policy (please don't upvote on meta unless you agree, "I said what I mean, I mean what I said" agree/disagree as you will):

• Are we creating divisions in our quest to make new users welcome?
• How do I draw attention to a meta post?
• Add a way for users to "opt out" of the new contributor indicator on their own posts

Answer 1

As noted in some of the comments on Journeyman Geek's answer, my role recently changed from "CTO" to "President and CTO". This is a made-up title that means that I'm now responsible for the entire exec team (engineering, product, marketing, sales, finance, etc) and putting together our plan for 2019, which is why I wrote the post.

A few things are different this year than previous years that maybe speak to your concerns:

1. We're hiring a bunch, especially in engineering. Last year was a rebuilding year on the business side -- we had to fix a bunch of things to get ourselves into a better financial position. We did that, and now we're ready to start growing again. The only reason you don't see dev jobs on our hiring page is because whenever we post dev jobs we get more applications than we can handle. As of this moment we have... 373 applications to our dev job listing that we're still trying to sort through. As soon as we work that queue down, we'll post the job for a week or two and get another few hundred applications.
2. We're putting more emphasis on dev community work. With the business side in much better shape, we're able to grow the team that works on public Q&A features. We're hiring for that team right now. We're also investing heavily in Stack Overflow for Teams & Enterprise, and a lot of that work spills back over into the community because they're working on the core Q&A engine (it's all the same codebase).
3. We're working on making the community easier to use and more welcoming, which is about focusing on devs. This one you might not agree with me on, but I deeply believe that in order for the community to grow, we have to make it easier to use and encourage people to join who right now feel excluded. The overwhelming tendency of internet communities, especially technical ones, is to become more insular and hard on new users ("RTFM!"), and we have to actively work to resist that. So we're going to keep working on this, but also staff up a related effort to work on mod tools & expert user experience that's parallel to the Welcome Wagon effort.
4. I'm... President?. I don't want to overstate my own value here, I'm still just one person and the real people making a difference are all the different people who work here, but I do think the fact that Joel chose me for this role (with my dev background) speaks to our belief that the dev community is at the heart of this company.

To the general feeling of being ignored and undervalued, I hear you. We haven't made community work enough of a priority the past few years, and I aim to fix that. It won't be immediate because it involves staffing a few teams back up while still supporting the business side (because we have to stay in business or there won't be a community), but change is in the air.

Answer 2

I don't work at SE – and I've complained pretty loudly in the past about the focus on careers. I've gotten a few sentiments from folk who work here though. I'd also say – David's been on SE for ages primarily on the engineering side. I actually think it's interesting he wrote it – as a long time employee at the pointy end of the engineering stick, rather than marketing. (I got informed he's the president and CTO in the comments - which adds more weight, but also that this is someone intimately involved in what he's talking about)

1. The blog's primarily marketing. It's aimed at selling the product, and for the most part, the product that makes SE money is Careers (though less so), channels and hosted SE instances and ads. We're not the target audience.

2. Feels a lot like we're in the middle of a course correction. While SE isn't huge, it's not small enough to go "Hey, we need to suddenly change things".

3. Hiring takes time – the layoffs were a year ago, and things have suffered from it. I for one am keeping an eye on the "work here" page. It's probably heavy on "manager"/"Lead" type jobs, cause those sectors are stuff that needs people, and they can build a team around that. I for one am expecting to see more QA end jobs there.

I do see UX jobs, product managers, information security (which is a new thing for SE)... The enterprise sales jobs probably reflect the fact that that's growing. The management level stuff reflects that, well it's growing, and they'll be the ones working out what's needed – especially in roles that haven't been needed that much.

I'd love to see more devs, more CMs and such but I don't think that's something that will turn up immediately right after such an announcement.

I'm not going to say "All is good" – but the noises we're hearing from SO blogs (marketing focus aside) have been better than they have been in a few years. While it's for them to win back lost trust - I don't think it'll be overnight.

Answer 3

To add to David's answer, I feel like we finally have good problems.

What exactly do I mean by that? Well, moving slowly because you're in the process of seeking and hiring folks for roles, some of them incredibly difficult to fill, is a really good problem to have.

Why is that a good problem to have? Because you're moving with the confidence of knowing what you're going to do nine steps from now and the only thing that remains commensurate is finding and hiring the right people. There isn't any more "well, if this does well as we think it should, we can ... (yadda yadda)."

Abby was saying in comments that this time we're asking you to wait is a bit different than previous times. I think her point is important enough to amplify, hence this answer.

I can't lay out a firm hiring roadmap, or exactly what parts of open roles makes them difficult to fill, or even the order that we might need to fill them for everything to come together (one might, after all, want to make a specific hire after hiring someone more apt at interviewing such candidates, for instance). But I can say, we have a solid plan that I am very excited to help David execute, and I'm really excited about us bringing on more folks to make it happen.

You'll see additional evidence of priorities refocusing way sooner than later, but since I'd rather surprise you than disappoint you, I'm going to stop there. I will say that I have been here since 2008, I served as your elected moderator for 4+ years, and have been in senior management at this company for about the same amount of time. I feel really good about what's coming up.

And, well, the people that tend to be good about fixing all the problems tend to be the ones doing it, instead of running around the Internet yodeling about fixing all the problems. That pretty accurately describes how David has been handling his demotion to President and CTO, though I have no idea how well he can or can't yodel.

It's safe to feel optimistic. I'll end it there for now.