Practical effects of the October 2023 layoff

Community is among the most reliable cornerstones of the place – the essence of what makes this company what it is. Our intent to support the community using whatever resources we have available is unwavering.

Then why, over the past two firings (and previous rounds), have you eliminated the CMs and other employees who were among the largest advocates for the community and who, in some of the worse periods, were the only communication channel with the company?

The community isn't going anywhere isn't true. We have lost chunks of the community over time and they never came back.

It's worth considering that the biggest project that's set back is trust. Trust built over years - lost, points of contact we were familiar with no longer exist.

If you do manage to get out of the rut you're in now, the next future CM or SRE is going to ask themselves - 'Do I have a future here' in a company that seems to have a revolving door even for great employees.

Unlike the GenAI initiatives many of these employees have had deep, proven, and marked effects on the community.

It's not just sucky - the company might have once again traded the present and future of our communities for a much more uncertain future.

As a long time user of the network - I have literally seen the same cycles of chasing a product at the expense of the public sites and seeing it fail.

I was excited to see actual concrete good for the community from CM hires and such. The current direction seems to have rolled back the good work of the past few years.

It's easy to see a silver lining when you haven't been rained on. And frankly when your house hasn't been partially dismantled for a distant Lord's castle.

The long term picture isn't rosy, and should overflow AI fail, trust you couldn't afford to spend is burnt

It isn't any different from ... Many previous times. It was careers not AI but we got the same promises of better days we never saw.

The practical effects are very much loss, sorrow and frankly a loss in confidence

Classical roadmap towards a sale. Make big promises, cut back costs, pocket reserve cash, boast net revenue, sell.

My question is: who are some prospective buyers, and what is the projected sale's timing?

You state:

At the end, if you squint, I hope you’ll see the faint glimmer of a silver lining.

I've been squinting really hard, but maybe you could help me out and tell what to look for. Where should I look? Since I'm not seeing the silver lining of dismissing 2 veteran CMs while you consider "priorities may shift towards reliability and maintenance". Those CMs were pretty important for the reliability and maintenance, both short- and long-term.

When the moderation strike ended earlier this year, the outcome of the negotiations was posted. I'm concerned about how the company is going to keep up its end of the agreement here.

First and foremost:

Improving day-to-day communication between staff and moderators

How will this be accomplished? The Community team has lost two highly respected members of the team. They were also two of the most visible members of the team.

Where is the community manager->community relationship at this point? I'm saying that it is much closer to the "Non-existent" end of the spectrum than "Fully engaged two way communication" end.

Tooling for mod communication and determining if the company violated the Mod Agreement

Combining one statement

Longer-term projects that are more piecemeal in nature, such as time spent servicing requests for new tools, may also be impacted and responsiveness may slow down. My commitments during the recent moderator action negotiations remain intact, and we will continue to honor them.

with another

It’s important to us that the sites continue to function as designed. Like I said, the community isn’t going anywhere. That means we’ll still prioritize bug-fixes as usual, and maintain our uptime. Any reduction in our work throughput will come from other areas of product development.

I don't know how to reconcile these two. How are you going to honor your commitments while also reducing the relationships that were vital in getting even minimal tooling upgrades out the door? At the same time you are pushing the generative AI brouhaha even in this announcement. It's clear that remains a priority. How do the other commitments the company made to the community fit into this new landscape with fewer employees and fewer Company->Community relationships?

Regardless of the nuances of the full picture, and as stated by Prashanth in his blog post, this layoff is part of the company's path to profitability--profit has 2 elements--income and cost. Layoffs reduce "cost" (in the form of humans and salary).

Based off LinkedIn, social media, this post, and conversations with friends, with a few notable exceptions, the layoff has affected the lives of many individual contributors from across the company, and only a select few managers.

I would appreciate answers to these three discrete questions, which all get to the main question of "Have senior leadership (VP+) shouldered any of the financial burden currently facing 120-something employees?"

• Will senior leadership forego bonuses and raises this year?
• Has senior leadership taken a reduction in pay so that they can share in the salary cost-cutting?
• Or are individual contributors expected to fully shoulder the direct financial impact of the company's strategy which resulted in the layoffs?

Why do I care? Why should users care?

Stack Overflow became what it is today because it was able to attract top-tier talent across all areas, both as employees and as volunteer content creators on the site. Top talent is choosy about where they work, and will choose to work where they feel respected and working on things they love. I hope that the company treated all laid off employees with the respect and compassion they deserve, and this is one important measure of that.

What will become of the development projects that Catija and other devs were involved in? There were some initiatives (such as mod tooling) she was acting as liaison on in the SO mod room.

Projects undergoing active work may change scope or be canceled.

Does that also hold for your GenAI initiatives? Will you continue to invest as much resources and energy into GenAI initiatives as before?

It seems to be a fact that your projects will suffer from this layoff. But it will be significantly worse if you are not willing to reduce the amount of energy/men(and women)power/money you put into GenAI.

Please consider reducing the focus on GenAI and ensure everything else doesn't fall apart completely.

(personal opinion/very biased)

If you don't, I only see the situation becoming even worse for SE (and the Community but the Community doesn't seem to be important for SE judging from what SE is doing (I am talking about SE as a company here, I am sure CMs are still caring about the Community, even without Catja and V2Blast)) in the future. And with "the situatuation becoming even worse for SE", I fear that 2 layoffs from now, even the CEO might be impacted.

Please, for the sake of god/allah/buddah/business or whatever you believe in: Don't take (any more) bets (on GenAI) you can't afford to lose (because you seem to be losing them).

At the time of writing this answer, on SO's main page, the featured blog post is "Is AI enough to increase your productivity?".

This... doesn't look good, given the circumstances. This whole AI thing is already infuriating as it is, and now that many people lost their job, it adds a taste of arrogance which we could do without.

Is there any way you guys can just remove this link for now?

Edit

Good news, the link to the article was removed. Less good news, we can still see an article on LLMs O_o

@Philippe: The Community does not agree with the AI initiatives being pushed by the Company. That was made abundantly clear in various posts on Meta.SE and other sites. This is a pain point for us and this is creating a rift between the Company and the Community.

You said that the Company cares about its Community. If this is indeed the case, please consider putting a hold on the AI-related articles being pushed? This would be a very clear display of how much you truly care about the Community. Then maybe you can find a way to exchange with the Community about their views on possible AI-related initiatives that could be helpful in our opinion?

I have a question for Mr. Prashanth Chandrasekar.

A while ago, Joel Spolsky made a post announcing your arrival at Stack Overflow.

At the time, one of the things that was said was the following:

Last March, I shared that we were starting to look for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. We were looking for that rare combination of someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth enterprise software company very quickly. This is not something I’m particularly good at, and I thought it was time to bring on more experienced leadership.

By them, it seemed Stack Overflow was going really well. Joel there talks about lots of opportunities arriving, and needing more experienced leadership to help managing things going forward.

A few years later, came the huge acquisition by Prosus.

With that acquisition, you personally mentioned that:

Once this acquisition is complete, we will have more resources and support to grow our public platform and paid products, and we can accelerate our global impact tremendously. This might look like more rapid and robust international expansion, M&A opportunities, and deeper partnerships both on Stack Overflow and within Stack Overflow for Teams.

And that:

Prosus is a long-term investor and loves what our company and community have built over these last 13+ years. They are impressed by the SaaS transformation the company has been on since the launch of Stack Overflow for Teams and especially over the last two years. Prosus recognizes our platform’s tremendous potential for impact and they are excited to launch and accelerate our next phase of growth.

Very promising words! Acquisitions are scary, but those were words that promised greatness to come and that things would only get better. That happened around the middle of 2021.

Fast forward just two years later, to 2023, and now we find ourselves on a strange situation where a third of the workforce, including people that were highly valued by the community, had to be let go in order to recover profitability.

A third of the workforce.

A third of the workforce being let go after very good news a few years ago is not a minor reorganization or a strategic shift. It's something very major, that doesn't happen from one moment to another. It feels like things are going very, very bad, and we as a community don't understand what is going on. I think I speak for many of us when I say that we're in the dark of why this was necessary.

We don't understand how things came to this. We had the acquisition, the big deals, the promises of growth and getting better and better, and now a third of the people that work on the company lost their jobs.

How did the situation got this dire?

One of the impacted CMs was the last remaining person who would straddle between the difficulties of communicating to the community and representing the company. Some of their announcements and projects were generally well received, and it was the impression that for as long as they were around, things could at least start to heal.

With their departure and with the calamities that have already befallen this community, what words could you offer to someone like me who would use this chance to forever give up any faith that the company is on the right track and that the community is being taken care of?

today’s actions will allow us to be more strategic and to narrow our focus as we move forward.

This statement implies that the individuals whose jobs were eliminated-- who are largely individual contributors executing on strategy set by senior leadership-- were somehow responsible for a lack of strategic focus.

That's a terrible thing to imply, and as a former employee I understand it is far from the truth. This phrase should be edited and frankly y'all should apologize for the insinuation.

I understand you are trying to find something positive to write, but throwing shade at the people whose jobs have been eliminated for somehow inhibiting strategy is a desperate look, not a community focused one or even a strategic one.

Practical effects of the October 2023 layoff

A CM who cares deeply about improving user onboarding and guidance is now no longer a voice inside the company. If anything, that's the kind of thing that I think will lead to anything like a "demise of Stack Overflow".

People don't hate SO because it needs more AI. (and I can give you a long list of people who have found SO more helpful than ChatGPT). They hate it because the onboarding and guidance sucks, and then they kick their pinky toe on a disgruntled curator who is equally frustrated at the situation.

I just want to scream- "WHY!?".

My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

The last announcement about the earlier layoffs said

This is painful for them, and we are supporting those employees through this transition with severance packages, extensions of healthcare benefits, and outplacement services.

There is no such statement in the current announcement. Is there anything the company leadership wants to add about this aspect of the layoffs?

I wanted to post this message yesterday, but then decided against it to avoid further drama. Then I saw Zoe’s answer and the company comment on that, asking almost what I wanted to ask.

Then why, over the past two firings (and previous rounds), have you eliminated the CMs and other employees who were among the largest advocates for the community and who, in some of the worse periods, were the only communication channel with the company? (Zoe post)

Not just the CMs. And in fact, this time around the CM team was hit much lighter than many other teams, because of the critical role that it plays here. But ultimately, decisions needed to be made to reach a certain target, and there was no way to protect the CM team entirely. Nobody has more respect for the CM team than I do. I'm feeling the cuts very personally today. I was blessed to work with them, and once they're on my team, that's forever, and I will celebrate every time I see them. (company comment)

@Philippe You're missing the point (and the "CMs and other employees" bit). The point is that over the past few years, the company has fired many of the outward-facing staff members who actually believed in, and advocated for the community. With this last round of employees being fired, the list of remaining community advocates (that, more importantly, also has the faith of the community) has shrunk. (Zoe answer)

I can't even begin to say how annoyed I was by this exchange and how the company comment seem to completely miss the point Zoe was making.

I think it is very obvious even from the outside that right now that the company is internally divided in two factions:

• one that sees the community as an issue/hindrance and something that must be controlled, avoided, corrected, cleaned.
• one that recognizes the community as the core of the network value and the central focus of what need to be done to move forward. Those seek collaboration and reconciliation instead of control.

Many users currently seems to share the feeling that the "cut offs" are surgically aimed at removing the second faction, the one that historically has shown support to the community in order to allow the other to progress in their plan more easily.

The comment on Zoe's answer avoided this issue completely. I am therefore posting this more direct question in hope to get some insight on that. Some attempts to tell us why this is just pessimistic thinking. Something that should make us change our wrong interpretation and be more trustful.

I'll leave you with this "artistic interpretation" of what is happening that I saw many users rant about in the last few months. Mind you, it is just a half-parody that hopefully isn't true at all, but I am posting it in hope this pushes some triggers and causes an epiphany to what a growing part of the community is thinking about the company right now.

Prosus bought the Stack Exchange network with the only purpose to use its data to train its proprietary LLM. For this reason they are pushing everything in the AI direction, researching more ways to use the available data to develop other products. At the same time they are trying to find way to ensure the exclusivity of their "market advantage", for example by trying to render competitors unable to use the same data (see: data dump, how can we kill the Creative Commons). The network is seen as a cost to pay to obtain more data. The focus is therefore to reduce that cost at much as possible while still obtaining that data, not to further develop the community. Depending on how things progress, the network will be kept open and slowly converted to an advertisement for the core product (integrating Prosus LLM in the site to showcase its abilities) or shut down as soon at it won't produce any more useful data.

Again, this is just an "Evil Incorporated Inc." comic-book style made-up story that in no way has to be true (nor in any way I am claiming it is). Yet, the sole fact that many users would consider this bleak scenario even plausible should really ring some big alarm bells in your heads.

Some further thoughts -

I would refer you to this verge article

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.” We’ve reached out to Stack Overflow to find out what other teams may have been affected.

This has generally been a cycle. SE's best years were as a community and engineering centric company with a product that was best in class.

Considering that this has been identical to the events that lead to ... every other downsizing, what does the company intend to do 'better'? While the consequences to the individual contributors who're downsized is clear, I feel like nothing has actually changed between CEOs with respect to this.

With a smaller sales team, and a core community that's beaten, bruised and exhausted, and a engineering and community team that's shed people - how exactly does

As per the blog post

continued product innovation of Stack Overflow for Teams and the health of the public platform by building out our AI/ML capabilities.

Actually benefit any of us and

As we refine our focus, priorities, and strategy it's to better meet the demands of our users, customers, and partners as part of this commitment to product innovation and the continued momentum of OverflowAI both for Stack Overflow for Teams and on our public platform. Our new team structure best positions us to succeed when it comes to these initiatives.

As a core and vocal community member we have seen many requests be put on the back burner, or frankly ignored due to lack of resources. Multiple rounds of downsizing due to non profitability shows you're not meeting your financial goals, and loss of core community facing employees over time shows you've failed in your commitment to the community.

Considering the failure in meeting many of the needs of the community, down to a unprecedented protest action shortly before these downsizing events, one might consider the strategies so far a complete failure.

I asked about this in May - and apparently the response to "What are you going to do" seems to be to double down on actions that hurt the community.

What does success look like in the face of this?

I ask as I have before. I've seen concrete steps that have stripped away vital community resources and put back many projects again. What concrete steps, not promises (which feel worthless right now) does the company intend to take to serve the community and protect their interests?

We clearly see the impact of poor decision making by management on staff. I guess the question is how many cycles does the same "we're increasing our sales focus" "we're losing money" cycle have to happen before there's nothing left.

My main issue is, among the roughly 28% of the workforce that has just been laid off, were there any at a management level? If so, then secondarily, assuming it's permitted to be publicly disclosed, what number and/or percentage of the total being laid off would that be? Finally, are the numbers of these managerial level lay offs in the various groups/departments, compared to those of regular workers, roughly similar, or are there some that are significantly more or less affected?

Note that Philippe's comment states

Yes, management was impacted, up to and including at least one VP. ... But I think I can safely say that just as with the layoffs of individual contributors, management layoffs were clustered around the same solidly impacted teams, primarily Go-to-market focused.

So, let's compare the Stack Exchange organisation with a wayward truck. This truck has a history of taking wrong turns and unnecessary diversions, which is causing it to consume far too much fuel and is costing its owner big money. How can we fix this?

First approach: Let's remove one of the rear axles/wheelsets. That will save money, for sure, and maybe that axle is the cause of the wrong turns.

Nope! That didn't work; the company is still losing money because of this wayward truck.

Second attempt: Let's knock out the headlights. Clearly, they are far too bright and dazzling, and are likely making it hard for the driver to read road signs. This is obviously contributing to the unnecessary diversions (and those lights also consume energy/fuel). So: Scrapping the headlights will save us money.

Nope! That didn't work either.

At what point will the truck's owners wake up and realize that the cause of the wrong turns and diversions is … the driver?

[ from Prashanth's blog post ]  To our community members and customers reading this note: you are foundational to our success. Thank you for your continued partnership as we enter this next phase.

My translation: we fart in your general direction, but we'll be happy to milk your contributions while you still stick around and volunteer. Calling it a "partnership" is between disingenuous and downright insulting at this point.

"Lost trust" has been mentioned several times in the previous posts, in the GenAI fiasco and strike discussions before this, in the Monica debacle years ago, and before that, too. Other than the goodwill of some SO staff, is there any reason to hope for the history not repeating itself next time around i.e. is SO management, and the CEO in particular, even aware of this "trust" issue, and do they have any concrete plans to repair/rebuild it?

I'm really struggling with

Our commitment to the community remains unchanged.

and

Community is among the most reliable cornerstones of the place – the essence of what makes this company what it is.

followed by

Our responses to you will be temporarily disrupted.

and

Short-term priorities may shift towards reliability and maintenance.

These things feel like opposites to me.

Consider this: Right now (4:38 pm Eastern on 16 October 2023), there are 211 [tag:status-review] questions on Meta Stack Exchange. The kind of disruptions are going to seriously impact the targets for addressing new posts as well as the backlog.

The fact that two of the currently active CMs I can remember interacting with the most were laid off also strikes me as odd, especially considering the agreements with the moderators and the community to improve day-to-day communication between staff and moderators.

Phrased as a question: What are your concrete plans for achieving these commitments? Or, in the case of the quarterly targets, what's a new reasonable target?

I recognize that this is not a question, and that Philippe is only a messenger, but it needs to be said.

I want to take a moment to say that the folks we laid off were not let go on the basis of poor performance. On the contrary, they are some of the best folks I have ever had the chance to work with. These are attractive hires, solid candidates, and affable, talented people. We’re grateful to have had the chance to work with them. They have our respect, and they deserve yours as well. I hope that we can count on you to do everything possible to ease their transition, beginning by not speculating as to who was cut and ‘why’.

It's downright insulting for the company to tell us this.

It's insulting that the company apparently has non-performance-related reasons for doing this. In my book, those would be the only possible good reasons.

It's insulting to be told (by implication) that we don't deserve information.

It's insulting to be teased with this lack of information, and then expected not to speculate.

It's insulting that the company describes layoffs as merely a "transition".

It adds insult to injury that this profound lack of transparency, couched in obnoxious HR-speak, comes at the same time that the layoffs include liaisons between the company and the community.

As others pointed out already, it adds insult to injury that the community are referred to (elsewhere) as "partners", even as we are continually further distanced and disrespected - when the site owes its existence to us.

Prashanth, I am not your "partner". I have had enough of this. Enjoy your AI-powered ghetto.

Is the experiment announced by Catija in “If more users could vote, would they engage more? Testing 1 reputation voting on some sites” still underway, or has it been affected by her being laid off? What's the status of this experiment, and is there another community manager in charge? The Arqade community is very enthusiastic about this idea, as shown in the Arqade Meta post, “Should Arqade opt-in to the 1 reputation voting experiment?” Many of us at Arqade are looking forward to seeing it happen.

Aside from Arqade, Graphic Design SE and Pets SE are also volunteering for the experiment.

Were the layoffs equally distributed among departments and roles or were they focused on specific areas like e.g. sales, development or a specific product?

Coming from a different region of the world, with much stronger labor laws, I always wonder why we seem to view layoffs so differently.

Where I come from, a layoff is stronger regulated and many things are out of control of the company. For example, you say your layoffs weren't performance related, but since you picked the people without any public criteria, that may or may not be the case, we will never know. Where I live, you have to set up public criteria (like age, number of dependents, salary, number of years in the company) and then select the people based on that.

Unless there is an equally public reason that cannot possibly be attributed to the company leadership (let’s say Corona lockdowns and airlines), a layoff is a very public admission of company and company leadership failure here. Two layoffs in a year certainly are. I'm not even sure when I heard about it the last time, except for companies that went belly up two months later.

Why is it that in the US, I never hear company leadership step down after such a failure? It's not SE alone, and I have not heard that from others either.

Can you shed some light on the cultural differences? Why is a layoff just something the leadership in the US shrugs off as something that just happens every few years?

We’re seeing some positive signs around uptake for our new OverflowAI features, and today’s actions will allow us to be more strategic and to narrow our focus as we move forward. Expect to see a continued focus on OverflowAI as we build it toward commercial viability.

Do you have any tangible proof about those positive signs or this is just bad case of wishful thinking? Because I am not seeing any improvements in the OverflowAI functionality since the initial release.

And if by uptake you mean, people trying the thing to see how it works, then is it really an uptake?

Do you really want to keep pouring all your money betting on the dead horse hoping for some kind of miracle?

What, if any, pay cut have folks on the C-suite level taken in response to these financial issues?

I generally find the actions of such layoffs a lot more reasonable when it's not just the rank and files losing their income stream alone. And if pay cuts haven't occurred on the C-suite level, why hasn't this occurred?

For any company, multiple large layoffs within a single calendar year are an extremely concerning sign. Following the round this past May, I hoped that the company's strategic plan would avoid another; that was obviously not the case.

Yesterday's blog post by Prashanth announcing the October layoffs contains the following section:

This year is no different, ranging from the monumental efforts to successfully launch OverflowAI to dealing with the ongoing threats to customer budgets shifting due to the macroeconomic pressures impacting the entire tech industry. This is why we have been so focused on our path to profitability, even as we commit to the continued product innovation of Stack Overflow for Teams and the health of the public platform by building out our AI/ML capabilities. This year we took many steps to spend less. Unfortunately, those changes were not enough[.]

Speaking as specifically as possible, to what factors, plans and strategic decisions since May does the company ascribe this latest layoff, and how will it change course going forward, beyond of course these layoffs? Was it doubling down on investing resources in AI, problems with sales, etc.? I'd like to have a better picture of what there is to learn here and where we're headed, since it feels like there's uncertainty everywhere.

Succinctly put, how did the company get from May to now, and how will SO avoid more layoffs in, say, another five months?

From the blog:

This year is no different, ranging from the monumental efforts to successfully launch OverflowAI to dealing with the ongoing threats to customer budgets shifting due to the macroeconomic pressures impacting the entire tech industry. This is why we have been so focused on our path to profitability, even as we commit to the continued product innovation of Stack Overflow for Teams and the health of the public platform by building out our AI/ML capabilities.

Translation:

We have fired a bunch of people so that we can continue to piss away vast quantities of money on AI hype.

We are all aware of many platforms (far beyond Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange) that once provided an excellent service to their users but afterwards started to degrade. Cory Doctorow calls this phenomenon Enshittification and ascribes it to greedy capitalist platform hosts that want to monetise their communities as much as they can. And in the next step, the advertisers are trapped and monetised, too. Some platforms are too big to fail, and others are left by their former users and go into oblivion.

Having said this, I hope that SO/SE does not go down this road, because I find their service still valuable.

P.S. A new piece by Cory Doctorow on Enshittifiaction and the Labour Market

Of the four "Chosen Spokespersons" listed, one doesn't even appear to have an SE account, one hasn't been seen for over a month, and I don't find a response here by the third. The only "Chosen Spokesperson" to make any sort of response is Phillipe.

Why were the three C-level persons listed as Chosen Spokespersons if they (appear to have) had no intention of Speaking to the beloved community?

Yes, any response they made would no doubt have been followed up with embarrassing follow on questions, but this appears to me to have been yet another false impression of caring given to us, the regular community.