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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.

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.

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
  • 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
  • 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.

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  • 11
    Why is it limited to the US? A quick check of indeed shows that the restriction is on your side, as Indeed has plenty of tech jobs in other countries too
    – Zoe - Save the data dump
    Commented May 8 at 15:34
  • Sasha has said they may expand to other markets at some point.
    – Shawn V. Wilson
    Commented May 8 at 15:39
  • 30
    @isanae Pretty much all buttons redirect to Indeed's page. Applying also requires an Indeed account. The entire implementation is an advert. Incredibly disappointing to see how hard the implementation was butchered compared to the old SO Jobs
    – Zoe - Save the data dump
    Commented May 8 at 16:11
  • 25
    powered by Indeed, is hosted by Jobbio ... are we now doing QA work for another for-profit company? Will Indeed and Jobbio devs participate here as well by sharing and resolving bugs in their technical offering?
    – rene
    Commented May 8 at 16:23
  • 7
    Not worth an answer, but Stack Overflow Jobs is supposed to only be available in the US. Yet, I can load stackoverflow.jobs directly without a VPN, and I'm not US-based. It also loads fully after disabling my ad blockers. There's no jobs outside the US, but this seems like an oversight when the direct link to stackoverflow.jobs is likely to be shared without context elsewhere
    – Zoe - Save the data dump
    Commented May 8 at 16:46

14 Answers 14

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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)

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43

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.

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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?

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.

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  • 12
    Indeed has plenty of fake jobs. SE has plenty of profile spammers. That is a match made in heaven ...
    – rene
    Commented May 8 at 22:01
  • 22
    10/10 name for a company that only exists in fake job postings, though.
    – Ryan M
    Commented May 8 at 22:09
  • 3
    It is not a new problem. Other Job boards experienced the same issue: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/395931/…
    – rene
    Commented May 8 at 22:16
  • @RyanM can't claim it's fake advertising, that's for sure.
    – VLAZ
    Commented May 9 at 6:34
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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.

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    For the adblock users that are going to do this faster than SE is going to fix this: The new label can be blocked by blocking .s-badge__new, but that doesn't get rid of the purple highlight, which seems to be defined by classes. The entire link can be nuked by blocking #nav-labs-jobs.
    – Zoe - Save the data dump
    Commented May 8 at 15:37
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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
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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.

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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.

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    I don't know what cities in my state or surrounding states have tech jobs, that's why i'd use a job search site! why should i need to specify each city one by one? this site would be infinitely better if the indeed logo linked to indeed so we can go to an interface that has more search options.
    – Kevin B
    Commented May 8 at 16:05
  • "I can't even search by state" is the second bullet in the OP no?
    – cafce25
    Commented May 8 at 16:10
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    @cafce25 that's why it's not the primary focus of the answer, ;) but the fact that we can't search by state means i can't select the city in my state. Who knows which Clinton i've selected if it isn't going to state that next to the city?
    – Kevin B
    Commented May 8 at 16:11
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The page isn't responsive. On small screens, the entry doesn't appear anywhere, nor do the list entries open a new tab.

Fine:

Screenshots of the jobs listing page with the jobs appearing on the right half of the screen

Borked:

Screenshot of the jobs listing page not expanding the listing itself

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.

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The footer is broken on mobile

enter image description here

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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.

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  • 9
    That's because Brave has a built-in adblocker. That's already a known issue.
    – VLAZ
    Commented May 8 at 20:10
  • To @VLAZ and the downvoters, obviously Brave has an adblocker. But obviously it's a terrible experience to have a site hang for a popular browser. So I figured the StackOverflow team would appreciate having this issue documented. They need to fix the user experience.
    – Ryan
    Commented May 10 at 15:48
  • I mean, the solution is no different. turn off the adblocker if you want to see the site. (in brave that means lowering shields)
    – Kevin B
    Commented May 10 at 16:09
  • @KevinB Let me put it this way. If I owned a site and found out that it didn't work for Brave, would I want to make adjustments to my site? Yes. At a MINIMUM, I'd want to detect that the browser was Brave (or that other ad blockers / interference was happening) and show an explanatory message to the visitor. That's why I logged this issue.
    – Ryan
    Commented May 10 at 17:18
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    Of course, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a known issue. It being a known issue doesn't somehow belittle the issue... it's just known already.
    – Kevin B
    Commented May 10 at 18:32
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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

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  • I found this happen a lot on a traditional jobs site (ads for jobs in Sydney when I'd filtered them for Adelaide, for example), I'm sure it's not specific to their product.
    – David Roberts
    Commented May 13 at 7:21
  • @davidroberts I think it's a little different for remote jobs. In this case the company location is displayed, but it's not the job worksite (your home is).
    – Shawn V. Wilson
    Commented May 13 at 19:21
  • FYI: Some recruiters fudge location info for remote jobs as a form of search engine optimization. They'll put "Sunnyvale" so that people in Sunnyvale will see it when they search for nearby jobs. They'll also re-post the exact same listing a thousand times with different city names in each one. Until job sites drastically improve their support for fully remote jobs, this might be an unavoidable problem.
    – bta
    Commented May 30 at 16:32
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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.

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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.

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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: Search results screen showing no-man's-land

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.

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