Stack Overflow Reviews

Where do I begin. I was employed by Stack in October 2019. From the beginning, things just didn't seem quite right, and I really should have seen the red flags. Meeting with the Chief Financial Officer during my first week, our entire conversation was made up of him ridiculing my decision to live and work remotely in West Virginia, making his opinions known that it was a terrible place, and questioning why I wasn't in New York (where Stack HQ is). He said he'd pushed for my role to be based in New York, but nobody listened to him. RED FLAG NUMBER 1. I was asked to make one of my team members redundant as there wasn't a need for him in the London office. I didn't agree with the decision, but went ahead with the dismissal. I was specifically told that informing employees of redundancies is to be done by their line manager, which made sense to me. More on that process later... During the redundancy process for my London team member, I was also hiring for a replacement for another team member that decided he'd had enough and wanted to leave. I usually quite enjoy recruiting for new team members, it's an opportunity to bring in fresh ideas and knowledge from a new person. Stack's recruitment process is so backwards it's pretty ridiculous. They insist on having several stages to the process, and at each stage you are interviewed by a different team member. The problem is, if one team member isn't 100% sure on the candidate, they're immediately ruled out. You can have your ideal candidate, but if one of your colleagues isn't sure, you'll lose out on them. I had to rule out a candidate because one of the other interviewers thought that the candidate was "too much like her, and they would clash". In other words, you felt threatened by them because they were an extremely strong candidate. Whatever happened to having the strongest team possible? I guess that's fine, as long as they aren't threatening your role. Ridiculous. RED FLAG NUMBER 2. During the annual company meetup, the Director of Engineering disappeared one day and was never to be seen again. We were fed very little information, but it was completely odd and unexpected. Did she step down? Was she fired? Who knows. I'm sure it's common knowledge now, but we had no clue at the time. Seems like strange timing to leave or be fired during the company meetup. RED FLAG NUMBER 3. So January approaches, I have been at Stack for around 3 months. I get a meeting request from HR and the CTO for later that morning, never a good sign. Of course, it's them letting me know that my role would be made redundant. Brilliant. Hang on a sec, where was my spineless line manager at this meeting? Wasn't it "process" for line managers to deliver such news? Apparently not. I am thankful I no longer work for this toxic company, I urge you to reconsider if you are tempted into applying for a role here. I fell for it, they paint a rosy picture about working for such an awesome, progressive company. It's complete nonsense. I left a stable, rewarding career at a reputable company to join these clowns. Don't make the same mistake no matter how tempting it might be.

1. Mission of the company. The company has changed from a developer-first mindset ("let's build the greatest Q&A platform to help the world's software developers level-up their skills and then somehow figure out how to make money") to a money-first mindset ("let's leverage the Stack Overflow brand name and web traffic to become a high-growth SaaS company while still paying lip-service to being developer-focused"). This caused some employees to become disillusioned and leave. 2. New leadership team. The new team can come across as corporate automatons who don't value the contributions of long-term employees. This almost caused me to leave. Recently, I've come to accept that they are not better or worse, just different. Before, we had a management team that was inexperienced, promoted from within and sometimes chaotic -- but people with great heart, an adventurous spirit, and an ambitious, mission-centered view of what the company could be. The new team is more traditional, hierarchical and top down -- a lot less fun, a lot less caring, somewhat indifferent to Stack Overflow's culture and traditions, but better able to drive business results. 3. Morale has been in the toilet across all departments for the last few years due to all the above-mentioned upheaval. I feel that we have turned a corner and people are starting to feel more hopeful. The company conducts weekly employee morale surveys (through a company called OfficeVibe), and the numbers overall have gone up. Attrition has also slowed from a flood to a trickle, but hard to gauge whether that's because people are happier or just unable to make a move in the pandemic job market. 4. Cracks in our armor. Stack Overflow was and still is, THE place where developers can find answers to their software questions. But in the process, we have created a 12-year-old site where rude, condescending comments are common place and a small group of power users resists any and all attempts to change the site in meaningful ways. Worse, we have created an us-against-them mentality with these power users (who moderate and contribute to our sites for free). We did this by neglecting the upkeep of our Q&A sites (since most of our internal focus is on our paid products), dismissing and publicly humiliating one of our most visible moderators (who we had to pay restitution to), and literally telling these power users that their voices don't matter. Thanks in part to the leadership of our new CTO, we have been trying to right our wrongs, make amends and rebuild our relationship with our power users, but significant damage was done. If an alternative to Stack Overflow emerges and/or Google changes its search algorithm, I fear our dominance would be in jeopardy.