I've been a developer for 10+ years and won't use it. I tried it on a whim a couple years ago and my GitHub wasn't cool enough for them so they told me "thanks but no thanks" so I've never looked again, and probably never will (my Github remains uncool, with no sign of that ever changing).
I bounced off SO itself for similar reasons, and my lack of participation there probably contributed to their rejecting me. Sign up, find question, have useful comment to make (no good for a full answer, but great clarifying comment on another) get told "sorry you can only post questions and full answers and nothing else until you've spent tons of time giving us free content" and was like "LOL OK [logout]".
Let's see what comes first: rep 50 or the next new email.
Given demain transfers, this would be a straight-up security hole miles wide.
Of that amount, the jobs product brings in close to 70% of the revenue.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-st...
I suspect your challenges with using jobs has to do with scale. It is competing with other companies that are spending a lot more, thus getting served up more in searches and thus generating more impressions.
Your comments about marketing though...yeah, that is daft. Swag costs next to nothing.
I also find that there seems to be a cadre of "answerers" who jump on new questions and then get pissy when you don't mark their answer correct because it doesn't actually answer the question. Your normal question will start getting negative votes suddenly at that point.
I also simply find SO quite a lot less useful than it used to be. They don't have a good solution to the "stale answer"--this was correct 5 years ago but is now completely obsolete and incorrect. SO is really only useful for things that appeared in the last year or that haven't changed in the last 10 years.
The world is a hard enough place to get a good job. Especially when there are scores of other people trying to that single entry level coding position that opened up and you just got out of college. So, how do you set yourself apart from all the others? You put Stack Overflow on your resume. You provided 200 answers on Stack Overflow! Opps, that one just got deleted.
Stack Overflow is a vehicle for resume improvement and comparison. Someone with 631 rep must certainly be better than someone with 239 rep. It sets a clear goal for how you measure up against the competition. Remeber to up vote your friends from college too.
Now that you've got a job as a contractor, your project manager is trying to find you contracts and up your billable rate... sending out your resume. He's asking you to get your reputation to over 2000 so the resumes can be marketed as "in the top 10% of Stack Overflow Users" or something like that. Everyone else in the office too. The easiest way to do that is to up vote all your co-workers and make trivial edits (guaranteed two rep and can't be down voted).
Documentation was a bonanza! Just add a few words, toss some code and as long as it is a "substantial edit" the reputation will roll in.
This is even more important for those people trying for the elusive remote jobs that get listed on the side of every Stack Overflow page and attach the profile of the person with it.
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How much of that is accurate? I have no idea. Its a story of a hypothetical social group at Stack Overflow that isn't interested in Spolsky vision or the Atwood vision of what the site should be.
It's also a site that has people who try to make a community site and feel that an upvote is the same as a like on Facebook. Make people feel better by up voting their posts (especially if they are down voted).
There's also the "FreELance" where people get a job for beer money and then post every single problem they have to Stack Overflow.
Without any guidance from SO corporate as the final arbitrator of culture, nor the tools for the core group (see "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy") to clearly define the boundaries that exist, the only tool that people have to get people who have a differing philosophy for what the site should be is rudeness. Compound this with far more things for the core group to curate and moderate (trying to keep it from becoming, in their minds, Yahoo Answers)... and, well, you've got Stack Overflow of today.
I've used their jobs platform on both sides (as a developer looking for work and as a hiring manager) and, regarding job postings at least, I suspect you're right. I've had very limited success with it. And yet it's my favorite platform for hiring or job-searching as a developer. I like it much more than Indeed which, to my chagrin, has proven more effective.
It's free for people looking for jobs and IIRC around $500 - $1500/mo for companies looking to post a listing or two. It still baffles me that it does not have more uptake. I spoke with a room full of about 80 new developers at a code academy recently and asked how many of them used it. There weren't more than 2 or 3 hands.
I suggested to our Sales rep that the hostile reception a lot of first-time question-askers encounter probably isn't doing them any favors. (SO has introduced new features to address this problem.)
Their Marketing team also footgunned themselves, at least as far as our company was concerned. When it came time to extend our first contract, our Sales rep asked if I'd like some t-shirts for our team. I said sure. He said send me your sizes. So I polled my team of 12 and sent him the sizes. He came back and told me that a Marketing Director or someone said there was a new limit of 4. I said, "Hey, you asked me and I got a team full of devs looking forward to a t-shirt. Can you send me one for each?" He said he'd check but came back and said the person calling the shots was firm. They sent the 4 t-shirts. I delayed renewing our subscription 3 or 4 months as a result. We gave them another shot in the future at one of the lower levels. But those shirts would have paid for themselves the moment they sent them.
I still don't know what the Marketing side was thinking. It ended up making me more attentive about paying for the platform. If they had sent the t-shirts, I probably would have just let the subscription ride and continued paying it even if we didn't have an active listing up. Instead, I only renewed when we needed to fill a new position. I'd say it taught me a valuable Sales or Marketing lesson, but isn't this common sense?
Alas, the platform itself continued to perform so weakly in supplying candidates to our postings that I have discontinued using it all together, even though I still recommend young developers sign up and use when looking for jobs.
I think SO deserves to succeed so hopefully the private Q&A will boost revenues.