Stack Overflow Jobs, a site run in partnership with Indeed, is now available outside the US, including the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the Netherlands. This should provide a revenue stream to support Stack Overflow at a time when its QA traffic is diminishing.

I reported Stack Overflow's partnership with Indeed, claimed to be the world's top recruitment site and the launch of Stack Overflow Jobs powered by Indeed in the United States back in May 2024. The intention was to make thousands of highly-relevant job openings easily discoverable by developers, and presumably to increase visitor numbers to Stack Overflow.

Since its launch more than 7 million jobs have been viewed on Stack Overflow Jobs and the time has come to expand to other regions.

The joint announcement by Stack Overflow and Indeed states that that employers in Germany, France, UK, and the Netherlands can now post open roles on Stack Overflow Jobs, explaining:

To ensure that the right talent finds the right opportunities, the Stack Overflow and Indeed teams have clearly defined criteria based on job title to ensure jobs posted on Stack Overflow Jobs are relevant to a highly technical audience. The job site supports searches for a variety of technology roles including engineering and development - allowing users to search jobs by job title, keywords or company and by city. 

Across many industries, workers are concerned that AI will take over their jobs. What has already happened is that AI has robbed AI of its traffic. People no longer go to Stack Overflow to ask questions, they turn to GitHub Copilot, Gemini and others instead. One thing these AI assistants are really good at is searching the internet - so if the answer is out there and you phrase you question appropriately you'll find it - without a lot of people telling you how dumb you are for asking or that you should switch to some alternative method. 

Trying out how Gemini responds to a question a beginner might make:

I've written a C program. Why doesn't my for loop print the final value?

I was impressed by just how easy it was - I didn't even have to provide my version of the program I was struggling with. Gemini wrote some inadequate code, pointed out why it didn't give me the result I wanted and supplied the additional code needed to fix it - all instantly.

I asked for its source, thinking it might have been taken for Stack Overflow which has licensed its data for use by Google, GitHib, OpenAI and others only to be told:

The information I provided is based on my general knowledge of programming concepts, specifically how for loops work in C.

Understanding of C Programming: I have been trained on a massive dataset of text and code, including a significant amount of C code. This allows me to understand the syntax, semantics, and common patterns in C programming.
Explanation of for Loop Behavior: The explanation of how the loop works and why it doesn't print the final value is derived from my understanding of the loop's control flow.
Essentially, I'm able to generate and explain code based on the underlying principles of programming languages.

So why would a beginner go to Stack Overflow for help with coding?

The fact that Stack Overflow has let others use its QA has upset many of those who provided the answers and were not consulted about having their work shared. However, as I reported in OpenAI Enriched By Stack Overflow, those tempted to remove their own contributions have discovered this isn't possible and taking protest action has led to being banned from Stack Overflow. 

All this is a feedback loop, fewer questions, fewer answers, disgruntled contributors, less high-quality content all exacerbating decreasing traffic:

This chart of the number of new questions per month on Stack Overflow from its launch in July 2008 to December 2024, based on data taken from the StackExchange Data Explorer, was included by Tim Anderson in his report Coding help on StackOverflow dives as AI assistants rise in which he noting a 60% year-on-year decline in the most recent months in December 2024. Anderson refers to an analysis posted on GitHub by Theodore Smith, who was formerly among the top one percent of contributors to StackOverflow which revealed that  new questions had declined by around 76 percent since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Smith blames not only AI assistants but also the culture of the site for the situation which he suggests indicates that:

“StackOverflow has less than one year of life left.” 

So can the expansion of the Jobs site stem the decline? Stack Overflow and Indeed are hopeful stating in today's launch announcement:

According to the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, only one in five developers are happy in their current role. With a focus on community and helping the world’s most sought after talent find fulfilling roles, Stack Overflow is looking to put thousands of highly-relevant job openings at the fingertips of technical job seekers.  

At the very least Stack Overflow jobs should provide revenue to help Stack Overflow survive.

More Information

Stack Overflow Jobs powered by Indeed

Stack Overflow Jobs 

Related Article

Stack Overflow Jobs Reborn In Partnership With Indeed

Stack Overflow Finds Job Flexibility Top Concern

Stack Overflow Announces AI-Powered Features

Stack Overflow Traffic Slumps As Devs Turn to ChatGPT

Stack Overflow On Google Cloud

OpenAI Enriched By Stack Overflow

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