Being a technician, I’m inclined to get attached to nice and innovative projects. However, speaking a lot about business taught me that sometimes sticking to something “no matter what” could be counterproductive.
A business is a complex maze, where technology is only an instrument used to reach usability and profitability goals, where the last ones usually are much more important than the first ones. A project or product can sometimes be super cool, super useful, super trendy, but simply could not fit current company’s business.
Just take for instance the recent announcement about the sunsetting of Stack Overflow’s Jobs and Developers story: I think we all know (and most of the times trust) Stack Overflow as one of the primary source of knowledge in our everyday work. The way solutions and comments are managed on the platform let a user find a solution his/her problem fast.
Please note: I’m not going in any way to deep dive into the quality of the solutions upvoted on SO: this is probably material for another article.
Evidence was that Jobs and Developers story would have been a win-win story: it allowed technology recruiters to find the correct expertise with real time proof given by the community’s contributions, and at the same time job seekers were able to raise their rank and credibility to find better visibility (and salary offers) while giving great content to the community in the meantime. Correct? Maybe, but maybe not, because “sunsetting” in my everyday language is more a diplomatic translation of “killing before it’s too late”.
If you go through the comments on the original post, you can see that a lot of users, and also developer team that took part to the project, are really sad and upset about this decision. So we can say that Jobs and Developers was a platform with a nice usability and usefulness, and developers was also happy to work on its maintenance. Still, it has been closed by the business, and usually tech people translate this like “the business is evil and is going to kill everything that is beautiful”. Well, I can admit that in my early developer days, this was more on less my thought too.
Now, I can understand that this was probably a smart move from Stack Overflow’s management instead, even if I’ll miss this tool because it was a great help for measuring recruiting trends under a strictly technical perspective. That’s because this platform was, in fact, a product expansion more than a product extension (sorry if I stolen two terms from the marketing area). The latter is what a company should seek for at first, trying to extend their products/services in the field they are stronger, to eat away shares from competitors and increase revenues. The first is pretty risky indeed, because opening to new markets (in this case, the recruitment) could require a LOT of effort to build up your credibility. Stack Overflow is leader in providing valuable solutions to real life problems, but is nobody in recruitment area: probably, building up a new leader position from scratch it’s simply not worth it.
Technology’s history is full of these kind of euthanasia, just think about Microsoft’s wearable and mobile phones, Google+ social network or Glasses (even if I hope a reborn for these….), Facebook Home, etc.
If you’ve been in technology business long enough, you’ve likely encountered these walking dead too. In almost every company I joined, I found old projects that maybe started with all the good intentions, or R&D departments using valuable resources studying technologies maybe new and innovative, but totally out of the business model of the company they were working for. And I must admit that most of the time was the IT directors not understanding they were taking the wrong path, both overcomplicating internal knowledge adding platforms and languages or including “nice” but not profitable features and trying to justify with the business.
The point is: making mistakes is pretty simple, and sometimes it could take a while to understand they were errors instead of great ideas, admit you were wrong and try to fix it it’s pretty damn hard. So kudos to SO and their decision, even if it makes me sad: sometimes it’s “better to die the hero” while it’s still a hero and simply let it go, or in the worst case admit that something will never make it and stop it before it’s too late.
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