
Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Overflow CEO - matrixunloaded
https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overflows-new-ceo-prashanth-chandrasekar?
======
Dunedan
> We were looking for that rare combination of someone who could foster the
> community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams,
> where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth
> enterprise software company very quickly.

To bad they're on the hyper-growth train now as well, but I guess their
investors want to get some money back. I'd preferred seeing them grow slow and
stable, because I feel that focusing solely on growth often leads to decisions
not in the interest of the users.

~~~
mandevil
I suspect (based on nothing so take it for what that's worth) that the
FogCreek Illuminati feel burned by the Trello experience: there they carefully
tended, had high organic growth, spun it out to its own company after three
years, and ended up selling for less than half a billion dollars _in 2017_.
This is bad because 2017 was quite probably the highest valuations for
privately held technology companies in this cycle, and they weren't a unicorn,
unlike plenty of other companies at the time- Quora raised 85m at a 1.7g
valuation in April 2017, to pick a business that FogCreek would know well.

SO, like Trello, took a long time to find a business model (honestly Trello
never really did); it seems clear that SO Jobs didn't work, but enterprise
sales is the key, just based on what they emphasized in the announcement.
Using the SaaS website as a loss leader advertisement for the shrinkwrap
software is an interesting model: I see it as somewhat similar to the old
'give away Unix and C free to universities, sell System V to the companies
those students work at' model, modernized for the internet age.

~~~
triceratops
I dunno. Quora had a 1.7B valuation but Trello had an actual exit. If I were
an investor or employee I might prefer the latter. $425M exit after a mere 3
years of operation as an independent company is nothing to sniff at. Trello is
merely a shared todo list, when you boil it down. Was a unicorn exit
necessarily expected of them?

~~~
adventured
I agree with that premise. Quora will be lucky to bail out with a $425 million
exit on the downside of this expansion. They're a decade old, the VCs are
going to want their money soon and the clock is ticking on this long up-cycle
(as the desperate IPO rush blatantly indicates). Who is paying $1+ billion for
Quora? There are no overpaying buyers for that type of entity - Yahoo is dead,
AOL is dead, and InteractiveCorp is far too shrewd to pay that extreme
valuation. Quora is worth $100-$200m tops right now.

Genius is in the same boat. A decade old, failed premise (turns out people
don't actually want to annotate everything), failed expansion plans (so...
back to lyrics then), no business model. At the mercy of the VCs, they'll
eventually be passed around for $10m or $20m like MySpace or Tumblr.

These companies are this start-up generation's About.com (or the latest eHow).

Simple rule for anyone doing a knowledge service: if you put the profit motive
over the knowledge motive (which is the only choice if you take a lot of VC),
your service will end up in the dustbin of history, no exceptions.

~~~
thrower123
What exactly is the value of Quora? It's Yahoo Answers with better CSS and the
idiots filtered out. I assume it's ad-supported - they have started supposedly
sharing revenue with users.

It could disappear tomorrow and leave barely a memory.

~~~
mjcohen
Don't know about the idiots. My quora feed keeps coming up with pairs of "What
is the square root of nnnn?" for seemingly random integer nnnn. Don't know how
to stop it. When I feel like it, I answer "2".

~~~
jodrellblank
Quora pays people who ask questions, based on how many views their question
gets. Now it's full of people spamming as many questions as they can, trying
to game it.

~~~
thrower123
Ah. When they started, they were seeding it with high quality questions and
famous answerers. I guess the floodgates have now opened.

------
yumraj
Prasanth was an I-banker. Looks like SO is being set up for a sale, most
likely to private equity or as someone else said perhaps Microsoft.

~~~
blantonl
Not in his recent roles. His focus was on execution at Rackspace, plain and
simple.

~~~
eldavido
I love Stack Overflow but there's a lot about this announcement that doesn't
make sense.

One: is Rackspace really such a great company? Hard to say. Maybe this CEO was
able to achieve great results there. From where I'm sitting, Rackspace is a
third-tier cloud infrastructure provider at best, falling farther and farther
behind competent "supermarkets" like Azure/GCE/AWS, as well as niche providers
like Digital Ocean, Hetzner, or Softlayer.

As for the announcement itself, this feels _incredibly_ "photoshopped". I give
Joel a lot of credit for stepping back from something he wasn't excited about,
but this press release reads as just this -- a press release. This is the guy
who wrote "Hitting the High Notes", "The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing", and
many other fantastic essays. The entire tone of this release just screamed
"PR".

------
xibalba
I predict Microsoft will acquire SO in the next 5 years.

~~~
333c
It would be interesting to see it integrate with GitHub. Not sure if that's a
good thing, but it would definitely be interesting.

~~~
amrrs
And VS Code time and time again showing suggestions from SO Answers and Github
- Coding made easy for any!

~~~
tasubotadas
And after people provide them with enough suggestions-samples-picks, they will
train AI to do the coding for you.

~~~
giggles_giggles
Then we'll just need some sort of a language to explain to the model what we
want the software to do....

~~~
justinclift
"Cortana, make the bike shed pink instead ..." ;)

------
oyebenny
I hope when he asked why he was getting replaced he got a [DUPLICATE QUESTION]
reply.

~~~
ryandrake
Or even better, the classic SO “What are you _actually_ trying to do?” non-
answer!

~~~
reificator
> _Or even better, the classic SO “What are you actually trying to do?” non-
> answer!_

I've never contributed anything to SO, but this is one of the most valuable
answers they could give.

Worst case, the people helping you can better understand the context around
what you're trying to accomplish. Best case they recognize that there's a much
easier way to do what you're trying to do, when you're too busy bashing your
head against the wall on the particular implementation that you chose.

So often when people get stuck, it's because they were shaving a Great Brown
yak.

But the Great Brown Yak can only be shaved with a razor from Bhutan. So they
go to get the Bhutaneese razor but first they need to prove their worth by
climbing the nearby mountain.

In order to climb that mountain they need the best climbing gear in the world,
which is only available from a small shop in Honduras.

To get to Honduras from Bhutan they need their passport, but they lost the
page with their photo on it.

Since they can't get back to their home country they need to get a passport
photo some other way.

So they go to Stack Overflow and beg for someone to help them forge a passport
photo.

SO asks what they're trying to accomplish, and they mention they need some Yak
fur, and it needs to be brown.

SO suggests that they shave the Minor Brown Yak which can be shaved with an
off the shelf Gillette but produces indistinguishable brown Yak fur, and could
be done in five minutes.

~~~
gmfawcett
Nice parable. :) This is sometimes called the "XY problem."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem)

~~~
Roboprog
Another parable

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_Hole_in_My_Bucke...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_Hole_in_My_Bucket)

~~~
ryandrake
Yea, I’m aware of the XY problem. It is still irritating when someone presumes
to know your problem statement better than you and insists on having you
change your question. Sometimes I simply want to learn the answer to this very
specific question and not keep restating my problem until I find one the
answerer knows the answer to.

A better way to respond would be: “Here is how to do precisely what you’re
asking, but there may be a better way if you more clearly stated your end
goal.”

------
iamsb
Thanks Joel for number of years that you have been a thought leader, nudging
developer communities towards right direction. There are may be 5 people who
could have started stackoverflow successfully, Joel was one of them. He had a
huge, cult like following before starting SO and he leveraged that in creating
a product which is immensely useful to many users. Thank you.

------
wolco
They went theough 200 candidates and finally decided in the former rackspace
ceo? Look for stackoverflow paid services getting a big push.

~~~
nathanaldensr
I heard from someone who worked at Rackspace that Chandrasekar was a Senior
VP, not CEO.

~~~
mikeyouse
Confirmed on his LinkedIn:

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/pchandrasekar](https://www.linkedin.com/in/pchandrasekar)

Rackspace trajectory:

Rackspace - 7 years

Senior Vice President & GM, Cloud & Infrastructure Services 2019 – Present

Senior Vice President & GM, Global Managed Public Clouds Business 2017 – 2019

Vice President & GM, Global AWS Business Unit 2015 – 2017

Senior Director & GM, SMB Marquee Business Segment 2013 – 2015

Director & Chief of Staff 2012 – 2013

------
lefstathiou
I worked with Prashanth at Barclays. He was principled, energetic, had a great
attitude, low on ego and worked his ass off. I personally feel SO stagnated a
bit over the past few years. I don’t think this would be an easy job for
anyone but I genuinely believe he has the potential to bring back the right
kind of creative energy and enthusiasm into the products. I wish him the best
of luck.

~~~
eccbits
What kind of culture did he create?

------
tootie
> Under his leadership, Rackspace successfully pivoted from a leading managed
> hosting company to a cloud services company

That's a pretty big deal and probably saved them from looming irrelevance.

~~~
inimino
No, it just moved their existing customers from trash level hosting at luxury
prices with "Fanatical Support"(tm), to trash level cloud services at luxury
prices with "Fanatical Support"(tm).

------
m0zg
Now would be a good time to spin up a Stack Overflow alternative. By the time
VCs are done with SO, there will only be a smoldering crater.

------
qnsi
people that yet dont know that, read Joel’s blog and books. He shares so many
gold nuggets

~~~
kamyarg
second this, can not remember reading an article that did not give me a new
perspective on the topic.

Also Jeff Atwood, the other cofounder of SO has a blog that is very
informative called Coding Horror.

~~~
rapfaria
The good old days when there would be at least one Coding Horror post at the
top in HN, regularly.

~~~
eccbits
Don’t think the new CEO will be doing any of that sadly

------
sytelus
This is quite surprising from Joel... So the new CEO is MBA and doesn’t even
seem to have profile on StackOverflow. This tell me he has little clue how
this complex community hangs on balance and what makes it tick. It’s also
painful to see that we have now one of the largest website for developers run
by guy who isn’t a developer. It looks like this person’s main achievement was
to create business unit at Rackspace. How does it help building open community
like SO? I can’t help but reminded of Jobs bringing in Scully with enthusiasm
to do “business things”. I have admired Joel’s writing and wisdom for years
but this somehow feels wrong given they could have chose almost anyone from
their vast highly dedicated user base who understands the complex dynamics in
SO community. Do we expect full blown value destroying commercialization of SO
from now on?

------
eccbits
This person doesn’t seem to be a real technologist, unlike Spolsky. That maybe
OK in most compsniea, but seems like a risky choice for a company so
developer-focused.

~~~
FlorianRappl
I will never understand why tech companies suddenly let non tech people step
up as CEO.

It _always_ failed (failed = does not continue on the same trajectory; at best
is stable and in the long term eaten up by more innovative companies).

------
mercwear
The OP created their Hacker News account 21 days ago and has only posted 2
articles, both about Stack Overflow. It looks an awful lot like someone is
just trying to drive site traffic to SO with this post. It wont matter much
but I figured it was worth pointing out ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
gadders
It's interesting to see how Joel's stance on VC-backed businesses seems to
have changed over the years. I think he was clearly against it in his
FogCreek/FogBugz days, but now seems to have come round to the idea.

I wonder if he regrets not taking VC money earlier - maybe then FogBugz would
be the new jira, and FogCreek would be as big as Atlassian.

~~~
skinnymuch
But Atlassian was bootstrapped for a lot of its history. It didn’t take VC
funding until 2010 when Stack Overflow did too. Fogbugz isn’t much older than
Atlassian.

------
chrshawkes
Congrats to the CEO. Welcome to the issues of SO. I have a major problem with
the way SO is handling the license agreements and Joel's opinion on developer
side projects as well. I plan to make a public statement on my YouTube channel
about it. I'm so sick of tech companies thinking they can act however they
want with impunity.

~~~
bigfailwhale
Can you share what the issues are with license agreements?

------
chrshawkes
Anybody else noticing StackOverflow is not the number one source to get
answers anymore?

~~~
aloer
I feel like I find more useful answers in GitHub issues (also through google)
now than a year or two ago

~~~
axiom92
I think this could be a function of what you have been working on. If you're
working on cutting edge/niche things, github might be better. For good ol'
tech stack, Stackoverflow is still golden.

------
pastor_elm
Empty suit

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neivin
Yes! We need more diversity in the executives club!

~~~
michaelmrose
How is this materially different from an old white dude cheering for more
white people?

~~~
vinay427
I don't actually think the comment you replied to is necessarily productive.

That being said, your hypothetical is materially different in that it's
literally not increasing the type of diversity they were referring to. This is
assuming a reasonable metric of diversity, probably similar to something I've
encountered, Shannon entropy, etc.

