This post is part of a series on the Providence project at Stack Exchange. The first post can be found here.
The last five blog posts have been a highlight reel of Providence’s successes. Don’t be fooled, though, the road to Providence was long and winding. Let’s balance out the highlight reel with a look at some of the bumps in the road.
I said the road was long. Let’s quantify that.
This post is part of a series on the Providence project at Stack Exchange. The first post can be found here.
We’ve talked about how we’re trying to understand our users better at Stack Exchange and seen just how big an impact it’s had on our pilot project, the Careers Job Ads. Let’s take a look at the architecture of the system.
Hardware This is the easy part, so let’s just get it out of the way.
This post is part of a series on the Providence project at Stack Exchange. The first post can be found here.
The Providence project was motivated by our desire to better understand our users at Stack Exchange. So we think we’ve figured out what kind of developers come to our sites, and what technologies they’re using. Then we figured out a way to combine all our features into the Value Function.
After all the rave reviews of my last post I knew you were just on the edge of your seat waiting to hear more about my little unsupervised text anomaly detector.
So, we’ve got some working ML! Our job’s done right?
‘Round these parts, it ain’t shipped ’til it’s fast and it’s got it’s own chat bot. We spend all day in chat and there’s a cast of characters we’ve come to know, and love, and hate.
So, I’m working on the new Data Team at Stack Exchange now. Truth is we have no idea what we’re doing (WANNA JOIN US?). But every now and then we come across something that works a little too well and wonder why we haven’t heard about it before.
We run a niche job board for programmers that has about 2900 jobs on it this morning. Quality has been pretty easy to maintain.
I work at Stack Overflow on Careers 2.0. In addition to our job board we have a candidate database where you can search for developers to hire. Our candidate database has 124K+ developers in it right now.
Customers frequently gawk at this number because they’ve looked at other products in the dev hiring space that offer millions of candidates in their databases. Sourcing.io claims to have “over 4 million developers” in their database.
So, we just went through comp review season here at the Stack Exchange. This is pretty much the only time of year we talk about money, because that’s the way we want it. We pay people enough to be happy and then shut up about it. You’ll probably only ever hear stuff about comp from me around September each year because that’s the only time it’s on my mind. The system works, and I’m generally happy about my financial situation, but we have a comp policy about remote work that subjects me to a bit of a perverse incentive when it comes to commuting.
