-79

Update on January 14th, 2025: Stack Overflow Jobs is now available in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

After more than 6 months of availability in the United States, Stack Overflow Jobs, powered by Indeed, is expanding to several new geographic regions in Europe. As part of the next iteration of this experiment, the job site will be available in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands sometime in January.

As we said in an earlier post about Stack Overflow Jobs, “our goal is to create a job site experience that developers and other technical job seekers love.” We are still in the early stages of proving the effectiveness and sustainability of the model we used to launch this job site, but we feel confident that we are moving in the right direction to help more technical job seekers, in more places.

In the US alone, there is an average of 15,000 - 25,000 total tech jobs for developers to explore on the job site on any given day. Since the launch on May 8, 2024, over 6,500 job applications have been started from Stack Overflow Jobs.

Over the last seven months since the launch, we’ve also worked together with Indeed to make several updates to improve the quality and relevance of jobs listed, as well as the site design and functionality. You can read more about those updates in this post.

Now that we have begun to expand beyond our initial test, in January we will be removing the Jobs link from appearing under the “Labs” section in the left navigation for users in countries where the job site is not yet available. We want to prevent users from having the frustrating experience of clicking the link and finding the job site is not accessible to them. However, we do still hope to continue expanding to more countries across the globe in the future, and will update the community when more information becomes available.

How it works

The experience in the new geographic regions will be the same as it is today for users in the US. It will still be hosted on its own domain (stackoverflowjobs.com), linked from the left navigation on Stack Overflow and technical Stack Exchange sites (the same group of sites where you see ‘Companies’ in the left navigation, though to be clear ‘Companies’ and ‘Jobs’ remain separate features). The only difference in the experience is that if you are located in Germany, France, or the Netherlands, some job listings will be posted in that country’s primary language, depending on what language the employer chose to use when writing the posting.

Use keyword searches to find technical jobs that are a great fit for your interests and experience. In order to apply for a job, hit the “apply” button and you will be redirected to the posting on Indeed, where you can submit your application. No personal data about users is shared between Stack Overflow and Indeed.

As always, we routinely take measures to ensure that the listings that populate Stack Overflow Jobs are high quality and highly relevant to the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange technical community. In the event that something off-topic slips through the cracks, we want to get it corrected as soon as possible. See the help center article here with more information.

We appreciate the feedback and feature requests we have received from community members regarding how we can improve the search experience on Stack Overflow Jobs. We will continue to consider these, as well as any new ones we receive, as we monitor the success of the expansion and consider the next phases of this experiment. We believe that by combining the unique strengths of Stack Overflow, including our dedication to the developer community, and Indeed’s volume of quality tech jobs, we can help more developers and other technical job seekers find their next great opportunity, now in a few more corners of the globe.

Feedback

Do you have any feedback about your experience on Stack Overflow Jobs (in the United States) that isn’t captured in the original post?

Where else in the world would you like to see Stack Overflow Jobs expand? We can’t make any guarantees, but we would love to serve technical job seekers in more regions in the future.

What features would make you most excited to use Stack Overflow Jobs to search for a new opportunity (if it became available in your region)?

Improve this question
13
  • 7
    Don't forget your South American colleagues. Especially your Brazilian colleagues. Commented Dec 12, 2024 at 14:34
  • 89
    Yes I have feedback, this is useless, bring back SO Careers with the developer CV and the flexible ways to find TOP PROGRAMMING TALENT. Commented Dec 12, 2024 at 16:37
  • 21
    So StackOverflow Inc is seeking unpaid quality assurance from its users about an unrelated commercial sponsorship arrangement, StackOverflow-branded Indeed? No thanks. Commented Dec 15, 2024 at 22:22
  • 62
    "a job site experience that [users] love" -> Who the heck "loves" a job seeking site? It's just a tool! Something that you will only use for a couple weeks every 3-4 years, if ever again at all. If you have to use it any more frequently, it's not doing its job right. Imagine you said "We want to create a drain cleaner that users will love"... See, I don't wan't to love my drain cleaner, I just want it to work; in fact I want it to work so well that I don't have to use it ever again. This job site is the same. So do you want it to be the cleaner, or do you want it to be the clogging? Commented Dec 16, 2024 at 10:22
  • 8
    By your own numbers, there are roughly 20,000 jobs available at any given time, each posting is probably relevant for a couple of weeks or so. Over the last half year a total of 6500 applications were send out. In other words, the vast majority of all jobs adds see zero applications for their posting. Is this intended to be the way this works? Commented Dec 16, 2024 at 14:05
  • 5
    @AugustoVasques Noted! We will update the community if further expansion is in the cards. Commented Dec 16, 2024 at 21:18
  • 9
    @JonH Bringing back the developer story in some form is one of the most highly requested features for Stack Overflow Jobs. We know it would bring a lot of value to the community, and we hope to be able to explore this possibility in future iterations. Commented Dec 16, 2024 at 21:19
  • 4
    @quarague You are correct that we don't have applications started from Stack Overflow Jobs for every job listing. This is typical for a small and newer job site like this one, in part because most jobs are listed in multiple places including other job sites, professional networking sites, employers’ websites, and so on. We hope to keep iterating on this feature in an effort to build a curated, tech focused job site where developers and other technical job seekers can find their next great opportunity. Commented Dec 16, 2024 at 21:26
  • 21
    I see no compelling reason to use the new SO "jobs" site either as a job seeker or as a hiring manager, if I wanted to use Indeed (I don't), I wouldn't use this. You used to have something that people liked, you should look at that instead of spending more time here. You've made a low-effort integration of something that's not very good to begin with, and if you do the best job you can possibly do, the best you can hope to achieve is something that's not very good. Commented Dec 20, 2024 at 1:08
  • 7
    Is this just another job site with data copied from elsewhere? We already have enough of these. Commented Dec 24, 2024 at 9:02
  • That’s a great launch: Unexpected Application Error! e.searchData.jobs.at is not a function TypeError: e.searchData.jobs.at is not a function (the whole stack trace) at https://prod.statics.indeed.com/tmn/white-label/jobboard.1.0.7.js:2:124459 Commented Jan 16 at 11:49
  • @KaiBurghardt can you tell me what steps you took that led to receiving this error message? Commented Jan 21 at 14:41
  • @Sasha Just navigate to Stackoverflowjobs.com, you can see the site build up (search form, etc.) and it goes blank and you get the aforementioned stack trace. Maybe I need to unblock/enable some things, I haven’t looked into that. Commented Jan 21 at 15:24

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
160

I don't see any reason to use this instead of a real job portal. Features are just far too limited and unlike the original SO job portal there is no developer-specific functionality here. Even basics for developers like filtering by programming languages doesn't work well, the search does not understand that C# is not the same as C or C++.

Other basics that are missing are filtering by radius around a specific city. Location selection is bad in general, it also already assumes I'm in Germany and I can't search for jobs in other countries. And I found all this stuff by clicking around for a minute or so on the site.

Improve this answer
18
  • 30
    Yes, the location search is weird. I live in a mid-sized city in Baden-Württemberg. On the first page, a job in Berlin was ranked above one in Stuttgart, same job title, and on the second page, the closest one was in Hamburg. You can select some cities in other countries (Basel and Strasburg worked for me) but not others (Zürich or Bregenz or Weißenburg or Luxembourg). Of course, a search in Strasbourg turns up the same jobs as a search in Kehl - but with the top result in Celle. For anybody who knows German geography, this is a setup for a comedy routine, with a causa belli thrown in. Commented Dec 12, 2024 at 15:39
  • 10
    It could be made relevant to SO specifically if there was candidate matching between tags used by the add and SO profiles active in those tags, who've opted in to see job ads. This was the main problem with the old Jobs. The old site frequently proposed that I, living in Stockholm, Sweden for example should move to Munich, Germany and apply for a Java programmer job, a tag that I have neither interest in nor any noteworthy competence about. If this site has the same problem understanding tags as the old one, this one is doomed as well. Commented Dec 12, 2024 at 15:43
  • 3
    I tried (as a test) searching for jobs in Austin,TX and every search result completely ignored the location to suggest france-located results (I'm in France indeed). Commented Dec 13, 2024 at 15:48
  • 13
    @RomainValeri Only the auto-completed locations work at all, everything else is silently ignored. Which is of course a terrible and thoroughly confusing user experience. Commented Dec 13, 2024 at 15:54
  • @MadScientist OK, makes (more) sense in a way. But only french locations pop up in autocomplete for my France-based browser. Oh, dear. Commented Dec 13, 2024 at 15:57
  • 19
    It's impressive, yet wholly unsurprising, that Stack Exchange Inc. was able to implement a basic feature like "search by location" in a way that is completely and utterly broken. Commented Dec 13, 2024 at 16:03
  • 2
    We know that there is still lots of room for improvement on Stack Overflow Jobs, so we appreciate the feedback on what would make it better for users, and especially for users located outside of the United States. Commented Dec 16, 2024 at 21:19
  • 1
    @Lundin Tag matching is a feature request that has come up once or twice before, so it is on our list of potential things to look into. If you have any more specific thoughts on how it should work to make it most helpful for users, feel free to expand on them here and we will keep them in mind. Commented Dec 16, 2024 at 21:21
  • 18
    @Sasha I apologize for being this blunt, but the SE jobs page is missing all the features. This is not a matter of small tweaks, the basic functionality is simply not there that you'd expect from a job portal. This is probably not a problem of implementation but a fundamental issue with how this project was designed and managed, it is not competitive at all and would require resources that SE is unlikely to spend and that would in my opinion be misallocated if SE tried to compete for real here (the previous effort was properly resourced and much better, but still failed). Commented Dec 16, 2024 at 21:41
  • 15
    @Sasha If there is no tag matching then what's it even good for? Linked-in, which isn't even explicitly a job advert site, both matches your listed skills, preferences and titles as well as your geographic location with the job ads. It's not some nice to have thing, it is MVP before you even consider release. Why would anyone use a site which is significantly worse than a social media site, that comes with job adverts mostly as a side effect? Such common sense conclusions should come up during the early benchmarking phase of the project: whats already out there, what do people expect? Commented Dec 17, 2024 at 10:26
  • @RomainValeri see my response here about location based results. Commented Dec 17, 2024 at 19:25
  • 8
    @RomainValeri I'm in Switzerland, and I would like to search for jobs in France and Germany and the United States, but I can't even load the site. Useless. I just saw an old post suggesting that non-English job advertisements should be hidden from people based on their location; that was a bad idea and this is a bad idea. It should be for the user to know where the user is authorized to work or where the user is planning to move. Just because you can think of a clever way to hide information from people doesn't mean you should use it (I'm looking at you, "posted yesterday"). Commented Dec 19, 2024 at 9:06
  • 12
    @Sasha I can see how SE's American staff didn't realize that, so I'll spell it out. Despite consisting of many nation-states, relocating within the EU+EFTA is, in many aspects, quite comparable to relocating from one US state to another. It's not a big, scary, "restart your life from zero" thing. And cross-border commuting is so easy, people don't even think twice about it. Many people do one of the two, especially in tech due to lower language barriers. It's very common to look at jobs in another country, and for employers to expect that these people will actually apply. Commented Dec 19, 2024 at 10:35
  • 11
    @Sasha The issue here is more the silent and invisible auto-detection of the country. That is quite confusing if it's not the country you expect or want. Commented Dec 19, 2024 at 18:22
  • 1
    @Sasha What "complex factors" impede searching jobs in, say Germany, while I'm based in Spain? What's the problem there? Please don't create issues where there aren't. As already commented by others, in EU we can move freely between countries, cross borders daily without any issues and more. But even more, you can work remotely from any country, so why not allowing searching everywhere. Myself, I'm loosely based in Spain but have worked with companies based in Ireland, Swedden and Malta. Commented Dec 31, 2024 at 12:32
57

Job-posting quality, revisited

Okay, last time I tried this, the jobs were (probably) fake. You mention "several updates to improve the quality and relevance of jobs listed", so let's give it another try and see if the quality has improved.

I'm an Android developer. I live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area (which was the auto-suggested result when I started typing "San Francisco", so I'm going with that). This is a common tech job in an area well known for tech jobs, so a search for "Android" in that area should be pretty much the best case for this. And we'll look at the first result, since it should be showing the best results first. In other words, I don't think I'm cherry-picking here.

Here's an overview in image form (note: I've cropped out the recruiter's name and email from the bottom, but this is otherwise the entire job posting).

tl;dr: It is, in fact, better, but the quality is still lacking.

Is this job remote or not?

A job description showing both "San Francisco" and "Location: Remote"

It claims to be both "Remote" and in San Francisco. Given that there are only two input boxes in the job search, they should really ... well, actually work. It's not just this one; another posting claims that "Our team is 100% remote", and then on the very next line says "San Francisco | Hybrid (3 days on-site)".

Does this "Android Developer" role include iOS development?

A job description asking "What are we looking for in our Android Developer?" and listing responsibilities including "Build new features and capabilities on iOS and Android."

Despite the title, the role's responsibilities include "Build new features and capabilities on iOS and Android." While it's possible they have a cross-platform app, the inclusion of Swift/SwiftUI (an iOS-only framework with no cross-platform capabilities at all) in the qualifications suggests otherwise. It's not clear if they just copy-pasted a generic "mobile developer" ad into an "Android developer" role, or if they really want someone to do both.

At what company would a prospective candidate be working, and in what form?

The job is listed as being a contract job for Russell Tobin (a recruiting/staffing firm), but many of the responsibilities discussed sound like something that a full-time engineer at Airbnb would be doing:

Responsibilities:

  • Build relationships across the Airbnb technology teams to bring world-class principles and patterns into our work.

  • Represent unique product needs to our technology partners.

  • Build new features and capabilities on iOS and Android.

  • Participate in all phases of software development including architecture/design, implementation and testing.

  • Provide guidance to newer native mobile developers across the company Identify opportunities for improving our native mobile experience.

  • Advocate for and work on various projects to elevate the native mobile experience for Airbnb.org users.

Is this a contract-to-hire role? Fixed-term contract? Something else? I have no idea. Given that the next call-to-action is "Apply", this seems like a question that needs to be answered by the job posting in order for candidates to understand whether they would be interested or not.

Improve this answer
8
  • 41
    Incidentally, if anyone at Stack Overflow is looking for better use-cases for generative AI in their products, ChatGPT spotted every single one of these issues (plus one more that I don't think is really an issue, but I spent maybe 5-10 minutes on this, with only one iteration after my first attempt; I'm sure an actual project to develop this could do somewhat better than this) Commented Dec 13, 2024 at 4:09
  • 12
    "It claims to be both "Remote" and in San Francisco." Everybody knows that a remote job offering requires you to be willing to relocate to San Francisco. Commented Dec 13, 2024 at 10:35
  • 17
    TL;DR the Indeed offering is crap, which should not be a surprise for anyone who pays attention. But I guess Indeed pays enough money for SO to ignore pesky things like content quality... Commented Dec 13, 2024 at 11:37
  • 1
    Does this technically violate the ToS against posting AI-generated answers? :p Commented Dec 13, 2024 at 16:10
  • 6
    @IanKemp I actually wrote it before I had the idea to feed it to ChatGPT to see if it could find the issues. I had joked in chat afterward that I should've had ChatGPT save me the trouble of finding and writing them up myself... Commented Dec 14, 2024 at 8:11
  • 2
    Frankly, most of the job listings look like they were written by time wasters Commented Dec 14, 2024 at 23:21
  • 4
    Apply also doesn't actually start the application process, it just takes you to the indeed listing. Which is also the only way to report the listing as being bad/fraud/scammy etc Commented Dec 16, 2024 at 18:50
  • 2
    Thank you for this feedback. We are glad to hear that you have noticed some improvements from the last time you explored Stack Overflow Jobs, but we know there is more to be done. We hope to continue building upon this to improve both functionality and content quality going forward. Commented Dec 16, 2024 at 21:23
42

I'm sick of this splinternet creeping into everything. Why can't I even see jobs in other countries!? Surely that was possible on the first job sites in like 1995? The way this works now you didn't "expand to more countries", you added a couple more isolated bubbles. Useless.

Improve this answer
14
  • 8
    In 1995, the regulatory environment surrounding websites was a lot different (read: largely non-existent). If you just open a job site to every country without country-by-country analysis today, you will almost certainly be breaking the law in at least one of them. Commented Dec 17, 2024 at 3:06
  • 6
    At this time, users can only search for jobs in the country that they are presently residing in. Several users on this post have noted that being able to search for jobs in other countries would be helpful, so I have added it to our list of things to look into for future rounds of updates and improvements. Commented Dec 17, 2024 at 19:22
  • 7
    OK, thank you for this. And in case it hasn't been said already, let's note that for part of the workers this is a complete deal-breaker: some people work in any country but live just accross the border. The example which comes to mind in my french context is people working in Luxembourg but living in France (quite a lot of people). Commented Dec 18, 2024 at 8:21
  • 6
    @RomainValeri or indeed just cf "the EU" as a concept regarding work rights. Commented Dec 19, 2024 at 0:37
  • 13
    @RomainValeri I think the problem is many of these decisions are made in the US, which is a less international place (no offence). Most Americans in IT would probably never consider a job abroad, while for us in the EU and elsewhere it's completely normal and a site like this just looks very limited right away. Commented Dec 19, 2024 at 5:18
  • 18
    @Sasha "At this time, users can only search for jobs in the country that they are presently residing in": that is incorrect. At this time, users can only search for jobs in the country that is associated with their IP address. I reside in Switzerland, but I can travel 20 minutes to a café in France, connect my phone to a French network without crossing the border, or use a VPN. I am authorized to work in the US, Switzerland, and the European Union/European Economic Area, so every_Jobs_ country except for the UK. Really, this makes no sense. Commented Dec 19, 2024 at 9:20
  • 1
    @RomainValeri thank you for raising this point. I am noting this as a feature request, of particular importance to users in Europe and other regions where working across borders is common. Commented Dec 19, 2024 at 15:43
  • @phoog I suppose "residing" was the wrong choice of word. What I meant was you can search for jobs in the country where you are (based on IP address), if SO Jobs is available there. Of course VPNs are always an option for users that want to look elsewhere. Commented Dec 19, 2024 at 15:46
  • 20
    American national. Currently working in other country. Can't see jobs in SF or NYC (or anywhere). Offensively useless. Commented Dec 20, 2024 at 3:33
  • 5
    @RyanM So... "regulations exist" becomes an excuse for compartmentalizing everything to death and predictively showing filtered results that don't apply to users? The responsibility should be on the employers to hire while adhering to regulations, and it should be on the prospective employees to know the conditions under which they are legally able to work. The role of a career site is to be a good match-maker, not to police everyone. (If this really is the reason for the platform being splintered... I'm not sure that we can know for certain.) Commented Dec 26, 2024 at 8:09
  • 2
    This task, at its core, is simple: you've got users who are job-seekers, and users who are employers. They need to find each other by having their search criteria match. If it was only as useful as a "CraigsList for jobs" you'd still be most of the way there. But you (SO) are lucky enough to have a massive list of talent already, which is the database of SO users. Continue to refine the site over time, and you can't fail. Oh, what's that? You need to appease a corporate partner (Indeed) while navigating through bureaucratic red tape? Never mind... failure is possible, and probable. Commented Dec 26, 2024 at 8:20
  • 2
    And... I know that building such a site is easier said than done. I made my previous comments not to be harsh or cynical, but to suggest that maybe this endeavor is being made more complicated than it needs to be. And if you start by building around users' needs first, you'll be on track to reach your goal, of creating a site that makes the lives of both employers and job-seekers easier. Commented Dec 26, 2024 at 8:33
  • @StackExchange: Think that not showing job from other countries is much alike not showing a job in Washington DC for someone in NY. (from my West EU POV, at least). Commented Jan 5 at 13:12
  • @KaiBurghardt That's the same order of magnitude than the distance between my town (not in France) to Paris, France. Unsure of the point here. Some people in NY could want to be able look at DC job offers, and vice versa (with obvious relocation in mind), couldn't they? Isn't that already possible in current Stack Exchange job offerings? Commented Jan 6 at 20:31

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.