As we work as a community to prepare for the impact of COVID-19, I wanted to share how Stack Overflow is addressing the current situation and the proactive steps we are taking to minimize any negative repercussions to the realization of our mission.
The safety of our employees, community, and customers are our primary concern. There are a number of measures we’re taking to ensure we manage to safely get through this situation while continuing to serve our community and customers effectively.
For our employees across our three main offices in New York, London, and Munich, we’ve asked them to begin working from home starting today, March 9th, and we have asked all employees to curtail non-essential travel for the time being.
Stack Overflow was born remotely. It began as a discussion across blogs and a podcast conducted on Skype. We’ve had employees working across continents for over a decade. Today, roughly one third of our employees work in locations where we don’t have a large team or physical office.
What that means is that for Stackers, much of our day to day work on Slack, GitHub, Stack Overflow for Teams, Google Docs, and other collaboration tools will be conducted as normal. We can continue to push projects forward and be in constant contact with one another. But we recognize that not everyone has the ability to work remotely. For our staff whose work involves maintaining our offices and preparing meals, we will continue to pay and support them, and they will devote this time at home to online professional development.
For our customers, we are committed to keeping our services up and running. As many of you shift to more remote work, we hope our SaaS product— - Stack Overflow for Teams, will be a valuable tool to share knowledge, find information, and collaborate effectively while remaining safely at home.
To our community, please know that our community managers will be available if there are issues you want to discuss or challenges that arise. Let’s all work together to ensure the information and discussion across our Stack Exchange network is based on facts and science.
These are challenging and sometimes frightening times, but we feel confident that as a company and community, we can get through this together.