A Message to our Employees, Community, and Customers on Covid-19
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.
9 Comments
I’m astounded at the hype of this virus. It’s not much different from the regular old flu, and you don’t people panicking about that… seriously, calm down. Geez.
Well, it is and the Stack Exchange itself (namely Politics) managed to provide an interesting answer about this: https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/50066/why-is-covid-19-prioritized-over-other-infectious-diseases
It is very much different from the regular flu, because we know much less about it.
One of the things that we think to know right now: it is more aggressive than the ordinary flu. Mortality rates across the board are worse than flu, same for various other parameters that affect spreading.
Yes, it is crazy that in Europe or Australia, you won’t find toilet paper any more in supermarkets.
But it isn’t crazy to consider “working from remote” where possible.
And from a business perspective, this is the PERFECT time to remind your audience that you offer services that help with that.
There’s toilet paper in my supermarkets.
Of all the stuff to stockpile – food and water, say, … Whatever happened to tearing up squares of newspaper and magazines, and spiking them on a nail ready for use?
If you do that just remember not to try to flush it in the toilet or else you can clog up the whole neighborhood.
It might be better to install a bidet.
How is it more aggressive than the normal flu? The normal flu sweeps the entire world at a massive rate over and over every year. We have entire “seasons” of it where a large chunk of people in most areas get it…EVEN in areas where effective vaccines are being utilized by a good percent of the population. That’s pretty friggin’ aggressive.
And most professionals recognize that it likely does NOT have a higher mortality rate. We have tons of statistical figures about the flu which are how we estimate how many people actually get it each year. Only with that idea of how many people get it can we come close to determining its mortality rate.
With COVID-19 we mostly only know about whatever extremely serious cases managed to hospitalize someone. Those are all we have to determine mortality rates, and therefore most the bodies calculating these rates are doing their best to point out that those rates being artificially bloated and are a special class of rate which cannot be compared to flu. If anything if you calculated flu based on only the cases that managed to hospitalize someone it would probably be significantly worse.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-disease-2019-vs-the-flu
While both the flu and COVID-19 may be transmitted in similar ways (see the Similarities section above), there is also a possible difference: COVID-19 might be spread through the airborne route, meaning that tiny droplets remaining in the air could cause disease in others even after the ill person is no longer near
…
The COVID-19 situation is changing rapidly. Since this disease is caused by a new virus, people do not have immunity to it, and a vaccine may be many months away. Doctors and scientists are working on estimating the mortality rate of COVID-19, but at present, it is thought to be higher than that of most strains of the flu.
Great reply. You inspire me by being so helpful.
Clonkex, if Covid-19 was just a type of influenza virus, we wouldn’t see professionals who have to deal with patients covered from head to foot in protective gear, vizors and goggles included. It is established that elderly people with underlying health issues are likely to die from this, if they catch it, which is why there’s a 6.4% death rate in northern Italy – it’s full of elderly people. Ordinary influenza never has anything like that death-rate. But this one is connected to SARS. Sure, millions of people are panicking like headless chickens, and the virus hasn’t even touched their community. Sure, let’s keep calm. But this virus deserves the respect of erring on the side of caution.