Unlike Quora, Stack Overflow was designed for software developers and engineers to discover, learn, connect, and collaborate. If you’re ready to witness the full power of a community, this question-and-answer platform offers emerging engineering talents an opportunity to hone their technical skills through a full-time apprenticeship. Stack Overflow ensures individuals are given the technical support needed to harness their true potential.
As an aspiring full-stack developer looking to explore the various technologies that make up the tech stack for top Information Technology companies, applying to the Stack Overflow apprenticeship program is the way to go. Read on to discover Stack Overflow’s apprenticeship program tracks, Stack Overflow apprenticeship salary structure, Stack Overflow’s apprenticeship hiring process, and reviews from former Stack Overflow apprentices.
Stack Overflow is one of over 180 question-and-answer sites in the Stack Exchange ecosystem. This knowledge-sharing and team collaboration platform provides programmers, developers, and tech companies with a broad range of learning resources, talent solutions, and product development tools to create the next generation of innovative software products. As a result, stack Overflow is among the most popular communities/forums for programmers and developers worldwide. According to data on the Stack Exchange Network, Stack Overflow has 257.7 million visits.
The platform boasts 51.2 million unique monthly visitors, 11.7 million registered users, and 30.3k company pages on Stack Overflow Talent. According to its 2022 recap, Stack Overflow has over 570 employees, 223 of whom the company hired in 2022. Ninety-six percent of Stackers work remotely across 22 countries and 40 U.S. states. An eight-man team leads this innovative tech company. Stack Overflow’s corporate headquarters is in New York, New York. It also has an office in London, the United Kingdom.
Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky launched Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer platform, in August 2008 to make coding resources accessible to all programmers and developers. During one of their weekly calls, Jeff brought in Jarrod Dixon and then Geoff Dalgas. The four of them worked at the company for a couple of months on a lean budget. It wasn’t until they made their first funding round in May 2010 that they started hiring people. The founders wanted programmers to view Stack Overflow as crucial as a compiler or keyboard. Today it is one among a fleet of question-and-answer websites that make up Stack Exchange.
Stack Overflow has raised $153 million in five funding rounds. It's first funding round was in May 2010, when it raised $11 million, led by Union Square Ventures. In July 2020, the company raised $85 million in Series E funding led by GIC. In addition, the company announced that the funds would be used to optimize the company's SaaS knowledge management and collaboration offering, Stack Overflow for Teams.
As a result, it introduced a Freemium model of Stack Overflow for Teams in March 2021. The new funding placed Stack Overflow at $153 million. The same year, the company reported that its monthly visits had grown to 120 million, including over 200,000 paid users and 5,000 teams. Nasper-owned Prosus, a renounced technology investor, acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion in June 2021. In June of that year, it launched Collectives, dedicated spaces for developers and technologies to discover and share answers and content on programming languages, technical products, and services.
At the close of 2022, the company revealed that the platform had shared answers to 23 million questions and helped developers 50.6 billion times. The company also onboarded 7,400 new organizations and launched three Collectives in 2022. In addition, between 2021 and 2023, Stack Overflow was awarded by top brands like RemoteTech Breakthrough, APPEALIE, Comparably, Globee Business Awards, TheMuse, Cloud Awards, and Webby for the company's efforts in promoting collaboration, productivity, positive work culture, and perks among employees in SaaS and IT companies.
Stack Overflow’s mission is to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge.
These core values guide the action of Stack Overflow’s workforce.
Stack Overflow’s loyal community of developers is its competitive advantage. The company capitalizes on its ability to match tech companies and various types of developers–front-end, backend, mobile, software, game, full stack, we, and DevOps–to learning resources, job opportunities, technical content spaces, collaboration workspaces, and strategic partners.
Stack Overflow generates income by providing corporate clients with team collaboration, advertising, and talent solutions. The company offers four pricing plans to clients seeking Stack Overflow for Teams: Free, Basic, Business, and Enterprise. The company’s core products include Stack Overflow for Teams, Stack Overflow Advertising, Stack Overflow Talent, and Collectives on Stack Overflow.
In September 2008, Jeff Atwood, Co-founder of Stack Overflow, revealed in a blog post that Stack Overflow was built using Microsoft ASP.NET (framework), C# (language), Visual Studio (development environment), ASP.NET MVC (web framework), jQuery (browser framework), SQL Server 2008 (database), LINQ to SQL (data access layer), Mercurial through Kiln (source control), Beyond Compare (compare tool), VisualHg (source control integration).
According to Stackshare, Stack Overflow has 17 technologies in its tech stack. The company uses nine application and data tools, three utilities, five DevOps, and three business tools. Stack Overflow’s application and data tools include Redis, .NET, Microsoft SQL Server, C#, MaxCDN, and Cloudflare. Elasticsearch, Braintree, and AppThwack are its utilities. The company’s DevOps include HAProxy, TeamCity, PagerDuty, Airbrake, and Bosun. Trello, WordPress, and G Suite comprise Stack Overflow’s business tools.
Stack Overflow launched its engineering apprenticeship program in 2016. As a company obsessed with helping developers succeed, its apprenticeship program ensures all kinds of learners–self-taught and coding bootcamp graduates–have access to all the resources they need to hone their skills and attract employers. Although it hesitated in launching the program because it had a small but senior-level engineering team and not enough time to provide mentorship, the company decided that providing a space for non-traditional candidates could help foster tech diversity. In 2017, Pieter Depree, a recruiting lead at Stack Overflow, revealed that the company is looking out for individuals who show a promising trajectory.
Stack Overflow recruits apprentices into engineering, product design, and product management teams. Stack Overflow featured classroom learning, on-the-job training, mentorships, and portfolio building during the first apprenticeship program. While apprentices shouldn’t expect full-time job offers at the end of their program, they can rely on Stack Overflow job boards and talent solutions to land their next role in the technology industry.
Stack Overflow’s apprenticeship is a three-month program preceded by a two-week C# and. NET crash course. After that, apprentices are ushered into an eight-week rigorous peer programming. Each apprentice may be assigned to any of the technical teams and allotted a dedicated mentor. This mentor guides the apprentice on using Stack Overflow’s code base while working on ongoing projects. Within the last four weeks, the apprentices will be expected to present a capstone project that’ll be uploaded on the website.
All new hires at Stack Overflow go through a standard onboarding known as the “Stack University,” consisting of a checklist of items for the apprentice to complete under the guidance of a mentor. The onboarding ,which extends throughout the apprenticeship cycle, may include interviews with the team members to learn about Stack Overflow’s codebase, technologies, existing projects, and machine setup. The apprentices will be expected to complete a graduation project, a prototype of the features of the Stack Overflow app. The apprentices were asked to build a “ping-pong” toy app in the first year.
Stack Overflow doesn’t use the contract-to-hire model. The goal of the apprenticeship isn’t to help apprentices transition to full-time roles at the company but to prepare them to attract the best of employers during their job hunt. However, after the first apprenticeship program, it recorded a 100% conversion rate. The apprentices in the first cohort converted to full-stack developers at the end of their three-month training.
Stack Overflow needs to provide details about the salary it pays its apprentices for internal reasons. However, if you're looking to work as a full-time software engineer, you should expect to earn between $72,416 and $78,152 annually. This amount covers only the employee's base salary.
Besides a moderate salary, Stack Overflow ensures its apprentices can look forward to a personalized annual conference budget for skill development. The company also provides that they get paid time off (PTO), traditional tuition reimbursement, educational materials budgets, and invitations to talks and events.
Stack Overflow Apprenticeship Selection: How Are Cohorts Chosen?
Stack Overflow’s apprenticeship model welcomes all types of developers into its junior developer program, whether you attended a coding bootcamp or are a self-taught programmer. The company has previously recruited candidates from coding bootcamps like The Grace Hopper Program and Full Stack Academy. However, stack Overflow’s apprenticeships are typically suited to individuals without a traditional technical background.
As a company big on diversity, it believes that hiring developers from alternative backgrounds will allow the company to deliver more innovative solutions. Stack Overflow’s hiring philosophy was drawn from Joel Spolsky’s guide to “Standing out and Attracting Top Talent.” As a prospective Stack Overflow apprentice, you should be enthusiastic about a career in full stack development, adaptive, and eager to learn. You should also have a go-getter attitude.
Stack Overflow Apprenticeship Program Interview: Is the Stack Overflow Interview Hard?
According to Glassdoor ratings, interviews at Stack Overflow have a 2.9 difficulty rate. Like most apprenticeship hiring processes, it starts with an online application. Since Stack Overflow believes in recruiting candidates from coding bootcamps, you'll be expected to submit your portfolio and resume for review. Then, suitable candidates will be contacted by the Stack Overflow recruiter for a series of interviews. Stack Overflow made a few adjustments to its standard interview process to identify eligible candidates for the apprenticeship.
Rather than make the prospective apprentices go through a two or three weeks evaluation period, the company created a system that allowed them to conduct all three interviews in one day. In addition, it phased out more technical/algorithmic questions to accommodate the new hiring goals. The first is a behavioral interview with the recruiter and a technical interview with the engineering manager and team.
In 2016, when Stack Overflow launched the apprenticeship and hosted its first cohort, the company recruited only two apprentices, which it noted allowed the hiring team at Stack Overflow to manage the growth of these apprentices. In addition, the company believed that recruiting a small cohort would enable it to ascertain the program requirements for subsequent cohorts, particularly in providing learning and mentorships. So rather than calling for applicants, Stack Overflow turned to Full Stack Academy and its newly launched program, The Grace Hopper Program.
Stack Overflow Apprenticeship Cohort Frequency: How Often is a Cohort Hired?
Stack Overflow hires apprentices based on its hiring needs. As such, the company may recruit prospective apprentices after only a few years. However, if you’re interested in joining the next cohort of Stack Overflow apprentices, you should regularly visit the company’s career page to review available roles. s depend on the hiring needs of the company. There are no guarantees that it will be held yearly. However, the hiring team at Stack Overflow believes that the apprentice.
If you believe in democratizing tech knowledge, Stack Overflow is an excellent company to work for. This question-and-answer platform offers workers a progressive environment where they can find their tribe and thrive. According to employee reviews from Glassdoor, Stack Overflow has a 4.4 out of five-star rating for having a great CEO, cordial colleagues, fair compensation, transparent leadership, good benefits, excellent work culture, a supportive environment, and good work-life balance. Eighty-six percent of reviewers agree to recommend Stack Overflow to a friend, and 94% approve of the CEO.
Stack Overflow encourages remote work. For example, most workers in the company’s engineering, product, and design teams are remote workers. However, during the last apprenticeship held, the apprentices were trained in-house.
Can you get a job through Stack Overflow?
Candidates who go through the Stack Overflow apprenticeship program can take advantage of its robust job board to explore high-value roles with leading technology companies in the country. While Stack Overflow hasn't implemented the contract-to-hire model, apprentices may receive offers at the end of the program, depending on their overall performance.
Yes, you can get a job at Stack Overflow with a full-stack certificate, as the company doesn't traditionally hire computer science graduates. Instead, most of Stack Overflow's engineers came from unconventional backgrounds and are often coding bootcamp graduates and self-taught programmers.
The Stack Overflow Careers page and the Stack Overflow Engineering Blog allow you to discover life at Stack Overflow. You'll explore the company’s technology stack, product features, and upcoming projects. The Stack Overflow Career page details the company's mission, values, and employee benefits.
You should visit the Stack Exchange DEI page read blog posts, listen to podcasts, join community conversation, and explore news about Stack Overflow’s diversity pursuits.
Visit the Stack Overflow Job Board to explore employment opportunities within and outside Stack Overflow.
If you don’t want to track and monitor the Stack Overflow apprenticeship program for yourself or are looking for support in an apprenticeship application, you can join apprenticeship.io to learn more and get support to land an apprenticeship program.
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