The CTO Podcast · Insights & Strategies for Chief Technology Officers Navigating the C-Suite while Balancing Technical Strategy, Team Management, & Innovation

End of Stack Overflow -- Stephan Schmidt // Amazing CTO

·38 min·2 clips

Recruiters ask developers to clone a GitHub repo, and the repo contains NPM malware.

The show starts with a format tweak. Etienne de Bruin opens with a short news section before the deeper CTO conversation, so the useful signal arrives fast. Then the security story gets very practical. A phishing attack built around cloning a repository and collaborating on a coding exercise sounds believable because it fits the way developers already work. That is the uneasy part. Stéphane Schmitt ties it to supply chain risk, NPM exposure, and the very real headache of getting hacked as a CTO. His advice stays basic on purpose. Raise awareness with employees, especially developers. Start by talking about the threat. The examples are ordinary ones: suspicious repositories, USB sticks, and the classic bad idea of working from airport Wi-Fi. From there, Stack Overflow comes in. Schmitt points to drops in Stack Overflow traffic, posts, votes, and developer interaction. The number that sticks is rough but sharp: upvotes or likes are described as being down by about two thirds. That makes the shift feel less like background noise and more like a real change in behavior. This is not a nostalgia segment. Stack Overflow used to be part of daily developer life. Now that role looks shakier. For CTOs, that matters because developer habits shape how teams learn, solve problems, and pass knowledge around. The episode ends looser, with a ChatGPT-flavored joke segment and the dark mode line, back in the show's usual mix of CTO judgment and technical banter.

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