My Developer Story
UPD (2022-05-22): Other people pointed to me that they have received three reminders from Stack Overflow about them discontinuing Developer Story feature. I have checked my email and couldn't find any of them :/ It could be I simply deleted them since I couldn't remember what "Developer Story" means. It could be I received them in my spam folder or never received at all. Sadly, I will never know the truth now. It has been more than 30 days and I don't keep deleted emails for longer than that.
I've used to have my resume on LinkedIn but since they started pushing more towards a social network for "professionals" and requiring an account I've started looking elsewhere. Around then Stack Overflow presented Developer Story and some time after I gave it a go.
I really liked Developer Story and decided that it will be my main CV and LinkedIn page will just refer to it. (I had to keep LinkedIn account because without it you can't access other people's profiles... This gets really annoying especially when you need to access resumes of candidates before interviewing them.)
I don't access my CV often, maybe one-two times per year. So a week ago I decided to edit my CV with some of the recent work I've been doing. I opened Stack Overflow and started searching for a Developer Story button. I didn't remember the exact name of the feature so at first I just thought that they moved the button somewhere. I continued my search but got more and more puzzled. There was just no links on my profile that would lead to my CV.
Since I couldn't access my CV to edit, I tried opening the page by following a link from my website and to my big surprise the browser showed a 404 page. I repeated the test in a different browser and in a private window but, unfortunately, all test cases showed the same not found page.
I became really worried since SO's Developer Story was my single source of all the work I've done. I literally had no other copies of it. My next thought was maybe internet archive has saved it. I typed at the speed of light but to no result. My CV wasn't there.
It was time to finally figure out what has happened to that feature. And to my surprise I found a post on Stack Overflow's Meta about them removing that feature and all the CVs. By the time I checked they had already removed all the data. There was one thing I didn't understand though: as a Developer Story user why didn't I get any notification about their plans? Nor why didn't I get an archive of my data? It is literally just a single page of text.
It's a shame they couldn't keep CVs for longer at least in read-only mode or sent a full copy of it to my email.
My current resume: 404 page
Support
I decided to try my luck and contacted Stack Overflow's support about my resume. Submitting a request was an easy part. I quickly found the form and asked them about the backup. I immediately received a response with my ticket number.
An issue has been created on your behalf in our support portal. You should see a response from us soon with more details or an answer to your question. 58430
When I checked my email I realised that I received not one but two emails from them.
The Stack Overflow offices are closed the week of April 25th. We will be processing support requests but responses may be delayed. We will be returning on May 2nd.
It wasn't a big deal as I already accepted the fact that my data was lost so I was ready to wait.
30 minutes later I received another email from SO:
Hello!
This issue has now been resolved. Please let us know if you have any questions or continue to have issues. This ticket can be re-opened at any time by replying to this ticket.
If can, we'd really appreciate your filling out the short satisfaction survey below.
Thanks! Stack Overflow Support
That was really unexpected. My request they promised to get back to in a week was resolved the same day without me getting any response from them! I responded to them with my puzzlement. A week later they finally responded:
Hello Roman,
I apologise for the delay in response. Unfortunately all candidate and user data related to the removed products have since been deleted. We don't keep such back-ups.
Thanks, The Stack Overflow & Stack Exchange support teams
Sadly they have not kept any backups. Well, it was just as I expected.
Developer Story history
Six years ago, in 2016 Stack Overflow presented a Developer Story. It seems that users weren't particularly excited about it.
Three months ago, in the beginning of 2022 SO decided they no longer wanted that feature and marked jobs and developer story for removal. This news received a massive amount of negative feedback. One user even claims:
Congratulations on posting the most downvoted question on meta — ever!
Despite the negative feedback from its users, Stack Overflow went ahead and nuked the feature and the data.
Summary
Always keep backups of your data hosted by other services. You have no guarantees that the data will stay there nor that the data will be accessible in the future. Stay away from companies that do not listen to users' feedbacks.
I guess it is time to delete my Stack Overflow profile altogether. My only two use cases of Stack Overflow were: my CV and upvoting/downvoting answers.
What ideally should have happened
Stack Overflow decides they no longer want a developer story feature. They notify all of their customers that use the feature that CVs are going away. They send an email and a notification which is shown on their website. They attach a full copy of CV in the email so that users have access to their data.