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Comment by scotch_drinker | Hacker News Reader

It's also interesting, apropos of the recent interest in StackOverflow Careers and the discussions on HN, that this guy has a pretty spectacular StackOverflow rep and still was having trouble finding a job. I wonder if he knew of the Careers/jobs portion of StackOverflow and if he used it at all. Of course it's anecdotal but seems odd if Joel's theory stands up that this fellow had such a hard time getting a job.

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There are a vast number of people--hiring managers and developers alike, good and bad--who haven't heard of Stack Overflow, or Joel Spolsky.

Those developers must never google any programming questions then.

I know I Google almost every day for something programming related. I know someone else (who writes credit card processing software in Java in a large team) and apparently most off their coding questions are answered in-house. She tells me it's frowned upon to use outside solutions or non-standards coding.

I suppose that makes some sense in a large codebase where often it's hard to know what problems have already been solved, but I can't help but feel like using the open source world in this capacity means that I have a much larger pool of talent to draw from.

I think it depends on the nature of the query. Often, I don't get SO results on the first page of a Google search.

That wouldn't surprise me but I'm not sure it's germane to my point that he seems like a perfect candidate for Careers at StackOverflow. Yet he had one hell of a time finding a job. Yes it's new and yes not a lot of employers are on there yet but this guy was in a pretty decent area as far as tech talent and needs go. I'd think given his SO rep, he would have known about the Careers section and given it a go.

If he did and still couldn't find a job, I just find that interesting.

Not to drag this way off topic, but 6k isn't really very spectacular; I'm neither a great programmer nor a prolific contributor, and I have a much higher rep than that, just by answering about one question per day for 11 months.

If he had 50k, in my opinion, then it might be a commentary on the meaning of the reputation, but not so much as is.

Based on the users currently on StackOverflow, he ranks 747th by my count. Assuming there are 100K+ users on StackOverflow, I think that makes it a pretty spectacular reputation statistically speaking. Answering a question every day for 11 months is also pretty spectacular if you ask me.

He may not be a Jon Skeet but he's clearly head and shoulders above the great majority of StackOverflow users. He's exactly the type of programmer that I think Joel would say would have a good use for the Careers portion. So I find it interesting that he had such a hard time finding a job ASSUMING he knew about and utilized the Careers section.

sounds like he had some free time without work for a while to work on the SO score.

... but he did have a pretty desirable skillset with stuff like C#, .NET ( I see ads for this kind of thing, anyway). And F# which means he's gotten into the FP stuff which means he's aware of current trends. So if it was tough for him to find work, well, then it's tough out there.

Oh, and nice to know that I'm not the only one who has trouble with nervousness during interviews.

Hypothetically speaking, given his situation, do you think he would have ponied up the (soon-to-be) $100 to sign up for Stackoverflow Careers?

No, but it was $29 when he was looking which is almost negligible. If you're going to go broke, it will happen whether or not you have an extra $29.

On top of that, I have no doubt that if he emailed the team at StackOverflow and told them his situation, they would have gladly waived the fee. I just don't see the money as being a sticking point.

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