Will high reputation in Stack Overflow help to get a good job?

Please don't forget that your real reputation is what definitely gets you a great job.

"Hey bossman, my great friend XXX, who I worked with at YYY, is getting bored over there. He's a great programmer and would be a great fit for our team and the infrastructure position we have open."

And bossman will definitely give him an interview and massive bonus points for the personal recommendation and relationship, and wisely make him a better offer than some stranger that comes in from StackOverflow or GitHub.

This cuts both ways.

As an engineer, you want a job that a colleague recommends to you, far before some random posting you see on StackOverflow Careers.

I read the article a while back by the chap who got headhunted based solely on his Stack rep. It made me think "heck. I'd best get started on that".

So I made a conscious effort to answer questions. I loaded up the questions list and ... nothing. Not an effing thing. All these questions from such a broad base of so many topics. I didn't know the answer to anything.

F I thought. Then a little later I asked a question that I needed an answer to... and I got points. Lots of them. And "badges". And I voted on an answer - more points and badges.

So I thought WOW I can ask my way up to 100k reputation! Fells a little like cheating doesn't it?

Then I reconsidered. Actually the 100,000 questions would be just as valuable as proof of skill, since it's all contributing to your 10,000 hours of practise (See Malcom Gladwell) - furthermore - as you contribute questions, you help build the encyclopedia of knowledge and someone else might find your answer in their "first go".

I think it's really neat that Stack is this odd sort of community where it's virtually impossible to give more than you get from it but simply by participating, even as a supplicant, you contribute to the greater good.

Just last night for example I learned about using chrome for profiling in Javascript. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4240416/reverse-engineeri... and it was good :)

Data point: As someone with a five-figure Stack Overflow reputation, I have received zero (0) job offers related to my Stack Overflow account.

Well it can't hurt.

Of course, you can't fully describe a person by just a number. It's theoretically possible that a highly reputed Stack Overflow user could be an awful programmer at work, but I'm sure that the intersection of "highly reputed SO users" and "people you'd regret to hire for a programmer position" is a very tiny set.

I think that number contains much more significant information for that kind of position than whatever you could extract from a CV or an interview.

What gets you headhunted is posting intelligent answers to tech questions on Linkedin Answers. Because that's where the HR people and recruiters hangout.

I wouldn't be swayed either way by a high Stack Overflow rating.

That said, asking and answering technical questions can be really beneficial. It's much harder to write about something clearly than some people realise, and a great skill to develop.

Also, rather than the whole reputation, I might take interest in particular answers: a single solid answer to a difficult question demonstrates a lot more than many point scoring answers to easier ones.

Last year when I was interviewing, I didn't mention my rank (which is so-so), but mentioned that my answers could be found, and if they wanted to see how I answered, and determine my competence, they would be able to do so. I believe that for at least one set of interviews making the additional information available helped me to get further.

But that was not my "rep"...

I doubt it would harm you. I certainly don't expect to get headhunted through SO (my score is low 4-digits), but I will be putting the link on my CV - as I probably will my NH profile - I don't have any other online presence (no fb, no blog, no github, no li). And although my score isn't super-high, I don't spend a lot of time on the site. I'll ask a question from time to time, and a couple of times a week see if there's anything I can answer. Hopefully my profile will give a reasonable overview of my general competence.

I don't think it helps at all, maybe a little bit of publicity but I think if that is your goal, you may be better served to place efforts elsewhere. I would wager posting on HN has better odds of landing you a job due to exposure than Stack Overflow. In the end networking is the golden rule for finding employment. HN or Stack Overflow can be used to that end, you just have to remember to foster relationships in the community. Doing so will pay far more dividends that pure knowledge displays.

It's part of your reputation portfolio which includes personal references, blogs, open source activities, and whatever else the employer believes to be predictive of the value you will add to the company. If the employer only cares about your SO reputation then it will certainly help. More often than not, I suppose it is only one data point of several which are considered.

A Google recruiter cold-called me -- well, cold-LinkedIn me -- based on my Stack Overflow responses. I did a phone interview even though I wasn't really interested in leaving my current job.

That, plus my location requirements, plus a so-so interview, plus the fact that I wasn't particularly qualified for the job, surely led to the following "Thanks, but no thanks" followup call.

It would be sad to see someone get a job solely on his/her Stack Overflow reputation, but I wouldn't object to it helping you get an edge over other candidates.

If I was an employer looking at a candidate, obviously I am more concern about the quality of each answer than the quantity of each answer.

I wouldn't expect many random job offers from simply being a user on StackOverflow, but shortly after posting a CV on the StackOverflow Careers site (which displays your StackOverflow reputation on the CV), I was contacted by an Amazon.com recruiter.

It might not hurt, but as an interviewer I'd be curious to know if you earned those karma points during office hours.