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participating in SO makes you elite? Although, there are many convincing real case scenarios discussed by few (perhaps fit for 'elite' label), they are overshadowed by the majority - the badge-gatherers.
What I found (mostly) in SO is more of karmaholics, copying/pasting info from the web. Imho, it is more of a human-enabled search engine for your questions - you get a compiled list of filtered result for your questions, instead of you filtering google results.
See S Lott (or Alex Martelli) and Jon Skeet for instance; There are many, many good programmers in Python tags giving many good answers; but to be only at +2 and an accepted.
In the C# tag on the other hand, or if you yourself, once in a while ask a question on git or svn, you can notice how many upvotes and points those questions get.
In general, I tend to up vote liberally, particularly for the Python community related questions; but there is a limit to number of upvotes as well ;)
Moreover, if a company is looking for someone working in that niche technology you speak of, then you having a fraction of rep points compared to a .NET guy is less relevant than you having 50% more points than the next guy in said niche.
It can also be a measurement of how much time you're willing to sink into talking about programming, rather than actually doing it. (HN has the same problem.)
I pointed out a few more in a blog post a while back that stirred up a hornet's nest. People attacked me as though I invented those rep-earning tactics when I was simply trying to defend myself as a newcomer.
http://www.codexon.com/posts/simple-tips-to-get-stackoverflo...
You can see an example of one of the worst problems (fastest gun in the west) that plagued stackoverflow here. Someone managed to get in an answer 2 minutes before me that was completely wrong.
Fast forward 7 hours later, he copies my answer, and gets accepted for it, getting far more votes than mine.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/919056/python-case-insens...
That said I use SO and enjoy it for what it is, but I definitely don't think it has made me the elite of the best, perhaps the elite of the not so bad.
I hope that StackOverflow Careers site does turn the job market upside down for the best software developers. I completely respect the idea they are trying to get across to employers looking for good candidates. But pointing at some online reputation and technical question forum isn't going to help the people who wouldn't know a great hacker from a turnip. Which, as discussed here many times, is the vast majority of people, including other hackers.
I think that it is more effective for hackers to offer up portfolios of completed work to potential employers. Projects the hacker designed, implemented, integrated with the work of others, in X time, that serve Y customers.
I also don't buy the idea that charging people to post their resume/CV before it will show up in potential employer's searches helps filter so that only "active, serious job applicants" show up (from the FAQ). Its a bit on the slimy side - you're charging us for the content you're selling to someone else?
My immediate reaction was that making developers pay a fee to be searchable doesn't seem to be turning the job market on its head at all.
I don't know if there's a non-slimy way to take money from developers when your stated goal is to help developers make money. It comes off sounding like any other job-assistance scam, where they take $20 to drop a resume into a template and spam it to X-hundred companies.
If you only want serious job applicants, you could just require the developer to check in every now and again.
And if this were really turning the market on its head it would need to provide developers far more information that they could use to get a leg up during negotiation and assessment. Developers would need to see things like: who's looking at their resume, what salary range they're looking in, team sizes, technologies in use, what search terms brought them to your name, what other developers they looked at, how many positions they're trying to fill, etc.
Come one. I dig free too. Maybe it's even better if it's free. But you can't just disqualify any attempt to charge for a service as slimy. $20 to post a resume if it might connect you to a job you want is nothing. There is nothing wrong with charging developers (or anyone else) when your stated aim is to help them make money. In fact, that is a very normal way of doing business. Charge money for something that is valuable because it helps you make money.
I wonder how relevant will the fact be that I dared to ask stupid noob questions about new technologies I am trying to learn. Maybe it's best I stick to giving Java advice :-/
Although personally I wouldn't really be all that crazy about working for the kind of employer who cared about this thing ("What? You asked... questions?").
Just my thoughts -- I'm speculating here, and there's still a long way to go.
I've been thinking about starting a programming blog with my real name just so people have something to find when they Google for me.
Of course, it would help if I had some public results to point to with my name on them...
So if you google my name and find Andy Hunt's blog or if you find the not me Dr. (PHD in Mathematics) Hunt, do I get a call back? Google is a powerful tool but to randomly believe there is only one person X out there is kind of shortsighted.
As more people get online it becomes harder to differentiate them.
At first the idea is intriguing. SO has a customer base of engineers, some of whom are very talented and where there is a rough way of quantifying talent through the karma points. Why not tap into that for the job market?
I was very tempted to sign up, because as I said, I was sick of my job and finally ready to move on. But $99/year? I spent a handful of hours on Craigslist and LinkedIn and within two weeks I had several interviews and two good offers. And I'm not nearly an all-star, just a guy with 5 years experience with LAMP (PHP and Perl) that isn't an idiot (or so I'd like to think).
So is SO Careers really targeted at someone like me? Is it targeted at the young post-college upstart? (If so, does he even have $100/year?) Is it targeted at the uber-engineer that has his own FOSS project and is a minor blog celebrity? (doesn't he have an even easier time picking and choosing his jobs than I would?)
It doesn't make any sense to me, and what frustrates me most is their explanation for charging is that "they need to make sure the candidates are serious." If they want to avoid the "stale resume" (and why do Jeff/Joel keep using the term 'CV'? are they too good for the word 'resume'?) problem on existing job boards, charging someone isn't going to make a difference -- a person is going to get hired and unless he immediately updates his SO careers profile, his resume is now stale too. Also why would I pay $99/year for something that I'll probably only use once a year, at most? Just how often am I looking for a job exactly?
Because every time I've seen you use it in an article and/or on your site, it really cracks me up.
However, he does enjoy making lattes for visitors at Fog Creek HQ, and people around the office.
There has to be more balance in the model. Employers can look at you and see how your peers (or actually, anyone with an account) rate you. Hiring companies should be similarly exposed.
As I understood it, we provide the content, we pay for the service, maybe we get job offers from companies that don't suck. Who's getting the most value from this arrangement.
(let me state for the record that I really, really like SO. I'm just iffy about this careers business model)
It would be good to offer the service free to the unemployed (if that could even be verified). It's terrible practice to charge people for access to a job if they need the money for food.
Maybe a more fair arrangement would be to offer the service free after X number of comments or questions contributed. That way, even if you don't get a job out of it, there's a direct relationship between what you contribute to SO and what you get (aside from all the free knowledge).
Anyone I know who is a good developer has more offers than they can manage, even in these times of recession. In my experience, there is no real need to put one's cv up on a jobsite to get good offers.
Would any good developer pay to put their cv on SO? I find it difficult to believe but I could be wrong. If anyone does this, please keep us posted on how it went.
But the premise of the SO careers is that 75% of the elite are not "delighted" with their current job.
So for many being happy with the job isn't a priority?
I'd also guess that those who spend lots of time on StackOverflow are overrepresented among those with low job satisfaction.
Edit: If I had more time, I'd spend it on perlmonks, instead. I might be spoiled; StackOverflow probably looks better to other communities.
Talks about happiness and work.
What I'm saying that a good programmer has no problems getting offers all the time , leave alone the "elite of the elite". Why should an "elite of the elite" programmer pay to get job offers? And how does SO guarantee that anyone who lists his cv there gets a better offer through SO than he does otherwhise?
Let's make this more concrete.I am decent programmer. Hardly "elite". Suppose I wanted to apply to an "elite" company, say Google. I'd just pick up the phone and ring up my friends who work there and ask them to get my cv int teh right hands. A real "elite" programmer(say Linus) would have no issues getting a job either. so this seems to be targeted at "less than elite" programmers who don't have the networks/open source code bases / whatever to get noticed by the right people. I still don't get exactly what SO charges for. I can put my cv on dozens of "job sites for free (not that I really would, but hypothetically I could). I can also add my SO profile url to my cv if I wanted to.
So unless Joel and CO can get my cv in front of people I couldn't normally reach what am I paying for exactly?
As I said earlier, I would love to hear from someone who actually got hired through this site.
I live in London, and work remotely for a US company, but I'm not from London, and haven't worked for any other companies in London. (I'm here because of my girlfriend.) I have no colleagues in London. Most of my contacts are on the west coast of the US, where it's somewhat awkward to get a job as a non-US citizen, and doubly awkward if one wants to work remotely.
Now, if I wanted to get a different job, what would I do? The best solution would probably be a job right here in London, but I have no "in" here. But I don't see that that lack has any obvious connection to my abilities as a developer.
But this is exactly what I said. SO is targeted at people who don't have an "in". "Elite " programmers generally get an "in" by their reputation and contacts, not by paying to list a cv on some website(I don't believe SO can overcome that lack of "in" any more than any other job site, but that is a separate point. And anyway, if I am popular on SO I can just add the url to my cv. Why pay SO?).
If I were in your position (US citizen looking for an "in" in London ) I would make contacts in the local sw industry asap. Attend local ruby/c++/whatever-tech-you-are-interested-in interest groups, attend major conferences and so on and make friends with talented people.
Writing /contributing to open source software buys you quite a bit of "in" with competent people anywhere.
People you know are the ultimate "in", followed closely (for devs) by shipping products/open source software you wrote.
Anything SO can provide (in addition to a url to your contrinuctions which you have anyway)is a weak/nonexistent imitation. And you certainly shouldn't (imo) have to pay for it and (again imo) won't be getting value for money if you did.
All that said, I do await SO career success stories. I'd love to be proven wrong. I still maintain that "elite of elite" programmers (to use Joels' words) won't pay SO (or anyone else) to host their cv.
But like I said, I'm fairly happy with my current job, so I feel no big pressure to integrate with the local scene.
Edit: Of course, a high SO rep might mean that you spend your working hours answering questions there. Generally you're employed to do something else [says the HN contributor, midday].
I wouldn't be concerned about paying for this, but what I think that it will not turn around the market as mentioned. Instead will create another hurdle for developers. The issue is that after a potential employer contacts you, the whole interview process will be the same as before. No Hollywood treatment you can be sure.
Moreover, for many companies search is usually done by HR firms. The SO interface will be used by these firms in the same way they currently use linkedin, etc.
I would be much more interested in free web site where you can list your accomplishments: projects finished, previous jobs, open source developed, so employers can have an easier way to compare you to your peers.
The $99/yr is meant to be a nominal fee to keep out the riff-raff, basically (my metaphor, not Joel's). SO will charge the hiring companies a much larger amount to get the opportunity to search the database.
It seems like this was actually designed more from the perspective of the person who is HIRING, not the person being hired. Joel mentions the frustrations of sorting through a zillion resumes, many of them from people who are wildly out of their league, and the reality that even a good resume doesn't really prove that the person is a good coder. Two people with identical backgrounds might have wildly different qualities as developers. Looking at resumes isn't enough.
So the $99/yr is a deliberate barrier to entry to reduce spam, and your Stack Overflow rep/answers are a second way to distinguish the quality of developers.
The grand unifying theory that makes it work (if it does work) is that developers want to work for the kind of company that takes enough care to look at SO answers in order to distinguish great devs from mediocre ones. That's why you would want to pay the $99 bucks just to have your resume searchable there. In theory.
Also, as a deliberate, specific method to prevent recruiters from using the database, you're required to give the name of the company that is hiring in order to search the database. Recruiters won't do this since the dev could skip the recruiter and go straight to the company, in which case the recruiter can't get their commission.
I don't mind paying for the service either. It seems like something I'd want to have exposure to and support to work towards a good solution to this problem whatever it turns out to be.
Which if you aren't reputable on the site would tend to imply that isn't a goal so why would you care?
All part of dealing with people for the hiring process.
Other people have made a lot of money finding me and placing me with good employers, or I've sought out specific positions at specific companies I was interested in. While I can see some value in linking CVs to SO accounts, it seems like the wrong group is being asked to shell out.
I love StackOverflow. From the first day StackOverflow was announced, I wanted to be a part of it. I knew that it would be successful and useful to at least a small group of programmers.
StackOverflow Careers? Not much. Why do they have to defend this careers thing so much? SO Careers is addressing a real problem, but I don't know if it is the right solution.
I don't mind paying, (paying back the great SO team is fulfilling) but the viability of the SO Careers model for an international audience is debatable. As EugeneG pointed out, we are not participating in SO just for the karma factor.
A career page seems to be the preferred route to go to raise revenue for programming websites. They're not defending it, they're promoting it. Using a job board to directly or indirectly raise revenue is done here, on reddit, on Joel on Software, and now on Stack Overflow. Probably because programmers often have adblock on and don't generally buy a lot of software.
I guess you're paying to prove that, yes, you will take their calls.
"can you send us your stack overflow account?" "yeah, i'm no longer interested."
This seems fairly unlikely at first glance. Large organizations often have required procedures that hiring managers must use. Smaller organizations clearly have more flexibility, but it seems the ones that want to go searching for talent themselves instead of soliciting applications will probably be looking for people whose reputations they already know or even already know personally.
SO reputation or not, this presentation is at least as good as what even an "elite" programmers resume would look like.