Predictably Irrational and StackOverflow Careers
rohbust.blogspot.com
rohbust.blogspot.com
> Stack Overflow will make both Spolsky and Atwood enormously wealthy, based upon the volunteer efforts of others. Who will get nothing.
The others won't get nothing. They'll get whatever rewards go along with participating in a forum: the opportunity to demonstrate prowess and be recognized for it, the chance to have specific questions answered in a peer-reviewed medium, and so on. Don't discount the value that people place in these things, even if they aren't being compensated financially.
Now I don't answer questions there anymore.
Just sayin', it's not sustainable. Why shouldn't I get a cut? What do I get for continuing to answer questions on Stack Overflow (instead of on free mailing lists, or on my own blog, or in a magazine)?
Karma is nice and all, but the only reason I bother writing here is because there are no ads.
However, the idea of charging participants in that community $100 per year for the privilege of having their resumes searchable by employers seems like a bit of a slap in the face.
Especially since the Careers site doesn't even seem to try to distinguish between employers and recruiters.
About the slap in the face, it's necessary to filter out bad developers who won't get value from posting their CV. The best price isn't always free.
Edit: and it's funny that Spolsky would complain about recruiters when that's exactly when he's trying to become on a larger scale.
A middleman by another name would smell so foul...
The willingness to pay $100 to post your resume could just as easily correlate to lower ability since someone who can't find a job through any other avenue might be willing to pay for additional exposure to employers.
I hang out on few online electronics forums ( http://forum.sparkfun.com for example) and answer a fair amount of questions, help people with electronics problems, and provide simple designs. Occasionally I think about how much value I'm giving away (even here in the Midwest, EE consulting rates are around $100/hr) for free and how much value the site owners get from having others like me on their board.
Then I remember that it's really fun and that I enjoy helping people and seeing what creations their minds come up with. Once in a while someone pays me to design/build something, but most of the benefit I get from it is in no way financial.
While they will make money from the people that post CVs, much, much more money will come from the companies that pay to search those resumes. I'm sure they set the price at wherever they expect the best filtering to be. If you value your time at $50 and SO careers saves you 4 hours of job searching every 2 years, it's worth it. If it finds you a job that pays you $.05 more an hour, it's worth it. It's underpriced because CV owners aren't the primary customers.
About the decoys, the $99 regular price isn't a decoy. They're offering the $29 plan because they need a critical mass of CVs to make it useful to companies looking for talent. They're sharing $268 of their value to early adopters as recognition that the first people in make the service more valuable. Once they have lots of CVs they're in a stronger position and don't need to discount anymore. Simple business economics.
And beside, really good engineers are never short of good offers.
It's standard operating procedure in our industry that when a manager or even a dev leaves, they always try to take the best engineers from their past job with them.
If it's not your first job out of school and you have to rely on throwing your CV in a black hole like SO Careers or Monster and hope to get offers from strangers you're doing something very wrong.
Plus, if you're resume isn't remarkable, you might have to do some crappy work to build it up. Life's rough, but if you want something, there's no better way to get it than to earn it.
Actually a lot of programmers suck at networking and are terrible at job hunting.
This is a myth perpetuated by the you-get-what-you-deserve crowd who also believe that the homeless deserve to be where they are because they didn't play by the rules.
The only times anyone has tried to "poach" me has been when a new company was starting up.
As for the given reason for charging, "serious" job seekers will pay... Seriously desperate ones, who haven't been able to get jobs anywhere else. The best candidates often don't use job boards at all, because they don't need to, the companies look for them, but by charging, you are guaranteeing that the top quality candidates will not be participating.