Programmer search engine
joelonsoftware.com
joelonsoftware.com
Joel Spolsky thinks we should all hire people who regularly use his software. He thinks those people are cool and he really likes how their time, effort and reputation on his site are something they can sell to recruiters for additional revenue. This is literally his dream come true.
It's only a very, very roughly a programmer-search engine. It's much more an extension of the stackoverflow community.
I think you have this characterized a bit wrong - he thinks that people that use his website would make for good job candidates.
I think his post is straight forward - this is a neat way to do specific searches for programmers. Programmers who use SO might or might not be cool, but they are now searchable.
I find it supremely unsurprising that Joel has decided to sell the user info he collects at the website he helped create. He is exactly that kind of person, who wouldn't see anything wrong with that. After all, it's his website and the privacy policy is clear, right? (sigh)
But honestly, I don't dislike Joel. I just am irritated by his disproportionate popularity. The man's writing is solid, but his technical and managerial insights are at best mediocre. This is in sharp contrast to someone like Paul Graham, who not only has the writing capabilities but also the background of technical and social achievement to back it up.
This isn't selling user details from Stack Overflow (for which all the data is available for download, by the way: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creativ...).
It's a separate service, the users of which have to pay to get listed. I'd say that indicates a pretty strong willingness to be contacted by employers.
As the co-founding CTO of Hotjobs.com, we provided this functionality on the very first version of Hotjobs in 1996, and subsequently ended up purchasing Resumix to provide a very in depth technical solution to allow employers this exact functionality you're describing.
Of course, we had tens of millions of resumes in every possible industry imaginable all searchable through a very robust search interface that did all sorts of fancy lexical analysis and data extraction from random resume formats.
Over the last 13 years, thousands upon thousands of people have been hired through the exact mechanism you're describing.
I imagine Joel believes this has more value then just the data extracted from a resume.
What stops people from linking to their stackoverflow accounts? Many people already link their CV to their github accounts.
I've come across many programmers that can code well, but had horrible communications skills. It's always difficult to interact with these programmers. I spend more time extracting the meaning of what they're saying rather than getting work done.
... on StackOverflow.
Meanwhile, the great bulk of programmer communication is happening on blogs, mailing lists, and IRC.
You're very right that written and verbal communication is important, but you have to look in the right places for it.
[1] - http://github.com/defnull/bottle/ [2] - http://github.com/kangax
This happened to John Carmack, Jamie Zawinski. They are probably too busy in making stuffs work then writing answers on Stack Overflow or committing code to GitHub.
But if the code has copyrighted issues, then how can I show publicly? I usually have a copy of repository for my past projects and I don't mind to show it to people who interview me.
Also I think if I need to put code on GitHub, it has to be some software for more generic tasks.
Also a lot of companies don't want their employees to write code for anyone else and will actually see open source contributions as a major red flag.
FUD. I work for a very large corporation, and open source was definitely not a negative when hiring me. Many very important parts of our business are based on open-source technologies. (And many aren't, FWIW.)
Besides, if you have 3 great offers on the table I'm sure you'll be able able to negotiate a $100/year raise to recoup the careers.stackoverflow investment.
I can get a crappy job off Dice anytime and spending money to do it would be a waste. Spending $100 to have a chance at a great job where I'm actually happy? That's an investment likely to have pretty good returns.
(1) The $99 fee is paid up-front, not when (if!) hired. (2) There is a limited-time price reduction (to $29) for 2009. (3) They advertise a 90-day, no-questions-asked money back guarantee.
http://careers.stackoverflow.com/faq#pricing
* "Our chief weapon is surprise... surprise and fear..."
Stackoverflow only charges a subscription fee for searching the database so they probably won't make as much.
If you are a hiring manager, you can test-drive our search interface any time and get an idea of how many matches you'll find. No surprises here. But if you'd like to view candidate details and make contact, you'll need a subscription:
* 1 week subscription is $500
* 1 month subscription is $1,000
* 6 month subscription is $3,000
* 1 year subscription is $5,000That's the default. If you're crafty there are ways to force it down over the course of the arrangement.
Isn't it better to find people who already have a job they like and try to convince them that they would be even happier in your company?
Anyways, it can simply be thought of as your personal resume. You don't have to actively be seeking a job to fill out a CV.
Is being unemployed a bad thing? Well, yes it generally is for the unemployed person but it doesn't mean that they're a bad hire. Sure, one could say that if they were really good, they would be busy with multiple projects at the same time, or have people waiting for them as soon as their current job ends for a reason or another. But it sounds a little bit condescending to me to imply that being unemployed means you shouldn't be hired.
As for "people risking getting fired", besides the fact that I doubt that it happens that often (and when it does, one could easily argue that it's a sign that it wasn't a good place to be in the first place), I don't see that as a bad thing for somebody hiring.
It just often isn't appropriate to have a single, world viewable resume. Job search is a delicate dance. Personnel departments and higher management may want to filter job seekers out an arbitrary criteria ("we want a backend/frontend programmer") while a job seeker may wants to make contact with the project lead and show they he/she is good fit for their process in particular. This kind of thing makes "spinning" your resume important and perfectly legitimate. If just exposing everything worked for programmers, Google would already be a great way to find programmers.
Also, you can easily remove yourself from the search results.
So far I see zero benefits for me but lots of moola for JoS.
Not sure how you'd solve the problem of people finding each other on Programmer Search and then just emailing each other externally.
I'd call that a feature. It cuts down on the resume spam. By charging $100 you create a filter to reduce the noise. It makes the people with jobs happier because they don't get as much crap and you make he job hunters happier as it's now easier for them to find jobs.
Everyone wins by charging.
Maybe you did a search that had 1 result, and then you edited your search, and the Ajax refresh didn't come back fast enough so it still showed one?
I just didn't notice the number to the right, and clicked the "Show Results" button each time. After I read your reply I tried it again, this time looking for AJAX updates across the entire page, and I saw it. I think I would have found it on my own had the "Display Search Results" button been disabled or hidden when no results were found.