Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrdOriginal | Hacker News Reader

So you definitely wouldn't want to hire someone with say, the highest stackoverflow score (Jon Skeet)? While I definitely agree that a high score isn't a black and white for a "good programmer," a SO score/account is yet another metric that may be available to try to find the perfect fit for your company. I see no problem with a person making more information about themselves available, especially if that information is in the form of technical Q&A.

View on HN

It's not quite what I said though. The thing with SO careers is the "tied into SO" feature. That is making your SO score a big metric; but isn't a very good metric at all because I am sure there are as many SO programmers with 2K score as good as, say, Jon Skeet just not as active.

Additionally if someone promoted themselves as "I have X score on SO" it would worry me.

(that's also before we discuss whether the ability to answer questions well on SO marks you as a good programmer or not :))

Additionally if someone promoted themselves as "I have X score on SO" it would worry me.

You have stated this twice, but the reason why this should invoke worry seems to have been left as an exercise to the reader. Perhaps there is some sort of underlying assumption you make about someone pimping their SO score that I am not making?

Help me understand why this should worry me. There are plenty of good questions and good discussion that I've seen on SO, and the reputation people have earned has seem more often deserved than not. I don't think a good SO reputation deserving quite the heated bandwagon snarking this article produced.

There are 2 points it would worry me on; firstly SO score is a poor test of how good a programmer you are. I have a reasonable score here: but I'm not really an entrepreneur and compared to some I'm only an adequate hacker :) but I am active and I usually hold an opinion about everything.

Secondly it would set alarm bells: why are they so excited about their SO score? Is it intended to impress me so that I skim over the rest? (it's not the only flag I've noticed in interviews; there are lots of similar ones, you pick them up). [it'd also worry me that they haven't figured out it's not a great metric]

So what I am saying is: having a good SO score is definitely something great to mention to me. But only in passing or I would get suspicious :)

(on the other hand if I were hiring, say, an API community manager then it's an awesome metric! :) so I guess it depends)

This reminds me of a time I interviewed a well-known blogger for a programming position - and his resume was filled with tons of mentions to citations his blog had received - and very little work experience. The interview, as you might expect, was awful.

I believe having a high reputation score on StackOverflow tells at least one thing; it tells that that person is very good at writing and honestly, that's a very important skill for a programmer.

If memory serves me, Skeet works for Google--perhaps SO karma is his 20% project?

I would probably hire Jon Skeet. Of course, I would probably still hire him even if he wasn't on StackOverflow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com