"They’re the elite of the elite of the best programmers out there. They’re the people who participate in Stack Overflow..."
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.
The major flaw in StackOverflow is the huge difference in rep you can gain depending on how many people use the same tech as you do. Answering C# questions, even insanely easy ones will get you loads of rep (between +100 to +1000) but that really specific and difficult post about some edge case in a niche technology will probably get you +10 rep, mebbe +30 if you're lucky.
I can't help but completely agree with that. After all, that's how I got most of my reputation score on StackOverflow. On the other hand, advocates of smaller but prouder technologies (such as Lisp) are more generous with upvotes than followers of more "mainstream" languages such as C# or Java.
No, I can personally testify to what the Op says; In general people in the Python/django community are quite stingy with up votes.
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 ;)
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.
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.
Is it really a flaw that certain technologies are more popular or more widely used? I agree that you can garner much more exposure on SO if you're answering questions about a Microsoft Technology, but I'm just struggling with labeling that as a flaw. Maybe I'm missing something obvious.
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.
No, the issue is that, in SO karma, relatively common knowledge seems to be valued orders of magnitude more than insight on problems few people would be able to solve. While some of those questions are probably just obscure trivia, it also includes advanced knowledge of (say) compiler optimization. Cases where most people on the site wouldn't be familiar enough with the subject matter to tell an insightful answer from ignorant ranting.
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.)
Seems Jeff and Joel are always patting their readers on the back and saying they are so 'elite' for reading Coding Horror or attending Dev Days. That part may be true, but using SO is anything but elite. Any google search containing something remotely resembling programming will return an SO result, it's not quite the underground programming exchange where only the artisanal coders are allowed that they think it is.
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.
From what I have heard from the SO podcasts, being the returned site from Google is _exactly_ what they want. So it sounds like a roaring success, in those terms.
Yea, it is definitely successful but what I meant by that is the users of SO are not at all elite when Google sends them there when they ask how to do their homework.
I don't think many people would object to that. I think the objection is that being a regular on SO does not demonstrate that one is serious about learning their craft. At least not anymore than someone hanging out on LtU, or GDnet, etc. The problem with SO Careers is that it is in effect being advertised as the only legitimate way for programmers to show that they are serious about programming. That doesn't seem right to me.
I've gotten terrific answers to the questions I've posted on there, for what it's worth. And it was stuff that was difficult to google for (which is why I asked it there).
I think there is a reasonable chance that the number of non-"shithole" employers (using Joel's term from the article) that know the difference or maybe even care that they are not getting the top 10% of talent is overestimated.
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.
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.
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.
"To a hiring manager, the fact that you took the time to help a fellow programmer with a detailed answer in some obscure corner of programming knowledge, and demonstrated mastery, is a lot more relevant than the Latin Club you joined in school."
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 :-/
You could always ask the "stupid noob" questions under a different identity if this is something you are worried about.
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?").
I think it depends on how you ask the question. If you give every indication that you've made an effort to try and figure it out on your own, even if it's a newb issue, I doubt anyone who knows what they're doing would see it as anything other than a good indication of character.
My concern is that this takes the fun out of participating in these kinds of online communities. Learning and helping others for the sake of fun is one thing, but doing it to beef up a resume is totally different.
/me goes and creates 20 new accounts so I can ask embarrassing stupid questions.
Otherwise I get rejected from a job because I asked where to find a setting in Visual Studio while claiming to have N years experience
You don't have to file a CV. It's completely optional. So far about 7000 people have filed CVs, which is a tiny fraction of the millions of people on the site.
I understand that it's optional. But if this type of thing becomes popular, programmers will feel pressure to show their employers an online track record. People will feel obligated to participate, even if they don't want to, and those that do participate will worry a lot more about how their answers will be interpreted by potential employers. The penalty for an incorrect answer becomes much higher than just a downvote.
Just my thoughts -- I'm speculating here, and there's still a long way to go.
I think that's already the case. When I get a resume the first thing I do is Google the name. If I find an intelligent programming blog, good questions and good answers on Q&A sites, and intelligent comments on online discussions I'm way more likely to call back.
Good(or perhaps bad) thing my name is fairly common if you googled it you would more likely find Andy Hunt of Prag Prog than me. There is also a few PHDs that match my first last name exactly. There is a Gary Paulsen book that is one character off my name. Googling my nickname turns up an unaffiliated construction company, a printing company and oddly enough my profile on HN which is devoid of detail, so the only internet leads you will find on me are ones I choose to reveal.
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.
But to be serious my blog mentions neither my name or my nickname. If you find it, it won't be because you are looking for me. I don't write for self promotion, I am just not that fond of that guy. I write to write. I write to share. I write to improve my writing skills. I write because it gives me a point of focus. Fame and fortune isn't what I seek from my writing.
If you Google my name you get a variety of people with my name. For example, I know there's at least one other person with my name on Facebook who also lives in the same geographic region.
As more people get online it becomes harder to differentiate them.
I wonder if over time this will drive parents to deliberately choose more unique names and drive people to start using their middle initial more frequently.
This is something I'm sort of worried about. I've generally kept my casual nickname separate from my real name. If I'm doing something professional or academic, I'll use my real name, otherwise I'll use a pseudonym, and I work to keep them separate.
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...
Is there a way change the openID account associated with your Stack Overflow account? Mine is associated with a name I'd rather not have potential employers seeing.
The danger there is false positives. To use my own name as an example, there are an impressive number of Timothy Wiseman's out there, at least two far more famous than I. Fortunately, a couple of the articles I posted do at least appear on the first page and the others are not programmers but it can be a major issue for some.
Most online discussion are behind nick name, not the name on the resume. I do not put my nick (sometimes I think I should LOL) on the resume. So, searching by resume name might not give you much results and give you false negative
I was one of those engineers that hated their job a month ago, so my job search commenced just around the time Joel and Jeff announced SO Careers.
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?
Hi. I'm that employee (http://babak.ghahremanpour.com/). Joel does pay me for using the photo. He babysits twice a month so my wife and I can enjoy romantic dinners. I get shoulder rubs when I ask for them. And, he makes me the best lattes (including latte art). All the other Fog Creekers are jealous...but, they're not the ones entertaining JoS readers, by being funny in a picture... :)
Were I to pay for this kind of service I'd want to know who's looking at me (not just how many times). Are the hiring companies vetted in any way?
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.
Well Joel did say, "They’re the elite of the elite of the best programmers out there."
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'll make it concrete too. First up though, I'm not particularly unhappy with my career.
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.
"The best solution would probably be a job right here in London, but I have no "in" here."
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.
I'm not a US citizen; but I've attended various interest groups, but to be frank, most of the folks I've met aren't up to much. Far better are the contacts I've made while I've been speaking at conferences, and in that case, it's the speakers who are the contacts, not the plebs who attend.
But like I said, I'm fairly happy with my current job, so I feel no big pressure to integrate with the local scene.
The perfect job comes along rarely, and it generally doesn't stay perfect. Our career focuses change over time, or the company undergoes a shift as work increases or decreases, or your favorite co-workers move on to different opportunities. The longest I was completely satisfied with a job was 3 years, and then the company was sold and things became very bad, very fast. I found an interesting new job in a week.
I'm not going to look good on Stack Overflow. I like to spend my spare time actually programming, you know? It's the difference between being a spectator and playing the game.
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].
SO is turning out to be a really nice case study on web business. (1) Create a community that will provide free content to your web site; (2) charge them for the privilege of saying to potential customers that they are contributing. :-)
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.
My goal is to establish a successful company that people will recognize as being worthwhile and offering a useful product or service. Then if I'm ever in a position where I'm looking to work for someone else again I can just point to that and say "I did that". Hopefully that'll be enough street cred to get me the job.
I'm excited to see where this goes. I've always felt like finding a job is probably the most annoying thing to go through. It'd be nice to have companies try to find you using parameters that they find useful. I'm not sure where it will all end up but I'm glad that people are actively working on this problem in a sane way.
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.
Then using SO careers isn't a good idea for you? The whole point is people who want to try and leverage what they do on SO towards easing/improving the job hunt.
Which if you aren't reputable on the site would tend to imply that isn't a goal so why would you care?
Lets assume if an recruiter looks up my name on Stack Overflow careers, and they won't find me there because I was busy I didn't have time for Stack Overflow. Does that mean I'm not a good programmer? does that mean I don't help my fellow programmers?
How long until other sites come up with this point based resume linking? Sounds like another online game to me now. Except that you use your points in real life.
No matter what you do if a recruiter has foolish assumptions that you don't happen to meet you are screwed. Just like how in many bigger companies you have to survive the buzzword mine field to be considered for a position.
All part of dealing with people for the hiring process.
I just listened to one of the SO podcasts that happens to have more information about this service. A few things of note (that have come up in these comments):
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 can't imagine paying to have a searchable CV. I already hear from recruiters about 2 or 3 times a month.
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.
To me, the value is in what a technical team could see about a developer. Are they narrow-focused, or have a broad range of skills? Do they keep up with newer technologies? Are they capable of answering tough questions, or do they just skim the easy ones? Too many people say 5/5 for Java or whatever, but don't have the first clue.
You can pay $99 a year to be in a database where potential employers will contact you? I ended up on a whole ton of those for free back in the 90s.. :-)
I guess you're paying to prove that, yes, you will take their calls.
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.
"Why do they have to defend this careers thing so much?"
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.
At least at first glance, this all seems predicated on hiring managers browsing CVs at this one site.
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.
Uh, obscure programming knowledge? Most of the questions on StackOverflow are about methodologies or about how to do something in some specific programming language. How obscure is that really?
If nothing else, the SO Careers site provides a convenient place to park your CV and make it public (if that's what you want) -- for free. I think the markdown formatting is more than sufficient to get the look you want and highlight what's important. The linking of up to 10 technologies with job experience is intuitive.
SO reputation or not, this presentation is at least as good as what even an "elite" programmers resume would look like.
Isn't this the guy that basically said if you have ever had to apply for a programming job then you are probably a loser that can't program anyway? (some article about "High Notes")
I really do think there is a LOT more money to be made doing stuff like this (and Stack Overflow more broadly) than selling Fogbugz. Smart move-- hats off to Joel.
Probably, but I really don't get the impression that Joel is motivated purely by money. There is a certain genuineness there about wanting to help the best programmers become better.
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.