Stack Overflow Careers: Amplifying Your Awesome

I look forward to seeing what happens. I expect I may have the same problem I have with agents - my remuneration is strongly influenced (positively, I’m pleased to say) by business domain knowledge, something few IT recruiters understand and can price. Similarly with recruiters from the business side, probably worse if anything. It’s a wonder I ever got this job, really.

I’m endlessly amused by the “I have a great job and don’t want to move” crowd. Good for you, guys, but how about I offer you a job doing more of what you really love to do but with a 50% increase in pay? Would you say no? How much s**t would you shovel for 100,000 a year? 500,000? A million? More? I’d shovel plenty.

Most of the people I know who assert that money isn’t too important are living high on Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs. That’s easily addressed - get a few kids (at least two, one kid is for wusses) and live somewhere expensive!

I am really excited about this new service. In my opinion there is a high likelihood that you will be looking for a new employer within 3 years if you are not currently happy. Monster.com, Dice.com, et al are VERY broken indeed. Programmers that are dedicated to the software craft deserves a chance to be happy at work and hopefully careers.stackoverflow.com will help achieve this. Thanks Jeff & company for making our work lives better!

Amplifying your awesome what?

Jeff, you really sound like some kind of marketing weasel. Please, stop it.

It looks like a pretty cool setup, but I do have to say that $29 for 3 years is not “outrageously” cheap when every other careers site I can think of allows job seekers to post resumes 100% free of charge.

If you want any chance of hitting critical mass with this thing, $29 is far, far, far too expensive (hint: the correct answer is “free”). There’s no way you’re going to be successful if you’re:

  1. Trying to break into a market that is already well established
  2. Charging people significantly (well, infinitely) more than the established players

At least it’s not "Free!"
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001301.html

I agree with Ruben. Jeff, all your anti-marketing-weasel posturing is pretty badly undermined when you post manipulative drivel like this. “I’m humbled”? “I’m thrilled”? “I won’t lie to you, this is a business”? These are all right out of the hard-selling car salesman’s playbook. Either practise what you preach, or give it a rest on the anti-marketing rants.

@Ryan Brunner

Ah, but it is cheap compared with the $99 a year once the trial ends.

See

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001301.html

point 1 Encourage false comparisons.

I don’t know – charging people to be looked at for a job (which is essentially the business model) is kind of sad stuff. I would be much more supportive of a model which charged employers and not potential employees. That being said, it is not like you are the only one doing this, and it is obviously a better business model to charge the applicants. (But I won’t be doing it.)

Jonathan:

It seems this ad was designed by McKinsey & Company; a quick google for the number brings up
http://advertisingforpeanuts.blogspot.com/2005/12/morons-need-not-apply.html

The number appears to be active still.
http://www.mckinsey.com/aboutus/locations/Zurich/index.asp

Philip

The last picture in your post is exactly what my current employer’s has hung next to the door.
For me personally it mainly creates the idea that the recruiter in question doesn’t know what he should be looking for.
All those who’s job mainly involves solving math problems, say I.

On the other hand the phone number was on their website too, so I guess it could be interpreted as encouragement to find the fastest correct solution :stuck_out_tongue:

And here I thought you were talking about job offerings with you, Jeff. Where I was going to state that I’d be ready for a job interview with you as I know some of your interview trickery that you’ve posted you ask people :wink:

Also apparently there is another “Russ”. I shall henceforth be known as “Teh Russ”…

As far as people saying they are comfortable at their jobs, it may also have more to do with knowing that they live in an area that doesn’t have a ton of competition, coupled with already being settled down in a house (and possibly kids).

I know some people aren’t afraid to play the nomad game, but I’ve always been very comfortable growing up in my home state and don’t plan on moving very far away. I’m sure this is the case for many others.

Solving difficult problems involves plugging in two numbers into an algebraic expression? Any advanced calculator can do that and any moron can afford one for about 50 bucks (or even less).

Congrats Jeff on a new revenue stream (the job site). You could also sell programmable calculators on that site to help morons look smart haha

Beta careers? I want an alpha career!

I hardly ever use Stack Overflow (un dépassement de pile en français). I guess I’m the smartest guy in the room. I also have better things to do than to be your digital sharecropper. Nobody is doing “developer community” in the right way to promote career networking. I get better offers from goofing off on reddit or on the message boards of open source web applications.

Feels like a sell out. I understand you’ve created a service and you want to advertise it. I just never thought you’d compromise the wonderfully varied and insightful topics (up til now, that is) of this blog to do it. I’m disappointed. Take a look at your posts of the last six months and see what I’m talking about - either web-centric topics or topics directly or indirectly relating to SO. This is your blog and you can do whatever you want with it. I just don’t enjoy reading it nearly as much as I did 2 or 3 years ago.

Is it just me or is Stackoverflow the best candidate for an open source project ever? If you want to trust your fellow programmers and let them show how great they are let them help you code it (and give them rep for it).

I can see you guys absolutely deserve to make some cash so opening up everything wouldn’t make sense (to you). But if you could write up a spec for a new feature and turn that into a SO question with a hefty bounty that allows these users to really show how helpful they can be.

And in an effort to push you guys more toward open sourcing the whole thing - do you make money from your code or from the community you’ve created?

Could you make it free for students seeking employment? Something like a giant flag --STUDENT-- so non-students wouldn’t use it because it would look that they are cheap bastards?

Keep ignoring the general unhappiness, Jeff.

I am shocked, SHOCKED I SAY, that someone who runs the domain stackoverthrow.com would be disappointed with our latest offering. :slight_smile:

My first reaction was that “free would be better” for all the obvious reasons, but I realize that putting a tiny hurdle up would probably improve the quality of the pool (at the expense of quantity), both in the sense of programmer skill, and the accuracy of information in profiles.