/Agree with cheapskates above who won’t pay $30 to put their resume on your site. Come on, that’s just dumb. Charge the employers. I would not, under any circumstances, pay to put my resume on the internet!
And that means that you’ll be offering a less valuable service to employers - they’ll only get to see the resumes of people that are desperate enough to pay $30 to post.
But by all means, good luck - maybe you know better than us, because Stack Overflow is definitely an awesome site.
Well, I don’t see the problem.
It’s not like SO is turning us into digital sharecroppers or anything like that. I wish I could remember where I first heard that term…
@johnnylambada
"…And the $29 or $99 price keeps out the riffraff who plug the dice.coms of the world and reduce job searching to an acronym matching game."
One could argue that a StackOverflow reputation that is over/above some value would also keep the “riffraff” out.
The site’s content is community driven. Seems that if company X wants to plunk down some coin to have access to the CVs of the community members who want to list theirs, that’s reasonable and appropriate.
But charging the community is different, I think. My reputation (or lack thereof) on the site already weeds out the folks who aren’t part of the community, or who haven’t contributed to its success.
I’m thrilled that Jeff & Company have developed the site infrastructure and I think it is a good one, but the content is the community’s content and the community does a darn good job of managing the spammers and other miscreants. Seems reasonable and appropriate NOT to charge the community members.
I believe that SO reputation will weed out the folks that other sites don’t.
In the end, it would provide a reciprocity:
Companies pay to access the info.
Developers get new job opportunities.
Jeff & Co. make some $$ from the hiring-company fees to access the data.
Developers think better of the site and stick around and contribute more and get the perk of have a place to post their CV that really matters.
And the world is a happy place for all.
(Cue the Peer Gynt music here)
I think some of the commenters really don’t get it at all and just want rant at Jeff:
The whole idea of a blog is to advertise yourself. Since Jeff’s day job involves SO and this new thing, isn’t it only natural to post about that?
If you do not like this blog, no need for threats, just leave. Personally, I disagree with the content often, but still stay because I like a professional discussion.
Concerning SO: Jeff and his team created it, invested in it and put in all the work. Not you. The majority is just leeching of the answers. Another part of the audience makes the actual contributions, but mostly only in their self interest (reputation), nothing wrong with that. All social sites work like that.
Web pioneers like Jeff deserve business income from coming up with a good idea, executing it very well and having all the risks. I’m getting really fed up with assholes demanding everything is free whilst running AdBlock plus and contributing nothing. The sites you visit need a way to exist, you know?
If you do not agree with the price of this new service, mention it by all means with valid reasons or simply do not purchase it. You are entitled to nothing, but also not obliged to nothing.
I was at the Los Angeles Dev Day, and one of the presenters mentioned that he had a couple id’s on Stack Overflow - one for answering questions and one for asking. Is there a write-up on how we’re supposed to game the system? Or is it simply that whoever is most clever and unscrupulous wins?
– T
But, didn’t Joel (see the “High Notes” article) already teach us that if you need to look for a job, you’re a loser that can’t program anyway?
@Ferdy -
"- Concerning SO: Jeff and his team created it, invested in it and put in all the work. Not you. The majority is just leeching of the answers. Another part of the audience makes the actual contributions, but mostly only in their self interest (reputation), nothing wrong with that. All social sites work like that."
Sorry, but Jeff himself spilled a good amount of ascii and graphics in this post and some others telling us that SO is about US, not them.
He can’t have it both ways. If he wants to build a site to make money, that’s fine. But spare us the whole, “this is all about YOU and community and flowers and puppy-dogs” BS.
Great service Jeff, as a professional freelance software consultant I immediately signed up. I can’t believe how many people here who read an entrepreneur blog and then is horrified that the entrepreneur have a service that actually cost money to use, and use his blog to promote this service. COME ONE, I would like to believe that you are not all unemployed kids living with your mom, but you sure aren’t acting any other way.
Keep the good stuff coming Jeff, people who are true professionals will have no objection paying for this service.
The programmers who choose to participate in Stack Overflow are the “secret sauce” that makes it work.
And like at McDonald’s, the secret sauce does not get paid for all the hard work it put into making the business possible. It just gets eaten. 
$99/year? A kind of too expensive. Is free of charge option ever considered?
I really don’t think you needed to advertise in your blog post. Put it on your sidebar or something.
Get back to the REAL content.
I’m just wondering what kind of employer market Jeff is anticipating on the “hiring manager” side. I’d assume this has been discussed internally.
I’m assuming that lots of software companies utilize these job seeker websites (the pay ones) to look for candidates but my experience with this is limited. We’ve utilized them in-house before and the results are a mixed bag, as might be expected.
Wife and I discussed it last night (she’s not a dev) and she definitely thought $29/3 years was pretty cheap but the $99/year thereafter seemed high. I think I agree with her.
Today’s captcha: “flushes $3,337,340” 
An employer really could not ask for a better way of determining candidate skill and knowledge.
Indeed, as long as you’re willing to cold-call 1,000 people to find the 5 that are actually looking for work. How much is your time worth? How much is your company’s time worth?
I understand that the entry fee is a solution to the problem of wanting to “qualify” the candidates some way.
But, as the developers of the site, that is Joel and Jeff’s problem, not mine. The entry fee is one possible solution, that essentially outsources that problem to the suckers “community.”
Which is a valid choice for them to make, but we don’t have to be happy about it, either.
Jeff,
why not expand into other lucrative markets liek photo hosting, contact management or even Jeff-branded cell phone?
“JeffTheAndroid” phone?
Why the heck not? it’s open source. You can rule the Universe before summer rolls in here in North America.
The problem I see with using money as a way of “qualifying” people doesn’t seem like it would be very effective, especially when StackOverflow is probably in a better position than anyone to provide a way of qualifying people.
Requring a payment to qualify that you REALLY REALLY want to get a job fails for the following reasons:
The quality of a developer is completely orthogonal to how much they want a job. I’m tempted to even go as far as to say that there’s a negative corrolation between desire to get a job and how good a developer you are - those people who are truly great developers can find a job without paying $99 / year to find one.
Simply making your resume searchable by employers online carries enough risk with it that it’s probably sufficient to gauge “desire”. Anyone who makes their resume public and searchable runs the risk of communicating to their current employer that they’re looking, or at the very least open to the possibility of changing jobs. It doesn’t tell you who’s absolutely desperate for a job, sure, but I don’t see why employers should care about desperation so long as the candidates listed are open to new opportunities.
On top of that, the truly baffling thing is that StackOverflow is practically designed to be capable of gauging developer quality and commitment to the community - there’s a little number and some shiny gold, silver and bronze things next to someone’s name, along with a searchable history of that developer demonstrating their expertise in the technologies they claim to be skilled in. An employer really could not ask for a better way of determining candidate skill and knowledge.
So the “weeding out the bad candidates” spiel just really doesn’t pass the smell test for me, Jeff, unless both you and Joel are dim-witted enough to not see that you are uniquely positioned to provide employers with a way of determing which candidates are worth pursuing. And I really don’t think you’re both that dim-witted.
Just be honest with the community and say you’re charging money because there’s money to be made in charging candidates for making their resumes searchable. I’m sure a lot of us will disagree that you’ll ever make much going down this route, but at least you’re being honest.
So Jeff you try somehow to build a notion (for the employers who pay A WHOLE PILE OF CASH to have a glimpse on this db) of hosting the most qualified devs on this career site.
What is exactly your USP for the employers as well as for the employees? I don’t get it:
Why will employers believe that people who hang around SO are better qualified than anybody else? Even for the people that answer a lot of question (most do ask a lot more, I guess) why is this any better than some proven references, open source projects, work history, certifications? Do you honestly think a potential employer will sift through all those discussions to find out if someone is qualified or not?
I get the notion that you want to communicate: here you have the proove that somebody is bright. This works typically if someone has some public and trackable exposure like long term commiter of a oss project, speaches at conferences, published books, etc. You now want to translate this to answering asking/questions? No offense for the quality answers on SO, but I guess this need a bit of refining.
we as developers should pay 29/99$ for this service. I am not critisising the amount that’s fine. I pay more for a Linkedin Premium, but: What do I get from it? When I pay for a service I must have some extras / exclusivity that I do not get with other recruiters headhunters, jobsites. Do you have that? What is your USP here?
you can link your SO profile/reputation badge right now if you like.
for online CV’s on LinkedIn or Xing I am already connected hundreds of contacts and have a full fledged complete online CV with graspable quality indicators like recommendations, certs etc. and both are free.
For your response just above: Is any company that has open positions calling 1000 people right now because nowbody is applying? I thought we have recession, apparently not where you live.
Apart from that and as mentioned multiple times: devs usually smell the marketing talk and do not like it, especially this feels very strange since you just recently posted against such talks. Not consistent, doesnt feel right and contraproductive.
I know you must take a lot already, take it easy.
Who cares if you get called a “sellout”? Computer programming is a profession, not a mission to throw a magic ring into a volcano. I’m sitting here in a cubicle doing boring-ass crap for a faceless corporate entity pretty much waiting to die, same as everyone else griping and moaning about you making money.
Good for you, dude, sell every 1 and 0 of what you’ve made for as much as you can get for each. Your family deserves the opportunities provided by wealth a lot more than we deserve free services provided by you.
You want to talk about betrayal? What ever happened to that world-famous “artist” why_the_lucky_stiff, who never charged a dime for his work but disappeared, leaving thousands of people, many of them children, swinging in the breeze.
I don’t particularly want to tie my contributions on stackoverflow, because they make me look bad. I have more questions than answers, a few accepted answers, and a few answers that are perfectly fine but were far too late to get any rep. Considering that there’s about one company in my country that’s even advertising on the jobs board, and no-one’s going to pay to ship me out to America, it’s not worth any amount of money.
I’m sure this system is great for the Jon Skeets of this world, but for those of us who are not superstars, but not morons either, there’s precious little value.
I would consider it if there were any jobs listed in my area. Unfortunately it seems that there are no jobs on Stackoverflow jobs (or jobs.joelonsoftware.com for that matter) in my state, let alone my metropolitan area.