Stack Overflow Careers: Amplifying Your Awesome

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@Chris McCall, you sound so broken. Not everybody else is waiting to die. Wah wah wah. Jeff Atwood gets called out on some of this stuff and it hurts your feelings because you are in Dilbert land waiting to die. Big deal. Even Jeff Atwood criticize people for doing the same tactics he is being crticized for here.

Anyway, I don’t really care. My thing is more about how cynical it is Jeff and Joel to have this service when one of them has continuously espoused this idea that if you need to apply for a job then you are a loser that can’t program anyway.

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@Keith, he’s using CV because he thinks resume has a bad connotation … but in Europe CV has the same connotation.

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Your article came across a little unclear. Is it really free?
->In your comment you explain it straightforward. Hosting a CV on SO is free.

So there is no need to rant about you or SO. You appreciate the users participation and give them this new possibility. Fine for the people giving advice and answering questions.

Best would have been you didn’t mention money… interrested people would notice it early enough…

Very few people around Europe would ever pay for such a service I think.

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Jeff,

So why can’t you have a flag on someone’s profile that says - ‘hey I’m interested in work’. You only see this option when you get enough points from the questions you have answered. An automated service could send out an email each month to see if the user is still interested in finding a job. You are going to need to do this anyway.

Surely this type of arrangement would work better as a qualifier than charging a fee for what many job sites now offer for free.

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There already is a series of checkboxes when you set up your resume that state what you are interested in. Honestly, in my opinion that’s enough of a signal that you’re open to a new job, because if you weren’t there’s no rational reason to check that box off and have recruiters calling you constantly.

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“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?”

That is a little silly - a program could cull the email addresses and send simple emails in, oh, about .05 seconds. Then all you have to do is find the responses that say ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’.

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@mgb: If you expanded CV the old fashioned way, you’d still need the Unicode to write the last letter/thingamajig of Curriculum Vitæ. :stuck_out_tongue:

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@Charles
No he’s using CV because if he used résumé he would need to have Joel explain about unicode to put the accent on the 'e’s.

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I respect your work and added blog to favorites

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The is great timing after having been made redundant at the start of the week.

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A little perspective:

Guys, think a bit on a broader scale. It would be an ideal situation to get companies to hire you based on your opensource code. Ohloh, sf.net are doing this.
But, it’s restricted to a section of the industry - that which trusts open source. I’m a foot soldier in the trenches, and I can tell you with a few years of experience, to mangers (majority are PHBs), open source sounds like stripping oneself in public without apparent monetary gain.
They’d strip and more if you paid them a million, but opensource doesn’t pay upfront, you just get the code, right?
PHBs are more than beancounters. And they have the green paper, not you.
So what about that part of industry that does not trust opensource?
Has a guy with an internet connection a godo chance in a closed-only business? Slim chance.
So what’s the alternative?
Go through the job jump routine and demand more money with every passing interview.
There’s another way to do it. Promote online via LinkedIn type sites.

And there’s another way now.
Look at my “awesome” on SO. I’ve been called a superstar / star / competent / wise / etc by programmers all over the world. And I rub shoulders with some REALLY big names daily.
See my points, see my code.
Screw the PHB and the HR.

SO says this to your prospective employer:

“Get your current Team Lead to see for yourself whether or not I am good for your job.”

What’s better over LinkedIn?

A few things:

  1. Much more ease of viewing - LinkedIn needs registration, SO does not. A huge barrier to entry is removed.

  2. You don’t have to rely on your LinkedIn contacts and “stay loyal” to them to get good leads. You don’t have to lick boots.

  3. More importantly, you don’t get the sole power to make or break another person’s next career step.

In short, SO, being open and free to view, and technical in nature, prevents people from controlling each others leads and links.
That’s a GOOD THING ™.

If you can’t understand what that meant, it’s ok. You will, once you find someone asking for favors in return for referrals, and you haveto polite with them all the time.
Remember the profs at University whom you had to humor to get the best letters? That’s bootlicking and you don’t do that here.

You write code, you give solutions, you get points and everyone knows you are cool and anyone can ask their local techie to check up on your fitness for a job.

Your “lead” sources go from website+LinkedIn to website+global
True, someone in Belarus is not going to be hired by smoeone in Nigeria. So there’s a lot of limits in the real world. So, not really global.

But think of 5 years down the line and 1Mbps wi-fi all over the world. Then you may not even commute, but just telecommute.

THEN, SO and “global” mean something much more.
Joel and Jeff aren’t just “me too” nuts. Joel runs a company that gives a telecommute solution for years. Do things add up now?

So there’s vision in this thing, not just marketing.
And remember, servers and bandwidth ain’t free. And if you’re getting a dream job at home, and you don’t have to spend $NN on gasoline or $N on railway, you can share that $29 with the guys who gave you a place to get that job.

Don’t complain when someone tries something new and different.

I just don’t see how I could call either Joel or Jeff a jackass or a weasel for seeing that far into the future.

I’m not a fanboi (I have a score or two to settle with them personally) but you can’t deny the value of the direction this thing is headed.

I’m all for a nice experiment of this scale.
Hateballs have neither peace and happiness nor success nor the ability to enjoy whatever success they already have. Hateball-ism is an EPIC FAIL.

Seriously current HR sucks. Let’s see if SO can fix this.

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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?

This makes no sense whatsoever. The subscription lasts 3 years, so after a few months we have three scenarios, from the most likely to the most unlikely:

  1. The user has found a job and didn’t cancel or update his or her CV
  2. The user didn’t find a job, in this case he or she is most likely not good and not someone some company would like to hire
  3. The user got a job and updated his or her CV to reflect that (extremely unlikely)

By the way, a little usability tip. If you press TAB in the “Your comment” textarea you jump to post instead of the captcha thingy, you should update the captcha’s tabindex.

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this is gonna be good!

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I’m not concerned with the idea of a guy making a buck, I think everyone wants to make it rich–Free country and all. But I do think this idea has some major flaws.

  1. You have to admit, whether it was your intention or not, that it does appear from this angle that Stack Overflow was a bait-and-switch idea. “We’ll first provide a large resource, suck people in, then find ways to make money off of it.” Whether you like it or not, you’ve just burned your brand loyalty and trust. You should’ve just started another site under a different name and then tie it into SO somehow.

It seems that many initial “free” sites go the way of making some money and it disenfranchises its users. Motley Fool, Lumberjocks, etc. are ones where I’ve left because the marketing ploys and advertising were too distracting. Another words, you can make money if you want to but consider the actual costs.

  1. I’m not really a big fan of Stack Overflow in general for a few reasons, but the major reason is the point system. Because of the point system, you get people answering questions just to answer questions–for the points. These answers are usually useless answers. They never really read the full question, and/or they answer part of the question but not the meat of it. I can only imagine what will happen if someone is trying to get a job. It will bring people in for a short time who’s goal is 1,000 points then never see them again. That’s not a strong community.

  2. The premise that a company is going to look for someone who has good answers and that they’re going to view this individual’s code is just plain naive. Head-hunters and HR people could care less about reading through an online resource–they care more about filtering resumes even before it gets to the technical side.

  3. In addition to number 3, these online resources already exist and we’re over saturated with them already. Monster, Dice, YourcityHelpwanted.com, etc, etc. Why do recruiters need yet another site to search for resumes or post jobs? I am finding that many companies in my area are just listing jobs on their website and not posting them anywhere at all.

Good luck with this, it will be interesting to see where it goes.

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Hi

Great information and you have review all the factors.

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I learned the collective power of my fellow programmers long ago writing on Coding Horror. The community is far, far smarter than I will ever be. All I can ask – all any of us can ask – is to help each other along the path. , very nice post.thanks.

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i dont know why he doesnt start a programmers agency where he provides employees on a trial basis, takes a cut of their salary (a nice big cut as agencies do) that way the employer gets to see what the employee can do how badly they want the job generally (as agencies do) on a 3 month trial/temporary basis.
so pros… employer gets to see what employee can do employee gets to see if he likes the job and prove his worth and has no initial outlay, stack overflow will make even more money and the cynics will have even more to winge about…everyones happy!!!
cons… everyones happy well except me you can paypal my cut (for providing the idea;-)) to craig_leeming@hotmail.com thanks

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Sure, by all means, as long as it’s legal, they can sell whatever they want to, it’s there prerogative. If they can turn a profit it, hey, more power to them. (Our economy needs way more of this!)

No, the problem I have is this move seems to fly in the face of everything Coding Horror and Stack Overflow have purported to be about. If I recall correctly, one of the original intents behind project Stack Overflow was to be a legit free alternative to Experts-Exchange. As far as I’m concerned, it’s well on its way to being that; at least it seemed. Jeff, I think you’ve now placed a fork in that road.

As I see it, the success of Stack Overflow lies in the price/value relation or more specifically, the priceless value of experts volunteering their expertise. As you mentioned, these experts participate in the pay-forward 5 and 10 minute parcels because they’re volunteering; often time it’s a one-up showmanship, but it all contributes to the betterment of the community. Once the quantifiable dollar figure is assigned to these contributions, the whole system breaks down. This, in turn, leads to reaction from the creators with attempts to salvage the sinking ship; and this ultimately leads to a steady shot down a new path. The betterment model is working, why do you want to change it? Examples of success and failure of this change abound in the medical and legal communities: volunteer works, quantifiable price/ranked value will not (with the new model).

I believe I understand the underlying goal (good intentions), which I believe to provide benefit or ROI to the wonderful contributors. This new addition to the lineup just feels like an exploit of all that we’ve done to date. The intent is to provide definitive supporting evidence of successful performance to those with a desire to display such performance. The bug-a-boo is that this behavior is happening in a long-standing universe predicated on an absence of such behavior. Which, is why I believe we’re reached a fork in the road.

The way I see it, it’s up to the individual contributor to carry the responsibility of documenting success in this unbiased universe. The HR department will nearly always not have a clue with respect to the specifics, nor should they, but point them in the right direction with the right road map and they’ll hear the intended message. It’s just one more example of the long standing advice: know your audience; it’s YOUR responsibility to convey YOUR message in away so that the audience will hear that message as YOU intended.

In my opinion, the better tool for accomplishing your goal would be to offer a packaging service to those of who regularly post. A packaging service where each thread involving the user is indexed or combined in such a way as to be a reference for the contributor; another tool in the contributor’s resume toolbox.

One last thing, I agree with those above, there has been a definite change in the quality of your recent posts. If this trend continues, my visits will be less frequent. Your topics are becoming less interesting and the depth of analysis has shallowed. Please return to the right path.

Respectfully submitted, —JET_Fusion

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Just an aside: this profile icon on Stack Overflow Carrers, at right sidebar, is just inappropriate and very, very awkward (not ugly, but very strange at this context).