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programming recruiting

1,001

Most “gamification” achievements I couldn’t care less about (and this is the Dirty Secret of gamification – most consumers don’t care), … but this is one of the few that I do:

(and I post this in the full knowledge that it’s possible to game (i.e. cheat) your way to well over 2k rep on StackOverflow … but I’m chuffed anyway)

Unlike my experiences of the SO clones, SO is *still* a very high signal-to-noise ratio, in my experience. And so I still care about it – and value the SO score on other peopl’s profiles

(yeah, not-so-subtle hint: your SO score is now a standard part of any employer’s background checks, if they’re smart. Can make the difference between getting an interview or not, let alone getting the job)

4 replies on “1,001”

One of the great things about SO is that occasionally, a proper heavyweight will weigh in and teach you something. I’ve been (politely) corrected by Eric Lippert quite a few times and it’s always nice to learn something from the folk who write the C# compiler and the tools you use every day.

The downside is that SO sometimes fosters an attitude of ‘fastest on the draw’, and ‘highest rep wins’. I’ve seen numerous cases where someone is asking a crazy question or using the wrong tool for the job but you can’t steer them onto the correct path as someone will immediately give them exactly the answer they want. I’ve also witnessed quite a few high rep users giving answers that are inferior to those provided by low rep users, but being voted up higher anyway. It’s not the fault of the high rep folk, just the way it works — reputation begets reputation.

It looks like they’re slowly making inroads into the same market as LinkedIn, too. As a software engineer, SO careers has a lot more that interests me, particularly in the way it allows me to detail my skills / likes / dislikes etc. Folk can immediately see my answers and how high up I am in my chosen areas.

It’s hardly perfect, but compared to the incestuous circle-jerk of LinkedIn recommendations (person A I wouldn’t work with recommending person B I also wouldn’t want to work with), it’s a much more valuable resource.

Linkedin is just a stramash of random ads & recruiter spam these days. If SO careers gets a bigger audience, I think it’ll beat it in every way.

Also I didn’t mean to sound like only heavyweights can teach — I just meant that folk who wrote the book on a lot of stuff hang around there and help out :)

I get plenty of help there from plebs who are just like me.

Yep, LinkedIn is crashing and burning right now for most of the business use I’ve used it for over the past 5 years. But their IPO seems to have done well, so I guess they’ve found a strong market somewhere?

It still seems to be doing fine (and I think we’ve recently had a few decent candidates via LinkedIn), but my experience of LinkedIn as an individual is that I constantly get random people trying to add me (“I’ve done business with you at “) because they’re too cheap to pay for a premium account and contact me that way.

I think it’s still doing well enough mainly because everyone seems to be on LinkedIn (for whatever reason). I still have no idea why I signed up in the first place, but I’m there, too. I’d imagine it’s the same for most people.

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