
Stack stats - billpg
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/12/13.html
======
snewe
Here is another possible explanation for the correlation between reputation
and CV upload:

Higher reputation --> more time on the web to answer questions --> likely
unemployed --> more desire to upload CV.

~~~
spolsky
That's a nice theory... I don't have any way to test it, but I've seen a LOT
of StackOverflow CVs and have NEVER seen someone who was unemployed.

More likely that they're UNDERemployed, bored at a dead-end, stupid job, so
they have time to answer questions.

That said, the typical high achiever on Stack Overflow is also a high achiever
at work. I know for a fact that Jon Skeet's employer loves him despite the
fact that he has the highest reputation on the site.

~~~
nuggien
So one guy == typical?

~~~
spolsky
Look at <http://stackoverflow.com/users>, those are all famous Netizens, you
should be able to figure out if they're high achievers or just basement
StackOverflow nerds

~~~
julio_the_squid
I recognize Jon Skeet, Quassnoi, Alex Martelli and cletus... but I know them
all from Stack Overflow. I wouldn't say all of those people are famous
anywhere in particular other than there?

~~~
mark_h
Alex Martelli I recognise; he's a python guru (behind the Python Cookbook,
among other things) now working at google. There's a couple of excellent tech-
talks on (mostly) advanced python by him that are well worth watching if you
use python at all.

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sriramk
I'm actually impressed that they get away with running a site with so much
traffic on such minimal hardware. Almost an argument against the
cloud/NoSQL/scale-out trends :)

~~~
spolsky
Everybody wants to believe their site is going to be The Next Twitter, and as
good engineers, they believe that they should build it super-duper-scalable
from the beginning so they don't have to re-architect it if it really does
take off.

Pragmatically, 99.99% of startups don't become Twitter and will manage fine
with one DB server and one web server, especially if you use a compiled
language and a commercial-grade database and nice hardware. And even if you
become Twitter, well, they had terrible scaling problems, and it doesn't seem
to have hurt them one bit.

~~~
aditya
Are you guys still in BizSpark, btw?

~~~
scorpion032
I heard in a Podcast that they are; and it is valid for a duration of 3 years.

So, they still would be.

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netcan
Are there any examples of domain specific jobs sites that have been very
successful?

~~~
sp332
Craiglist's old "Erotic Services" page :)

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jrockway
You have to pay $30 to upload your CV?! Why would anyone ever pay to get a
job?

~~~
spolsky
You're not paying to get a job, you're paying to have your CV seen by
employers, which is a heck of a lot less :-)

Having a small barrier to listing a CV ensures that most CVs in the system
represent people who are genuinely interested in finding a job and actually
have the confidence that they are moderately qualified.

If you've ever been on the employer side, and looked at the resumes you get
when you put an open job listing on a high traffic site like monster.com, you
get enormous piles of junk, people that are completely unqualified. Our theory
is that having 5 qualified candidates is better than having, say, 10 qualified
candidates in a pile of 300, both for the employer AND for the employee who
would rather be in the smaller pile.

In any case, $29 is a tiny amount. You'll spend a lot more than that on the
haircut you get the day before your interview.

~~~
johns
I spent $14 for a haircut a few days before my last interview a few weeks ago.
It didn't help. I should have spent that money playing craps ;)

------
clistctrl
I don't plan on ever submitting my resume to stack overflow careers. I'm
pretty confident in the content, but i feel my lack of participating on the
site (no reputation) will work against me, thus making the site useless.

of course I haven't looked for a new job since the economy tanked, for all I
know dice may not work any more :)

~~~
spolsky
It depends on where you are and who you're competing against. In smaller
markets, or if you have unique skills, employers searching will be finding a
small number of employees, and won't care about Stack Overflow participation.
So for example if you know lisp and want a job in Austin, you're competing
against exactly one person, who only has 424 reputation, so you're pretty
likely to get a call anyway even without StackOverflow reputation.

If you are competing against more people, say, if you're looking for a Java
job in the Bay Area, it may work against you, but I doubt if it will make the
site useless. In my own recruiting using Stack Overflow careers I found plenty
of good people who didn't even use Stack Overflow and I still contacted them
because their CVs were great.

~~~
spolsky
PS when I search StackOverflow I look for lisp, OCaml, ML, Smalltalk, etc.,
not because we need them, but because we like to hire people who know them.

~~~
adsyoung
Joel, on a slight tangent...we've been seeing all sorts of Jeff and Joel
bashing posts lately, which personally I don't get why people get so worked
up.

If I had to take a guess though, it would be that as you guys get more and
more successful there's a fear that you will succeed in creating the number
one method in the world for getting a programming job and it will end up
discriminating against people who don't answer questions on StackOverflow or
fit your model of a programmer.

That somehow you guys end up being the gatekeepers for defining what a good
programmer is and how they get hired.

I was wondering what your thoughts are on this?

~~~
spolsky
That's crazy fantasy extrapolation, almost too absurd to address, but I will
anyway since you asked :)

There are 1492 CVs on StackOverflow right now, and maybe 9,000,000 programmers
in the world. Even if we're monumentally successful we're still going to be
only a tiny fraction of the hiring of programmers that goes on in the world...
a TINY fraction.

I should also add that in the bizarre scenario that StackOverflow actually
became a common way of getting programming jobs, it would be a metric ton
better than the current system of Monster and Dice and emailing around Word
resumes which are scanned in by stupid software that looks at keywords.

~~~
mquander
I think this post is on the money. You have to bear in mind that right now the
"gatekeepers" you're referring to are mostly completely non-technical HR
people who might as well be using an Ouija board for all their proclivity
finding good programmers. One can argue the merits and demerits of judging
someone based on their Stack Overflow participation, but it can't be worse
than the current reality.

