The score itself doesn't prove anything, but its inclusion on the CV is meant to encourage employers to view the account and see what sort of questions and answers the candidate is posting on the site. It won't let you compare apples to apples, but it's not meant to. It's meant to provide another dimension to assess the candidate, in addition to their work experience, personal projects, GPA, etc. As such, it's not designed to fit in the same slot that Monster.com, Dice, etc fill - and to trying to treat it as such removes a lot of the unique benefit of the site for employers.
> encourage employers to view the account and see what sort of questions and answers the candidate is posting on the site
If a candidate feels that there is a very good, publicly available demonstration of their knowledge (be it a project they're involved in, some open-source software, or participation in a technical forum or mailing list), they already have the ability to simply point that out to me in their cover letter, or other communications.
> It's meant to provide another dimension to assess the candidate
This is precisely the problem. It creates an additional dimension, but one that exists only for a subset of candidates and isn't easy to evaluate fairly. That seems likely to create an imbalanced hiring process.
Why should I pay for that? (or implicitly ask the candidate to pay to give it to me?)
Especially the later question especially, [why should I] "ask the candidate to pay to give it to me?", hangs in the air.
Asking a candidate to effectively pay money to apply isn't "the way to their heart". It isn't necessarily legal or ethical either. Joel has described what high demand there is for the "great programmers". Is it plausible that these same great programmers are going to be paying money to be found?
I like Stackoverflow. I spent a month getting 1000+K reps and then realized I should stop and do some work.
I like the idea of integrated SO to job search. It's just that direction that this integration has been problematic, indeed it could plausibly called evil.
I don't see what fairness has to do with anything.
Uh, I wouldn't want to work for a company which showed blatant unfairness in its hiring. Similarly, most worthwhile companies don't want to show such unfairness. The companies that are unfair in hiring probably would be unfair in their treatment of employees once they get hired, etc..
