Joel just announced the launch of Stack Overflow Careers. Like most things Joel, this seems to be built around his idea of how the world should be, which is actually pretty cool, since in his world we’d all be treated like super stars. I do however take issue with one of his statements:
Instead of submitting a resume, you’ll fill out a CV, which links back to your Stack Overflow account, so that you can demonstrate your reputation in the community and show us all how smart you really are. To a hiring manager, the fact that you took the time to help a fellow programmer with a detailed answer in some obscure corner of programming knowledge, and demonstrated mastery, is a lot more relevant than the Latin Club you joined in school.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I actually disagree. I don’t think having an uber Stack Overflow reputation means that you’re a great catch for a potential employer. In fact, I think it may mean the opposite. Along the same lines, I don’t think not having 50 bajillion points on Stack Overflow means you are not knowledgable and skilled.
Why do I say these things? Well, the day consists of 24 hours. Let’s assume you sleep for 8 of those (I know that’s probably on the high side for most of us). Let’s assume preparing for and commuting to/from work eats up another 2 hours a day on average. We’re down to 14 hours. Let’s assume we don’t work for all of that, let’s say we spend 4 hours doing things outside of work. That leaves 10 hours a day. Let’s say I don’t work much overtime, so my employer gets 9 of those hours. That leaves me with one hour a day. Exactly when am I going to fit in time to read and answer 50,000 questions on Stack Overflow to rack up some serious reputation? I don’t think people are doing it in the “free time” on Saturday and Sunday. Are they doing so on the clock for their employers? I bet most of them are. While I agree that participating in Stack Overflow can be a good thing, I see people that spend entirely too much time on there. If I was their employer, I’d be cutting their pay.
If I’m an employer, I’m paying people to add value to the business, not to chit-chat with their peers. If I see a resume that lists a ridiculously high Stack Overflow reputation, I’m throwing that resume in the trash, because I’m pretty sure that person is going to spend more time on Stack Overflow than on doing real work.
Let’s look at someone else (me). I don’t spend much time on Stack Overflow at all. I lurk on quite a few mailing lists and forums, I follow several good blogs, and I read any spare chance I get, but I don’t participate much. If I can’t find an answer to a problem through other channels (such as newsgroups, forums, and mailing lists), I might post a question or discussion, but that’s about it. I don’t spend a lot of time participating because I’m too busy doing real work. Simply put, while I’d love to participate, I don’t have time. I’m too busy adding value to our products.
The same goes for Twitter and blogs. I actually know of several cases where someone was hired partly because they had a lot of followers either on their blog or on their Twitter account. If I see someone that’s hyper-active on either Twitter or their blog, I’m going to have the exact opposite reaction.
Thoughts? Am I being totally selfish to use Stack Overflow (and other sites) in a mostly read-only manner? How exactly am I a worse dev because I don’t spend time on Stack Overflow grinding out reputation points?
I mostly agree. I don’t know that I’d count it *against* someone as harshly as you would, but it’d really depend. If I saw someone who twittered now and again, and blogged every few days, that’s not a problem. But if there’s a crazy excess, then it might be a warning flag.
The main thing this gets down to, as you stated, is:
Will this person make money for the business?
How much they blog, how much they twitter, how much they use stack overflow, how "popular" they are, all of those are 100% INVALID metrics to determine a person’s ability to increase revenue. Now, those observations may give some insight into various aspects of a person that are important to the position – their ability to adapt to new technology, to work through problems to produce solutions, to see how they work with their peers, to show their level of expertise. Those are all great traits for a developer to possess to be successful, but some employees may have all of those attributes, but still not be able to produce functional components of a system that fall within a given set of guidelines.
It’s honestly very difficult to get a 100% accurate gauge on someone. The best you can do is observe and make notes about those factors. Talk with them to discuss real, actual scenarios, and see what their reaction is. Call up their old boss – did the employee actually get product out the door? Or were they constantly shifting gears every week on whatever the newest buzz word in the community was? Those things, with a technical interview relative to how in-depth the work would be, all should be taken as a whole to determine if the employee can produce revenue for you.
Unless all your company does is produce tech demos that don’t actually work, and noone ever uses. Then your super blogger is probably a great fit!
Let me clarify, I’m not saying I’d hold occasional blogging, tweeting, stack overflow(ing?), or whatever against a developer. I’d probably count it in their favor as long as they weren’t using those tools excessively. However, if they’re writing novels on their blog multiple times a day, responding to hundreds of SO questions each week, or tweeting stupid stuff every 5 minutes, oh yeah, I’m absolutely going to hold that against them.
I’m going to play <devilsAdvocate> for the moment. 😛
I’m not sure that interpreting Joel’s statement about “having a link to your stack overflow account demonstrating community reputation” is tightly correlated with having a huge number of points. Reputation points are displayed prominently on that page, yes, but so are the questions and answers you’ve been involved with. If during an interview you can see that a job candidate has had a thoughtful question in a particular topic that they claim to have experience in, then great, that candidate has just demonstrated problem-solving resourcefulness. If they’ve answered a question in the topic, then even better – “the best way to learn is to teach”. The number of reputation points is almost irrelevant, except perhaps to quickly find the “best” examples of their involvement.
During the interview process, it’s fairly straightforward to discover an interviewee who has not represented themselves honestly on their resume. Going through their qualifications and starting conversations about each of their experiences, trying to detect inaccuracies in their answers, the depth of their on-the-spot knowledge – it take a bit of time but eventually any BS will float to the top. What are more difficult to uncover are their more abstract characteristics – dedication towards their work, creativity in solutions/problem solving, a passion for their field, self improvement tendencies, adaptability, etc. When an interviewee has some sort of community involvement – whether it’s blogging, publications, user groups, SO (or experts-exchange) use, conference attendance, presentations – it’s an indication that there might be gears turning in their head and that they might be a worthwhile asset to building your business.
Back to the SO points – the #1 reputation-points-user today is Jon Skeet (http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/tony-the-pony ). He’s employed as a software engineer for Google – as I doubt Google is in the habit of keeping employees that don’t continue to bring home the bacon, he must be able to manage his time in such a way as to both do productive work and be a hugely active community member. He describes how he breaks up his day here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/555/why-does-jon-skeet-never-sleep . Somewhere in that time, he was also able to write a manning published book on C#. Throwing him out as a potential candidate based solely on his involvement in SO would be a bit tragic.
</devilsAdvocate>
I completely agree that productivity-limiting behaviors for potential employees would be very worthwhile knowledge to have during an interview (or before!). Sadly, I don’t think this can be measured with any accuracy until they’ve been on the job for a number of months.
@James,
I see "some SO presence" listed during work. I wonder how many hours a day that translates into in reality, or if Jon has ever actually kept track of it. From what I’ve read of Google culture, they are very laid back, so an abuse of SO might go unnoticed there. I’m not saying that’s the case as I have no evidence, but I would still be very wary of hiring anyone who had a SO reputation that was anywhere near Jon’s.