I’ve been curiously watching LinkedIn try to transform itself into an awkward Q&A-style forum. Subscribing to the Senior .NET Developers group recently, I was a bit surprised to see the type of tactical and specific implementation questions being posted.
This is a terrible pairing of technology, IMO. Sure, LinkedIn is great at building and exposing the professional web, but their Q&A offering is almost an after-thought with a feature set that’s at least 5 years dated.
Even worse, none of this dialogue is publically searchable!
We’ve written about the value of StackOverflow reputation rankings as an emerging compliment to traditional resumes and awards. Yes, the current scoring system leaves much to be desired: users are more incentivized to create ‘popular’ content that drives participation than accurate, factual content that doesn’t.
The score itself is less telling than a closer examination of an individual’s responses. Nonetheless, it is best-of-breed and it’s no surprise that they announced a new career site today specifically intended to link hands-on Q&A activity with public CVs.
What is careers.stackoverflow.com? It's a few things:
- a completely free, public CV hosting service for programmers, to share the cool stuff you've coded and created with the world.
- a way to explicitly link your Stack Overflow profile with your CV, to provide concrete examples of your communication skills and individual expertise to anyone who is interested.
- a better way to connect great programmers with the best programming jobs, for those who opt into the small annual listing fee.
Prior to the announcement, bloggers were already starting to sport “My answers @StackOverflow” feeds alongside their content, courtesy of the user-specific RSS feed exposed by StackOverflow and tools like Yahoo Pipes – the new careers site formalizes this intention in a much cleaner way.
Joel had a great post this week on finding out what your company is all about and the theme of helping your users become awesome that really resonated with me – they’re certainly living this out loud with this launch:
If you love to code, too, I encourage you to create your own Stack Overflow CV. Keep it private, or make it public via the URL of your choice -- it's completely free either way. If you think you might be actively looking for a job in the next 3 years, take advantage of our outrageously low promotional pricing of $29 for a 3 year filing. That way, at any point in those 3 years, you can flip a switch and become visible to hiring managers. Or not. It's totally up to you.
It’s refreshing to watch these guys in action and I can’t wait to see how it evolves!
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