It seems the site is grinding to a halt with the traffic. I think it's a good idea. Just the other day I was thinking, what can you really do with reputation? I think this is going to push the peer-review process to new limits with more kinds of "attacks".
I think this is significant not necessarily for what it is now, but for what it can evolve into and inspire in other services. I'm excited to see what comes of this!
Ads, I'm assuming. They do have those, you know - pretty well-targeted at programmers, too, and not farmed out to Google or whatever. Although if you're running Adblock, you might not know that.
You really shouldn't be running adblock on StackOverflow. They have really good ads, things you very well might want to know about. I've already found one service I use all the time through ads on SO.
So the executive summary is the first effort didn't work and now you're trying something different? I would be curious if you've got any postmortem analysis for the last effort.
But more. I would like to offer a simple theory for why no "making search as easy as possible" site is going succeed. My explanation is that this is because job search is an adversarial process. It is, at least partially, a zero sum game. Neither player wants to remove the information-asymmetry on the part of their opponent in such a game. For example, forcing the other side to work for information about you is good because it impels the other side to be committed to you (and the other side concomitantly hates having to work for their information).
The fact that neither side is very rational either doesn't help. It's in my interest not to reveal my love of Labrador Retrievers to my potential employers because it's more likely they will reject me for this than that they will accept me for it.
Just consider - an employers wants to know everything good and bad about an employee before they make that employee an offer. A potential employee wants the opposite - they want to know all the potential jobs available, where each company is in their search and what offers said companies are willing to make before they start revealing information about themselves. Then they want the employer to know all the desirable things about them. Then they want the employer to know any negative that they'd forced to tell anyway. And they don't want to describe any potential negatives that the employer won't need to know. AND what's negative and what's a positive varies from employer to employer. What potential employees certainly shouldn't want is a "beauty contest" where they "strut their stuff" to invisible judges. But naturally, neither side can or should get everything they want here.
The adversarial situation of job search is the ultimate reason for its clunkiness. It's complex dance involving each side revealing information and making commitments. The ability of each to make commitments is important to the process as well as long as the commitment process is reasonably symmetrical (why my committing to a mere "job search" by paying money is highly disadvantageous. I only commit to specific employers after they had partially committed to me). It's a reason that job-shops exist despite seeming ignorant and irrational. It's the same reason that find "contracting agents who understands programming" to be the worst to deal with (the contracting agent isn't there to evaluate you, they're just a mediation a way for both sides to unveil their information slowly. They work good for only that).
I think adversarial/zero-sum is the wrong characterization. There are clearly misaligned interests---companies want to pay less; workers want them to pay more. However, if both sides are better off under a match than they would be otherwise (which is why the market exists), then they'll try to match so long as the search costs, frictions and losses due to bad hires (i.e., adverse selection) don't swamp the benefits.
Imagine the worst case job market, which is that anyone can hang out a shingle and say "I'm a highly skilled Python programmer." Suppose 1/2 are good, and add value +1 to their companies, and 1/2 are bad, and "add" -1 to their companies if hired. If there is absolutely no way to tell before hand who is good and who is bad, then no one is getting hired---the expected gain from hiring is zero. We have complete market failure (this is the "market of lemons" example).
Now suppose you throw in some signals---schooling, resumes, interviews etc. if firms can tell w/ probability .8 whether someone is what they say they are. People now get hired, but even the good ones take a haircut b/c firms still wrongly hire bad programmers because the signals available--while better than nothing---are not perfect. I think SO is basically raising .8 to .95 (so to speak). This is valuable to firms and to workers and I can easily imagine a world where firms pay to get to .95 (and good workers pay to be evaluated with the .95 lens).
Hmm, your model doesn't consider that some companies might not be able to benefit from any programmers what-so-ever because of their own incompetence (some companies are -1 to begin with).
Anyway, job search is certainly not entirely adversarial. But any negotiating process has to involve a sequence of honest signals from both sides. If one side can completely control the signaling process, that side can get the most benefit for the least cost (and the other side would choose a different frame if they could - and especially the most valuable players would make this choice).
Thus even though I eventually do want to reveal everything and commit fully to a potential employer, I expect the process of commitment and revealing will only happen as the employer also reveals information AND makes commitments to me. It's a dance. Things that allow the employer to merely get commitment and information from me without anything in return result in an undesirable negotiating process.
sure - it's a simple model, but I don't think the presence of ignorant firms changes the basic insight.
That being said, labor markets are very complex and there's lots of strategic maneuvering going on. Given the indeterminacy of much of game theory (i.e., it depends on how you model the scenario), I'm sure you could be right under the proper assumptions.
But to bring it back to the SO example, it's hard to imagine a scenario where giving high ability workers the ability to truthfully signal that high ability hurts. Low ability workers can be hurt i.e., either I know you're bad from your SO rep, or I start to think "hey - where's your SO profile? you must be bad." In the pre-SO system, the low ability workers were getting an unearned rent (assuming the market existed at all) at the expense of the high ability workers and firms (which is market-killing).
If you happen to have one, I think an SO account is a great thing to show potential employers. But I'd want to know that they were willing and able to read my answers to questions rather than simply look at my karma.
Having been on SO a bit over time, I know very well that SO karma doesn't directly measure programming ability. You can get high karma with lots of random or dubious answers. If someone already has programming ability, they might be able to tell from someone's SO answers whether the person's real but raw karma isn't enough.
The further problem is that Joel has been trying to jump from SO being a good answer site to making SO a job site in it's own. The first iteration was announced with fanfare and a post with argument for his approach. This version has appeared with little discussion on his part so I'm not sure what his reasoning is.
On the general subject of signaling, if an SO account ever became a strong signal of ability, you can bet there'd be SO "gold farmers" along the lines of game gold farmers today.
And while I've enjoyed SO for its own sake at times, if creating an SO account became mandatory for a job search, a lot of skilled people likely find that an annoying imposition.
Google rightly has a policy against "why manhole covers are round"-type questions. They're an imposition on a candidate without proving anything. An employer asking for a SO account would have the same quality.
On a related note, this line form the wikipedia article is priceless: "Caesar accidentally burned the library down during his visit to Alexandria in 48 BC." It may be a gross mischaracterization, but I love the image of a Mr. Magoo-like Caeser bumping into a brazier and burning down the greatest collection of knowledge in the world.
I hear they addressed this in the Q&A after their presentation at LAUNCH, but I'd like to see them pull in more external services. StackOverflow is only one small part of my online identity. GitHub is much more representative and I'd like to include things like my Hacker News and Twitter stats as well.
I recently made a rough mockup of what I called 'Devume' to show the concept behind a living resume for developers: http://screencast.com/t/FRwVor0hnm If anyone wants devume.com and @devume to make it real, it's all yours.
Yes... we didn't have time for GitHub/Blog/Twitter integrations for today's launch, but that is our absolutely highest priority and of course you can always add links to those things.
What if there was integration with online labor platforms e.g., a "Hire Joel on oDesk/Elance/Freelancer etc." button on profiles? More than once I've asked a question on SO, gotten excellent answers and then wished I could offer one the responders a short job.
full disclosure - I work at oDesk, but I had this idea before I started.
I did a test search and found a Erlang/Android job "by the beach." I don't job surf very often and I'm not currently looking for another day job, but this has to be one of the coolest job listings I've seen:
Thanks for making me chuckle. You do make a good point. If this was just another enterprise Java job, I wouldn't have listed it. I guess I was mostly curious about the Erlang/Android angle.
You won't be surfing in Sarasota but the beaches are in fact a reason to list "by the beach." Not many beaches (Boracay, Lombok and Sulawesi, some areas of Phuket) compare to what can be found from Sarasota down to Boca Grande and on to Sanibel and Captiva.
I live in Sarasota and find it boring. But then most of my time is either coding or outdoors. I can't think of many more places I'd rather be.
Clearwire Wimax covers the Tampa Bay area now; you should take your laptop out to Fort Desoto and code with inspiration.
edit: In fact, I may have just talked myself into signing up with Clearwire; care to start a co-working space just around the bend from the northernmost parking lot?
It's a shame there's still no decent PDF export option other than the less-than-ideal print-to-file route. I don't want to have to maintain yet another copy of my CV.
Mighty CV is in private beta at the moment and is just about to roll out dynamic PDF generation. It's essentially a big button located on your online résumé that generates a printer friendly PDF whenever you need it. This PDF output is also useful for recruitment companies that require a PDF as part of their registration process, usually they need one for their internal candidate database. You can sign up for the Mighty CV beta at:
There is also a LinkedIn importer that creates a new résumé in seconds by using information that you've already entered in to your LinkedIn profile. Hacker News profile integration is coming soon and soon after there will be GitHub and StackOverflow integrations too.
I'd still encourage everyone to check out Careers 2.0 from Joel and his team. It looks great to me and is a slightly different animal to Mighty CV. For example there are no plans to integrate job listings as part of the Mighty CV service. Take a look at some of the other benefits at the site.
Can anyone comment on whether or not they have found advertising on the SO jobs board to be a good source of candidates? I listed a position there in December for a systems engineer with EC2 experience and got no responses - I've had much better luck with Startuply for example.
I'm not sure why I would look for postings and contact you. I just listed my CV there and employers started contacting me through the site. Do you have to pay extra for that or something?
It's somewhat hard to say what makes a listing successful as it depends on a combination of factors such as location, technologies wanted, the company, the position and people looking to work with all of the above. And sometimes there's just no match. That said, we'll follow up with you directly to see how we can help you get the best out of your posting (and there's always our money back guarantee if your not entirely happy).
For a new user who visits this site for the first time, the "2.0" doesn't make any sense. Why add version number to your product name? It's fine to write about it in blog post announcement. But when I visit your site, I don't care which version it is. I know I'm using latest version that is live.
I think the name is "Careers 2.0" as in, this is the new version of how you manage your career. Before, you searched for jobs on job boards, sending out your resume, etc. Now, the employers come to you. Careers 2.0.
This seems like a great fit for the stack exchange sites in general. They're building communities of experts in various fields and now you can hire someone who proven to be an expert in that field by going to careers.[stack exchange site].com.
There are still bugs, I cannot change how many years of experience I have with languages. Currently stackoverflow thinks I have 10 (!) years of C# experience. That must mean I have designed the language...how can I change this?
50 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadCareers seems like a great fit, because you have definite evidence of developers' interests and abilities.
btw: if you don't indent, urls get linkified, like this: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/careers-2-0-launches/
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-advertising...
But more. I would like to offer a simple theory for why no "making search as easy as possible" site is going succeed. My explanation is that this is because job search is an adversarial process. It is, at least partially, a zero sum game. Neither player wants to remove the information-asymmetry on the part of their opponent in such a game. For example, forcing the other side to work for information about you is good because it impels the other side to be committed to you (and the other side concomitantly hates having to work for their information).
The fact that neither side is very rational either doesn't help. It's in my interest not to reveal my love of Labrador Retrievers to my potential employers because it's more likely they will reject me for this than that they will accept me for it.
Just consider - an employers wants to know everything good and bad about an employee before they make that employee an offer. A potential employee wants the opposite - they want to know all the potential jobs available, where each company is in their search and what offers said companies are willing to make before they start revealing information about themselves. Then they want the employer to know all the desirable things about them. Then they want the employer to know any negative that they'd forced to tell anyway. And they don't want to describe any potential negatives that the employer won't need to know. AND what's negative and what's a positive varies from employer to employer. What potential employees certainly shouldn't want is a "beauty contest" where they "strut their stuff" to invisible judges. But naturally, neither side can or should get everything they want here.
The adversarial situation of job search is the ultimate reason for its clunkiness. It's complex dance involving each side revealing information and making commitments. The ability of each to make commitments is important to the process as well as long as the commitment process is reasonably symmetrical (why my committing to a mere "job search" by paying money is highly disadvantageous. I only commit to specific employers after they had partially committed to me). It's a reason that job-shops exist despite seeming ignorant and irrational. It's the same reason that find "contracting agents who understands programming" to be the worst to deal with (the contracting agent isn't there to evaluate you, they're just a mediation a way for both sides to unveil their information slowly. They work good for only that).
Imagine the worst case job market, which is that anyone can hang out a shingle and say "I'm a highly skilled Python programmer." Suppose 1/2 are good, and add value +1 to their companies, and 1/2 are bad, and "add" -1 to their companies if hired. If there is absolutely no way to tell before hand who is good and who is bad, then no one is getting hired---the expected gain from hiring is zero. We have complete market failure (this is the "market of lemons" example).
Now suppose you throw in some signals---schooling, resumes, interviews etc. if firms can tell w/ probability .8 whether someone is what they say they are. People now get hired, but even the good ones take a haircut b/c firms still wrongly hire bad programmers because the signals available--while better than nothing---are not perfect. I think SO is basically raising .8 to .95 (so to speak). This is valuable to firms and to workers and I can easily imagine a world where firms pay to get to .95 (and good workers pay to be evaluated with the .95 lens).
Anyway, job search is certainly not entirely adversarial. But any negotiating process has to involve a sequence of honest signals from both sides. If one side can completely control the signaling process, that side can get the most benefit for the least cost (and the other side would choose a different frame if they could - and especially the most valuable players would make this choice).
Thus even though I eventually do want to reveal everything and commit fully to a potential employer, I expect the process of commitment and revealing will only happen as the employer also reveals information AND makes commitments to me. It's a dance. Things that allow the employer to merely get commitment and information from me without anything in return result in an undesirable negotiating process.
That being said, labor markets are very complex and there's lots of strategic maneuvering going on. Given the indeterminacy of much of game theory (i.e., it depends on how you model the scenario), I'm sure you could be right under the proper assumptions.
But to bring it back to the SO example, it's hard to imagine a scenario where giving high ability workers the ability to truthfully signal that high ability hurts. Low ability workers can be hurt i.e., either I know you're bad from your SO rep, or I start to think "hey - where's your SO profile? you must be bad." In the pre-SO system, the low ability workers were getting an unearned rent (assuming the market existed at all) at the expense of the high ability workers and firms (which is market-killing).
Having been on SO a bit over time, I know very well that SO karma doesn't directly measure programming ability. You can get high karma with lots of random or dubious answers. If someone already has programming ability, they might be able to tell from someone's SO answers whether the person's real but raw karma isn't enough.
The further problem is that Joel has been trying to jump from SO being a good answer site to making SO a job site in it's own. The first iteration was announced with fanfare and a post with argument for his approach. This version has appeared with little discussion on his part so I'm not sure what his reasoning is.
On the general subject of signaling, if an SO account ever became a strong signal of ability, you can bet there'd be SO "gold farmers" along the lines of game gold farmers today.
And while I've enjoyed SO for its own sake at times, if creating an SO account became mandatory for a job search, a lot of skilled people likely find that an annoying imposition.
Google rightly has a policy against "why manhole covers are round"-type questions. They're an imposition on a candidate without proving anything. An employer asking for a SO account would have the same quality.
Edit: Looks fixed. Quick work!
I recently made a rough mockup of what I called 'Devume' to show the concept behind a living resume for developers: http://screencast.com/t/FRwVor0hnm If anyone wants devume.com and @devume to make it real, it's all yours.
full disclosure - I work at oDesk, but I had this idea before I started.
http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/10048/android-developm...
I live in Sarasota and find it boring. But then most of my time is either coding or outdoors. I can't think of many more places I'd rather be.
edit: In fact, I may have just talked myself into signing up with Clearwire; care to start a co-working space just around the bend from the northernmost parking lot?
I wonder, did you get any benefits from implementing the hResume microformat? Was it worth the effort (I don't see many tools using it)?
http://www.mightycv.com
There is also a LinkedIn importer that creates a new résumé in seconds by using information that you've already entered in to your LinkedIn profile. Hacker News profile integration is coming soon and soon after there will be GitHub and StackOverflow integrations too.
I'd still encourage everyone to check out Careers 2.0 from Joel and his team. It looks great to me and is a slightly different animal to Mighty CV. For example there are no plans to integrate job listings as part of the Mighty CV service. Take a look at some of the other benefits at the site.
Maybe it works better for upper-level developers?