It's still merit based, though it might not yield the world's best candidates, since they might not have the time. And that's going to be a problem, of course,

It's still merit based, though it might not yield the world's best candidates, since they might not have the time. And that's going to be a problem, of course, but other things you might do to demonstrate merit except for actual paid work (open source projects etc) also take time. The exception being technical interviews, which for various reasons are undesirable or at least seen as suboptimal by many. I suppose a system like stockfighter can try to take into account the fact that not everyone has time to optimize their solution, but also, at the end of the day, how you prioritize your time I suppose is a factor in the whole merit-equation - the more driven you are the more 'passion' you are seen as having. Stack overflow is different in this respect, though, I will admit that - although some answers are really high quality it is probably the people spending the most time there that end up with most reputation. And I guess that's fine as well, if some recruiters want to use SO points as a basis for recruitment they know (or should know) what kind of people this process singles out. I hope to see many projects like stockfighter in the future, each focusing on their own aspects of work in software so that employers can look for their candidates in the appropriate 'pool'.