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I have ~42k points on SO and I don't think it's worth much to be honest. It's only worth something if you don't have prior professional experience. For example,

by hasenj 12y ago

I have ~42k points on SO and I don't think it's worth much to be honest. It's only worth something if you don't have prior professional experience. For example, you're fresh out of college, and the only thing you can do to demonstrate your competence is to point to your blog, Stackoverflow profile, and some of the hobby projects you've posted on github. If you have worked prior jobs then a Stackoverflow profile wouldn't be worth much. How did I earn 42k points? I was very active on SO for about 4 months (during the early days, long before Serverfault was launched (which, for those who don't know, was only the second StackExchange site; heck, StackExchange didn't really exist back then)). I used it actively because I had tons of free time. I had just finished University and didn't have a job. When I stopped being active, I had about 9k points. I was hoping to get to 10k but I gave up, or rather, stopped caring. All the rest of the ~31k points were earned passively; upvotes I've been getting on a daily basis for the past 5 years for all my previous questions and answers. That's why I don't think a Stackoverflow profile is worth that much. EDIT: For example, I have 1430 votes on this question: http://stackoverflow.com/q/671118/35364 http://stackoverflow.com/q/671118/35364 Does that say anything about my skills/knowledge? The only thing it says is I was an early user of SO, so I got to ask that question before anyone else. I also have tons of votes for this question: http://stackoverflow.com/q/1261975/35364 http://stackoverflow.com/q/1261975/35364 Whose answer I just googled and have no idea why it works. Still, it's the most upvoted question/answer related to VirtualBox. Someone literally contacted me because of that. They assumed I was some sort of a virtualbox expert. I'm the third person on this list of "all time top users on virtualbox": http://stackoverflow.com/tags/virtualbox/topusers http://stackoverflow.com/tags/virtualbox/topusers I can assure I know very little about virtualbox.

S4M 12y ago
The problem with the karma of Stack Overflow is that the questions that are the most viewed, and thus are getting the most votes, tend to be very easy, like the ones you mention, or this one [0] about merging two dictionaries in Python. At the end of the spectrum, a very advanced python answer wouldn't get that much views so much, like this one [1] about extending python with C - I think the guy who answered put some efforts in it and has experience in writing C modules for python, which would make him a solid python programmer. One way to disrupt Stackoverflow would be to have some way to access a question's difficulty and give karma points accordingly. [0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38987/how-can-i-merge-two-python-dictionaries-in-a-single-expression http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38987/how-can-i-merge-two... [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4238154/how-to-extend-python-in-c http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4238154/how-to-extend-pyt...
- hasenj 12y ago
  Stackoverflow was specifically built for the first type of questions: those that you have to google all the time, but which have a simple answer. Before stackoverflow, the answers to such questions were buried in forum discussions. Worse, sometimes the top google result is a forum thread where the answer is "google it"! Detailed/advanced questions don't really belong on Stackoverflow; it wasn't designed for them.
  - brudgers 12y ago
    Having listened to almost all the StackOverflow -> StackExchange podcasts, the idea was to cover both obvious questions (that was more Spolsky [1]) and long-tail questions where Spolsky and Atwood were both in agreement. Both were in agreement about the horror of forum threads. One of the direct targets however was ExpertSexChange's pseudo-pay wall. The big idea behind SO was reducing friction for finding answers to programming questions. Today, "What is REST?" would probably be killed because it is too broad for StackOverflow and better answered on WikiPedia. [1]: See Spolsky's famous How do I move the turtle in Logo: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the...

by hasenj 12y ago

S4M 12y ago

The problem with the karma of Stack Overflow is that the questions that are the most viewed, and thus are getting the most votes, tend to be very easy, like the ones you mention, or this one [0] about merging two dictionaries in Python. At the end of the spectrum, a very advanced python answer wouldn't get that much views so much, like this one [1] about extending python with C - I think the guy who answered put some efforts in it and has experience in writing C modules for python, which would make him a solid python programmer. One way to disrupt Stackoverflow would be to have some way to access a question's difficulty and give karma points accordingly. [0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38987/how-can-i-merge-two-python-dictionaries-in-a-single-expression http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38987/how-can-i-merge-two... [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4238154/how-to-extend-python-in-c http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4238154/how-to-extend-pyt...

hasenj 12y ago
Stackoverflow was specifically built for the first type of questions: those that you have to google all the time, but which have a simple answer. Before stackoverflow, the answers to such questions were buried in forum discussions. Worse, sometimes the top google result is a forum thread where the answer is "google it"! Detailed/advanced questions don't really belong on Stackoverflow; it wasn't designed for them.
- brudgers 12y ago
  Having listened to almost all the StackOverflow -> StackExchange podcasts, the idea was to cover both obvious questions (that was more Spolsky [1]) and long-tail questions where Spolsky and Atwood were both in agreement. Both were in agreement about the horror of forum threads. One of the direct targets however was ExpertSexChange's pseudo-pay wall. The big idea behind SO was reducing friction for finding answers to programming questions. Today, "What is REST?" would probably be killed because it is too broad for StackOverflow and better answered on WikiPedia. [1]: See Spolsky's famous How do I move the turtle in Logo: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the...