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I think it's beneficial as a personal achievement. You set a goal and worked hard to achieve it. (Kudos!) As a professional achievement, I think it would have

I think it's beneficial as a personal achievement. You set a goal and worked hard to achieve it. (Kudos!) As a professional achievement, I think it would have mostly neutral effect. There are a lot of good jobs (doing decent work) that just won't filter past basic proficiency and professional competence. Additionally, I'd suspect that, for jobs where you'd do amazing work and where candidates would be filtered to a much higher standard, something like this could set expectations too high. Even if you have a corresponding degree of real expertise to match your StackOverflow rank, there's still very little upside in passing these high expectations. Of course, you're probably more visible to recruiters now, whatever that's worth.

aaronchall 12y ago
Thanks, James, one of the reasons I set out to climb the ranks on SO was because I needed to build credibility, since I don't have a CS degree. I've been playing around with code since I was a kid coding elementary games in BASIC. I've been reading material on coding online for a long time too. But all that is not enough. My MBA, personal programming experience, and constant exposure to tech at NYC meetups (like NYCPython and NYLUG) got my foot in the door, but I knew I needed to build reputation over time in a reputation based system. I now feel like I have not only my own work as a source of credibility, but also an independent source that gives me a requisite gravitas for my desired trajectory. I know I'm not ready to be a Kirat Singh (or fill in your favorite giant system's architect's name), but I'd like to build up that kind of capability one day.