I was one of those engineers that hated their job a month ago, so my job search commenced just around the time Joel and Jeff announced SO Careers. At first the

I was one of those engineers that hated their job a month ago, so my job search commenced just around the time Joel and Jeff announced SO Careers. At first the idea is intriguing. SO has a customer base of engineers, some of whom are very talented and where there is a rough way of quantifying talent through the karma points. Why not tap into that for the job market? I was very tempted to sign up, because as I said, I was sick of my job and finally ready to move on. But $99/year? I spent a handful of hours on Craigslist and LinkedIn and within two weeks I had several interviews and two good offers. And I'm not nearly an all-star, just a guy with 5 years experience with LAMP (PHP and Perl) that isn't an idiot (or so I'd like to think). So is SO Careers really targeted at someone like me? Is it targeted at the young post-college upstart? (If so, does he even have $100/year?) Is it targeted at the uber-engineer that has his own FOSS project and is a minor blog celebrity? (doesn't he have an even easier time picking and choosing his jobs than I would?) It doesn't make any sense to me, and what frustrates me most is their explanation for charging is that "they need to make sure the candidates are serious." If they want to avoid the "stale resume" (and why do Jeff/Joel keep using the term 'CV'? are they too good for the word 'resume'?) problem on existing job boards, charging someone isn't going to make a difference -- a person is going to get hired and unless he immediately updates his SO careers profile, his resume is now stale too. Also why would I pay $99/year for something that I'll probably only use once a year, at most? Just how often am I looking for a job exactly?