I just listened to one of the SO podcasts that happens to have more information about this service. A few things of note (that have come up in these comments):

I just listened to one of the SO podcasts that happens to have more information about this service. A few things of note (that have come up in these comments): The $99/yr is meant to be a nominal fee to keep out the riff-raff, basically (my metaphor, not Joel's). SO will charge the hiring companies a much larger amount to get the opportunity to search the database. It seems like this was actually designed more from the perspective of the person who is HIRING, not the person being hired. Joel mentions the frustrations of sorting through a zillion resumes, many of them from people who are wildly out of their league, and the reality that even a good resume doesn't really prove that the person is a good coder. Two people with identical backgrounds might have wildly different qualities as developers. Looking at resumes isn't enough. So the $99/yr is a deliberate barrier to entry to reduce spam, and your Stack Overflow rep/answers are a second way to distinguish the quality of developers. The grand unifying theory that makes it work (if it does work) is that developers want to work for the kind of company that takes enough care to look at SO answers in order to distinguish great devs from mediocre ones. That's why you would want to pay the $99 bucks just to have your resume searchable there. In theory. Also, as a deliberate, specific method to prevent recruiters from using the database, you're required to give the name of the company that is hiring in order to search the database. Recruiters won't do this since the dev could skip the recruiter and go straight to the company, in which case the recruiter can't get their commission.