Currently, it is impossible to get a Stack Exchange Careers 2.0 profile without being invited. It recently occurred to me, that this might be by-design, I'm guessing to avoid having users with no experience.
Is this the case? Will Careers 2.0 always be invite-only or is it just temporary?
Well the concept of "invite-only" is quite ambiguous here, because there are option to get in that don't require someone to send you an invite. If you have done minimal Github or Codeplex contribution you can get an instant invite. I think it will officially stay "invite-only" in the sense that they probably want to stay very selective about who can get a profile, but that doesn't mean that if you have no friend that you can't get in.
Always is a long time, so probably not. But there are no immediate plans to get rid of invites.
We've always wanted to make sure that Careers has high quality programmers and companies. Way back in the day, we thought we'd do that by making developers pay to list their profile. That turned out to be way too high a bar, and very few people created profiles. So we switched to an invite system that requires either:
1) Demonstrate that you're a programmer, or
2) Get someone who we already trust to vouch for you
That's the existing invite system in a nutshell. You can demonstrate your programmer-ness via Stack Overflow, GitHub, Codeplex, or by requesting an invite with some links to your blog or other relevant sites. Or, find someone you know who already has a profile and get them to invite you.
The invite system is not simply a controlled beta to keep the numbers down. It's a very basic quality filter. It will be replaced, if it is eventually replaced, with something that we're convinced will be a better quality filter than invitations.
I only see one flaw in this is that those of us who have been stuck in corporate development for the last 15 years have nothing we can put on Git-hub or public that we can send links to.
