27

Careers.Stackoverflow.com has one benefit for me. If an employer happens to find my resume, they can then browse through my SO answers to see how I work and how I think. I work very hard on my Stack Overflow answers and I would like employers to see what I can do.

But there are so many posts.

It would be nice if I could go through and highlight my best posts specifically to be linked with my resume profile (sort of a best-of). This link would be available for employers to peruse my most relevant posts without having to wade through a bunch of irrelevant fluff. It might also show tags I've participated in, average number of up-votes, and other information that might make me look good.

This would be a huge benefit to me and worth the price of admission many times over.

Improve this question

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
11

Seconded. I've answered a lot of questions, but my highest-rated answers tend to be the highly-viewed social-poll style questions, whereas most of the lowest tend to be simple RTFM-style answers; the interesting ones from an employer's POV - the sort where I give complex in-depth answers involving specialist knowledge - tend to get orders of magnitude fewer views that the social-poll questions, and hence fewer upvotes; and thus are buried somewhere in the middle of the "noise"; yet if I stop answering newbie questions, SO would lose something I think.

Perhaps if having me select questions to be highlighted is not acceptable, something like displaying the highest-rated question for each of the top few tags I am most active in might work.

Improve this answer
2
  • Exactly. If I want Stack Overflow to be a serious career resource, I might tend to stop answering "less impressive" questions. Too much noise in my SO-answer portfolio. I don't want to do that.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Commented Oct 20, 2009 at 22:32
  • 4
    Yes, don't just display the highest rated answers. My highest rated answer on SO is "As a programmer, what are some telltale signs that you’re about to get fired or laid off?", which wouldn't be the one answer that I'd choose to highlight to a potential employer.
    – Dan Dyer
    Commented Jan 10, 2010 at 23:16
8

There are also answers that I put a lot of effort into, and for one reason or another they weren't voted very high or accepted.

But they're still answers that I'd be proud to show an employer because it shows a breadth that isn't highlighted by many other posts. (for example, I answered a linguistics question. It only got 4 upvotes, and it is the only linguistics question I've answered, but I'd really like to showcase the fact that I "Was able to apply my knowledge of linguistics to solve this problem")

So yeah, the same way one might highlight specific articles one wrote for a magazine or specific websites/projects, it seems like a good idea to, since SO careers is intended to be intertwined with our SO answers, be able to highlight things that we feel are particularly relevant to an employer or our abilities.

Improve this answer
1

You could also just delete the irrelevant fluff.

Or make up a list and paste the links into the "Projects and links" field.

Would be nice if that field allowed some sort of formatting though. Raw URLs with the ends cut off don't look all that great.

If it turns out a significant number of employers actually bother looking at this stuff, then i'd imagine they'd try to emphasize it more in the future.

Improve this answer
2
  • 3
    "Irrelevant" to an employer, not to the site. Answers can be well-thought-out, almost-blog-like answers. Other answers don't necessarily showcase your talents: "have you tried rebooting your computer?" I'm not going to delete otherwise helpful answers. But I want to leverage my good work by culling my "best posts" down to a manageable number and make them directly available to an employer. That's all.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Commented Oct 7, 2009 at 20:22
  • Gotcha. Though again, it remains to be seen how much, if any, of the SO side of this will end up being relevant.
    – Shog9
    Commented Oct 7, 2009 at 20:39

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .