How do you increase your Stack Overflow reputation in a realistic manner?

Question

This question might not be a directly related to programming but more the culture around it, specifically Stack Overflow.

I recently stumbled onto Stack Overflow Careers, and read how you could create an online CV that links to your Stack Overflow reputation, thus allowing future employers to review your answers and questions. Since Stack Overflow has become such a phenomenal success for developers, I realised that Stack Overflow Careers was going to be crucial when applying for software development jobs in the future. This would imply that a high reputation is needed to reflect well on your CV.

Now, I love Stack Overflow and think it’s a great resource for finding solutions to problems regarding software development. However, I cannot possibly sit on the site 24/7 and hope to be one of the first replies to a question to try and increase my reputation. Developers need to work, you know.

So my question is: How do you increase your reputation score on Stack Overflow in a realistic manner? There are users out there boasting reputations of 25,000 and higher. How do you do this? Suggestions, comments, tricks, etc. would be helpful.

Answer 1

There are lots of ways, and to some extent it depends on whether you view StackOverflow as a game (to get points), a way of demonstrating your competence in specific areas, or just a place where you help people out. From a purely point-accumulation standpoint, here are some basic techniques.

• Quality answers. If you take the time to answer something well, chances are high you'll be accepted. This includes basic things like answering the question that was asked, and linking to relevant online docs for evidence to back up your answer.
• Quantity answers. Someone else here said 'quality not quantity'. But quantity is a perfectly viable strategy. You can get a lot of points for short, pithy answers over many questions (if they're vaguely correct, you'll get 1 or 2 votes per answer). Personally, I don't like doing this, but there are many users (including some on the front page of SO) who do.
• Answer straightforward stuff, even if you're not 100% sure. Most people have an aversion to answering questions they're not sure about. But what's the worst that can happen? Normally, you lose 2-6 points. On the other hand, if you're right, you're the first answerer - 50 points+. If it's really awful, you can always delete it. If in doubt, answer the question first, then go look it up.
• Consider niche questions. From a points perspective, niche questions are rather expensive for the amount of work you have to put in (I know, I answer lots of them). You won't get a lot of points for them, because they're low traffic, and the answers are often esoteric enough that the reader isn't normally sure what you're on about (so won't vote). On the other hand, if you have some unusual expertise, they can be easy to answer, and are much less competitive than mainstream questions.
• Fold up large threads into single, comprehensive answers. Combining many small existing answers into one cohesive answer is an explicitly encouraged behaviour on SO. If you do it well, it helps the site. It's usually time-consuming, but in my experience a good summary answer continues to gain points over time.
• Learn regex. If you're just looking for points, learn regular expressions and leap in there whenever you see a 'how do I match X?' question. They're easy, unambiguous, and so provide a depressing number of points for very little effort. On the other hand, you have to be fast.
• Answer subjective stuff, before it goes CW. A favourite trick of some of the high-rollers seems to be answering subjective questions quickly, before the OP is forced to make the question community wiki. This can garner huge numbers of points, merely for expressing your opinion. The trick here is to pick a position that some fraction of the audience is going to agree with. From a points perspective, the more contentious the answer the better. You want downvotes as well to generate more upvotes.
• Answer something really well when there's already an accepted answer. The psychology of voting means you'll get more points if you're 'better' answer is not the accepted one, because it doesn't seem fair.
• Ask interesting questions. Or just ask lots. This is a simple way to get a lot of points. No competition, no research required. The community in general seems to get uneasy about this sort of technique, if used to excess, but it's explicitly rewarded by the system, so there's nothing stopping you.

Note that some of these approaches are not in the best interests of the community. Reputation generators are my favourite example. But from a pure game-playing point of view, they will be effective.

Answer 2

Overall reputation score on SO is not indicative of technical ability. It can be a helpful indicator, but nothing more. An employer needs to dig into the specific answers and tags a user is active in. A user may have 5000 points, 4500 of which are from brilliant answers in c#, whereas a user with 20,000 points might be from 2-3 sympathy votes on 600 mediocre answers across a wide range of topics, indicating no strong abilities in any area.

Answer 3

"Realistic"? Well, I'm not exactly a "rep superstar", but I am real, and here's what works for me:

• Post good answers to good questions. Ignore (or edit!) bad questions, and questions you don't have a good answer for.

• Stick to questions that don't already have good, comprehensive answers. You need not limit yourself to unanswered questions, but avoiding those that have already been adequately answered will save you a lot of time and reduce noise on the site.

• Take the time to improve your best, most popular answers. They'll keep generating reputation for you over time...

...Please note that these aren't "tricks". This is how the site is meant to be used! I've tried the tricks, and frankly they require a lot of effort for relatively little payoff. If you're gonna put extra effort in, why not put it toward improving your writing, formatting, or the actual information you're presenting rather than trying to trick other users into up-voting your stuff... Remember, a big number beside your name isn't everything.

Answer 4

Honestly?

Rep is only an indication of your effort and skill in helping other people solve their problems.

It's not an indication of your desire to help people, nor of your skill at any given programming topic. It's most closely related to your ability to quickly

1. Understand the problem
2. Research the issue
3. Apply problem solving skills
4. Clearly, completely, concisely, and quickly address the problem in text

Yes, there are 'tricks' and 'techniques' to enhance one's questions in this community, but they will only help in the low single digit percentages - they will not gain you significant rep, and will generally only give you a slight edge against your peers - not bring to on par with the high rep users.

So, to 'enhance' your reputation practice answering questions. Being first helps if you already know the answer, but if you come 2-5 minutes late with an obviously superior answer, you will almost always come out ahead.

You need only spend one hour a day, perhaps 3-5 six to twenty minute periods (more is better - bigger question pool) scanning the 20 most recent questions, and answering those that are within your skillset.

Just do that to the best of your ability daily, and you'll surpass 10k before long.

Answer 5

I'm not sure I'd want to hire somebody who amassed a huge reputation in a short time -- especially if that guy was supposed to work instead of browsing stackoverflow.

I'd say, be yourself. Answer what you want, when you want, and the right job will come looking for you eventually. Stretching things too much is like faking a resume to look better.

Answer 6

You ask a project-related question expressing a worry of some sort, where everyone and their grandpa has a chance to give his or her opinion as an answer, and put a bounty on it for greater visibility. Not only is it going to pay back the 50 rep bounty, but it will bring you far more than that if it's a situation that many people would likely confront at their jobs while working on their projects. Even more so, it'll get insanely bookmarked if someone actually gives a satisfying answer. Some answers might even give personal examples, that you may draw other potential equally subjective questions from, so the circle never ends. If the question is about software development practices, asking it on SO it's like asking a bunch of supporters about football - everyone will have an opinion, and many will up-vote you for asking.

Answer 7

I was reluctant to link to this post at first because I was uncertain about the community's stance on being the FGITW. (I didn't even know the acronym!) Now that I've read a few threads and seen that there are people on both sides of the fence, I'll risk it. It's basically a script I wrote to monitor SO for new questions; I've been using it for the past week and it's been very effective -- I get to answer questions early without wasting time on manually browsing and refreshing. My script does one page-scrape per minute, and (thus far, at least) I haven't been banned or warned for consuming too much bandwidth.

Answer 8

Quality not quantity.

Answer 9

Reputation at SO have a 200/day cap, so you can't make 25k points in one day.

I personally answer some questions early morning, some more at lunch time and a few more at night, when I have time.

Answer 10

It's really based on the time you have to put into looking for questions you know the answers to or could figure out the answer to. Even though there is a 200 day max you could still go above that max with accepted answers, which are harder to get than votes, so basically you just need to make sure every answer you post can compete to be selected as the accepted answer.

Time is rep. not money

For example when I first got interested in Stack Overflow, I used to check constantly to answer questions all day, even when I got home, but since then I don't check as often, so my reputation earning rate has decreased to reflect that.

Answer 11

Firstly when asking questions, try and make them as interesting and enticing as possible. Not only will you generally gain more answers but you'll get some votes for a good question.

For answers, it's useful to set up some favourite tags so you can pick them out of the list. Whenever I'm in a question-answering mood, here is what I look for:

• Niche questions. I often look at the joomla tag, since I know a lot about Joomla but those questions don't get as many answers normally.
• Newest questions, with 0 or 1 answers. If there are a few answers, it's more than likely been answered well.

Generally I don't bother looking at simple questions with many answers unless it sounds really intriguing to me, or I would like to know the answer myself.

Answer 12

This is what I do:

1. I upvote questions which I like.
2. I comment where I need clarification.
3. I try to answer what I can.
4. I question what I don't know.

This helps me to get the most of stack exchange sites and enables me to improve my knowledge :)

Cheers!

Answer 13

Here is an interesting article on how to gain rep.

Edit: Some of the points in the article are frowned upon, but content in the article is nonetheless interesting because it shows how people can use the site.