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I noticed that a percentile is placed at the top of my resume in Careers 2.0.

70th percentile on SO for android tag

How are these percentiles calculated? Is there a certain threshold you need to be over in order for it to be displayed?

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  • I actually find the whole wording confusing ... it would be better if it just showed "advanced"/"expert" and so on and on hover spelled out what it means.
    – waffles
    Feb 24, 2011 at 0:29
  • @waffles hover is standard for the network, but I'm pretty sure your average employer would not expect to find it there
    – David Fullerton
    Feb 24, 2011 at 0:37
  • @David these percentiles have been turned off for the time being, right? Or am I just overlooking them?
    – Pekka
    Feb 24, 2011 at 0:43
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    @David, I am not following how "70th percentile" is more clearer to employers than "Expert on Stack Overflow" ... :) percentile is weird word
    – waffles
    Feb 24, 2011 at 0:51
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    @waffles maybe a difference between US and AU? "90th percentile" is fairly common, I think
    – David Fullerton
    Feb 24, 2011 at 0:56
  • @Pekka yes, turned off except for passive candidates
    – David Fullerton
    Feb 24, 2011 at 0:57
  • @David yeah ... I am not convinced the term is even being used correctly, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile ... regardless percentile is a really hard concept to convey which will be lost in international translation
    – waffles
    Feb 24, 2011 at 1:02
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    @Waffles @David how about in the top 30% for the 70th?
    – Pekka
    Feb 24, 2011 at 1:04
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    @Pekka top 30% works fine for me ... it makes sense
    – waffles
    Feb 24, 2011 at 1:06
  • @waffles yeah. Sounds more flattering, too IMO
    – Pekka
    Feb 24, 2011 at 1:09
  • @Pekka I like it
    – David Fullerton
    Feb 24, 2011 at 1:11

2 Answers 2

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We take all the candidates in our system who rank for that tag, sort by their total score in the tag, and figure out where you fall (rounding down to the nearest 10%, and accounting for large blocks of users who all have the same score).

The key bit is "candidates in our system", which only includes people who have at least a total score of 5 in that tag. If we didn't do that, everyone would be in the top 10% because the long tail of users with a score of 1 or 0 is so long.

If you fall below the 60th percentile, we don't show it. Also, we're now only showing this on passive profiles because we realized that active users should be able to customize which tags are shown.

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    Have you considered using more fine-grained categories near the upper end? (Somehow – maybe it wouldn't work with current layout.) Like "98th percentile" / "in the top 2%", etc. Talking about what sounds more flattering... ツ
    – Jonik
    Feb 24, 2011 at 2:07
  • Now active candidates are disadvantaged. Passive candidates can show that they're the cream of the crop when it comes to answering questions on some tags, while active candidates have no option to show off that status. I thought it was a neat thing to display, now I can't even if I want to.
    – Dan Grossman
    Feb 24, 2011 at 18:48
  • By the sounds of things, they pulled it from active temporarily until they implement the ability to show/hide them.
    – Fiona - myaccessible.website
    Feb 24, 2011 at 22:10
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    @Dan @Fiona that's correct -- it'll be back once we add the ability to show / hide
    – David Fullerton
    Feb 24, 2011 at 22:15
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Based on david's answer, I created this script on SEDE to calculate your ranking percentile on a given tag.

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/958556/tag-ranking-percentile

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