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So I recently posted a thread here reporting what I thought was a bug, regarding the fact that my Careers Profile was listed as 200% complete after adding a whole bunch of GitHub projects to it. Imagine my surprise to find out that this was a feature, not a bug.

As I posted in a comment to that answer, I think this feature is highly debatable. Okay, I get the joke, and the reference. And I like it! I like Stack Exchange's pervasive quirkiness, ranging from the error pages, to the captcha pages, to the funny FAQ entries. I think it's important to have little "easter eggs" like this to create a sense of culture. But I think this particular implementation is actually harmful.

The reason is that this actually reduces the usefulness of the feature. Before adding my GitHub projects to the profile, I was at 75%, and the little counter acted as a reminder for me that I still had to fill out a Personal Statement and a few other things. I still haven't added those things, but now I'm at 200%; if I didn't already know they were missing from before, I certainly wouldn't know it now. And suppose the site later adds a few more fields that can be filled in -- I won't notice them, because I'm at 200%. And how many things are missing? I have no idea, because I don't know what the current Personal Statement:GitHub Project ratio is trading at these days.

Especially since things like GitHub projects can be imported automatically without much work on my part, the progress counter can quickly become nearly useless as an indicator of how complete my profile is.

I think a good compromise would be to not allow the counter to go over 100% until 100% of the fields are filled in. After that, I'm happy to be "rewarded" for my GitHub prowess, but I feel 100% should really mean 100%.

Hopefully this post can act as a discussion about this.

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    This has actually been near the top of our list for sometime and the consumer of my time all week. We have a new system which should come out very soon which focuses on a more per section score, but still gives you an overall score which can be used to gauge the completeness of your profile. There is more to it than that, but it will all be explained in a future post.
    – Nick Larsen
    Mar 31, 2011 at 12:52

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We now show you a "completeness" score:

enter image description here

If you click the link to "view completeness report", you get a new page modeled on the Badges page that tells you how complete each section is:

enter image description here

This should give you a much better idea of what's not done yet.

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I would suggest that optional things like Github projects would be indicated with stars. Maybe it would look like Profile 75% * complete where the star would have a tooltip indicating that it represented successful importation of your Github profile.

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What if the team designated a few fields as "recommended" and then showed your percentage of such fields as completed in response to leaving the existing facility? That way you can see that you're going above and beyond, but you can also see that you still have core fields that haven't been filled in?

I mean, this is all in addition to actually taking 30 minutes tomorrow night and filling all these in ...

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