Community Q and A through Stack Overflow leads to Careers 2.0

According to various estimates, there are about 9 million Java developers worldwide, who range from writing a small amount of Java per day to a lot. Going by the number of site visitors per day, one of their favorite places to ask questions and exchange information is Stack Overflow. A community run along similar principles to Wikipedia, Stack Overflow allows any visitor to ask programming-related questions, supply answers, and vote on the best answers. This simple concept became so popular that its originators, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, decided to expand it and create a set of additional topic sites under the umbrella of Stack Exchange. Following that success, the natural next step was a site to facilitate recruitment of the regular experts contributing to Stack Overflow, called Careers 2.0. The reputation that an individual has built on these sites creates a profile that recruiters can mine. Careers 2.0 demonstrates how participating in web communities can be fun and also have professional implications.

Crowd sourcing and community activities harness knowledge to answer specific problems

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that everyone says they do not trust but do use. It grew as a community effort, a fine demonstration of crowd sourcing and one of the concepts behind the Web 2.0 revolution. However, if you have a software development specialist question you need to turn elsewhere. Forums have sprung up all over the Web where experts can discuss subjects, such as TheServerSide and Slashdot. Where Stack Overflow struck a particular chord was its Q&A system, which uses a voting mechanism for the best answers. According to statistics quoted on the site, 10 million IT professionals have accessed Stack Overflow and nearly 500,000 actively use the site to post questions. You can of course type your question into a search engine, but the hits garnered by Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange indicate the popularity of these sites, and have led developers to go directly to them. Stack Exchange currently covers 46 topical sub-sites with a total of 19 million unique visitors, carries 1.7 million questions and 4.1 million answers, and has 2.1 million visits per day. The subject matters vary from other computer-related subjects to mathematics, English language, gaming, and cooking. Its nearest competitor appears to be Quora.

The Stack family of sites does appear to have gained a momentum. While computer and IT related Q&A is the core activity, regular users have created additional sites based on their other interests, and these sites have begun to grow. The Stack family will not replace the specialist blogs that proliferate on the Internet, but it will be a useful stopping point to help answer tricky questions not easily found elsewhere, with the incentive for contributors to build reputations.

Building online reputations has career payoffs through Careers 2.0

On February 23, 2011, the Stack Overflow programmer community was offered a new service, Career 2.0. Needing to fill 13 of its own vacancies, CEO Joel Spolsky had used the programmer contributions on Stack Overflow to streamline its own interviewing process and bypass the use of a traditional recruiting firm. This experience led to the creation of Careers 2.0. This is a recruitment site where companies can list jobs available and prospective candidates can create profiles linked to their contributions on Stack Overflow. The benefit for recruiters is that the Careers 2.0 profile goes beyond a traditional resume by showing the expertise displayed by the candidate in answering technical questions. As a first screening step, the service lets recruiters create a shortlist of talented individuals for face-to-face meetings. Programmers can therefore participate in helping their community by answering questions, and as a by-product build a reputation that may one day prove useful in finding their next job. The activities on Stack Overflow are moderated, just as they are on Wikipedia, so anyone trying to trick the system will likely be spotted.

While there are other sites, such as Guru.com, allowing companies needing projects fulfilled to be matched to suppliers, the purpose of Careers 2.0 is to assist a traditional recruiting process. We see the community built at Stack as a good hunting ground for recruiters, and it need not necessarily displace recruitment agencies, which can easily make use of the service as well.