Importance of community recognitions and credits of a developer in his career

Question

Hi,

Many fellow developers and software engineers largely participate in developer communities like stackoverflow, codeproject, msdn forums and many more recognized ones. Communities like stackoverflow and many other have recognition and credit programmes for the contributing end-users.

Do you think when you next time apply for a job, companies should consider this recognitions since they are based on most un-biased source?

To what extent these recognition and credits should play the role in being decisive for the developer?

Answer 1

Personally I wouldn't place a huge emphasis on them.

They can be used as a barometer to see how interested someone is in technology, but to be fair, this doesn't always correlate with how good they are at a particular job.

I would be more interested in the contents of what they've posted, as this will be more indicative of the how good they are at a particular job.

Answer 2

I work as a headhunter for software developers and most of my clients are looking a for way to further validate their interviewing process. I don't see them looking at the "Recognition and Credits," but I do see them looking at the answers and questions you write. Most large organizations like to have a formal process and using recognition/credit programs from various developer communities will be hard to fit into their hiring/interviewing process. On the other hand, the knowledge a hiring manager can gain by reviewing your comments, questions and answers in a community (not to mention the fact that you are even part of a community - as most are not) is a huge bonus to any candidate interviewing for a position. The type of questions you continuously ask and how you go about answering questions is extremely important to a hiring manager (dev team manager). Again if you have something to give and can communicate it well, the more experience the better.

For smaller more flexible organizations they "may" see the points/credits/recognitions as something they can count on to add value. So far I’ve not talked to any company that uses the developers successful recognition or credits as part of the process.

Answer 3

As a jobseeker I'd like to think that an employer would be dazzled by my brilliant insights on stackoverflow. However, I can't see how this would work, given that real names aren't used (or verifiable, AFAIK). I could claim that I was brian d foy, or, more realistically, some high scoring person with a more pseudonymously-chosen name - I can't see how they'd verify. "no really, I'm him, I'll log in and show you" - doesn't seem to professional.

I imagine you could put a link to yourself on stack overflow or similar and encourage them to go look. If I were interviewing, I'd probably check it, with the caveats that if the name were in any way unclear I wouldn't necessarily believe it, and that I'd assume that you felt that your answers were bragworthy so the bar would be pretty high.

Or you could change your name to Jon Skeet;)