I am mad again
More and more websites are coming out these days, trying to solve an age old hiring problem: “How to screen applicants”.
The latest hit on my radar was StackOverflow. A very successful site to allow programmer to ask and answer questions from each other. I have used the site a few times, both to ask and to answer, and the results were amazing. Smart and knowledgeable people, lent me their time and gave me full and accurate answers to my not-so-simple questions.
Fuelling these exchange of ideas is a rather ingenious ranking system. Users may upvote your question and your answers, raising your overall rank on the site. There are different badges being given for reaching arbitary goals (Answering X questions, Logging in for Y days in a row, etc). And while knowing its silly, its hard to resist increasing your rep.
Now comes the money
The owners of the site, in an attempt to capitalize on the user-base, created a spin-off. A hiring site. Here you can post your resume and open positions. The difference from other sites is that applicants can link their StackOverflow profile to their resume. This, in theory, gives an immediate mark to the applicant’s quality (high rank). Which should tell the hirer, that this applicant is both highly professional and respected.
The BUT
A bit of exploring will show an obvious picture: The very basic and common questions like “What is better, C or C++ ?” are always a hub of interest, causing massive upvotes to the posters of both question and answers. The answers obviously, do not solve the age old problems. They simply quote or reference existing debates on the subject.
On the other hand, complex questions and questions that require intimate technical knowlege, are much less relevant to most people. Only few read (and upvote) them and even less are able to provide a good answer.
So we end up with two types of users:
- Good writers and Wiki/Google users. They answer all the popular questions, while requiring almost no technical skill. – High rank
- Excellent engineers: Answer the hard, complex and knowledge requiring questions. - Low rank
See the problem ?
So we are back at the starting line
Until the ranking system is changed, to perhaps give more credit on accepted answers, instead of popular answers. The ranking system appears to be completely useless to hirers. As the information it provides, gives them almost no data of the applicant’s real aptitude (and worse yet, is confusing and inaccurate).
Back to the old: “10 years of Java experience” – What does that tell you about the applicant’s abilities ?