Predictably Irrational and StackOverflow Careers

http://rohbust.blogspot.com/2009/10/predictably-irrational-and-stack.html

by coriander • 17 years ago

15 27 17 years ago

rohbust.blogspot.com

From the comments:

> Stack Overflow will make both Spolsky and Atwood enormously wealthy, based upon the volunteer efforts of others. Who will get nothing.

The others won't get nothing. They'll get whatever rewards go along with participating in a forum: the opportunity to demonstrate prowess and be recognized for it, the chance to have specific questions answered in a peer-reviewed medium, and so on. Don't discount the value that people place in these things, even if they aren't being compensated financially.

jrockway4• 17 years ago

I thought there was value in Stack Overflow until I accidentally visited the site with Adblock turned off.

Now I don't answer questions there anymore.

coriander4• 17 years ago

You could always turn Adblock back on. I think it's fair for them to make some money to support the site.

tocomment• 17 years ago

It doesn't seem that bad at all. I don't see any ads actually.

pchristensen4• 17 years ago

They wouldn't have made it if they couldn't make a living off of it. Relax.

djb_hackernews• 17 years ago

I believe once you reach a certain point threshold, the ads disappear. So, answer more questions!

coriander4• 17 years ago

Agreed. StackOverflow provides tremendous value to the tech community.

However, the idea of charging participants in that community $100 per year for the privilege of having their resumes searchable by employers seems like a bit of a slap in the face.

Especially since the Careers site doesn't even seem to try to distinguish between employers and recruiters.

pchristensen4• 17 years ago

Spolsky has said that every job that gets posted requires the company name, ditto for companies using Careers. Ergo, it's no use to recruiters because they can go around the posting straight to the company. He (correctly) believes that recruiters destroy value for job seekers and companies and keep markets from working.

About the slap in the face, it's necessary to filter out bad developers who won't get value from posting their CV. The best price isn't always free.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 17 years ago

That's a very good point.

I hang out on few online electronics forums ( http://forum.sparkfun.com for example) and answer a fair amount of questions, help people with electronics problems, and provide simple designs. Occasionally I think about how much value I'm giving away (even here in the Midwest, EE consulting rates are around $100/hr) for free and how much value the site owners get from having others like me on their board.

Then I remember that it's really fun and that I enjoy helping people and seeing what creations their minds come up with. Once in a while someone pays me to design/build something, but most of the benefit I get from it is in no way financial.

pchristensen4• 17 years ago

Paying to post your CV is a fantastic filtering service to provide to companies looking to hire. Resume spam is even worse than email spam. See also Local Bacon for more evidence on this approach.

While they will make money from the people that post CVs, much, much more money will come from the companies that pay to search those resumes. I'm sure they set the price at wherever they expect the best filtering to be. If you value your time at $50 and SO careers saves you 4 hours of job searching every 2 years, it's worth it. If it finds you a job that pays you $.05 more an hour, it's worth it. It's underpriced because CV owners aren't the primary customers.

About the decoys, the $99 regular price isn't a decoy. They're offering the $29 plan because they need a critical mass of CVs to make it useful to companies looking for talent. They're sharing $268 of their value to early adopters as recognition that the first people in make the service more valuable. Once they have lots of CVs they're in a stronger position and don't need to discount anymore. Simple business economics.

dschobel2• 17 years ago

Sure, it's great for companies filtering out resume spam but how about individuals trying to avoid recruiter spam?

And beside, really good engineers are never short of good offers.

It's standard operating procedure in our industry that when a manager or even a dev leaves, they always try to take the best engineers from their past job with them.

If it's not your first job out of school and you have to rely on throwing your CV in a black hole like SO Careers or Monster and hope to get offers from strangers you're doing something very wrong.

pchristensen4• 17 years ago

See another comment of mine on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=933490

Plus, if you're resume isn't remarkable, you might have to do some crappy work to build it up. Life's rough, but if you want something, there's no better way to get it than to earn it.

coriander4• 17 years ago

good engineers are never short of good offers

Actually a lot of programmers suck at networking and are terrible at job hunting.

This is a myth perpetuated by the you-get-what-you-deserve crowd who also believe that the homeless deserve to be where they are because they didn't play by the rules.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 17 years ago

This assumes that the place they're going to has openings for more than one person, or that the person they would take has the job requirements. Honestly, I have never seen what you describe in my 20 years in this industry.

The only times anyone has tried to "poach" me has been when a new company was starting up.

tomjen22• 17 years ago

The problem is that there is way of the developers to filter the companies - I don't want any company to be able to see my CV, I want much more info and control, if I am to pay (especially that much money) I want better service, uptime guarantees etc (I can't look a gift horse in the mouth, but only a moron will buy one without looking well at it) - and the Stack Overflow team will never go for that.

dusklight• 17 years ago

It is perhaps more accurate to say that the inflating prices are being used to artificially create scarcity, manipulating you into wanting to "get in" with a membership before the deadline.

As for the given reason for charging, "serious" job seekers will pay... Seriously desperate ones, who haven't been able to get jobs anywhere else. The best candidates often don't use job boards at all, because they don't need to, the companies look for them, but by charging, you are guaranteeing that the top quality candidates will not be participating.

Predictably Irrational and StackOverflow Careers

Related Stories