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A comment on One Year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow. Parent comment

Re:One Year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow by marketforlemmas on Tuesday June 21, 2016 @07:20AM (#11944899)
I don't think advertising for jobs is a zero-sum game, especially if the matching algorithm is good enough to match employers and employees that had no knowledge of each other before. If you are able to reduce those search frictions, you have created value. Several economic professors won the Nobel prize for their work in this area:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/the-work-behind...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_theory

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Re:One Year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow by amelius on Tuesday June 21, 2016 @08:01AM (#11945038)
Well, those Nobel prizes are for a specific theory. In practice, in this case, you see developers looking to get problems solved (or solving problems), and getting distracted to look for another job. So even if you are removing market friction, there's a huge cost in people switching (or even getting distracted all the time). In my opinion, if people are looking for a job, they should go to a job-hunting website (even if it has lower-quality data about them).

Anyway, it would be nice to have the effects properly quantified.

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Re:One Year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow by var_explained on Tuesday June 21, 2016 @01:40PM (#11947659)
There are many developers looking for a good job. There are many companies having difficulty finding qualified developers.

Our goal is to solve those problems, and it is not a zero-sum game.

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