Don't forget Kuro5hin!

I had the idea I'd be able to attract some consulting clients if I answered lots of questions at StackOverflow.

I expect that would work well were I to keep it up, but after just one day of devoted overflowing, I came to the conclusion that my brain would explode were I to persist.

Does this work for anyone other than the top few posters?

I have quietly accumulated 13k rep on electronics.stackexchange, but I don't think it's much use to me.

When StackOverflow first arrived on the scene, I spent a bunch of time trying to catch Jon Skeet. I found that answering the questions was a great way of procrastinating, and in some ways, good therapy for dealing with a tedious work environment. While I found it satisfying to start with, eventually I realized that it was just an impedance on my work day and there were many more interesting endeavors to pour my energy into.

I have been contacted by several (!) recruiters of Google after answering some very specific questions about a distributed consensus protocol (Paxos). I can imagine they rather search for specific topics / keywords than reputation, using the logic "if he can get the accepted answer on these topics, he might be worth checking out".

I myself once scored a firewire consulting contract as a direct result of answering question's on Apple's firewire developer list.

However that contract came several years after I answered the question.

To the extent I do stuff like post to stackoverflow, I don't expect it to pay off soon.

Stackoverflow makes it difficult to hire people. (I've tried and given up.) There is no way to send somebody a private message saying "You obviously know what you are doing here. Can I pay you a lot of money to do that for me?"

Isn't that the point of careers.stackexchange.com?

My observation after just one day of very determined SO posting, was that if I persisted like that for about a week, I would be the #1 poster for that week.

I expect that I could stay in the top ten over a long period of time with far less sustained effort.

The reason I didn't persist was that I wasn't able to get anything else done.

"But employers might want to look at your SO score when you apply for a job!"

This seems to be the bad result of people turning gamification into real world results: you encourage people to pour lots of resources into a metric to get the real world result, which might be a complete waste of time.

A better recruiting tactic would be to find someone who answered so much as one question, then examine the quality of their answer.

Suppose someone posted Fermat's Last Conjecture to Stackoverflow, in hopes of getting advice as to how to prove it. Were someone to produce that proof, they would be demonstrating their superiority to three hundred years of the world's very finest mathematicians.

But yes, my experience is completely correct - to the extent someone looks for stuff like stackoverflow at all, all they want to know is that I've answered something, even if my answer was stupid.

My pet peeve is that online application forms commonly as for my "github". How about my sourceforge? How about the repository that I host myself?

I expect that most of those who request my github don't really know the difference between a github and a hubcap.

Your post made me sad, as I was momentarily reminded of K5, and needed to check it out to make sure it was still dead. And then of course I went on to try Memepool as well, but that site doesn't even respond anymore.

I'm too young to feel this nostalgic about websites.

Just yesterday I got some spam from fark. My ex was heavily into fark back in the day.

It's not so much that I was nostalgic for fark. Finding its spam in my inbox, reminded me of the love Bonita and I once had.