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.