The strange thing about this is that the StackOverflow team seems to think that people will use these reputation points for hiring decisions. They have little widgets you can embed into your site to display your reputation, and I've even heard them suggest that developers put it on their resumes.
I can't think of a better indicator of somebody not to hire than a guy with 10,000+ reputation on any community site. You can only get that sort of rep with a 4hr+/day commitment over a period of several months.
That time is pretty much guaranteed to happen at the office. I'd hate to have to take up the slack for one of those guys. Worse, I'd hate to have a room full of employees spending their days gaming StackOverflow on my dime.
I have 16K and I haven't spent 4 hours a day on it. I do spend some time at work on it, usually while I'm trying to distract myself from a problem so I can get a fresh perspective on it. I just answer a couple questions a day and eventually you start to stockpile rep. Old questions/answers get you rep like interest on a savings account.
I have the rep on my blog, because it has some perceived value amongst my professional peers (the .NET community) and there was recently a job I applied for where it actually was a useful number. That's the exception though since it's a unique opportunity. I would never put it directly on my resume, but I wouldn't hide it either.
Ha, great response Jason. Maybe it'll feed back to SO devs. These quality scoring crowd sourced systems need refinement. Although I'm a believer in emergent properties of large systems, the initial reputation should be tied to domain expertise. Let a group of really smart folks set the standard and promote intelligent answers.
I can't think of a better indicator of somebody not to hire than a guy with 10,000+ reputation on any community site. You can only get that sort of rep with a 4hr+/day commitment over a period of several months.
That time is pretty much guaranteed to happen at the office. I'd hate to have to take up the slack for one of those guys. Worse, I'd hate to have a room full of employees spending their days gaming StackOverflow on my dime.