Building a (much) worse mousetrap…

So Stack Overflow is revolutionizing the resume you guys!  Everything is going to be better now!   SO glad the guys who built the world’s foremost website for providing totally not-at-all arrogant answers to technical questions have entered the already crowded fray of trying to improve technical recruiting.

Seriously, is this necessary?  Did the global community of software engineers/developers/programmers really need another place to maintain an online presence?  It’s not like we’re not already inundated with a ton of different places that need our attention.  I’ve been rather unfortunate in my recent employment past in that my longest stint in the last six years has been about two years total, so I’ve had to do quite a lot of job searching in the last half-decade.  Each time I’ve done this I have had to go through the following routine.

1. Check e-mail account, both your normal personal e-mail account and the spam trap that you provide to job boards like Monster, Dice, etc.
2. Check LinkedIn, find the typical “connect with me” invites from random recruiters that you’ve never met which serve to do nothing except connect you with someone you don’t know and who will never help you with finding a job.  However, you put time in on LinkedIn, it’s kind of like a Bonsai tree, it doesn’t really do anything but some people might find it interesting or aesthetically pleasing.
3. Go to job board sites to try and find opportunities, which means wading through a lot of garbage “SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER WANTED, Salary: 50 – 60k/year” type listings.
4. Maintain a set of personal projects and use GitHub actively so that potential employers will see that you’re a special shiny genius that they NEED to hire.
5. Practice algorithm based interview questions in CTCI, on Interview Cake, etc.  Stay sharp on these so that you can knock them out when given one in an interview.
   1. Practice on a whiteboard.
   2. Practice in a word processing app.
   3. Practice on lined notebook paper.
      1. Make sure you talk out loud to no one in particular while you practice so you’re comfortable talking through the process of solving the problem when in an interview.
   4. Practice with a peacock-feather quill on papyrus because being in the software industry means being a modern-day alchemist and not using industry standard tools and being able to make gold out of lead.
   5. Learn and re-learn algorithmic complexity notation and practice estimating complexity on all of the aforementioned algorithm practice questions.
6. Keep resume up to date, make sure that you go back to the aforementioned job board sites to post your most up-to-date resume.
7. Field calls from recruiters.
   1. Answer uninformed questions about an obscure tech that you haven’t used in 4 or 5 years.
8. Crawl Stack Overflow in the hopes of finding an unanswered question that isn’t a duplicate and won’t simply be deleted by some moderator someday so that you can answer it and hopefully have your answer accepted so that it looks like you’re just a terrific developer and everybody will want to hire you.

Repeat all of this daily until you get an interview, and then scramble to keep up with it while you prepare for said interview.

Oh, and the folks at Stack Overflow now wants you to add updating their little pet project to this list too.  Now, I understand why recruiters and developers might want better options for finding jobs and getting talented candidates to fill said jobs.  Hiring engineers is different from hiring sales associates or marketing managers, however, if my list didn’t already give you this impression then let me be explicit; the practice of hiring in the tech industry is hopelessly fractured.

One of the most troubling aspects of this fracturing is that everybody is convinced that they are going to be the one to build a better mousetrap.  Everybody thinks that they have the magical silver bullet that will be the Gutenberg press of hiring engineers.  It’s really quite disheartening that what Stack Overflow thinks the industry needs is a way to pile a boatload of CSS and JS over top of the existing content of the average CV.  It’s really not that innovative and just creates more overhead for the already overburdened engineer.