Why do people want to pad their rep? I have nearly 14K "rep" on SO, never had any positive effect on my career whatsoever.
Also, theoretically (never happened), if someone mentioned their exceptional SE profile on their resume or their cover letter, I'd for sure ask them some details from the topics they suggest to be experts on.
Will they also bring ChatGPT to the interview? That'd be fun to watch.
> Why do people want to pad their rep? I have nearly 14K "rep" on SO, never had any positive effect on my career whatsoever.
If you are an applicant to a position where there are 5000 resumes submitted and the people doing the filter want a quick and easy numerical ranking of them - provide your Stack Overflow account.
At that point, they can look up your rep and pick the best ones based on that.
This doesn't happen as much in US based companies as there are other metrics that they can use to filter candidates rather than SO rep.
However, if you are in India and applying to a consultancy and every resume and transcript are very similar to the point of not being able to distinguish between them - SO rep provides a very easy way to rank and filter applicants.
Unfortunately, I can't verify this. I've only heard it second hand but it does make sense and helps explain why I occasionally get SO account and stats on resumes from contractors.
> Will they also bring ChatGPT to the interview? That'd be fun to watch.
It is already done, as I've heard. The previous iteration was to pay your lookalike to pass the interview for you. Or just pay anyone and blame lack of camera on "technical difficulties".
Because a bunch of dumbass software companies (especially the sweatshop ones) decided that your annual review now needs to include a bunch of dumbass "open source software social work" or you get dinged on your review.
So, Github contributions, Stack Overflow moderation, etc. all became subject to Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
ChatGPT is just accelerating this contamination of the well to all-out flooding of it with industrial sewage.
It is _effort_ to moderate content, to read answers and see if they are legitimate. It is almost zero effort to chatgpt out "answers".
The people providing the ChatGPT answers _do not care_ about them, they are only looking to pad their Rep.
It is an attack against the very core of the StackExchange system.