A question with absolutely no relevance to myself:
How would a programmer with a stellar SO reputation (like 30k+) market his or herself to poential employers/investors who have never heard of SO? In other words, how can one describe SO in a few sentences that will make a high reputation sound impressive at an interview?
In an interview, you wait for the right question. Something about "how do you keep current with technology today", or possibly "would you describe yourself as active in the developer community" (a question you are much more likely to be asked if it says "active in the developer community" on your resume) and then you say something about SO and how it's "a question and answer site where other users award you reputation points for good answers and good questions" and then give your score in really round numbers and then translate into English like "which puts me in the top 1% of users on the site. I'm happy to be recognized as helpful in the technologies I use a lot."
On your resume, you could simply include your SO handle in the contact section, along with your Twitter handle and link to your blog, assuming they're technically relevant. People who recognize it will go check your rep. People who've never heard of it won't learn anything from a simple sentence on the resume.
If you have 30K+ reputation on SO and the employer doesn't even know what StackOverflow is, I think you shouldn't be really interested in working for that employer.
In the case of investors, I don't think any are going to be interested in your SO reputation (even if they know it)...
Your reputation doesn't make you a guru. It just means you spend a lot of time here and tend to post helpful stuff. Particularly in the early days of SO, you could get a massive reputation spike just for posting a funny cartoon or joke.
Your reputation could come with a negative: What if the employer decides that a high reputation means you'll spend all day posting instead of working?
Don't sell your reputation, this is only remarkable in the community but meaningless outside of it...
The best you coiuld do is to include a reference to your list of answers in your CV.
Frankly, I'd be nervous about mentioning a 30K rep during a job interview, because it is blatantly clear you don't get a rep that high by only answering questions outside of work hours. While some employers may be cool with that, I wouldn't count on it unless you had some indication they were SO addicts themselves.
I include my SO profile directly on my resume and consider it to be just as important as the education. It gives the employer a way to look into how you communicate and what your current level of knowledge is.
If you're interviewing for a really good company, likely you will be interviewed by your future peers. Depending on the type of job, if your future peers don't know what stackoverflow is there is probably a problem with that company and you probably don't want to work there.
Also I wouldn't say that I had X rep, instead I would say that I am within the top 0.01% of SO users, or whatever that number is, and that I am ranked at the top of technology X, Y, and Z which is what you are looking for.
Dunno about 30K+. I only got 8.6K but I'm overall 2nd place for the language I got hired for, which actually was one of the things that got me my current job. I put it in my CV in the section "participation in relevant online communities".
No, you can't. Please don't. We despise you.
Seriously, I think posting well-thought, well-organized answers to non-trivial questions qualifies as a way to practice technical communication, as is careful reading of other people's great writings on SO.
Depending on the position you are interviewing for, technical communication may be an important and marketable skill, especially if the position is not entry-level. In this case, you should be able to demonstrate your writing and verbal skills without directly mentioning SO.
I would only mention it if one of the people interviewing me was a developer, and the opportunity presented itself.
I would avoid mentioning it at all to the management / administration type people. Even if they knew what it was they'd think that you had acquired such a high reputation score at the expense of getting things done. I know that's not fair, and that the whole thing has to have people CONTRIBUTING as well as CONSUMING, but all other things being equal it could be a detriment.
Is your reputation on StackOverflow going to help the company make money?
Is your reputation on StackOverflow something that will let the manager get projects done faster?
There are exactly two things that programming managers care about, and that's making the company money, and by extension, getting stuff done faster. If your "skill" doesn't specifically support that, then it's not a skill, and nobody cares.
