> 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.
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.