Alright, I'm sold. The best developers are also active members of the Stack Overflow community.
That being said, I run a small startup - small enough that I'm both the CEO and lead developer. We're at the point where I need to start doing more of the CEO stuff, and delegate at least some of our development work (as much as it pains me) by hiring some part-time or freelance help from other developers.
Hey, SO can sell me that! The only problem is, I don't have $495/mo to run an ad, or $1000/mo to actively search and recruit.
No problem, I'll just hunt around on one of the bajillion freelancer sites out there. There's just one problem with this strategy - and once again, SO is spot on about it:
Developers are mostly passive job seekers: they’re not always visiting job boards, but they do visit Stack Overflow to get solutions to their coding challenges they encounter daily.
I agree, and strongly believe that SO could give me access to more and possibly higher-quality developers than say, your typical freelance-for-hire directory/profile site.
I also see SO unique as a recruiting resource, because it is a community built by developers, for developers. Freelancing directories seem to be geared towards pressed suits who know nothing or next-to-nothing about software design and development - their target customer is someone who "just wants an app", and the profiles pander to that.
I want a place where developers sell themselves to other developers. Somewhere that I can search for developers based on the deep, well-thought questions they ask about SOLID, or dependency injection, or what really constitutes a RESTful web application, instead of a list of Wordpress plugins they know how to configure (red alert!)
I'm not criticizing SO's pricing structure for large companies looking to hire full-time employees (after all, $495/mo is a drop in the bucket if you can net a team that brings in millions of dollars a year for your company). But, it is a big expense for us if we don't find someone who ends up working out.
If we were at the point where we're ready to bring on a full-time employee, I'd shell out in a heartbeat. In the meantime, what if SO careers provided a more affordable tier for people like me - engineers and developers who are just beginning to see some success in their own companies and are ready to look for some part-time or freelance help?