Podcast #52 – We Didn”t Need Headphones

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #52 with your hosts Joel Spolsky, David Fullerton and Jay Hanlon. Today's show is brought to you by Marmite Yeast Extract - you either love it, or hate it! (You probably hate it.) Joining us today are Careers 2.0 Marketing Coordinator Bethany Marzipan, er, Marzewski and Careers 2.0 Product Manager Will Cole.

• Site Milestones: Space continues to be all around us, everywhere. It's also a Stack Exchange site, but we've talked about it already.

• Our new milestone is Digital Fabrication, which will probably be in public beta by the time this podcast airs. It's about modern iterative manufacturing (3D printing, for example).

• New Features: Our Android alpha is continuing, and we now have someone working on the iOS version (but that's a long way away from alpha). Another minor change: we got rid of the automatic downvote from the Community user when a question got closed. Since you no longer have to pay 1 rep to downvote a question, this was no longer really necessary.

• Featured Site: Skeptics! This is a great example of a site whose community has taken the engine in a very interesting, odd, and wholly successful new direction.

  • This is Doubting Thomas.

  • It's sort of like the MythBusters (who folded a piece of paper eight times)… except better!

  • Skeptics has rules you can't break: your question must reference a _notable_claim, and the answers must have referenced sources.

  • Examples:

    • Will a mother bird abandon her young if touched by a human?

    • Did people think the Earth was flat?

    • Is there any evidence of a "mosquito line"?

    • Do expensive, "premium" speaker cables actually make a difference?

• And now we turn to our guests! Let's talk about recruiting programmers. Recruiters are terrible. They make people take down their LinkedIn profiles just to avoid getting messages from headhunters. Our hosts and our guests step through the issues related to recruiting developers, and how to solve them. (Good thing we're working on a way to fix the problem, too! It will be perfect in 6-8 weeks.)

• Also, Jeff Atwood designed a keyboard.

• If your employer isn't great at recruiting, have them check out the Careers 2.0 Blog. Bethany and the rest of the team are building up a compendium of great information for hiring employers over there.

Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #52. Marmite may be stored at room temperature, even after it's been opened.

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