SE Podcast #38 – This One”s At Least a 4/10

Welcome to Stack Exchange podcast #38 with Joel, Jay, David, and new special guest Will Cole, PM on the Careers team.  We're doing a deep dive into Careers today, as we have the launch of Careers in German coming up!

• Stack Overflow Careers 2.0 is launching in Germany! (Much has happened since the last time we talked about Careers 2.0 on the podcast.)

• So Will, tell us about Careers 2.0! Will gives us an overview about what it is and why it's awesome. It has two products: job listings and CV search. They are both neato.

• David and Joel discuss the background of why something like Careers 2.0 is necessary: resumes are awful for demonstrating what programmers know and can do.

• We have over 75,000 profiles in the CV search database, which is awesome. If you're looking to hire a programmer, we have 84,000 that you can have.

• The average old-school big company hiring department has separated the task of finding resumes from the task of hiring candidates, so they are a little confused when they're told to just check out Stack Overflow Careers 2.0.

• We are trying to take the work and the confusion out of the job of the hiring manager - kind of like a dating service, trying to make employers happy with their candidates and candidates happy with their new companies.

• We're disrupting the contingency recruiting model, because contingency recruiters' interests are not aligned with employers OR candidates.

• How come this localization took so long, Will? Because it turns out you can't just go in and replace a bunch of English strings with their German equivalents!

• Also, the site was not originally built with localization in mind, so the project was a little bit painful. Will and David walk us through the challenges the Careers team faced

• Next currencies: bitcoins, and Google Wallet. Joel bought a sweater with Google Wallet, and it's magical.

• Careers is hiring! Come join us in our new spectacular NYC office that we'll move into in early 2013. It feels like a boat except it's on the 27th and 28th floors. So a flying boat.

• We have no other topics to discuss, so we're going to continue talking about what's great about working for Stack Exchange. Free food! Cuban health care! Free MetroCards! Gym membership reimbursement! A beach party! We don't poke people with a sharp stick, and there's nothing else oppressive, either!

• People wear hats, especially winter-themed hats. Shouldn't we celebrate all those hats? Definitely! Last year, we ran a project called Hatdash on our site about video games.. It was a huge hit, so we're revamping the program this year for all sites that opt in. It will go live on December 19th. Hats!

• Joel teaches us about the nightly news in Israel. It would just run until they ran out of things to talk about, which meant you never knew when anything was going to be on after that.

• Next week on the Stack Exchange Podcast: Is this thing from the drug store killing you? We'll tell you next week!

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