Which web site gives the most accurate indication of a programmer's capabilities?
- by Jerry Coffin
If you were hiring programmers, and could choose between one of (say) the top 100 coders on topcoder.com, or one of the top 100 on stackoverflow.com, which would you choose?
At least to me, it would appear that topcoder.com gives a more objective evaluation of pure ability to solve problems and write code. At the same time, despite obvious technical capabilities, this person may lack any hint of social skills -- he may be purely a "lone coder", with little or no ability to help/work with others, may lack mentoring ability to help transfer his technical skills to others, etc.
On the other hand, stackoverflow.com would at least appear to give a much better indication of peers' opinion of the coder in question, and the degree to which his presence and useful and helpful to others on the "team". At the same time, the scoring system is such that somebody who just throws up a lot of mediocre (or even poor answers) will almost inevitably accumulate a positive total of "reputation" points -- a single up-vote (perhaps just out of courtesy) will counteract the effects of no fewer than 5 down-votes, and others are discouraged (to some degree) from down-voting because they have to sacrifice their own reputation points to do so. At the same time, somebody who makes little or no technical contribution seems unlikely to accumulate a reputation that lands them (even close to) the top of the heap, so to speak.
So, which provides a more useful indication of the degree to which this particular coder is likely to be useful to your organization? If you could choose between them, which set of coders would you rather have working on your team?
