Last week LinkedIn reminded me I have worked for the same company for eight years. In the same role. By coincidence Jeff Atwood [codinghorror.com] published a new post on his blog a few days later, What Does Stack Overflow Want to be When it Grows Up [codinghorror.com]. Jeff’s blog is in my feed because I was fairly early user on Stack Overflow [stackoverflow.com], though I had already left day-to-day programming, a choice driven by the economics of making a good living as a techie in Singapore. Coding was the only career I ever wanted but it lost out in the end to wanting to live and travel outside the US and getting married. I moved into development management and then into solution architecture, so I don’t have a lot of chance to practice software engineering or programming.
In his post Jeff mentions the “people reached” feature of Stack Overflow:
Stack Overflow later added a super neat feature to highlight this core value in user profiles, where it shows how many other people you have potentially helped with your contributed questions and answers so far.
So I checked mine:
Almost one million people! Wow. But much more impressive, to me, is this stat:
“Top 10% overall“. I have not contributed to Stack Overflow in years and I’ve still managed to crack the top 10%. I’m proud of that. Anyone want to hire me to go back to writing code?