Magical Mystery Talent Algo Tour

DEV.BIZ.OPS
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

I had something else in mind to chat about this week, but I got distracted by this awesome post by one of our developers. Hopefully you will indulge me in a bit of Stack Overflow navel-gazing, but this really is an amazingly insightful and transparent look into how the proverbial sausage gets made.

Most people that I speak with have little idea how Stack Overflow stays in business. They just use it without much thought beyond that. You are a more in the know since you are a reader of this blog and probably know a bit about our Enterprise solution. But there are other ways we keep the lights on as our Director of Architecture shared in a post “How We Make Money at Stack Overflow”.

Which brings me to the post I mentioned that digs into the code behind our Talent business. We are radically transparent about many of the things we do here, so walking through the steps of how we built our job matching algorithm was enlightening. To deliver something relevant to our users was not some instant revelation, but a series of iterations, and failures, to get the slightly better each time.

This highlights for me two things. One, our commitment to making our products great, even if it initially leads us down the wrong path. Stack Overflow Enterprise was itself a failed experiment six years back. We learned a lot since then however and now have a stellar team, approach and product. Two, our job matching algos are pretty damn spot on, and there is more to come to further refine our results. Which means the best place for companies to find talented developers is getting even better.

I have a bunch of ideas for next week’s post, but I would love to hear from you on what you care about most or what I can pull back the covers on in the Stack world.

Why does ++[[]][+[]]+[+[]] return the string “10”?

A fascinating question exposing some of the more arcane aspects of Javascript.


I help senior IT leaders and companies solve the challenges involved in digital transformation and moving towards a developer-centric culture that delivers innovation and customer value. In my day job, you can find me here.

DEV.BIZ.OPS

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Thoughts on developers, digital transformation, enterprise agility, community building & software engineering culture. Author 👉 https://twitter.com/marksbirch

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