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A lot of answers on here suggest linking to your Stack Overflow account on your CV. I only have 300 some points over on Stack Overflow, so I don't think I'll be mentioning it just yet.

Still, I'm curious to know how much reputation I should get before "boasting" about it on my CV.

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    Having a few quality responses from someone who is new to the site is not bad.
    – JeffO
    Sep 10, 2011 at 19:57

3 Answers 3

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In some post on careers.SE Joel pointed out (edit: See @Atul's answer), that actual rep is not so much what matters. What you should do, is to add links to answers (or questions) that you think really show your knowledge and skill.

In fact, rep has two major problems:

  • it follows some weird group dynamics. There's a lot of uneven amplification effects, that distort it even as a measure for the "absolute" value of an answer.
  • using it as a measure for a whole person basically dumbs it down to measuring something very individual and complex on a linear scale.

However your profile as a whole tells a story. One can see, whether you're a specialist, or a generalist. One can quickly see your top answers and questions, to see what you master and what intrigues you. Your style of writing reflects on your personality and so on.

I guess the point where you should use your SE profile as part of your CV is the point when you like the story it tells.

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Seeing as you can get +1000 rep by simply suggesting edits (which get accepted), I would say that the actual rep is not as important as the quality of your questions and answers.

Simply post that you participate in SO/Programmers with a link to your profiles and let these speak for themselves. The fact that you participate in the community is more important than rep.

If you have anything that you are particularly proud of, link to that.

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    Even worse than edits are some populistic questions and answers that pull 300 upvotes for being the first to give a funny answer.
    – Job
    Sep 10, 2011 at 20:56
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    @Job - true, though if they do attract such high upvotage (?) it tends to be very quickly and most of the rep that would have been accumulated will end up not added as result of the daily rep cap (200 atm).
    – Oded
    Sep 10, 2011 at 20:58
  • @Oded: unless the period in which it attracts attention happens to span multiple days. In that case you can still get double (or more) the daily rep cap.
    – Marjan Venema
    Sep 11, 2011 at 8:12
  • I challenge you to find a 300 upvote answer that was more funny than technical, and not community-wiki.
    – Eric Wilson
    Sep 12, 2011 at 14:52
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Careers 2.0: It’s About Reputation, Not “Rep” Take a look at this SO Blog posting.

As Joel Spolsky says in the blog post (I boldfaced that last line to highlight it):

But more importantly, sheer reputation scores are not how Careers 2.0 works, and it’s not what Careers 2.0 hiring managers are looking for. What they want to see is a sample of your work. They don’t need to see your answers to 7000 questions—they want to see five really good ones.

So, (as also suggested by others) it's the quality not quantity that matters.

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