As Jason pointed out in his reply, it’s not really just about reputation, but we do see the two things you mention as entirely related. ie: The primary problem in hiring developers is not in acquiring piles of resumes for the job, but actually in sourcing a handful of QUALIFIED candidates. In other words, it’s not about quantity, but the fit and quality of applicants feeding the hiring pipeline.
To get quality, you need good filters; filters in the form of what types of people who will even see the listings before applying and good filters for evaluating the applicants once they do apply. Most systems fail on both accounts because they target a mass audience of all job seekers (the dreamers, not just actual programmers) and the resumes they submit are easy to trump up and can be expensive to validate.
The cool thing about Stack Overflow is that the community is great for both types of filters. At the first level, basically everyone who is a programmer is coming to the site regularly and also conversely, for the most part, programmers are the only people coming to the site. Second, participation in Stack Overflow (to the extent that they actually contribute content) leaves behind a great peer reviewed bread crumb trail of their actual experience and programming knowledge. Therefore, this content is a great thing for programmers to be able to include and feature on their Stack Overflow Careers profiles and also good value add for prospective employers evaluating candidates.
I agree. It's an impressive interface. If this really proves to be a very desirable improvement from an end user perspective, it may take Bing YEARS to be able to duplicate the experience unless they had something like this in the works already. ie: It takes lots of coordinated effort to make something like this possible at scale. Congrats to the Google team!
As stated by another reply, part of it definitely is the shift from managing people to managing managers.
The other main shift is that the scope of what you are doing goes beyond what one person can keep in their head. You can't know everything going on any more and you can't be telling people exactly what to do.
The closest analogy I can come up with it that it's kind of the like difference between "procedural programming" which you can get away with for the $1M company as compared "object-oriented programming" for the $10M+ company.
You can't possibly know every detail of every object's design and at the same time you need to have techniques to discover how well all the objects in the company are being constructed and acting as the "system engineer" making sure all the "objects" (ie: teams) still interface together well.
When starting a business, if the idea is even reasonably good in a decent sized market and you stick to it, getting to $1M per year in revenue is not the hard part. In fact, after two companies of my own, it was almost too easy to get that far in each one. The hard part is making a decent amount of money at that revenue level because realistically you are going to have at least a few employees in the company to get there. ie: $1M isn't what it used to be.
In my experience, getting to $10M dollars should be the real goal and that proves to be quite a bit more challenging because this takes some real scale and the skills from 0 to $1M are quite a bit different that say the skills from $5M to $10M range....the job of CEO is completely different between the two and most people don't prove to be good at both types of the "jobs".....so the company hits a ceiling and never quite gets there.
To get quality, you need good filters; filters in the form of what types of people who will even see the listings before applying and good filters for evaluating the applicants once they do apply. Most systems fail on both accounts because they target a mass audience of all job seekers (the dreamers, not just actual programmers) and the resumes they submit are easy to trump up and can be expensive to validate.
The cool thing about Stack Overflow is that the community is great for both types of filters. At the first level, basically everyone who is a programmer is coming to the site regularly and also conversely, for the most part, programmers are the only people coming to the site. Second, participation in Stack Overflow (to the extent that they actually contribute content) leaves behind a great peer reviewed bread crumb trail of their actual experience and programming knowledge. Therefore, this content is a great thing for programmers to be able to include and feature on their Stack Overflow Careers profiles and also good value add for prospective employers evaluating candidates.