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Stack Overflow, a popular online community for developers, has announced Developer Story, a new feature that overhauls the traditional resume to better highlight developer strengths.
Developer Story enables developers to highlight the accomplishments most important to them. It is targeted at helping both programmers and employers by giving hiring managers a different view of potential hires so they can identify the best candidates.
“When Stack Overflow launched, it gave developers a better way to find answers,” reads a quote on the Developer Story page on Stack Overflow’s website. “Your Developer Story gives you a better way to find a job you love based on what you can do, not just where you worked.”
Indeed, the web page notes that Developer Story is better than CVs and resumes because the traditional resume format doesn’t fit a developer’s needs. The Developer Story shows that a programmer is more than a list of places they have worked. It indicates that assessing developers should be based on what they have built. The story enables developers to “highlight what matters most to you whether it’s a project you coded, a blog post you wrote, or a position you’ve held,” the website said.
According to the 2016 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 56 percent of developers do not have a college degree in computer science or related fields. Yet, in resume format, college education is prioritized over highlighting other key information like programming knowledge or showcasing a feature a developer built end to end, Stack Overflow said.
Also, in many instances on resumes, the list of new programming languages developers have learned or open source projects they have contributed to often gets relegated to the same extracurricular section as hobbies. However that information might be centrally important to a hiring manager looking to fill spots for a particular project that calls for the candidate’s unique skill set.
“Traditional resumes, with their emphasis on titles and pedigree, do a terrible job of conveying what a developer can do,” said Jay Hanlon, vice president of community growth at Stack Overflow, in a statement. “Developers are makers. You wouldn’t hire a designer based on static words on a page, so why hire a developer that way? The goal of Developer Story is to let developers share whatever it is that best conveys their skills, so we can match them with the companies that need them.”
Meanwhile, according the 2016 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, only 15 percent of developers are actively looking for a new job, but another 63 percent are open to opportunities. Developer Story enables companies to gain a more complete understanding of developers’ skills.
Coming from Stack Overflow, the new feature brings with it the strength and reputation of the popular online community. Stack Overflow officials said their organization is the largest and most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and advance their careers.
In fact, more than 40 million professional and aspiring programmers visit Stack Overflow each month to help solve coding problems, develop new skills, and find job opportunities, the company said.
For instance, in July, Stack Overflow launched the public beta of Stack Overflow Documentation, which is the company’s effort to help developers better document their software. The offering will enables developers to take static technical documentation and turn it into a set of evolving assets that developers can update continually and collaboratively with new use cases, implementations and integrations.