It seems like just two months ago (OK, it was exactly two months ago) that I announced our last batch of new hires.  Today I’m pleased to introduce our newest employees.  There are TEN of them … so get comfy and prepare to learn all about our latest hires, who seem to have an overall fondness for food, sports, music, and the great outdoors.

Jessica Brady, Associate Sales Representative (Careers 2.0)

New York

Jessica was born and raised in warm, sunny Florida, until she packed up and moved to less warm, less sunny Chicago for non-weather-related reasons (okay, it was school). She has lived in New York and worked in television for the last four years, but is excited to make the leap into a brand new industry at a great company like Stack Exchange. In her spare time, Jessica likes to run for fun, take in a baseball game (TV, radio, or in person), hang out with her four-legged friend Cash (like Johnny)…and yes, watch TV.

Marco Cecconi, Web Developer (Core)

London

Marco is from Milan, Italy, and he has been traveling around the world for some years. He studied in Singapore, then worked in France, Portugal, and finally settled in the UK for the past four years where he lives in Kent with his wife and kid.  He goes by the handle of Sklivvz on the Stack Exchange network, where he has been a contributor since November 2008 and moderator on Skeptics since February 2011.

Pieter DePree, Recruiter

New York

Native to sunny Florida, Pieter decided to trade in his flip flops and board shorts for a piece of the good life here in the Big Apple.  Pieter has a passion for travel and has, at last count, traveled to 27 countries including a year spent living abroad in China. Previously, Pieter has been responsible for high volume regional sales recruitment at ADP, as well as the national sales recruitment at Seamless! Outside of work, you might find Pieter hiking, sailing, or playing volleyball.  Pieter is very excited to be helping Stack Exchange grow its global sales teams!

Jim Egan, Sales Representative (Careers 2.0)

Denver

Originally from the south side of Chicago, Jim now feels the need to argue with people in bars that Chicago is the greatest city in the world. He’s passionate about the Bears, Bulls, Blackhawks, and White Sox, so Jim couldn’t imagine a better sports town. Leaving that behind and moving to the Rockies was tough but needed.  Armed with his trusty sidekick Loomis (pictured here, left), Jim plans to conquer the mountains and everything Denver has to offer. An avid crock-potter and terrible at accents, Jim hopes to fit in nicely.

Paul Frey, Account Executive (Careers 2.0)

London

Paul has lived in London since May 2010 and he loves it!  He was born and grew up in Cologne, Germany. Due to this fact he’s a big supporter of his local football club, FC Koeln. But he doesn’t just watch sports; he also loves to be very active, playing European handball up the third German division, and also squash and football. But his biggest passion is cooking and eating! His cooking style is experimental and cross culture…he never uses recipes, he just combines the things he knows and likes. Most of the time his cooking tastes good. ;-)

Todd Jenkins, Sales Representative (Careers 2.0)

London

Todd originally hails from Boston (UK not US!) but now lives in London. He’s looking forward to transferring his sales skills to Stack Exchange! He really enjoys trying new foods and new restaurants, and he has a great love of the outdoors and adventurous walks. Apart from enjoying friends’ company in London’s nightlife, he does try to keep very sporty, although he admits shamefully that his two favourite sports are the two he’s the worst at (tennis and swimming). Todd is also a huge fan of Liverpool Football Club!!

Shikha Malhotra, Account Executive (Careers 2.0)

London

Shikha grew up in Brussels / Belgium and has an Indian background. She has been living in London for over 6 years, and is super excited to join Stack Exchange’s growing UK sales team. During her spare time you will find “DJ Shake” mixing the latest Bollywood tunes with a mix of French hip-hop and Arabic flavor, reading books, and learning to play the “Dhol” (Indian drum).

Pawel Michalak, Sales Representative (Careers 2.0)

London

Pawel is from Poznan, Poland and has lived in England for 7 years. He studied journalism and PR, and used to play handball (the best European sport ever!) quite seriously. He’s upgraded to playing football (the best international sport ever!), and can be found on London football pitches falling over, or screaming “Go Arsenal!” in support of the best football team in the world. You might see him on the road scooting cheerfully on his Vespa between angry Londoners stuck in traffic. He’s very excited about starting at Stack, as you can see here (CTAPT means START in Russian).

Bryan Ross, Web Developer (Careers 2.0)

Denver

An LA native, Bryan Ross (everybody just calls him “Ross”) moved to Denver in 2010 after being chewed up and spit out by the rock music industry. A self-taught developer of 15 years, he has an unhealthy interest in language design, expensive keyboards, strong coffee, and music. When he’s not nitpicking about the merits of various programming acronyms, he can usually be found writing, recording, and mixing in his home studio.

Derek Still, Sales Representative (Careers 2.0)

New York

Derek spent the first three years of his career in equity sales & trading, and is excited about making the move to a growing firm with unlimited upside like Stack Exchange. He grew up in Philadelphia, spent summers in Cape Cod, and moved to the concrete jungle in 2010. Outside of the office, Derek spends his time traveling, rooting on Philadelphia sports teams (Go Birds), listening to the Grateful Dead, and hanging out with his brothers and friends.

Visit our careers page to learn all the reasons Stack Exchange is a ridiculously awesome place to work. Want to see your face in our next new hire announcement? Here’s who we need:

Web Developer (NYC or telecommute)

Senior Product Designer (NYC or telecommute)

Sales Representative / Account Executive (London)

Sales Representative / Account Executive (Denver)

Sales Representative / Account Executive (NYC)

Senior Account Executive, Digital Ad Sales (NYC)

Community Manager (NYC)

Community Manager (telecommute)

Customer & Sales Support Agent (London)

Customer & Sales Support Agent (Denver)

Inbound Marketing Manager (NYC)

Marketing Manager, EMEA (London)

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When we launched Careers 2.0 back in 2011, we set out with a goal: make the job search process better for the millions of programmers who visit our site every month. Part of achieving this goal is educating employers about what you want from them. In the past, our annual user survey helped us help companies change the way they found and hired programmers, while Joel’s book on how to find the best technical talent and his talk on how to stand out and attract top talent are a few other examples of how we’ve worked to educate tech companies on what you really want.

Today, we’re taking this one step further:

Announcing the Employer Resource Center on Careers 2.0

Employers are having a really hard time getting programmers to work for them — hardly a day goes by without another article, blog post or Tweet attesting to this. A study last year found that as many as 93% of employers find a disparity between the technical skills required and the level of the talent they’re able to find while recruiting. As a result, talented programmers are in incredibly high demand, putting you in a position to demand the best jobs, perks, and benefits.

In the Employer Resource Center, we offer advice on best practices, recruitment news and trends, case studies and product guides to help employers with developer hiring. We’ll be updating the content regularly (mostly via the new Careers 2.0 blog), so check back often! If you have any tips you think employers should know about hiring developers, please leave a note in the comments below.

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Our guest this week (after she joins a bit late) is Zuly Gonzalez – Stack Exchange moderator and power user.  As usual, we also have David Fullerton, Jay Hanlon, Joel Spolsky and (Fake) Producer Alex!

• Things are a mess over here, not just because we have to remember to stop masticating long enough to talk about podcast things. We’re moving offices! The office is full of crates into which we have to pack all our stuff before we move.
• The new office is going to be awesome. It has hexagonal offices, and we don’t remember if we’ve talked about this before.
• We have three chefs competing to be the chef for the new Stack Exchange office, and it’s apparently a very desirable position, because they keep bribing Joel with treats.
• What’s really going on? Our Tridion site went into public beta. It’s different from the one that sounds like Magneto!
• For very small and/or very new sites, Joel thinks it might be useful to be able to email opted-in users every time a new question comes in.
• Let’s talk about the new user homepage, shall we? It’s exciting! We’ve been doing a lot of work about new user experience, and the homepage new users now see will finally be optimized for helping them figure out what to do next.
• Meanwhile, our guest has arrived! Welcome, Zuly! She’s a moderator on OnStartups as well as a co-founder of Light Point Security, a web security startup that provides malware protection through the use of cloud-based web browsing.
• Zuly walks us through some of the history of OnStartups, the things that make the site work really well and ways in which the site could be improved.
• So what’s the prognosis? Zuly would like to see people get more involved with the community aspect of the site, and with moderation.
• Moving on to questions of security. Zuly (and Joel) observe a move in the field of IT Security away from detection and protection against major threats and toward isolation (the Battlestar Galactica defense).
• Jay thinks everyone screaming homophobic slurs into Xbox headsets is German. Nobody is completely sure why.
• Jay wonders, what about real people? What things should normal people be thinking about in terms of security that most people still don’t do?
• One other very serious question: Is Zuly’s dog cuter than Joel’s dog? Dog Talk ensues!
• Time to discuss a Meta question: how can we stop premature deletion?

That’s a wrap! You’ve been listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #46 with special guest Zuly Gonzalez and the rest of the regular gang! Join us next time from our brand new podcast studio – it’s going to be awesome (but the podcast will still be terrible).

SE Podcast #46 - The Podcast That Sounds Dirty But Isn't [ 52:32 ] Download

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Our guest this week is Eric Lippert – language architect extraordinaire and famous for all his work at Microsoft in developing their languages

• Eric joined Microsoft right out of college and was originally working on VB
• It’s time for everyone’s favorite game: Name the Worst Feature of that Microsoft Technology!
• If you’re a non-programmer and still listening, make sure to email us for your free prize
• Eric now builds “static analysis” programs which actually means something real when he’s talking about it
• We actually have some listener questions this week!
• First up – what problems with C# would Eric fix with magical genie powers?
• But wait, there’s a second one he wants to change too!
• David has some interesting stuff to talk about! Make sure to check out Sustainable Living
• Check out the meta question (its a problem we have to deal with a lot): Lots of not-always-useful but well-intentioned answers
• A public service announcement: please don’t forget how to dog
• Make sure to check out Eric’s great blog at EricLippert.com
• Our designer Jin points out that Eric is not only a contributor to Stack Exchange, but also to the popular tumblr: Programmer Ryan Gosling

Join us next week!

SE Podcast #43 - Keeping it Sharp [ 56:15 ] Download

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It’s time once again to cast your vote for the next Stack Overflow moderators. The primaries have just ended, and the top ten candidates can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/election.

Why more moderators?

We’re running the election now (rather than a year from the last election in June) because veteran moderator Tim Post is stepping down in order to work with us as a Community Manager! While we’re extremely lucky to have his hard-working brilliance brought to bear on the problems we face managing all these sites, his transition does create an immediate need for a replacement on the SO mod team.

But of course, we’d be running an election soon anyway; as amazing as the current Stack Overflow moderators are, the workload continues to grow:

What moderators do

Jeff laid out the basic philosophy in A Theory of Moderation:

Moderators are human exception handlers, there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally happen, but when they do, they can bring your entire community to a screaming halt — if you don’t have human exception handling in place.

As the previous graph indicates, flags – the primary embodiment of those exceptions – are a fairly frequent occurrence on Stack Overflow, purely because of its size. That said, a lot of flags aren’t identifying things that are particularly exceptional: in particular, posts that need to be closed (duplicates, off-topic questions, etc) or are of extremely poor quality aren’t all that uncommon on a site that gets over 7000 new questions and 11K answers each day. While moderators are well-equipped to handle these quickly, they don’t actually require moderators when a sufficient number of experienced users are willing and able to help.

The effects of improved community moderation tools

I mentioned last year that we were working on tools that would help to distribute the load more evenly between the elected moderators and the community as a whole. Well, eight months after their introduction, I’m happy to report that the revamped Review system is doing exactly that:

As Jeff wrote:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.

That’s not empty rhetoric – on a site the size of Stack Overflow, it’s absolutely essential. Geoff Dalgas came up with the design for the new review system based on his observations of wikiHow’s Community Dashboard: individual tasks, each focused on a specific need with specific actions to be taken and specific guidance provided for new users. The philosophy: don’t just give people stuff to do – help them learn how to do it.

Geoff, Emmett and Kevin have done some amazing work in making these new tools as fast and effective as possible; while there have been some growing pains and a few unexpected challenges, it’s great to see folks jumping in to help so enthusiastically. In the past 30 days, we’ve seen:

• 9384 suspected low-quality posts cleared, 1608 deleted, 319 edited.
• 30339 suggested edits approved, 15497 rejected, 4949 improved
• 17434 posts that’d been voted or flagged for closure closed, 3308 left open, 376 edited
• 571 posts reopened, 2203 left closed, 56 edited

(a detailed breakdown of actions to first posts and late answers can be found here.)

That’s a lot of work being done by a lot of people… Heady stuff. To be sure, that still leaves a huge amount of work for elected moderators, but I think it demonstrates the ability of the whole community to step up and assist when the opportunity is provided, that thousands of you are still willing and able to work together to created and maintain the site that you want to be a part of.

So as you go to cast your votes today, looking over each candidate’s stats and reflecting on what they’d do as a moderator… Remember that moderation doesn’t start with winning an election.

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