[vibragiel]

Well it can't hurt.

Of course, you can't fully describe a person by just a number. It's theoretically possible that a highly reputed Stack Overflow user could be an awful programmer at work, but I'm sure that the intersection of "highly reputed SO users" and "people you'd regret to hire for a programmer position" is a very tiny set.

I think that number contains much more significant information for that kind of position than whatever you could extract from a CV or an interview.

[troels]

From a CV, yes. From an interview?

Maybe I'm just naïve.

[vibragiel]

How thorough would an interview need to be to match thousands of thumbs ups by thousands of tech-savvy (to say the least) people?

[troels]

OK, point taken. But it's very different kinds of information that you can pick up in an interview vs. some kind of metric (Be it SO score or diplomas).

[dtby]

Well it can't hurt.

Sure it can, if I think you are more invested in your badge-earning game mechanics than in the money-earning game-mechanics for which I pay you.

Of course, the chances that I review your SO score with this mindset seem relatively low, since in order to cover this possibility, I also need to check out your GamerTag, gear score, and Wikipedia edit history.