I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
As far as gamification goes, I believe I'm better off without it. I believe most people are, too, so I use a bunch of plugins, like Twitter Demetricator for example, to remove the like/retweet counts from Twitter.
Since I can't control what appears on my feed (that's down to other people falling for the popularity contest) it doesn't make a huge amount of difference to what I read, but I don't want numbers to make a difference to what expectations I have of an author or whether I'm inclined to vote for them one way or another.
I'm definitely not a fan of badges. I like unlocking different privileges on Stack Overflow as time goes by becuase they're related to what I've done and the process is generally so slow that by the time I can, say, re-open a ticket, I've been there and seen enough arguments about it to know what I'm doing.
Without going to my profile, I have no idea what badges I have, except a couple of "1 year!" anniversary badges which are just an accident of when I signed up. It doesn't matter. I'm not going to look at someone else's profile and be impressed, neither am I going to decide not to follow them because they don't have enough bling.
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We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
As far as gamification goes, I believe I'm better off without it. I believe most people are, too, so I use a bunch of plugins, like Twitter Demetricator for example, to remove the like/retweet counts from Twitter.
Since I can't control what appears on my feed (that's down to other people falling for the popularity contest) it doesn't make a huge amount of difference to what I read, but I don't want numbers to make a difference to what expectations I have of an author or whether I'm inclined to vote for them one way or another.
I'm definitely not a fan of badges. I like unlocking different privileges on Stack Overflow as time goes by becuase they're related to what I've done and the process is generally so slow that by the time I can, say, re-open a ticket, I've been there and seen enough arguments about it to know what I'm doing.
Without going to my profile, I have no idea what badges I have, except a couple of "1 year!" anniversary badges which are just an accident of when I signed up. It doesn't matter. I'm not going to look at someone else's profile and be impressed, neither am I going to decide not to follow them because they don't have enough bling.