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Is there any way to link a users reputation to the current annual SO survey (or future surveys)? The stats that would be interesting are:

Any Correlation between user reputation and things like Position (title), Pay, etc..

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Are you talking about Carreers? –  juergen d Jan 25 '13 at 15:48
I think the OP is talking about the SO Annual Survey @juergend. –  ben is uǝq backwards Jan 25 '13 at 15:55

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up vote 6 down vote accepted

I hope not; at least not if it means giving out my account ID.

That means I would have to tell Stack Exchange (and by proxy their advertisers) a lot of personal information about myself. For a start it's invaluable marketing material; more worryingly it would probably be enough information to work out exactly who I am. I do not want that information to be available. With an anonymous survey there is a lot lower risk.

The only way I see this working if you allow users to input their reputation manually, rather than linking it to their Stack Exchange account. This enables people to inflate their reputation to what they would like it to be, making the results less accurate.

Also, don't forget that, reputation, to a large extent, is simply a measure of participation. It's highly likely that there are people who are capable of having a high reputation who don't simply because they can't be bothered. Equally likely is that there are people who currently have a "low" reputation who will, in the future, have a high one.

Though I believe in everything I wrote above, the survey actually included this question anyway, so it's , see question 31 in the results. This isn't broken down and compared much in the blog post but apparently you can get the dataset yourself should you wish to play around with it.

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Privacy is dead. Embrace the new order. –  Robert Harvey Jan 25 '13 at 15:58
It's still possible to maintain a little @Robert. Or, at least, sell yourself more expensively rather than giving it away for free (metaphor intended)... –  ben is uǝq backwards Jan 25 '13 at 15:59
A question with reputation ranges would invade privacy? –  Jake1164 Jan 25 '13 at 16:06
No @Jake1164. A link to SE would invade privacy (paragraph 1/2). A question with ranges would invite truth-misrepresentation (paragraph 3) and it doesn't tell you much anyway (paragraph 4). –  ben is uǝq backwards Jan 25 '13 at 16:08
A link? So somebody is more likely to embellish a reputation than salary? Interesting. –  Jake1164 Jan 25 '13 at 16:10
I made no mention of the likelihood of embellishment of other variables @Jake. I suspect that people are more likely as in my mind it's somehow less official. This is just a personal opinion though. In your defence there must be papers around that measure how much people embellish salary when asked in anonymous questionnaires. It would be possible to add the same corrections to rep, though that pre-supposes that the rate of embellishment would be the same. –  ben is uǝq backwards Jan 25 '13 at 16:16

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