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Thanks for sharing your brain (and experience) with us! We don't think number of tweets or followers is a relevant means of assessment at all—quite the opposit
by idan 15y ago
Thanks for sharing your brain (and experience) with us!
We don't think number of tweets or followers is a relevant means of assessment at all—quite the opposite. Ashton Kutcher is not an interesting candidate for a rails job, and that should be reflected in our report for him (were he ever to apply for such a position.)
We obviously gather a lot of metrics (hey, storage is cheap) but the ones we actually use in our scoring mix right now are tied to two simple concepts: does this person care about their craft, and do they enjoy any amount of professional respect for what they do.
We aren't offering shoe size; what you need in early-stage hiring decisions is an indicator: something more fast than perfect. Resumes suck at this because everybody is trained to write sterile, "professional" resumes stuffed to the brim with keywords. We can tell a much more interesting story—today!—with the kinds of data that most developers in our industry are already sharing. SO reputation isn't a story, it's a data point. What tech people ask questions about versus what tech they answer questions about reveals something more interesting. They know Python very well but seem to be exploring JavaScript? Interesting. Maybe a hybrid in the making.
Skills isn't for everyone and every industry; it's for one industry and a very specific breed of candidates that has this kind of publicly-visible track record. We think there are enough companies that are hiring in this space that there's a business to be built here now, and the Internet trends towards more public data. Do we really think that we'll still be using resumes in ten years to assess whether to spend more time on engineering candidate X?
- ericd 15y agoA point of feedback - I write a lot of code that gets used by lots of people, and I don't do any of it in a social fashion because I'm entirely uninterested in creating a brand for myself as a developer. All of these metrics you're talking about would screen me out, whereas a simple "created and scaled FOO with BAR set of technologies, used by 100,000/1,000,000/10,000,000 people/month" on a resume would probably get a good amount of employer attention, for good reason - that's an indication of a real full stack engineer who has faced a gamut of real problems. It's not as easy to quantify, but you should probably take that kind of thing into account, because it's a lot more meaningful than the number of people signed up to receive my quips about how much IE6 sucks or how many side projects I've open sourced.
- roguecoder 15y agoMy resume isn't like that, and I think that's why I don't have any problem finding jobs. My resume tells the story of each role I've had, including concrete examples and metrics of success. I think your site is a perfect example of "lucky" candidates winning over unlucky candidates. A bunch of data probably unrelated to paying employment that a certain, lucky, subset of developers happen to score well on while others, especially those who traditionally hide on the Internet, look really bad in comparison.