We should talk. I have an idea that would incorporate this. I doubt that I'll be able to get the resources and will probably be starting a regular day job inste

We should talk. I have an idea that would incorporate this. I doubt that I'll be able to get the resources and will probably be starting a regular day job instead (and I never go into a job intending to "hop") but discussing the idea would be useful. Assessing programmers is a good idea, but what I would really like to do is start measuring companies and managers for how they affect peoples' careers, so we can reward the faithful and punish defectors. If you look at salary trends, you're also picking up reputation, which corrupts measurement. Of course anyone leaving Google is going to be getting a bump. If you could asses actual skill and noticed that it wasn't doing much for the underlying (e.g. their actual capability growth) which will have more effect on their careers in the long term. Now, the problem with the auction site concept (not to say that it won't work; but you'll have to make the ability verification both very accurate and very respected) that you're talking about is the "ghetto" effect that most recruiting sites get. Good engineers are nervous about signing on because it's still stigmatized to be looking for work at all. Top-end employers are going to prefer word-of-mouth for similar reasons. It's really hard to make a job-searching site not a ghetto, and once it is one, trust-sparsity sets in and it's inferior to the (non-scalable and infuriatingly intermittent) word-of-mouth economy.