The whole benefit of hiring based on recommendations of your technical staff is that nerds generally only recommend people who can do the job. They aren't goin

The whole benefit of hiring based on recommendations of your technical staff is that nerds generally only recommend people who can do the job. They aren't going to recommend someone who can't pull their weight, because it will hold the whole team back. If you take the nerd judgement out of the equation, as this article seems to suggest, and just spider their connections? you lose most of that benefit. Yes, if you are a connection, you can spider my linkedin; and yeah, people on that are probably above average. But if I'm in the loop? I can give you more information than a recruiter could possibly understand about the technical abilities of many people on that network. As an aside, I /really/ need to find an app to keep private notes on my linkedin profile. I have a lot of customers as connections... more, really, than my tiny brain can handle. I need some (private) way of recording what's what (as well as a public way of telling them to mark their relationship with me as a prgmr.com customer)