I took a look at skills app -- I like the approach and the clean layout, but a couple thoughts from this hiring manager:

* Most of the really good devs I know and hire do not bother with easy metrics like number of tweets, followers, or StackOverflow points. They are perfect to paste together on summary reports and look "complete," but their absolute values or essence don't mean anything.

* The high numbers on public sites seem to be for two classes of devs -- celebrities, who you already know are celebrities -- and people with way too much time on their hands (if they don't work for an open source company, which most people don't). Most people have average values. If someone is on LinkedIn, I'm more interested to see if they have X hundred followers per years in industry up to some maximum lifetime value. I generally ignore recommendations.

* See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3771286 for the discussion about what the number of points actually measures on SO, for example. It's a great site, but it's struggling to handle both breadth and depth of material well. High numbers does not necessarily correlate with expertise, just dedication. Maybe I want that skillset for a customer service rep, but I haven't yet wanted it for an engineer.

* I have shipped 20M loc in my career in 32 regions, and none of it is available on github or sourceforge. Most engineers are like that -- again, the public numbers are biased to certain individuals. Maybe there is a way for candidates to quantify the projects they have worked on?

* What I would love is a way to automatically assess FizzBuzz on candidates. I know there are some sites like interviewstreet.com that try to do this, but they don't yet have the critical mass like linkedin. And I fear, the moment they get critical mass then they'll become a new SAT or other standardized test that becomes too easy to game.

Just FYI, we've been working hard on completely revamping ur github visualizationns to be a ton more meaningful. The current site is very much our MV(?)P.

We've thought about automated coding assessments but for where we are right now, it doesn't feel like the right direction to swim in to get to viability. Any kind of exam this early in the hiring process will sour the best candidates on applying. If you are a solid developer with a good track record, chances are that you wouldn't want to work with a company that can't figure that out about you with a brief googling. Anybody using that sort of tool to replace resumes is locking themselves out of the top talent.

Finally,mwe've definitely been thinking a lot recently about moving to a model without any kind of scores—just visualizations of data that help you figure out who a person is, maybe get a little bit of other personality in a way that resumes will never give you, and help you make that quick move-forward-or-not decision. We're not sure if scores really contribute something to that, and we'd love to hear what you think.

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?

My 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.

A 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.

Perhaps I can try to convince you of our long term vision: developers increasingly take their work online, which results in a mountain of professional data. A lot of it is meaningless, but some of it can be woven into interesting stories.

We're still trying to find the best approach to this, but in essence, our mission is making sense of this data. Some of this will have nothing to do with popularity - say, we might give you a concise overview of someone's code or professional thoughts. Other metrics will use social activity only as a rough validation. For example, if someone has 20 watchers on GitHub, they're definitely not a celebrity, but they have crossed a very meaningful threshold of "someone cares about this person's work".

Does that sound like a good direction to you?

Sometimes developers don't have a choice about putting their work online--many large companies actively discourage (or prohibit) their engineers from participating in any meaningful way in open source projects.

Want to post your personal hacking online under your real name? Nope, sorry--"everything you do belongs to the company, and we can't take the chance that you might accidentally post some uber-valuable trade secret." So rather than risk losing the job, you just find some other, not-publicly-visible way to spend your time.

Maybe this group of developers isn't viewed as interesting to many employers, and if that's the case my argument isn't worth much.

We know, and that sucks. Let me ask you a question though - developers who can't put their code online, will some of them not engage online otherwise? Say, consume professional content on twitter, post on HN, or answer questions on Stack Overflow?

Our goal is to look at any kind of professional activity online, not only code. What do you think?

I'm not inclined to do any of those things in a serious way, much less in a way that I'd call professional. I post on HN sporadically and solely for my own amusement, and I don't know that any employers would find my history here relevant in any way.

I don't really get into the social media aspect of development even when I'm allowed to contribute to open projects, so I doubt I'd be very visible (or very attractive if I were) via any social media outlets. Whether I'm the norm or not, I don't know.

Edited to add: By the way, I do appreciate that somebody's out there trying to help developers be more easily visible for doing such things, so don't take my comments the wrong way. :)

Thanks for the edit :)

I think the problem I have is that it is not the case that "developers" are taking their work on line. It is the case that "some developers" are taking their work online.

If all you care about is that subset of developers, I'm sure your approach is fine.

I get you. A lot of developers don't take their work online at all. But there are probably a hundred thousands developers who do take at least some parts of their work online.

Perhaps speaking more practically, the market for developers is segmented. Not all companies want to hire all developers, and some companies specifically look for developers who do take their work online. It's those companies we want to help right now.

Take us for example. We just hired Yuval Adam (http://y3xz.com/) for a project, and his online activity had a huge part in raising our interest.

Check out his site. It's essentially a collection of links to professionally relevant online content. Sure, these are no guarantees. If you were hiring a developer though, wouldn't your interest be raised?

Wow. That app is really bad for people like me.

I'm not on GitHub because I code for my employers. That work doesn't get put out there like that.

I don't tweet much at all about the languages I code in or cool bits of code I just wrote or any of that. I'm one of those weirdos that tweets pictures of my lunch and funny crap my 4yr old says.

I'm "on" StackOverflow since I have a log in... but I rarely comment on stuff and have never posted a question. I probably should I suppose but I don't.

I don't think my candidate brief on Skills would be a very accurate indicator of my actual skills.

We know, and we're working hard at that problem. Here's two thoughts:

(1) It's not our goal to make candidates like you look bad, not at all. When candidates have professional stuff online, we think employers should be interested in getting a good view of it. That's all we try to do. We wouldn't give you a bad score - we'd give you no score at all. Essentially, we're telling employers: "we can't know anything about this candidate, you should look at other stuff".

(2) I checked out your HN profile, and you have a ton of comments up. So, you do interact professionally online, at least in some way. I'm curious to hear your thoughts - say you applied for a job, and we did our best (algorithmic) job to make your HN footprint interesting to employers - what would that do for your attractiveness as a candidate?

After rereading my comment I think maybe it may have come off harsher than I intended. But I see you understand my message. And I don't for a minute think you would intentionally try to make people look bad. But this type of assessment definitely favors a certain type of person. And as someone else pointed out is kin to tossing half the resumes straight to the trash. Maybe I'm more old school than others but I just don't see the need to have potential employers using my online interactions on forums (and whatever commenting on HN is viewed as) to asses my skill. My HN footprint is probably not something I would want included either. Not that I think it would show me in a bad way. I just don't think it adds anything about my ability to do the job. Just like I'd not really want them checking out my Facebook (also a quasi-hot issue recently). The fact that I had a debate the other day with someone here about my use of "have had" is pretty irrelevant to any job I would be looking at. I'm not sure how you could mine any useful or relevant info from my HN posts.

To be quite honest, if I found a job post that wanted me to go fill out a profile on Skills I would probably not do it unless I was getting desperate or I really wanted to work for that particular company. I would move on to the next job post.

One thing to consider: I read that you're geared to employers at the moment and that they would be funneling candidates to the site as a way to apply. I would be more inclined to fill something out if it was just me doing it as a way to make a summary of me disconnected from any particular job app. I don't know how your system works right now, but I would be hesitant to just fill in the info and hope the results are in my favor. I'd want to see my brief and have an opportunity to adjust it before letting employers see it. But I imagine that dilutes the meaningfulness of it. Obviously if a person entered all that info and found their Twitter presence is not as good as they thought it would be, they would just remove that. But you can probably see where I'm coming from.

I understand, and you raise important questions. We think about these things quite often, and we're very much prepared to feel our way to a product that works. The big question for us is - is online professional activity valuable for a large enough group of employers and candidates? We think the answer is yes, but we can't be sure until we (or someone else) builds a successful business around it.

Well-made logo and landing page but I doubt that the idea will work at all. There might be some correlation of let's call it "social media activity" and skill. So, somebody who blogs a lot technical stuff, tweets about it and contributes to open projects on Github often is surely somebody to look at—but that's just it. Social media activity is a nice to have and btw can be checked with a few clicks, why do I need a dedicated app for that? There's so much noise in social channels and generally you find many people there who look rather for attention than real long-sighted achievements and it's hard to recognize the real gems in that noise.

There are many using social channels very rarely or in read-only mode. They don't because they just don't have time to tweet or their project is just confidential to be public on Github. Rather they work 12 months non-stop and quietly on a project and at the end of this period they raise with their work 2 million or got millions of user or whatever. And THAT are the relevant achievements and signals a recruiter has to identify—real achievements and no social streams full of "buzzword spam and unverified claims" (using your own words).

Glad you like our style!

When you say "there's so much noise in social channels and generally you find many people there who look rather for attention than real long-sighted achievements and it's hard to recognize the real gems in that noise.", could that not make room for a company that aims to do just that - recognize the real gems?

Something that wasn't clear to me - as an employer - what do I get when I sign up? Do you have candidates' profiles like the sample one in the system, or I will have to provide my own candidates to filter through your system to get a profile like that?

Yeah, we're working on a new homepage to make that bit clear.

Right now, you sign up, creat one or more positions. Each has a unique landing URL, and anyplace you'd normally publicize "send us your resumes," put that link—job boards, advertisements, recruiters, etc.

Candidates go through a very, very (sub-five-minute) short form to collect their personal contact details, their recant social networks and a 500-char-max tell-us-about-yourself and why-are-you-a-good-fit-for-this-job. You get a brief, and the rest is up to you.

We definitely need to make that clearer. Right now, we're focussing on letting companies make better sense of the candidates they already have. Can you tell me your thoughts on that?

How do you measure "passion" and "respect"? And how are the twitter tags determined?

If I'm a job seeker I want to present myself in the best possible light. Allowing a 3rd party to rate my "passion" and "respect" without any knowledge of the algorithm would keep me from using the service. If you did publish the algorithm it will be gamed just like search engines in a matter of hours. You might want to consider suggesting tags and keywords and allowing job seekers to select the ones they believe apply. I would consider dropping the "passion" and "respect" part as they may open you to future legal action.

Right now, we aren't doing any kind of indexing. If you apply for a position through our service, you give whatever information you want about yourself, and we check out your public data on those networks. If you don't want to share your twitter or stack overflow, leave those fields blank.

We don't publish the details of the algorithm but in effects it would be fairly difficult to game. Either you have a solid history of consuming and contributing relevant content or you don't. If you are able to manufacture that fraudulently, well, chances are that you're somebody interesting to talk to.

I didn't actually see any way for me as a developer to use your service. Signing up for the beta looked like a way for an employer to sign up.

Right. Our current goals is to help employers with their existing candidates. I have a question - would you like to be able to get a profile on skills? If so, what would you do with it?

Thanks!

I'm more curious as to how it finds me. I guess these days everyone's various accounts are pretty interlinked, and you can mine 80% of data from github and twitter.

That's correct. We're a tool for employers.

We're thinking about allowing some form of "self indexing" but we aren't there yet.

Hey! I'm David, the other co-founder of Skills. We're been mulling over our scoring for a while, and at this point we don't consider it a fundamental part of the product. Within the next few weeks, we'll be canning 'passion' and 'respect' and replacing it with something much simpler. In the future, we might drop scoring all together.

Our mission it to extract the most meaningful data from someone's professional activity online, and we're currently exploring how to best do that. If you're a job seeker, it's our goal to show employers the best version of you.

Question: do you think your current activity online can make you look good to employers? If so, what would you most like to show them?

Thanks!

I think that online activity like contributions to forums, twitter and github could be good indicators of a quality employee. However, I know many really smart, productive people who just aren't participating online in a significant way. If you're hiring for a community liaison then online activity is a critical indicator. If you're hiring a network engineer who watches log files and traffic all day online activity may not represent their "best self."

Agree 100%. Our approach is "if a candidate has some data online, we'll help you make better sense of it. If they don't, there's nothing we can tell you."

http://help.skillsapp.com/kb/skills-basics/scores-passion-an... is about scoring.

Twitter tags are based on lists, but with some amount of tokenization and stemming so we count "djangonauts" and "Django" as contributing towards the same tag.