[mbailey]

My company is making a business of identifying great developers (gild.com). It is a notoriously difficult task, even with the wealth of information developers tend to make public about themselves.

[spitfire]

"automated scoring" and "social network activity".

That sounds like a fantastic way to find scads of mediocre developers. Development isn't about language, it's about comprehension.

[mbailey]

We are making assessments of code made public, and combining it with how active people are in places like stackexchange. You can argue that code evaluated from github is not necessarily indicative of a good developer, but it's a good place to start rather than shotgun LinkedIn spam from recruiters.

[amcintyre]

...even with the wealth of information developers tend to make public about themselves.

I guess I'm gonna be a negative Nancy here, but I know some very good developers that don't make anything about themselves public. I expect some of the very best are completely invisible on the internet, at least by their real name, because they're too busy working on things their employers would rather keep as trade secrets.

[mbailey]

For sure, we can only evaluate what we can get access to. We're trying to scour as many sources as possible, but if you're exceedingly quiet, you wouldn't be in our system.

[benlakey]

I suspect you're right, though I'd rather they share the non trade secret advice that they have in a more public fashion, such as a blog or stackoverflow.

[sanswork]

Is there any way to view your own profile on gild?

[mbailey]

Eventually we're planning to do just that.

[thornelius]

i find it ironic that your sign up page, for gild.com, doesn't work...

[mbailey]

Not sure why hubspot is having issues, I'll have to talk to the marketing guys who maintain the hubspot pages... Currently we don't let people claim their profiles, but will in the future. "login" is really just for customers at this point.