Comments on: Algorithmic recruitment with GitHub

By: Jim Lindstrom

Jim Lindstrom — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:50:20 +0000

I had trouble getting the java portion of this running so I adapted it to run all in ruby, using the igraph library. If anyone’s interested I’ll put it up here briefly:

http://www.columbia.edu/~jbl2132/graph_jbl.rb

I also ran it for New York. If you’re interested, let me know (jim at researchmob dot com).

By: In The Know v1.07 Five Links To Expand Your HR View | HR Examiner with John Sumser

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 02:43:09 +0000

[...] Algorithmic recruitment with GitHub Future talent markets will include demonstrations of skills and social network analysis. This piece (from a geek, not an HR player) shows the beginnings of that process. GitHub is a website where coders can leave examples of their work. The author steps through the use of an algorithm to find the right talent. [...]

By: Recruiting smart people | s-anand.net

Recruiting smart people | s-anand.net — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:31:01 +0000

[...] Biddulph talks about Algorithmic recruitment with Github. The premise is that smart programmers are at the centre of the social networks in their respective [...]

By: Matt Biddulph

Matt Biddulph — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 10:49:23 +0000

Jilles, nice to see someone from Nokia drop by. I hope nobody thinks that by calculating this highly biased metric I’m dismissing anyone who doesn’t score well in it. Of course there are all sorts of reasons why people don’t have code on github that don’t make them bad engineers.

As an aside: you may not contribute to OSS but you care enough to write interesting stuff at jillesvangurp.com, another good indicator of interesting people (that the metric in this post also ignores).

By: Jilles van Gurp

Jilles van Gurp — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 10:40:49 +0000

Hey Matt, this is a great way of scouting out new talent for on our floor :-). Only thing is, many developers (me included) actually don’t commit that much code to OSS projects. I don’t code much outside of work. My way of staying sane, I need my downtime after a long day of programming on the job.

And working for Nokia, makes on the job contributions kind of a grey area , since it is not up to me to decide on what are technically and legally Nokia owned IPR contributions to outside projects.

Does that make me a bad engineer?

You might want to check out ohloh.net. They don’t seem to have a geographic feature but there are a lot of nice statistics about what people do on which projects.

By: Tonći Galić

Tonći Galić — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:10:34 +0000

Many connections doesn’t mean one produces quality code, but it’s sure a nice approach to finding interesting people. I’ll have a look at it, perhaps it could be applied to twitter and other SNs?

Thanx for sharing :)

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:58:45 +0000

Berlin is the shittiest city i’ve ever lived in. I hope you fail in fooling people to move here.

By: Charles

Charles — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:47:37 +0000

Not all people doing interesting, secret stuff aren’t checking it into Github (in fact, anyone doing secret stuff DEFINITELY wouldn’t). Bad source dataset to start from!

By: Daniel Haran

Daniel Haran — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:16:48 +0000

Betweenness is a great metric for finding the people that will know who’s available. Some “PeopleRank” like algorithm would be more likely to find those people that have deep expertise without being very social.

I’d love to see results for my city (Montreal, QC) for Rails.

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:12:09 +0000

I read out your list (of things to love) and Christi here thought that I said “curry versed”. Clearly the Haskell books I leave lying around haven’t gone unnoticed.

I would definitely be interested in seeing you adapt this method to include (a) people on Github and Dopplr who already travel to Berlin a lot and (b) people who actively contribute on github, not just people who are well connected.

But I get that contributing is harder to measure, and that you probably don’t have a github-dopplr username mapping just sitting around, even with all your connections ;)