[lolname]

Yes. I'm sure. (I just googled a couple of the most prominent names.)

They work around it, or more often they realize that somebody else has found the same bug and just track that. Or they'll feel generous and submit a fix via some bug tracking system other than a mailing list.

If you're using that as a proxy for unix-fu, you should know that it's a REALLY shitty proxy in my (roughly 20 years) of experience.

[angusgr]

It's ironic that I immediately tried to contextualise your opinion by finding out who you were, but your HN account is new and your pseudonym is anonymous.

Although, if your opinion is correct, it doesn't mean anything that I can't look you up online.

Speaking from my lesser experiences, the best professional *nix programmers I have worked with left some traces of themselves online, but I don't think it correlated that closely with their skills. They definitely don't have web sites proclaiming their Ultimate Hacker Ability - why would they need such a thing?

[lsc]

The number of posts, certainly, doesn't correlate with skill. But the quality of post, I think, does. I know many people who are obviously better than I am who post a lot less than I do. However, a person with sufficient skill could take a sampling of those posts, and a sampling of my posts and pretty quickly come to a conclusion as to our relative skill levels.

[lolname]

Although, if your opinion is correct, it doesn't mean anything that I can't look you up online.

That's on purpose. I establish new HN accounts from time to time because I despise the fact that many people will upvote old users more readily, or will cite 'user for a long/short time' as though it means something.

[lsc]

In most social situations, having a history of contributing to the group is important. This is part of why I try to spend time on mailing lists for software I use/am likely to use even when I don't need help. If I have a history of helping others, others are much more likely to help me when I need it.

[lsc]

well, the phenomena of using bugzilla and other web based bug tracking systems is a fairly recent one. And certainly if they are posting good stuff, it doesn't really matter if they are posting good stuff on a mailing list or on a bugzilla or what have you. I'm just making a historical observation that the people who have been around a while tend to use mailing lists.

but yeah, I do think there is something a little fishy about a SysAdmin who doesn't have any public evidence of collaboration. I mean, sure, they could be really good and just have worked places that don't let you give your changes back, but eh, you can say that about any other metric. You must have added a feature to something at some point. You must have been the first user to find a particular bug at some point.

The biggest problem with this metric is that search kind of sucks for mailing lists. I mean, usenet used to be /the place/ for this sort of thing, but usenet is dead, and as far as I can tell, much of the usenet archives that at one point I could access via dejanews are gone (groups.google does not have some of the posts that I know are there.)

[lolname]

FWIW, if you look at any of the senior people who work for me, they'll have little to no activity during their tenure. Here's why:

1) One individual has final responsibility for our platform. We run a modified version of FreeBSD, which includes both changes that are only appropriate for our own use, and some changes that are more generally applicable.

The other devs and admins submit any patches they need on all the servers to the individual, and he deals with them. Sometimes they stay private, sometimes they go public, but when they go public they go out in his name. He has responsibility of tracking when they're accepted upstream, and when they're included in the base distro.

2) The vast majority of our platform is very, very tried and true. We use a few cutting edge bits of software (new versions and new features), but that's the exception. As such, most of our bugs are found well in advance.

3) The most troublesome bits of our platform are commercial or completely proprietary, so support on those parts doesn't hit a public mailing list anywhere.

I was trying to understand why your response annoyed me so much, and I realized it's because if I had to lay off my best unix guys, you advocate that employers google their name, see nothing on the mailing lists, and pass on them. That annoys me.

I take a lot of pride in being a good employer, and meanwhile you're standing there advocating anally-extracted screening criteria that would hurt my guys.

[techbio]

So where could an automated heuristic find your guys to make an estimation of them? Citeseer? Company about page?

Aside from personal references--as if they were "in a stack of resumes."