[glass3]

Applicants could organize in a guild. The members can rate each other in a friendly environment with constructive feedback. Then, the guild knows who are the best matches for a given job.

Employers at first communicate with the guild and only have to evaluate 5-10 candidates. All interviewed candidates pool their knowledge about the employer so the next suggestions from the guild will be even better matches.

Medieval guilds made sure that craftsmen could be trusted. Programmers can do the same thing.

[lapcat]

> The members can rate each other in a friendly environment

> Employers at first communicate with the guild and only have to evaluate 5-10 candidates.

Yeah, no. It's not friendly when there's an obvious hierarchy and competition for jobs involving large amounts of money. And who decides the criteria? How are other developers even supposed to "rate" you if they haven't worked with you?

Putting all software engineering hiring in the hands of one central authority is one of the worst ideas ever. It's good when different employers have different hiring criteria. What sucks is when a bunch of employers cargo cult on the same hiring methods. We need more diversity in hiring, not less.

[glass3]

It doesn't have to be one central guild. There can be a competition of guilds, each with their own criteria.

Guilds already exit as networks of friends who recommend each other. Hiring is only dehumanizing for those who are not part of an informal network. With guilds, there could be accessible knowledge to everybody on how to be or become a good professional.

The fact that programmers haven't already organized themselves in guilds suggests that they are not the right layer of abstraction. It remains funny that programmers create formal processes and structures for everything but not for themselves.

[lapcat]

> It doesn't have to be one central guild. There can be a competition of guilds, each with their own criteria.

But that totally undermines the central premise:

> Employers at first communicate with the guild and only have to evaluate 5-10 candidates.

For employers, there's no reason or advantage to deal with the guilds rather than directly with job candidates when there are a bunch of competing guilds with their own criteria.

And if guilds aren't providing/gatekeeping access to employers, then why would job candidates join them?

[bko]

Isn't this the role of head hunters?

They get paid a lot for finding a candidate so their incentives are a lot more aligned with your own. You can openly ask about salary and timelines. They're not gonna waste your time or theirs if they know you require X while the employer is willing to pay a lot less.

They also work across different orgs so they can place you accordingly. They can even help you prep for an interview and work with only serious employers (they don't get paid unless you get hired). It's very reputational. Some workers use the same headhunter their whole careers. Plus it's very industry specific so it's more personalized. Head hunters for hedge fund jobs will be very different than those for IT departments for law firms.

It's not perfect but it's decentralized and you can choose the head hunter you want to work with as opposed to being stuck in an industry with a bad guilde. It's not perfect and you still have to jump through hoops but i think that's unavoidable

[blindriver]

Terrible, horrible idea.

The main benefit of our current system is that it's very equitable. I'm the furthest thing from an SJW, but I do believe that in essence, the current way we interview helps people at the lower rungs of the ladder. People with no CS background can learn and if they pass the test, they can work at a FAANG. There's no guild, there's no politics, there's just performance on a well-defined measure.

It's not the greatest system, but it's also extremely fair and gives a shot to people who wouldn't normally get a shot.

[swatcoder]

That's certainly a way that our industry might mature (and it will need to mature eventually), but a guild becomes its own political organization with issues of corruption, bureaucracy, inaccessibility, inequity, etc that compete against quality of craft. It does ensure some stability in quality, but makes it much harder to break into the craft, much hard to approach the craft in different ways, favors artisans who can "play the right game and know the right people", and loses some efficiency to all the political overhead.

We might be close to developing that model, or we might not. I personally don't know that we need to rush there. I'm of the auto-didactic hustler crop of hacker/engineers and many of us wouldn't have fared well if there was already a strong guild culture as we were coming up. I'm not sure I'm ready to start building that wall behind me yet.

[e40]

It does sound like a good idea. I worry about the unintended side effects of it, though. It will make "who you know" much more important and people with few connections will be penalized, regardless of how good they are.

[patel011393]

Interesting idea, but wouldn't it lead to groupthink and prevent outliers from pushing the envelope?

[muzani]

This is basically recruiters and referrals. Many recruiters here also filter out bad employers too, but this seems less common in countries where talent is not as rare.

[janalsncm]

Given the number of laid off professionals now, this is very doable.

To join, one must have some amount of professional experience and pass a test. Members pay some nominal fee to support an internal liaison team. That team communicates with with companies looking to hire. Create some sort of internal ranking metric (which includes filters for e.g. location and pay), and top ranked members will be connected directly with HR at the company.

This is basically what H1B sourcing companies do. No reason it can’t be for full time as well.

[janosett]

This could be really useful, but it feels like the bootstrapping phase might be difficult to get past -- on one hand you need to reach the size and level of repute for companies be willing to deal with the process, and on the other you need to provide a sufficient value proposition for candidates to contribute to the guild.

I also have some concerns about how you manage problems as this sort of guild scales. How do you keep a consistent standard of skill? what if members performance changes over time?

[RationPhantoms]

I love this idea. It's like a proxy for hiring. I see similarities to recruitment firms yet a lot better.

[sebastianconcpt]

Yes. How a modern could look like? From a UI/UX point of view?

[jdmg94]

this is not league of legends my dude