[DigitalSea]

How about us ghetto developers who taught ourselves everything and know just as much, perhaps sometimes even more than those who endured years of study? I hate the way society works. Just because someone went to a good university doesn't make them a great engineer/developer. I've encountered numerous developers who went to good universities and knew half as much as I did.

[suresk]

I'm certainly not in the elite ranks that they are targeting and I don't feel too bad about it, but this makes me wonder about the general purported software developer shortage.

How much of it is genuine (some of it certainly is), and how much of it is chasing this same small pool of people (ivy league CS education, worked at Google or Microsoft, or significantly contributions to a major open source project)?

[rpwilcox]

I've had similar thoughts: everyone seems to be chasing the developer with 5 years Rsils experience, worked at Zynga, lives in the Bay Area, went to Stanford, (probably) is willing to take stock options for a reduced salary, and is a JavaScript genius on the front end and server-side.

So, of course you csn't find your rockstar.

It seems in the tech world today, the answer is to not lower your requirements, or find one Ruby person and one JS person, or look at non-Zynga alumni, or (gasp!) look at remote workers, but to LOOK HARDER AND LOUDER for the same thing. Which is, from someone slightly on the outside of, well, the Valley, grating.

[jquery]

You will bow down to the Ivy-League appointed nobility and accept society's <del>educational</del> caste system without complaint.

[NonEUCitizen]

Neither Stanford nor MIT are Ivy-League. Ivy-League alumni are actually disqualified by default, and will have to qualify by some other means like working at Google or Facebook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League

[DigitalSea]

Isn't the only way to get a job at Facebook or Google to be a developer fresh out of college/university with a degree in CS or equivalent anyway? I have a friend who got a job working at Google Australia in Sydney and he had a CS degree, I doubt he would have been hired, let alone got through their strenuous interview process without his education papers in tow.

Not that there is anything wrong with wanting to undertake some kind of degree, I respect that. It's when having a degree is considered the only real entry into Facebook or Google, or any large Internet company which in turn gets you into a service like this, the gaps start to widen. Unless you work for a company that gets acquired by one of these big companies, you need a degree, no ifs or buts.

I don't mind not being a part of the service myself, it's a great idea. I would just love to get in on it though, I think I am a decent developer with a decent list of Github repositories and code contributions to other projects as well as years of experience.

[benreesman]

I work for Facebook on infrastructure and I don't have a degree of any kind.

[DigitalSea]

Wow, really? How did you get an interview and was getting a job at Facebook without a degree any harder than getting a job somewhere else?

[hnwh]

Most big companies won't hire you without your educational papers in tow.. (for the majority of cases)

[Maascamp]

Well, to be fair I went to an Ivy League school and am not eligible to participate either.

[allangrant]

As a fellow self-taught "ghetto" developer, and one of the cofounders of Developer Auction -- believe me, this is a problem we plan to solve. :)

Limiting it to developers from places that already have rigorous selection practices is just a starting point. Any suggestions for how to evaluate talent otherwise? We have a few ideas, but would love to hear yours.

[bithive123]

Maybe you should have called your service Developer Provenance or Developer Pedigree if you want people to delegate their hiring decisions to you based on the rigidity of your screening criteria.

I wouldn't want to work for a place that was so technically strapped that they couldn't evaluate me as a candidate on my own merits. But I do like the idea of a "Developer Auction" where anyone can participate, like in a real market.

It's a shame that after creating a profile I have to go through the trouble of contacting you to be notified if you decide to start offering such a service.

[Bill_Dimm]

Why limit it? Collect all relevant info (like college) as fielded data and allow employers to create whatever filters they want to focus on the type of employee they want.

If the employer got his/her degree from Cornell (for example), he/she might not be too thrilled to find that you've decided that job applicants from Cornell aren't even worth letting into the system.

[bithive123]

Their value proposition is that you don't know how to identify the best candidates but you can outsource the problem to Developer Auction, which applies arbitrary criteria for you because as they admit, they also don't know.

Yeah, I don't get it either.

[waterlesscloud]

How was your talent evaluated? Probably a good starting point.

[johnbellone]

How about you let us solve it for you: let me delete my profile.

[usmanity]

Agreed. I hate how because I don't have a degree, I somehow don't know programming as someone who took english classes for 3 years.