Yes. They only take "top developers", who are "25 times more effective than the average developer". Which is precisely measured by looking at what school you went to, or what gigantic tech company you have previously worked for.
I can't speak for these guys, but assuming they have good intentions I'd like to think that "went to a brand-name school or worked for a brand-name tech company" is essentially just the MVP of a system for verifying credentials that will eventually get more nuanced and less embarrassingly-biased.
Right. Having a filter of some sort is obviously vital, actually putting in legwork to figure out who is good is expensive, and I agree this is about having something they can quickly implement and not about offending the rest of us. Having said that, it would be a place I would hope they are focusing their efforts, and articles about other changes making things better for the favored few before they've addressed it come off as in poor taste.
We're also approving developers with notable GitHub accounts, Computer Science grads from top Universities, etc. but it's not perfect.
Employer & education are only a rudimentary filter for the time being - some of the best engineers I know are self-taught and work at companies you might not have heard of. It's a big challenge, and we'll get there eventually.
I'd love to get your ideas on how to filter through candidates and then communicate their value to prospective employers in a credible way.
The best way of assessing someone's value in this kind of work is to work with them. Extracting that second hand, through recommendations and such, seems to be substantially less reliable but perhaps there's some way to engineer around that? I wonder what you'd get if 1) recommendations were public, and 2) they were explicitly a statement that "I have worked with this person and they are better than me at X".
Yes, that's obviously impractical. But there are people who have that knowledge, having worked with the various candidates. If you can come up with a reliable way of getting that information out of their heads and into your database it would be hugely valuable. I recognize (and mentioned) that it's not a trivial problem.
Yeah, from a revenue standpoint I can understand why, saying you are from google means you passed the 'google interview' or something. Therefore those candidates are probably easier to place (there's an assumption of excellence).
That doesn't make it any less frustrating for those of us not graced with the big names on our resume. In the meantime however I've found places like Angel List is a good place to put your profile to find out about startups.
Not that you necessarily feel this way or aren't doing something about it, but I think it's important whenever someone brings up the "us not graced with ..." argument that we point out that at one point and time those graced with it didn't have it either.
So, the logical question to ask is "What are you doing right now so that in 2 years you are graced with it."