[Matt_Mickiewicz]

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.

[blitzcraig]

In the meantime, your service is useless to the vast majority of us.

Have fun with your Ivy League circle jerk.

[dllthomas]

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".

[im3w1l]

Working directly with every candidate would be extremely time consuming.

[dllthomas]

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.