
Sourcing.io - jmduke
https://sourcing.io/
======
coolsunglasses
Engineers are valuable for what they can learn (skills and about the problems
they are solving) not for what they know at a particular point in time.

A myopic way to look at hiring.

Edit:

You should care about the _delta_ of an engineer's career and knowledge. That
says a lot more about how they'll perform now and in the future.

These days companies prove themselves to engineers. I'd rather see something
like a more descriptive and meaningful glassdoor so that I can know what
companies are worth my time.

Tags/attributes like:

"$company is in the 67% percentile for employee freedom in your job type
[Software Engineer]"

"$company practices open allocation."

"$company is known for fast-firing. They are also known for paying XX% above
average for your job type [Software Engineer]"

I don't want some bullshit tag-based skill endorsement clone of LinkedIn
profiles. I hate LinkedIn for a reason. I definitely don't need to be even
more discoverable by recruiters - my website is a fucking curse on that front
as it is. I leave it up because I do get valuable conversations going because
of it.

I'm more interested in sites that could further balance the lopsided
information power dynamic between employers and employees.

I want to know if there's a chance of a fit between me and the company before
I even email somebody.

A company is more likely to be able to recruit me the more _substantive_
information I have about what it's like to work for them. Shut the fuck up
about perks, tell me about how you empower your employees to perform their
best and entrust them to do the job as it needs to be done.

Things like sourcing.io don't just hurt engineers, they hurt the companies
that recruit like this (technology checklisting) too.

-

Making it even easier for lazy recruiters to be shitty is a bullshit thing to
do. May the spam of a thousand recruiters looking for "Senior Java developers"
flood your inbox and decimate your sanity MacCaw.

~~~
richardburton
(I'm working with Alex on Sourcing.io.)

Hi Chris--I completely agree that an engineer's ability to learn is a huge
part of their value. With that said, many companies are searching for
engineers who are intimately familiar with particular languages or frameworks.
Anyone can get comfortable with a new framework over a weekend--it takes much
longer to be become an expert.

Your idea for a better Glassdoor is an interesting. In the future we're hoping
to build a set of tools for engineers who are interested in getting a job--
we'd like to cater to both sides of the market.

Alex and I do not want to increase the volume of recruiting spam in the world.
Poorly-constructed, boilerplate emails are the mark of a bad technical
recruiter--we're not building tools to help them. We want to give the great
technical recruiters a tool to help them figure out if they should be sending
an email to an engineer in the first place. Furthermore, we're encouraging our
customers to have the C*O's and engineers construct and send the initial
emails--an email from the person you'd be working with is much better than
another piece of recruiting spam.

If you'd like to get in touch and chat more please feel to email on
richard@sourcing.io.

~~~
mtrimpe
I don't know if it's universal (Dutch freelance IT); but I would loooove to
have a tool that would:

* broadcast my availability to a group of approved (company) recruiters

* let recruiters propose companies to me (and have me list companies I already have contacts at or was introduced at.)

* let me set up job interviews with the interesting opportunities

* and, _most importantly_ , let the recruiters/companies place bids on me negotiate.

I've found that every time I'm on the market I'm essentially running this
auction myself and it's a lot of work.

Given the massive impact it has on my earnings I'd love some tooling that
would let me focus on the important parts of this process rather than the
administrative minutiae.

~~~
poseid
That is an interesting idea to have some kind of broker platform where you
trade skills against rates. I have been exploring a small job platform idea
too, and maybe anyone out there wants to chat more?

~~~
w0rd-driven
During my latest round of searching for a new gig, I realized I could use an
application to at least track the opportunities I had. If you juggle a bit of
interviews at once it becomes a little difficult to keep things sane if you
aren't careful. Having something to help me refine my crappy interviews or
take adequate notes to realize the pros and cons for future endeavors would've
been a godsend. I hadn't really done a lot of interviews for development shops
around here so I had no clue what I was missing until I saw it first hand. I
kept somewhat adequate notes in OneNote (yes, windows phone and yes I know I'm
one of 3 users). I even made an Excel spreadsheet to keep most of the
information together but nothing beats charts, graphs, or adequate reminders
like "Hey, you should likely prepare for the interview you're about to have
buddy" because the ones I weren't prepared for sucked hardcore and they were
totally my fault.

I had the idea that it could be beneficial to freelancers/contractors as they
do the same thing but usually in much more limited time scales to the x months
I took. I'm one to share ideas because if someone makes it, I'll stop building
it. As someone that wants to be a freelancer at some point, I don't look
forward to the oDesks of the world (no offense to people that do great there)
but having just something to keep all of these plates spinning more freely
would help a lot of people I think.

~~~
poseid
Interesting, so you say it is also a problem to track the jobs that company
offers? I totally agree that ODesks, elance, etc. are very poor to find a good
match between project and interest and rate. These platforms are really about
"out-"sourcing, often not about developing solutions to your unique problems.

Well, the main problem is that companies often don't know what skills they
really need, and employees don't get a sense for the work culture from vague
job descriptions.

Last, from what I heard was that most freelance jobs go via the personal
network anyhow.

Just curious if there are others interested in discussing a better project
platform for freelancers, and the way to meaningful work? Have a look at
[http://voki.me](http://voki.me) for a rough prototype.

------
richo
Right, so I'll just come right out and say this:

What the flying fuck?

I already get a TON of recruiterspam (much of it hilariously inaccurate, like
offering me a relocation bonus to move to the city I was living in).

Based on their "How do you find engineers" answer

    
    
      >  We scour the web, and use multiple different sources of public data to find candidates. Next we put all that information through a variety of different algorithms to try and separate the wheat from the chaff. 
    

I would presume that you're gunna scrape my github, notice that I've got code
in a couple of big projects, and then proceed to email me? How the hell do I
opt out? Or view the profile that you've got for me?

~~~
richardburton
(I'm working on Sourcing.io.)

We don't currently have a quick-and-easy way for you to opt out--we will do
soon. If you'd like to email me on richard@sourcing.io I'd be more than happy
to find your profile, show it to you, and remove it permanently.

As an aside, we _really_ hate recruiter spam too. We've just got started but
our plan is to build a tool to help great recruiters manage engineer-to-
engineer outreach--it's much better to receive a recruiting email from the
person you'd be working with. If you're interested, they can connect you to
their technical recruiter who can manage the process from there.

~~~
richo
Email sent. Looking forward to hearing back.

~~~
richardburton
Reply sent--thanks for getting in touch.

------
xerophtye
I don't understand. They say "we find you developers from our database of 4
million devs" but later say that they find them from YOUR
github/fb/linkedin/twitter connections? So is this a sort of web scraping
tool?

~~~
X4
Time for the damn GitHub to introduce more privacy, instead of putting all you
ever do in a PUBLIC activity feed, with no opt out.

~~~
nfoz
Time to stop using GitHub.

------
maccman
Hi, I'm the co-founder of Sourcing.io, and the engineer who built it. Stoked
that we're on HN, and get the chance to respond to the engineering and hacker
community.

Our introduction blog post says a bit more about our mission.

[http://blog.sourcing.io/hello-world](http://blog.sourcing.io/hello-world)

Believe it or not, I hate 'spam' recruiting emails as much as the next
engineer. This is how I feel about them:

[http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/recruiting-
emails](http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/recruiting-emails)

We're not here to increase the spam problem - quite the opposite. We've put a
number of safe guards in place against this kind of abuse:

* We don't allow big recruitment agencies known for spamming on the system.

* Our system is geared around referral based recruiting - finding people already connected to your company. For example, promoting candidates who follow one of your engineers on Twitter. This is the type of recruiting we live for and want to promote.

That said, there are definitely some things we should (and will) do.

* Allow developers to see, edit and update their own profiles

* An instant opt-out button

Let me know if there's anything else I can answer.

~~~
ameralimanovic
I appreciate this idea leveraging data from Twitter and GitHub and truly
believe that's the better way to find professional engineers which are
associated with your community somehow. What about intelligent algorithms to
evaluate and to display engineer skills (points or school grades)?

~~~
maccman
We actually originally started generating a 'score' for engineers, and it's
still part of our API. However, we dropped it from the interface since it was
confusing a lot of people, and the score tended to reflect how popular an
engineer was, rather than how good they were. As you can imagine, figuring out
the latter is a very complex problem. For now, we've removed it.

~~~
ameralimanovic
That's true. It's nearly impossible to evaluate accurately how good an
engineer was, but for me personally it seems to be useful to display similar
informations to companies. Something like "geek cred" (coderwall.com) or open-
source track record, because building many projects is one of the key-factors
of experience. Coderwall published that they work with statistical methods
like central tendency. [https://coderwall.com/blog/2012-02-05-the-companies-
id-want-...](https://coderwall.com/blog/2012-02-05-the-companies-id-want-to-
work-for)

------
msy
That they launched with a price tag and functionality for recruiters but
nothing to even let developers see the profiles they've assembled, without
consent, by scraping public data tells you all you need to know about their
respect for engineers.

~~~
richardburton
(I work at Sourcing.io.)

This is a very valid criticism--we need to do a much better job of explaining
the service to engineers. Like most startups, we've got a list of things we'd
love to build but haven't had time to. With that said, the tools for engineers
could certainly have been prioritized. At the very least, we should have added
a simple way to opt out. We will be adding this soon.

------
ilaksh
Not honest to say its 'our database' when you are just scraping/searching
github and stuff.

But I looked at the [https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-
service](https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service) and I don't
think it says you can't scrape to a database, although at least one clause
about reselling or whatever causes a question.

Its cool if they are honest in their marketing and actually add something to
github search, which I am pretty sure they do, because github search isn't
very good.

Anyway seems very useful but don't really like the marketing.

~~~
richardburton
(I work on Sourcing.io.)

I'm sorry to to hear that you don't like the copy on the homepage--it's
definitely a work in progress and I appreciate the feedback. We're going to be
adding a section for engineers soon.

Just as Google keeps a copy of the web, we have an index of all the engineers
we can find in a database. This is built up by crawling publicly available
information.

------
sethbannon
When developers on a team using sourcing.io connect themselves to the service
(in order to enable the social search functionality), does this add them to
the sourcing.io database? If so, doing this would probably lead to more spammy
recruitment emails for all those devs.

~~~
richardburton
(I'm working on Sourcing.io.)

Great question. Our database is built up by indexing publicly available
information. Some (or all) of the engineers that connect their accounts will
already have a GitHub account and, if so, will probably be in our index.
However, we certainly don't use the social connection feature to index _even
more_ people, particularly if they're not publishing code and are more
private.

The ability to see your team's extended network of engineers is really useful
but we recognize that it's pretty scary to connect your personal social
accounts to an app that's work-related. We're working hard to earn the trust
of the engineers who happy to share their network with their employers.

------
mpermar
First of all, best of luck with this guys.

This approach has been already tried many different times. I've got some
friends that really pushed really high on that whole "recruiting via web
scrapping" thing - [https://masterbranch.com/](https://masterbranch.com/) (
feel free to contact them, they are really nice guys ).

I wish you luck because I understand this approach never really worked for
anyone. IMHO, it's simple [Disclaimer: I created a super fancy ATS software /
job board too and did all the sales up to a point of really hating HR people
:)], recruiters are truly lazy and are interested only on tools that do their
job - something understandable as the sourcing part of the job is really
weary. Web scrapping tools instead of doing their job just add more noise to
it, i.e. forward them tons of profiles that are not really interested in the
specific job posting they are marketing. You might think most developers are
always open to move because some of us might be, but many people are really
happy with their daily jobs, so this sort of tool always ends up making angry
both sides of the coin: the developer and the recruiter.

So, it does not really matter that your "database" has 4M people on it. Even
if those are somehow linked to the company recruiting. When as a recruiter I
search for "node.js programmer" and get 100 results back but 99 of them are
not interesting in changing jobs, well... that sucks. I wouldn't use the tool
again myself. And going further with this example, well, believe me, most
recruiters would think the tool sucks if just the first three profiles are not
interested in the job.

But hey, I insist, I wish you the best of luck. Just pointing some stuff I
learnt ( hopefully for you wrongly learnt ) during my HR entrepreneurship
stage.

~~~
richardburton
Thanks for sharing the link Masterbranch--it looks like they're catering to
both sides of the market place. I'd be really interested to hear more about
what you learning during your foray into recruiting--could you email me on
richard@sourcing.io?

------
w0rd-driven
I was expecting an ability to view the data not so much as a way to opt out,
but to see if there's anything I could improve. Maybe something is public that
is only hurting my "score" so to speak. Maybe the little I contribute to other
OSS projects due to limited free time is hurting me more than I expect?

I purposefully went to the site hoping I could see something on myself without
going behind a paywall. I'm starting a new gig on 1/6 and even if I weren't,
I'm not quite the "target market." I do want to recommend this to the powers
that be and hopefully use myself as a "control" to find a somewhat adequate
replacement. I'm such a jack of all trades though that I'm afraid I may not be
adequate for that either.

I do quite understand that $95/mo is much less than any recruiter fee over
time so I completely understand the value of this service. It'll just be
really hard to do a cold recommendation to have my soon-to-be-ex employer
spend money on something they wouldn't be able to evaluate as easily as I can.
I may be addressing problems Sourcing.io can't really speak to anyway. These
may be "shoot ourselves in the foot" sort of issues no one can address but
them.

------
octaveguin
Scraping data of engineers not looking for jobs with the purpose of recruiter
spam?

Sounds like that dating site that scraped facebook and called it their
userbase:

[http://www.wired.com/business/2011/02/facebook-
dating/](http://www.wired.com/business/2011/02/facebook-dating/)

Honestly, sometimes this stuff really works and only seems shady before it
takes off.

But sometimes it's just shady.

------
brandnewlow
Yikes, on the one hand this sounds like a very useful search tool for
technical recruiting. On the other, it sounds like its usefulness depends on
how many members of your team you sign up for it...and once someone is signed
up they scrape all their data and add it to their "database".

~~~
richardburton
(I work on Sourcing.io.)

Although the social connections feature is really helpful, there are lots of
other ways you can use Sourcing.io to search for engineers. There a lots of
other ways to filter the data: location, project contributions, language
experience, current employer, et al. For example, to find people who might be
a fit for your DevOps role at Perfect Audience, you might want to see all the
engineers that had contributed to Graphite's web app
([https://github.com/graphite-project/graphite-
web](https://github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web)) or have lots great
DevOps people following them on Twitter--we try make these kinds of searches
really easy to do.

------
rhgraysonii
So how does one know if they are in your database?

~~~
richardburton
(I work on Sourcing.io.)

Right now we don't have a simple way for engineers to see what their profile
looks like--we'll be adding this soon. In the meantime, please feel free to
email on richard@sourcing.io so I can show you what your profile looks like.
If you'd like to be permanently removed from our index I can do that right
away.

~~~
nawitus
Hmm, so there might a profile created for me without my permission? This is
wrong in my opinion, and illegal too in Finland.

------
throwa
Alex and Richard good job. looking at the progress of your competitor's link
below, suggest to me that what you are building is needed.
[http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/19/entelo-the-big-data-
recruit...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/19/entelo-the-big-data-recruiting-
platform-used-by-box-yelp-and-square-lands-3-5m-from-battery-and-menlo/)
leverage social data to search for and identify great candidates

------
riquito
While I may like the project, I really hope that in many countries is illegal
to earn from profiles of oblivious people who never choose to be part of an
"offer"

------
caiob
Why does it need my credit card number during trial period?

------
colinbartlett
This is one specific reason I have no Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. (And I
still get tons of recruiter spam calls and emails.)

------
joshlev
won't this just enable recruiters to spam developers?

~~~
richardburton
(I'm working on Sourcing.io.)

While that is a possible outcome, we're working _really_ hard to make sure
that doesn't happen. We'd hate to be responsible for an _increase_ in the
volume of recruiter-spam sent to engineers every day. Although this isn't on
the homepage, we are planning to add a set of tools so that engineers can
manage their profiles and companies' technical recruiters can coordinate
engineer-to-engineer outreach. We believe that it's a lot better when
engineers should receive cold recruiting emails from the people they'd
actually be working with.

~~~
nfoz
So the answer is /yes/. Everyone you index has to know about you, and go to
your website in order to opt them out of receiving emails they never asked to
receive in the first place? That means it's spam.

------
pacofvf
Ok, It's good that you are working in an opt out, but how about of an opt in?,
many developers don't have a public profile to scrape their abilities..

------
liamgooding
How is this different to
[http://www.3sourcing.com/](http://www.3sourcing.com/) (500 Startups 007
batch) ?

------
richardburton
Hello, I'm working Alex on Sourcing.io. Please feel free to ask me a question
here or email me at any time (richard@sourcing.io).

~~~
edent
I asked this on Twitter and never got a reply - how do I opt out?

I get enough spam already from recruiters on LinkedIn - even though I've said
I'm not looking for work.

If you want to make this useful, become opt in only. As a recruiter, I don't
want to waste time emailing people who aren't looking for work.

~~~
richardburton
(I work with Alex on Sourcing.io.)

Apologies for the delay in responding your tweet--I found it
here([https://twitter.com/edent/status/415537481829068801](https://twitter.com/edent/status/415537481829068801)).
I'll get back to you over Twitter as soon as we've removed you from the index.

We are working on a set of tools to allow engineers to manage their profile on
Sourcing.io (and opt out)--I hope that they'll be good enough to encourage you
to re-join.

~~~
edent
Thanks. Although, in the spirit of HN pedantry, I cannot _re_ -join as I never
joined in the first place.

Please, I urge you to move to an opt-in only model. Otherwise you run the risk
of being as despised as Klout and other similar forced participation sites.

~~~
richardburton
Correct! That was not clear. I hope you'll forgive the transgression as I'm
juggling a few forms of communication at the moment--this HN submission came
out of the blue.

I completely understand your perspective. The problem for companies who want
to recruit great people is that most of them aren't looking for new a job
(several studies put the percentage at around 80%). Therefore, companies are
forced to reach out to those people to pique their interest. There's a subset
of great companies who take the time to craft personalized, relevant emails to
these people; there are some who even get their engineers to write the initial
email. We want to work with these kinds of companies.

~~~
nfoz
> The problem for companies who want to recruit great people is that most of
> them aren't looking for new a job

Right, then they're not looking for a new job. What part of that do you not
understand?

~~~
testing12341234
I'm not actively seeking new employment and am very happy at my current
position. However, I am always (passively) interested in new opportunities,
and am not going to ignore something awesome that falls in to my lap. A
service like this is actually very valuable for someone like me.

That said, opt-in is the way to go. I definitely don't understand the
seemingly contradictory point of view of them saying "we don't like recruiter
spam either" and "we find ways for companies to send unsolicited requests".

So, I would fall under the categorization of "aren't looking for a new job",
while at the same time don't agree with the opt-out (without an actual opt-out
mechanism) nature of this service.

