
GitHire - wolfparade
http://www.githire.com/
======
spooneybarger
As far as I can tell, this equates 'best programmers' with people who run
repositories for popular projects.

I suppose if you think Justin Bieber and various top of the charts pop stars
are the best musicians it makes sense.

I think that good programmers can be involved in popular projects but being
involved in a popular project on github shouldn't be the defining
characteristic of a 'good programmer'.

~~~
heyrhett
I think that it depends on what you're hiring for. This is analogous to
Gladwell's, "there is no perfect pepsi, only perfect pepsis"

Ideally, githire should let one select from a few different hiring algorithms,
which rank people differently.

~~~
rhizome
Malcolm Gladwell is not a management consultant.

~~~
heyrhett
All I know is that if I put in Austin, Tx, I see a few people that I know in
the top 10 to be really good software developers.

However, these are the types of people who generally start their own projects,
and attract other good developers to a project. Their salaries are also going
to be quite a bit higher than the average developer as well.

So, it seems to me that project popularity is at least some indicator that a
person is competent as a software developer, but I can think of a lot of jobs
that wouldn't require someone to be in the top 10.

I think that it would be great to be able to be able to search by code
quality, test coverage, etc., but I don't think that we have the AI metrics to
do that yet, and unfortunately, a real human has to look at someone's code to
decide if it's any good.

However, this reminds me of software that tries to detect what "reading level"
a person is writing at. For example, google lets you search by "reading
level". It would be an interesting project for someone to apply the same
principles to software.

------
krobertson
1) Searched for "San Francisco, CA" and it was returning people from India....
?

2) Its 2011, githire.com should work the same as www.githire.com. This is my
biggest pet peeve with any site.

3) The "add info" button on a user page goes to
<http://www.githire.com/user/edit> which simply loads the user info for a
username of edit on github.

Overall an interesting idea, but maybe unveiled a bit prematurely.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
_Its 2011, githire.com should work the same as www.githire.com. This is my
biggest pet peeve with any site._

Agreed. At the very least, either CNAME one to the other. If you really
want/need one canonical domain, it's not hard to define a 301 redirect to the
appropriate domain.

------
cheald
Don't pitch the value of your product with "We have a very high tech
algorithm" until it works. Invoking the "secret sauce" when your basic
functionality doesn't work is amateur-hour stuff, and degrades the benefit of
the doubt that people otherwise give a new product.

This project feels like it's about halfway to MVP. This is more akin to a tech
demo.

All that said, equating inbound connections with programmer ability is an
inherently flawed metric for measuring how hireable a person is.

~~~
anthonyb
That seems to be all they're offering that's different from github's advanced
search:
[https://github.com/search?type=Users&language=Python&...](https://github.com/search?type=Users&language=Python&q=location%3A%22Melbourne%2C+Australia%22)

~~~
sktrdie
But the order of that is based upon the number of followers, which isn't
usually proportional to being a good Githubber.

------
shadowfiend
I'm mildly confused. What repository is listed alongside a user? My user
(<http://www.githire.com/user/Shadowfiend> ) shows a repository that, to my
knowledge, I've never created, forked, or contributed to...

~~~
zbowling
I have the same problem with my own page on this site.

~~~
johndoeee
On my page it finds a different person.

~~~
telemachos
Ditto (username telemachus which points to the user derekprior instead?!?)

Actually, now my profile has been updated, and it now points to Linus
Torvalds. Snapshot for posterity: <http://cl.ly/C23P>

_Edit_ : Don't believe the pretender i386 below me. _I_ am the true Linus
Torvalds! :)

~~~
i386
I'm really flattered - apparently I am Linus!
<http://www.githire.com/user/i386>

~~~
DiabloD3
I'm Linus as well: <http://www.githire.com/user/Diablo-D3>

~~~
rnadna
Me too.

------
TMK
Failed Execution. Take it down and fix it up. Do at least some testing before
launching.

The biggest failure is that wrong information is showing up for peoples
username. Thing is, if the username does not yet exist in your data set, then
query it before showing someone else's profile.

Popularity does not show how good software developer is, we are not
celebrities, some of us are not even bloggers. Some of us do not actively
participate on open source, even if we have few repositories in Github. Though
we still might be looking for work.

~~~
TMK
Funny. Now my own profile has been fetched from github.

The edit info, button still goes to user/edit instead of user/nickname/edit.

Still the system is showing those who are listed as "hireable: false" showing
up before those who are actually hireable.

The search result ordering is odd. There's no reason for gitrank, if it does
not affect the order the github users are shown.

------
tibbon
I actually love this based on easy of finding cool programmers in my area
using languages I can play with. Yea, this sounds silly if you're in SF, but
in Columbus, Ohio, finding cool programmers that dig FoSS and interpreted
languages is tricky. Too many people doing Java, .NET and Oracle stuff at
Nationwide and similar. Too few people doing fun things.

THANK YOU to whoever made this.

~~~
dustinupdyke
I always thought Columbus had a pretty good tech scene going on? EdgeCase,
Leandog, etc always represent at conferences and such.

~~~
tibbon
Problem is in a single sentence you've got almost all of it covered :)

So much here (too much for my tastes) is around manufacturing and the
insurance industry.

------
kstenerud
So how is this different from Klout's "high tech super-secret ranking
algorithm" that everyone knows is worthless?

~~~
wolfparade
GitRank, is based on the pagerank algorithm. Check out the best see if they
don't match who you think should be there. <http://www.githire.com/best>

~~~
akavlie
So it's based on inbound links (aka popularity)?

~~~
kstenerud
If it is, it becomes an SEO game, which defeats the purpose of such a ranking
system. I'd rather hire someone who is passionate about something, designs
well, and writes good code. Their page ranking doesn't help me with that.

All I really see here is a "who's who" of the popular kids.

------
imajes
Hey, there's MVP, and then there's buggy as hell. Yours falls into the latter.
I've loaded 'my' user profile now a half dozen refreshes, and I only saw
myself once.

It'd be great if you went back and had a good look at your code, and how you
got here. Less rush == better product == higher chance of traction.

------
drgath
Currently showing Linus on my page. Bug, or feature? :)
<http://www.githire.com/user/derek>

~~~
getsat
I dislike how basic functionality like this is completely broken, yet ads are
being served. You can see where the priorities are. :(

------
dylangs1030
Aside from the constructive criticism, it might help usability is you made
your algorithm more transparent so users could see _why_ they are essentially
irrelevant (if they expected otherwise) and why some others are getting what
appears to be arbitrarily high rankings. But, I do like this idea, and it
would certainly benefit me if you found a way to make it universally
indicative of a coder's skill. But that's hard. 1. It's still hard to tell
without sitting a hacker down and testing them, 2. popularity does affect page
rank. Some highly useful repositories are lost in a sea of absolutely useless,
but popular programming playthings.

------
sogrady
This is similar to what Matt Biddulph wrote back in 2010. See here:

[https://github.com/mattb/flotsam/tree/master/github-
recruitm...](https://github.com/mattb/flotsam/tree/master/github-recruitment/)

~~~
wolfparade
this is actually where the idea came from.

------
jamie_ca
This sounds like it's supposed to be for hiring, but a quick search for
Toronto had 7 of the top 10 as not hireable (according to their profile).

Bug? Missing feature of MVP? Missing filter option?

------
iambot
hmmm, seems I'm entirely irrelevant, with a GitRank of: N/A. Better not tell
my employer.

I'm not sure whether this is due to my profile not being indexed or that its
rank is so low so as to be negligible.

Would be nice if they explained their ranking system better. (On the site
itself)

~~~
mstepniowski
It looks like they are still crawling the GitHub pages.

------
tmcw
Cool idea! - though the projects that show up next to users don't correspond
with those users, as I would assume they're supposed to?

------
pyre
The blog link parsing is off. If the blog value doesn't have an "<http://> on
it, then it treats it as a relative link under githire.com. E.g.:

    
    
       Blog: mechanicalgirl.com
    

links to <http://www.githire.com/mechanicalgirl.com>

------
budu
The idea is great, but the implementation is totally broken presently. I tried
two times with "Montreal, QC" as a query, the first time it returned only
result from London (UK) and the second time only Philadelphia (PA).

------
amasad
So lets pretend project popularity is a good measure for programmers. But what
if somebody is contributing to other popular projects or is part of an
organization that has popular projects?

------
asolove
NB: It seems you have your DNS/subdomains set up incorrectly. githire.com
returns nothing while www.githire.com works. Be sure to set one of them to the
canonical url for seo purposes.

~~~
wolfparade
honestly DNS still confuses me a bit. I have a CNAME record pointing www to
the ec2 public url. What do I do for the naked domain?

~~~
mnutt
Set up an A record and point it directly at the IP address.

Edit: on EC2, much better to set up an elastic IP as described below.

~~~
darrellsilver
Careful not to put an ec2 host IP address directly in your DNS provider. Given
the caching in DNS, if/when you change EC2 instances you'll be given a new IP,
and your site will be down (or looking at the old server) while DNS updates.

Better to use amazon's Elastic IP. Simply 1) create one, 2) assign it to the
EC2 instance of your choice, 3) add the Elastic IP as your A record as the
parent post suggests.

------
jlarocco
I'm a bit confused how this works.

I searched for my location and couldn't find myself.

I tried my page directly at <http://www.githire.com/user/jl2> and see my
"GitRank" is N/A. I clicked "Add Info" and was taken to another user's page:
<http://www.githire.com/user/edit>

Is it a bug? Did this happen for anybody else?

------
espeed
Nice idea :) I have been working on a blog post and example app for how to do
this with Gremlin and Neo4j -- should be up soon.

------
achompas
I'm sure you're working to fix a couple of issues with your app, so I'm not
trying to pile on here. Love the idea, and I just wanted to report two bugs:

1\. githire.com/user/acompa returns my account, while
www.githire.com/user/acompa returns someone else.

2\. Clicking "Add Info" on my profile

githire.com/user/acompa

takes me to the profile of user "edit" via

githire.com/user/edit

You might need to construct your URLs more consistently, it seems?

------
jt11508
Looks like they are in 503 land right now...

~~~
astrodust
Good. As interesting an idea as this is, it'll just be exploited by worthless,
lazy recruiters.

------
to3m
Nobody has mentioned the name.

A simple "Doesn't do exactly what it says on the tin" disclaimer would
probably suffice...

------
antihero
How exactly does GitRank work?

Also, the add info doesn't seem to do anything.

BUG: If you click add info on a user page, it goes to /user/edit rather than
/user/<username>/edit

Finally, the repo next to me is some uni project that I haven't updated for
about a year, why is it showing that? :(

------
clark-kent
Small bug, "add info" button takes you to <http://www.githire.com/user/edit>
which belongs to the github user <https://github.com/edit>

------
rebel19
This thing is a joke. Searched for Atlanta Georgia and came across someone who
had no open source contributions on and three skeleton projects as a top guy
while high profile open source contributors were not in the system.

------
sktrdie
There's something wrong. <http://www.githire.com/user/parse> has rank of 10
and doesn't own the project shown on the page.

------
alpb
Can't even find my username (ahmetalpbalkan). I think it requires more testing
on the ranking algorithm and probably more input parameters to compute rank.

------
rumblestrut
I tried searching for local Ruby guys, and some of the top Django/Python
people I know showed up at the top of the list.

It might need some tweaking.

------
jcoder
Seems to me you don't have enough information to declare "Hireable: false." I
don't have much of a github presence. I am hireable.

------
thepumpkin1979
Looks like is not showing the commits on other projects or the organizations
you belong to. It's an interesting idea though.

------
robertgaal
Somebody should do the same for Dribbble.

~~~
iambot
Dribbble already does it natively: <http://dribbble.com/designers>

------
umarmung
For a glorified search engine, why does this require Javascript to return a
static page set of results?

------
lincolnwebs
Searching 'detroit' gives results from Munich. Searching 'detroit, mi' gives
Zurich.

~~~
cheald
Quick, try "Turkey". You might get a Sandwich!

------
creativityhurts
For Palo Alto it gives me only non-hireable people. And Facebook.

------
kno
I found a good candidate then saw this: Hireable: false

:( I will look again ...

------
dcolish
Oh please let companies use this to determine "real" talent!

------
Jd
Just got my first Github spam message today. Coincidence? Is this being used
as a spam tool?

Anyone else got something like this in all caps? <<GREETING TO YOU AND YOUR
FAMILY, IN MY SEARCH FOR A... >>

------
cliftonmckinney
We've had a similar project live for a little while now. It's opt-in only
though.

<http://www.workforpie.com/>

------
emreyilmaz
nice idea but poor implementation.

by the way, it would be good if users categorized by programming languages.

------
fasouto
Good use of twitter bootstrap!

------
dennisgorelik
Search takes ~30 seconds and returns no results or "503 Service Unavailable"

Does not look viable.

------
jQueryIsAwesome
There are some problems with the search engine, if i search by "Bogota" there
is no result from my city... and it give me exactly the same results if i
write "Colombia".

Maybe you should use the Google API: <http://goo.gl/H5cGY>

