
Ask HN: Professional Hacker's Web Presence? - techbio
What sites are key for the professional hacker? What is your public face?<p>How do you evaluate a candidate professional for employ/contract/partner/supplier online?
======
superk
Edit: Ok, that's a little bit of a loaded question. Key to the professional
hacker / public face: blog, github / google code, twitter and activity in
forums (like HN).

How to evaluate a potential employee / contract.. the above, plus LinkedIn, CV
/ references, portfolio and social networks (if they aren't careful with
permissions).

Supplier.. google, twitter (#good / #bad tweets) and credibility of web site.

Partner.. lot's of face-to-face time.

~~~
techbio
Loaded? As in the answer is obvious because of how it was asked? I don't mean
it that way.

I am curious if there is a combination of online attributes that will
generally form a proxy for professionalism.

~~~
superk
Sorry... I meant because the two sentences weren't entirely related.

~~~
techbio
Not at all. I meant for it to ask a specific question. Your response hit all
the notes.

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lsc
depends on what kind of hacker. for a unix greybeard, it's all about the
mailing lists. I'd be very suspicious of any applicant for a high level open-
source *NIX job who doesn't show up on mailing lists.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
Why, exactly?

~~~
angusgr
I think because that's where the bulk of the community is for "greybeard unix
open source" technology.

The generalised answer, I would think, is "be visible or at least present in
the online community that exists around your chosen technologies".

(I didn't post the parent reply, but I did upvote it!)

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I just disagree with the current mantra that you have to be so out there and
in the public to be a worthwhile programmer. Many great programmers really
aren't interested in tweeting every time they figure out what a hashtable is
or whatever.I think it would be suspect if one was not aware of mailing lists
and didn't at least lurk through them as a resources but as far as being an
active participant, I think it's a bit over-hyped.

~~~
lsc
For many kinds of programming, you are right.

But if you hit a bug in the kernel, you are probably going to communicate with
others (probably on a mailing list) in the process of fixing that bug. Same
goes for hitting bugs in any other open-source part of UNIX.

I mean, sure, if you are writing an application, this only applies on the
shared library bits. But I was specifically talking about advanced *NIX
people... people who would be expected to deal with bugs in open-source
products.

~~~
ryanjkirk
I'm a customer of yours. Out of curiosity, what mailing lists do you
participate in?

~~~
lsc
xen-users, xen-devel, NANOG (oh man, I'm about 8K messages behind on that one)
freeside-devel opensc-user dns-operations svlug lopsa-tech wear-hard centos-
virt freebsd-xen netbsd-xen and a few others. If I'm working on an open source
project, even in a minor way I usually subscribe to the list so I can lurk and
ask questions in a more intelligent manner... For a while I was on the qemu
mailing list (I think I even posted a stupid patch.) I'm leaving off the
-announce lists I'm on to listen for security vulns because I don't post
there, but they are _essential_ for any computer janitor. I'd recommend a
search on "Luke S. Crawford" as most of these lists have public archives that
are indexed by google and other popular search engines.

Actually, I'm sure you'll notice that I'm more active here than on any of
those lists... this is probably a bad thing for my technical career
development. (perhaps a good thing for my career development as a business
person, though.)

Edit: just to be clear, I'm not saying you should ask an applicant what lists
s/he is active on... by itself that won't give you that much information
(well, except maybe that if a SysAdmin is not on a bunch of security announce
lists, something is _very wrong_ but expecting them to remember this data
without going through their mailbox is pretty unreasonable.) you should figure
that out. maybe ask them what usernames they use on technical forms that
they'd like to share? (note, as an employer, you have to be careful not to be
creepy when you do this. Most of us have a 'professional identity' we don't
mind sharing... but you don't want to look like the kind of employer who goes
through employee's myspace profiles looking for drunken party pictures.)

~~~
Poiesis
Wear-hard! I didn't think that one would still be alive and kicking. It's not
exactly what most employers would be looking for, I guess. I lost interest in
wear-hard when I realized that smartphones pretty much did everything I needed
a wearable to do and also got out of my way when I needed them to.

But all these mailing lists, they take serious _time_ . For me, they're really
the first thing to go.

~~~
lsc
I was wondering if anyone was going to catch that one. Wear-hard, certainly,
won't take up much of your time. It's just about dead these days, but every
now and then someone talks about their rig which usually triggers a bunch of
responses like yours. I don't think smartphones are quite there yet. Most of
the way, though. A bluetooth twiddler would about do it.

Lists I can ignore (e.g. everything but the security -announce lists) go in
their own folders to be ignored, most of the time. but they are a good
substitute for HN, if you want a more technically oriented and less business
oriented discussion, and they are essential if you really want to figure out a
tough bug or add a new feature, so having a presence on the mailing lists
(even if you don't read them every day) is really useful.

------
nathanielksmith
github (or something similar, but only if used heavily) is the most paramount,
I'd say.

By looking at a well-used github (/gitorius/bitbucket...) account you can
evaluate someone's: \- communication skills \- code quality \- areas of
expertise \- creativity \- ability to see things through to the end

~~~
lolname
Do you refrain from hiring anybody without a github account?

~~~
superk
If it were an _employer's market_ you could probably get away with that.

~~~
lolname
Why would an employer want to do that?

A github account just makes it slightly more likely that the candidate's
experience involves more open source, and less proprietary code.

Personally, I'd rather filter candidates based on factors that relate to their
performance. After all, bad hires are _very_ expensive... as such, most of
these shortcuts strike me as incredibly misguided nonsense.

~~~
superk
Because they can see first hand the quality of the code (plus all the other
meta information that comes along with commit logs). How do you evaluate
proprietary code at anywhere near that same level?

------
angusgr
I think that the answer to the first part of your question ("public face")
depends on a lot on the choice offered in the second part
"employ/contract/partner/supplier".

Also, to a lesser extent, on the kind of work you're talking about (startup
hacker, co-founder, web programmer, systems programmer, open source hacker, IT
dogsbody?).

Can you be more specific? Assuming the question is for your benefit, what are
you looking to be? If the question is for your own analysis, who are you
looking to hire/partner/contract to?

~~~
techbio
Lets say your boss gives you a list of ten name/email address pairs every
morning at 10:00, and you have to give him a list of the three most
professional candidates, in order, by 11 because your competition will hire
them or something.

What script/Google search query/yahoo pipe/metrics could you use to automate
this task?

~~~
angusgr
I'd say that this is still meaningless without context. Who is your boss? Who
are you? Who are the potential hires for? Where did the names come from in the
first place?

If I'm reading your reply correctly, you're actually looking to write an
algorithm for an automated "find-a-hacker" engine?

In which case, I'd say the first bar to surpass is from another comment here -
the guy who said his website is pretty crummy but it comes up first when you
google "PHP programmer edinburgh"

~~~
techbio
I do not know your name, but for example, projectgus gives me 3400 Google
results: blog, twitter, github, and then the rest of the top ten are
"something something Project - Gus Winters, something, ..."

So 3400 is a poor rating metric. But what metrics from the list of HN,
StackOverflow, /., reddit/prog, yahoo answers, MIT Media Lab, web site PR,
Citseer mentions, etc. could constitute a good ranking? Sure, a Nobel Prize is
a shortcut. I am talking about a proxy or data model for finding and sorting.

If it can be automated, it will be.

~~~
angusgr
It would still seem to me like it would be context sensitive, in the sense
that you want different information to hire different types of professionals
and also that people put different aspects of their life online.

To follow on from your example of me - googling projectgus gives you my both
my personal blog and my twitter account as the first two results. My twitter
account title gives you my real name, and if you google that then you
immediately find my current employer, and some details from an old employer,
and then a long tail of quasi-related noise.

Whether or not you'll find anything relevant to what you want depends on what
you're looking for. I don't have a resume posted online, which means that
although I'm a professional programmer most of my programming experience
doesn't immediately show up anywhere on the internet.

However, it's possible you could infer a lot of it from my posts on various
little mailing lists and forums (for example, a handful of posts on Erlang-
Questions because I spent about a year writing Erlang and a few posts on the
Hibernate forums because I've done a little bit of Java middleware
development.) Maybe.

Of course, nobody just says "let's see if Angus is a hacker we can hire".
Someone might say "oh, you need more Erlang programmers? I know a local
programmer called Angus who has programmed in Erlang" (for contrived example).
In which case, you google my name + Erlang and you can see that I've
programmed in Erlang. Although my online Erlang presence is, in my opinion,
underwhelming and you would not decide to approach me on that basis. Which, in
my opinion, would be a mistake. ;)

However, even though you wouldn't get specific information about me, you would
be able to read my blog and find out I like Linux & open source, I own an
Arduino, I like taking apart cheap chinese gadgets, and I like writing. Which
is possibly all useful information, again depending on exactly what you were
after me for in the first place.

Although I didn't put that information online to get jobs (if I did want to do
that, I'd have a resume section online or a LinkedIn profile or something, and
maybe the above paragraphs of rant would be redundant.)

I hope this discussion helps you in whatever process you decide to automate. I
understand that you're talking about something a bit different, but at the
same time I think it would be hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all
approach that was entirely based on scraping other data. Finding something
more specific, in the same vein as Haskellers.com except without the user-
submitted data, might be plausible.

Stack Overflow Careers, for instance, uses Stack Overflow as its data source
but OTOH it still relies on the user to submit other details, in order to make
the information relevant to employers.

~~~
angusgr
Also worth noting that this process of "Google stalking" me only works because
I have a relatively unique name.

Doing it by email address might work, although most people make an effort to
keep their email addresses away from automated harvesting. :).

~~~
techbio
I just googled the name of your website. I hope you don't actually think that
is stalking.

~~~
angusgr
Of course not.

I put it in air quotes because I couldn't think of a better word for "using
google repeatedly to find out everything you can about someone" (referring to
the process that I described, ie more involved than simply googling me.)

------
user24
I publish a lot on my personal blog ( <http://www.puremango.co.uk> ). Other
than that it's twitter, reddit and HN. I do have linkedin but I don't really
use it at all.

I invite employers to read over my blog posts and my CV which I put online (
<http://www.puremango.co.uk/2009/08/php-cv/> ).

That's about it really. If I don't want something associated with me, I try
not to do it really...

~~~
techbio
The Eric Schmidt Solution to web archives?

[http://gawker.com/5419271/google-ceo-secrets-are-for-
filthy-...](http://gawker.com/5419271/google-ceo-secrets-are-for-filthy-
people)

------
TamDenholm
I'm a web dev so obviously i've got a website. Its very neglected but it still
ranks in google for "Edinburgh PHP Developer" which is exactly the people i'm
after so its fine for now.

