

Looking for a Job? Let GitHub Help - twampss
http://github.com/blog/553-looking-for-a-job-let-github-help

======
btilly
Major potential flaw.

If I am looking for a new job I'm generally not going to put that information
anywhere my employer might find it because then I'd be concerned that the
urgency of my job search might suddenly increase substantially. Therefore I
don't want to put my information anywhere where employers might search and
find me.

Yes, they can put something on it to say, "Employer can't find their own
employees." But that is too easy to circumvent either on purpose or
accidentally through a clueless recruiter.

I'd want to see the design of phase 2 before deciding whether I'd dare
participate in phase 1.

~~~
UncleOxidant
I'm not sure why they include the "available for hire" checkbox. Seems like if
you didn't have that it wouldn't look like you were looking for work. Putting
your info on LinkedIn, for example, doesn't automatically mean you're looking
around. A lot of people in my work group, for example, are on LinkedIn
(including our boss) and we don't assume that means they're looking.

I'd suggest they lose the "available for hire" box.

~~~
patio11
That suggestion is (perhaps) in the users' interests, but it is directly
against the customers' interests. Follow the money: prospective _employers_
pay to identify/contact people who are actively looking for work. They are not
interested in paying to contact people who will not accept job offers.

Prospective _employees_ pay nothing. They are not the customers of this
system. It will serve their interests... when it is reasonably practical to do
so without trodding on the toes of the _paying customers_.

Prospective employers are not worried that prospective employees might find
themselves suddenly separated from their previous employer -- indeed, _that is
sort of the general idea_.

~~~
btilly
Take it one step farther. After a couple of well-publicized bad situations
they are likely to find the most desirable users becoming reluctant to check
that checkbox. And then the model breaks down, which is not in anyone's
interest.

I hope they figure it out before that situation arises. But until I'm
confident that they understand that, I won't be comfortable with that service.

~~~
sandGorgon
A good middle ground is search rankings - users who are "looking for a job"
have their ranking bumped-up on search results (shown to employers). Not to
the very top mind you (too obvious!) - but enough to come ahead of non-
lookers.

This way - the employers get a good result on their search for prospective
hires and employees get plausible denaibility.

------
blasdel
This is a much better idea than jobs.stackoverflow.com -- find people who have
publicly produced something of executable value, rather than those that are
publicly addicted to a MMO hint line.

~~~
ciupicri
There's no one stopping you to put links to your projects that are hosted on
GitHub or somewhere else.

------
SlyShy
I think this is a really neat idea. Lets people get some well deserved
kickback from their open source coding, hopefully.

~~~
patio11
I think Github is very adroit at extracting value from other people's open
source coding. (I don't say that as a criticism of Github.)

~~~
ionfish
I think this is true, but it's important to bear in mind how much they
contribute back, not just through the community they support, but directly in
terms of code they've open-sourced. They could get away with doing this a lot
less than they do, and deserve credit for how dedicated they are to open-
sourcing their code.

------
icefox
Interesting feature, I wonder what caused it to come about. Perhaps GitHub is
looking to hire and wanted first pick :D

GitHub has a lot of little hidden features these days. The ability to do code
review is there, but very hidden, any plans for improving that workflow? On
the topic of hidden features is there a graph showing off what features people
use (and don't?) I was recently told about one that has been around for a long
time that I just didn't know about. no doubt there are others.

------
psranga
This is a really really good idea. I expect clued-in companies use this to
search for developers instead of LinkedIn (if GitHub charges less than
LinkedIn for access to the hiring profile). We'll finally have something like
a "portfolio" for developers, where you can _show_ your code in a slick UI
instead of _talking_ about it on your blog etc.

~~~
jacoblyles
Why would github have to charge less for a more valuable service?

~~~
psranga
Great question. Thank you for challenging my assumption. I thought they'll
have to charge less at least at first because they'll have a smaller pool of
candidates.

~~~
djcapelis
The right there would be what we call a feature.

------
davidw
Nice idea, but I already maintain my resume, and a linkedin profile. I'd
prefer to just link to those.

~~~
gord
I was going to say cut-n-paste your blurb... [so you get keywords]

But then it occurred to me that maybe doing cut and paste from webpage A to
webpage B is a missing feature.

I dont think microformats or frames answer this need well.

It seems the most basic feature of a web mashup, so why dont we see this as a
trivial standard?

<div src=url id=div_id />

Ive used plone before as a companywide repo for project docs, but one feature
I wanted was to do this for subsections of a page. This would have solved that
problem.

~~~
_pius
How would this differ from iframes?

~~~
gord
Without knowing exactly why, my feeling is iframes are broken. If not.. why
arent iframes used in say yahoo and google customisable home page mashups?

Differences :

granularity - share one div, not whole page

scope - how should javascript interact between the inclusion and the whole
page? [ Im not sure.. this wasn't on the radar when iframes were designed I
guess ]

------
thinkcomp
This may be obvious, but how do I search GitHub as an employer? Do you just
view a lot of different individual profiles?

~~~
btilly
The plan is that in phase 2 they will introduce a search interface for the
convenience of employers.

