

Should RescueTime Help Get You a Job at your Favorite Company? - bfioca
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2011/02/24/should-rescuetime-help-get-you-a-job/

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mckoss
Thanks for posting this straw-man, Brian [disclosure - I'm an investor in
RescueTime, and talked to Brian about this idea earlier]. If I might kick off
this discussion ...

I think it's a cool idea if done right. If I can summarize your post:

    
    
      - My RescueTime data *proves* I'm a hot-shot developer.
      - I opt-in to receive job offers from top technology companies.
      - They get to send offers to a pre-screened group of targeted devs.
      - I remain anonymous unless I want to pursue an offer.
      - I score an awesome job with a company I already love.
    

Seems like a nice process to get around the pre-screening aspect of the
recruiting process. And I bet it would work well for occupations like
"developer", "web designer", etc.

Just don't spam users or give out personal information to companies w/o
permission.

~~~
fname
I guess my only problem would be that this really shuts down users that aren't
able to install RescueTime on their work PCs due to company security policies.
These may be the hot-shot types that are actively seeking a new role and the
relative data would be missing for these users unless they do moonlighting of
some sort after hours where RescueTime can monitor that data.

~~~
mckoss
Come to think of it - I'm locked out because I use Linux all day and there is
not a good data collector on Linux!

------
scottru
I hire engineers all the time, and one of the most common failure cases in
hiring is someone who's smart but doesn't get things done - i.e. they
whiteboard/interview/code sample well, but when push comes to shove, don't
actually end up delivering.

There are lots of reasons people don't deliver, but one is that they aren't
actually writing code during the day. I'd love to have someone prescreened
with a "he actually spent 40 hours this week working in Textmate & Terminal."
That's like hearing you're somebody's first choice - a huge point in your
favor.

So while I can't imagine this not feeling slightly creepy, I love the idea. Go
RescueTime go!

~~~
tjr
I once worked with a guy who spent an inordinate amount of time working in his
text editor... modifying editor settings. He didn't actually produce much code
on our project.

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orky56
I would be most interested in getting introductions at these target companies.
Even if it's an informational interview with the person who has my dream job,
that's a big step from not having that relationship.

If we imagine this as an AngelList sort of system, then the employers and
prospective candidates are all high quality. The service could just be a
match-making service that does a bit of due diligence on their respective
quality. That's a big asset.

------
daleharvey
This fits on those, "on paper sounds like a good idea" but in reality I cant
quite see it.

1\. easy to game 2\. suffers from the lines of code problem, is someone a good
developer because they spend 99% of their time inside emacs

I used rescuetime for a while and I didnt see a particular correlation between
how productive I felt one day/week was and how productive rescuetime said I
was.

I feel that github has really nailed this public profile of developers that
accurately shows what they would be like to work with. I have hired and been
hired in the last year and both of them came down to github / open source.

~~~
bfioca
It's not easy to game in that a lot of the data relies on proportionate
comparisons (i.e. time spent in .py files vs. time spent in .java files or on
IM). Not only that, but there'll be a level of human interaction involved. If
we were going to vouch for a candidate, I'd want to at least look at why we
were vouching for them myself, or have someone else audit that conclusion. At
this point we're pretty familiar with (and have a lot of reference points for)
what a real human usage profile looks like. To your point about the lines of
code problem, really the only thing we can do is provide a filtered list of
people who we'd be sure spent a certain amount of their time in the technology
areas companies are looking to hire in.

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jaredsohn
How does RescueTime data actually prove that you're a good developer, though?

At most, it might be able to show that you spend a certain amount of time
within programming-related text-editors and that you're not spending time
browsing the web. Assuming this is the case, it still doesn't prove that
you're doing things effectively or that you're creating software that matches
requirements.

Also, if it is possible to fake out RescueTime by writing a program that sends
keystrokes (haven't investigated if RescueTime has put effort into preventing
fraud like this) then a developer could just set it up on a VM and then use
another VM to surf the web all day and be seen as a "good developer".

With that stated, it would still probably be a good filter today since to my
knowledge there hasn't previously been an incentive to fake out RescueTime
data.

~~~
bfioca
You make good points. This process would always be a two-way street, though.
Nobody would ever be able to land a job just by having an interesting
RescueTime profile. And I'd argue that, for some jobs, coming up with a way to
hack this system would be more than enough justification for hiring that
person. :)

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dangoldin
I had a similar thought a few days ago but not for job hiring purposes but
more for job understanding purposes.

If you are interviewing with a company it would be great to see the rescue
time profiles of the people working there as well as the rescue time of people
in different roles.

