Uri Guttman wrote: > ...since early on i realized this is a bad idea for a group.
I share your concerns, though I wouldn't characterize it as a "bad idea," but one that may prove to be impractical to implement. > ...membership will mean nothing to employers (or me) and i doubt it > will help with hiring anyone as it is one little bit (a true boolean > bit) in a sea of information about you. you could search it but > finding hundreds of members again doesn't help with locating the > skills you want in a hire. Deven has listed a handful of items that can qualify you for membership, but he hasn't necessarily said enough about the objective of the group. Quoting brian, "Deven's intent is to have a group of serious Perl programmers who we'd want to hire ourselves." That's not really specific enough. There are plenty of programmers I'd hire for certain jobs that don't pass the threshold of being "advanced." If the goal is to show off your status to a potential employer, membership either needs to be based on a well documented objective criteria, or else you need to "show your work" - have a page showing the written recommendations from those that vouched for the person, the links to public projects, and other artifacts. Then we aren't relying on a "boolean bit", but instead a starting point for researching a candidate. Even with a weak vetting mechanism, there can be some benefit to an employer in a self-selected label. The group has existed for 3 or more years and has only about 250 members with another 200 pending. So of the thousands of people on LinkedIn that make mention of Perl on their profiles, less than 500 felt serious enough about it to apply for membership. That in itself could be worth while criteria when searching for a candidate for a Perl-centric position. On the other hand, if the objective of the group is just to create a social network of higher skilled Perl developers where you can get peer support on technical matters, then vetting people doesn't matter so much. The worse case scenario is that you end up with some junior developers that add noise. But LinkedIn isn't a great platform for interacting on technical matters. Their discussion forums are pretty clunky. To be effective you'd need to supplement this with a mailing list or something. > my job is reviewing candidates for perl jobs and it is not > easy or trivial. i spend hours on each one and this group requires only > a click to allow someone in. there is no way to vet all those applicants > (or even the ones in it already) by vouching and such. To scale up I think there are two options: 1. Throw labor at the problem. Get more managers in the group, and have them put on their "head hunter" hats and research the applicants. 2. Build an automated system where the applicant populates a web form filling in references to artifacts that support their claim and provides a mechanism for 3rd parties to write a recommendation. Some minimum combination of artifacts and recommendations needs to be met before a group admin is notified of the candidate, at which point they look over the evidence and approve, or send feedback. #2 still sounds fairly labor intensive. No automated system is going to chase down a CPAN or Github link and be able to tell that the code quality exceeds "Matt's Script Archive," or that the references are written by real people. The upside for #2 is that you can publish a permanent link to a report showing that information, which the member can then put on their LinkedIn page. It answers the "show your work" requirement. It sounds like a fair bit of work to build this, and a lot of redundancy with other social networks, including LinkedIn. (I guess the ideal approach would be to build it as a LinkedIn app., if their APIs can support something like this.) > some may be experts in a focused area or say in perl guts. expertise > can be up and down in many ways. Agreed. Perl is too big of a field for someone to have both great depth and wide breadth. But it still may be enough to say that someone is an expert in some areas. It also says something if you've achieved advanced status in at least some areas, as you are likely capable of easily increasing your depth of knowledge in others, as the job requires. Obviously an employer would be foolish to hire someone for a specific expertise within Perl without investigating the candidate's actual expertise. -Tom -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/ _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
