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GitHub Jobs Pre-Launch

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80 pointsjackowayed30 comments

I think this is a great idea, but, are Job Boards the new "thing" for "community-type" sites to implement?

37Signals, StackOverflow, GitHub, ... But hey, they're all full of job postings, right?

There's a lot of things that can be said about job boards, finding talent, finding companies... in my mind the salient point is that the job marketplace sucks. It sucks to find a job, it sucks to find good people to hire. And it affects real people in a very real way. The ability to work in job that you love is such a meaningful thing in life, and the inverse is just as true.

I'm not saying our new jobs site is the magic bullet, but it's an area of software development that we think is lacking, and there's a ton of things we'd like to build to help improve it. This is the first step.

It does. A lot.

The unfortunate thing is that all these add-on job board solutions don't really go any way towards fixing the problem.

With the greatest respect in the world; I don't see this being a lot different (though I would be overjoyed to be proven wrong! :)). Not for any other reason that it is not really GH's focus...

See; it would be really cool to see this integrated with GH proper. With payment mechanisms so you could write a spec, post an ad, get someone sign up, code the work and then collect the payment. That's the sort of job board you should do :)

For the "real world" there is a lot of work to do for programming jobs - most of the offerings work for big corps and mid/large startups. Smaller indie firms like the one I work for struggle to find good local talent and there is just no one catering for us. And that is a huge market (I know at least 10 firms with the same problem within about 5 miles of where I work - in a sleepy market town).

But that's more aiming towards freelance type work, while it seems like this is more of for people to find full-time jobs.

As for this being different, I don't think it is supposed to be. But I guess we will find out once it actually launches.

> I think this is a great idea, but, are Job Boards the new "thing" for "community-type" sites to implement?

Community sites implement job boards not because they're the hot new thing, but because they're trivial to implement and wildly profitable.

Thats actually what I meant. Not necessarily that job boards are the "Hot new thing", but that they are the "thing" that is easy to get rolling and always seem to attract listers.

To the people adding them, there isn't very many reasons not to add them.

So what kind of budget to companies put towards hiring? Are tech companies going to continue buying listings on every tiny job site for as much as $300+?

you'd be surprised how much companies spend to find employees. I think recruitment agencies take 10-20% of yearly salaries.

The bounty for employee referrals at the (mid-size but prominent) software company I work for is $4000 US.

If they can place these ads for 30 days on 10 of these little, influential sites, they're already ahead.

I Love this "thing" ..now as an employer i know where to go if i am looking for a rails fanboy/ open source enthusiast /mentors .

Would be cooler if you had a job board where consultants could outsource bits of their work to other GitHubbers. It would require a Github subscription. That way it drives more subscribers and keeps the job board free from recruiters and spammers. It would also create a special Github community, where people could trade out work. You could probably also have some kind of integration into Github, like giving someone Git access to a certain directory only, or similar.

> Would be cooler if you had a job board where consultants could outsource bits of their work to other GitHubbers.

Turning GitHub into rentacoder.com?

I don't see what would be cool in that.

> It would also create a special Github community, where people could trade out work.

Moving the reward from being social in nature (the appreciation of your peers, either those who use/contribute to your project or those whose projects you contribute to) to being an exchange of good, cheapening the whole community.

Good point. I wouldn't want to see Githubacoder :) There are many problems with Rentacoder, but I think there is a way to blend a short term job board with social coding. Possibly just building on to the "For Hire" feature they already have.

This is both good and worrying. It'll be nifty to see how they implement it, and I'm sure it will increase the company's financial security, but I greatly worry about how it might impact their customer priorities. Before, the customers using Github to host their repositories were the only ones to cater to; will this create a conflict of interest in any way? They say "quality jobs", but really, how do they maintain this quality in any fashion, and do they really have any incentive to do so?

There's no conflict of interest here. We're focused on making GitHub the best place to collaborate on code. Part of collaboration is having others to work with.

If anything, we have more of an incentive to keep quality jobs. We don't need to sell job listings to keep the doors open — so we can focus on making the best job board possible.

Thank you; this is what I was wanting to hear.

So what? If you're not happy with the quality of the jobs, disable having them show up on your dashboard.

What situation do you see arising where they worsen the site that they love and that has been making them good money just to "cater to" people who want to post jobs?

My initial worries were that perhaps features for the job board would be given preference over features for the repository hosting. Money talks, and things like job listings can bring a lot of money. I just want to be sure that code hosting will always be their top priority.

That's like saying you worry that Google's search results will get worse if they focus on Adwords too much. Code hosting is the core of Github and what makes this job board possible.

They work hand in hand. A successful job board gives us the ability to focus more on code hosting and collaboration. That's the fun part of GitHub, after all.

In fairness, many of the pre-Google search engines _did_ focus too much on advertising, and auctioned off 1st place listings for various searches.

Google succeeded largely because they were unusually scrupulous about protecting the quality of their search results, and didn't make compromises that some advertisers wanted at the time.

in an obvious but interesting way that apple are continuing to influence us- note how much this product announcement reads like the sort of stuff apple have used to sell us the iPhone, iPad etc- i'm not sure how well it plays for webapps, but it is definitely compelling....

I'm not getting a particularly Apple-y vibe from the press release. What similarities do you see to iPhone ads?

alot of it is about tone, approach, etc. That's harder to show examples of, but definitely has the same feel.

For text, some of this stuff seems Apple/jobs-esque:

"When you post a job on GitHub Jobs, you're sending a message: you want developers who care about their craft."

I'm sure Jobs or Ive has said something like that in one of their videos.

"Starting next Tuesday, everyone will be able to search and browse jobs."

Sure, this is a standard type of sentence, but the composition is distinctly Apple- "when, who, what" - where the who is 'everyone' - no barrier to entry, straightforward, clear.

"Of course, .... if you don't find them useful. But we think you will."

that's again very Appleish. Confident of the opinion but not overly arrogant, suggestive of the outcome.

I'm not sure i can prove this with empirical evidence, but I definitely feel it.

News flash: Apple does not have a monopoly on that tone. It's just a good marketing strategy following basic principles that they employ a lot.

You could also say that a lot of Acer's marketing has a Dell-like tone. But that doesn't mean Acer is taking cues from Dell.

He didn't say they have a monopoly, he's just saying it feels influenced. Considering the guys who run GitHub are mostly (all?) Mac guys, I don't think that it's a stretch.

You forgot the key - "Tuesday". Apple likes to do things on Tuesdays.

Fedora, too[1]:

One week is the added to the schedule to maintain the practice of releasing on Tuesdays. Tuesdays are the designated release day because they are good days for news coverage and the established day we synchronize our content with the mirrors that carry our releases.

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Schedule#Schedule_Con...

I'm not necessarily against this but I don't see anything here that couldn't be accomplished by one of the dozens of other job sites with the GitHub API.

The nice thing is that we can tap into the internal GitHub info and show listings only to users that specifically opt-in. 3rd Party sites would have little choice but ask people to opt-in through their site or to spam everyone.

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