Should RescueTime Help Get You a Job at your Favorite Company? | Hacker News Reader

Should RescueTime Help Get You a Job at your Favorite Company?

blog.rescuetime.com

20 pointsbfioca12 comments

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!

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.

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.

Good points. Some of the thinking behind this is inspired by an old site I worked on in 2006 which let you pick tags that represented your skills. This is better because you don't have to pick, we should be able to derive them. That project was engineering focused because that's what we knew best. This is definitely going to start that way since we can manually check that any results make sense.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com