Not every developer has a brand. This service appears to target companies hiring developers that don't. Fortunately that is 99.99% of the market.
This happens even if one is fairly isolated doing "heads down coding" for much of the year. There are times when you meet with clients in meetings, or talk to customers, and talk to competitors at industry conferences, standards meetings and the like.
People who are competent recognize other people who are also competent just by talking to them. People either know what you are talking about and can respond intelligently, or they don't. When people don't know what you are talking about, you downgrade the conversation and talk about gardening, the weather, sports. This is just normal everyday human interaction. It's strange reading some of the replies here, it sounds like some of the people on this discussion board don't know about how that is done. They seem to not have face to face interactions with other people in their field.
In the cases where you connect with someone who is likewise competent, you both remember the encounter. You trade business cards. And if you have an opening at your job for the sort of work the person does, when the position is mentioned, you pull out his card and say "What about this guy? I met him at the XYZ conference. He invented the ABC protocol that is used in GHI devices, just like the thing we are looking to get into."
Connections made don't have to be with management. Typically it is another engineer, a peer relationship. If you know what you are doing, then you get recommended when there is an opening. That is how most jobs at good companies get filled. It's not "nepotism" as someone below claims (apparently he is lacking a dictionary.) I have never worked for a relative. If I do in the future, they will have tried to hired me not because I am related, but because I am the best. And should that happen I would turn them down since I wouldn't want to mix up family relationships with work, that can be a disaster. In any case, if you are good, even the most reclusive and introverted developer/designer/inventor is going to have some people he talks to. And if he is good some of those people are going to talk to others about his work. If that is not happening for someone, the likely reason is they are not all that great. There is no shame in being incompetent nowadays, but the article under discussion is about hiring "excellent" people, not incompetent ones, so it is relevant for the specific topic at hand.
That said: this site clearly doesn't look like the right way to do it.
Here's our hiring process (we're hiring!):
http://www.matasano.com/careers/
I think we're extraordinarily careful to be respectful of people's time. We've learned through difficult experience to put practical problems in front of candidates, but to avoid Aspie-type alpha-geekery in those problems, and to be appreciative of the time people give us to go through those problems.
Running the puzzle gauntlet doesn't sound respectful to me. There are great programmers who get off on solving puzzles and this process may not weed them out, but there are lots of other great devs who will walk if they see something like this. Caveat emptor.
We've found some success by trying to make the problems really interesting; perhaps some people jettisoned but others came back and said they had a really great time trying to solve them.
Maybe for software you could ask a question like: describe a little piece of software you'd like to build, you could build in an evening and would be useful/entertaining for you or someone else. describe how you'd do it.
and then...
show us, one week from now. :-)
I think that is an excuse. Speaking as the person you are claiming doesn't understand, I am highly introverted and awkward. I hate interacting with people in public, it is exhausting. I throw up after having to do public speaking. Yet, I do talk enthusiastically about my work and the field with other people, and I have learned over the years, as introverts do, to be sociable, just as I have learned over the years how to write compilers, design microchips, do web design, etc. (Little of which was covered in depth at all in the university classes I took at a pretty good engineering school.)
[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
> They seem to not have face to face interactions with other people in their field.
That has very much been my experience, and the whole meeting-strangers-at-trade-shows thing seems similarly atypical to me. I've never known anyone who does that who wasn't dedicated to sales or marketing or biz dev full-time. I've been looped into maybe a dozen phone conferences and three in-person meetings with customers and partners in the last four years, and there's one guy (from our first API integration) who I could reasonably expect remembers my name without a CRM search. Dunbar's number doesn't leave room for very many of the semi-celebrities you're describing, and they're all going to be extroverts anyway, so I just get recruited by former coworkers (and the obligatory headhunters).
And is it any wonder? Threads like this are filled with comments saying things like "80% of programmers can't code their way out of a paper bag", so is it any wonder that the folks who can program adequately get big heads about it?