Only Stanford and MIT graduates? What about the other 99.9% of tech grads?
Edit: It seems there is no way to delete my profile either.
Not that there is anything wrong with wanting to undertake some kind of degree, I respect that. It's when having a degree is considered the only real entry into Facebook or Google, or any large Internet company which in turn gets you into a service like this, the gaps start to widen. Unless you work for a company that gets acquired by one of these big companies, you need a degree, no ifs or buts.
I don't mind not being a part of the service myself, it's a great idea. I would just love to get in on it though, I think I am a decent developer with a decent list of Github repositories and code contributions to other projects as well as years of experience.
Limiting it to developers from places that already have rigorous selection practices is just a starting point. Any suggestions for how to evaluate talent otherwise? We have a few ideas, but would love to hear yours.
I wouldn't want to work for a place that was so technically strapped that they couldn't evaluate me as a candidate on my own merits. But I do like the idea of a "Developer Auction" where anyone can participate, like in a real market.
It's a shame that after creating a profile I have to go through the trouble of contacting you to be notified if you decide to start offering such a service.
If the employer got his/her degree from Cornell (for example), he/she might not be too thrilled to find that you've decided that job applicants from Cornell aren't even worth letting into the system.
Yeah, I don't get it either.
How much of it is genuine (some of it certainly is), and how much of it is chasing this same small pool of people (ivy league CS education, worked at Google or Microsoft, or significantly contributions to a major open source project)?
So, of course you csn't find your rockstar.
It seems in the tech world today, the answer is to not lower your requirements, or find one Ruby person and one JS person, or look at non-Zynga alumni, or (gasp!) look at remote workers, but to LOOK HARDER AND LOUDER for the same thing. Which is, from someone slightly on the outside of, well, the Valley, grating.
Having no knowledge of the founders at all, I would guess that some of the founders graduated from those universities and either worked at or know people who worked at those companies, and so they chose that list to start with because they were familiar with the range of quality they could expect of programmers from those places.
The second sentence in the quote outright tells you that they plan to expand this list. Presumably they could be convinced to advance their expansion schedule if there was a lot of demand from people not fitting their stated starter profile.
Basically, I think commenters here are making a big deal about something that's really just a temporary filter to reduce the volume of applicants until the company is ready to scale up. Maybe I'm being too trusting, but I didn't read anything sinister into it.
It was/is a temporary filter, it's a band-aid awaiting a better long-term fix. Certainly the list of half a dozen or so companies isn't meant to be all inclusive.
We'd love to hear your suggestions/feedback on how we can avoid being spammed with 100,000+ applications and how we can better determine which candidates will attract job offers & interest from employers.
We're trying to come up with ideas for how to open it up to a wider audience while still keeping up quality. Any ideas?