Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a lengthy piece that describes how a startup called Gild is using big data analytics to help other companies find talented developers. Gild’s technology scours the Internet for data from social networking sites, blogs and code-sharing sites like GitHub. It attempts to find those programmers who are very active and whose code gets reused. Using a special algorithm it assigns each developer a “Gild score.”
Gild has used the service itself to find programmers. For example, it found and hired Jade Dominguez, a 26-year-old programmer who hadn’t attended college and was living in Southern California. Dominguez didn’t have the sort of resume that normally attracts employers, but thanks to his blog posts and the popularity of his code among other developers, he achieved an amazingly high Gild score of 100. In his eight months at Gild, Dominguez has earned a reputation for being talented, although he “sometimes struggles to work in a structured environment.”
