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Comment by ericclemmons | Hacker News Reader

As a developer, is there a reason to use LinkedIn at all, since Github provides all the evidence needed to vouch for a person's skills?

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Because many, many programmers don't store their code on Github, as the majority of their work is on proprietary, closed-source projects for for-profit companies.

And many people don't like Git.

But for those that do use git, and do use github, wouldn't github do the trick?

Their interface is simple enough that you don't need to know git to browse around a potential candidate's code, evaluate their interests and abilities, etc.

For vetting somebody, yeah, but that's not what LinkedIn is used for by a vast majority of people. It's used to get introductions into businesses as a lead-generation method for B2B firms, and finding people to recruit. You get them into the recruiting bucket, and then filter it out as you vet them. You're misunderstanding the purpose of LinkedIn: It's not there to be a resume, it's there to be a discoverable and up-to-date contact list.

You're living in a bubble if you think more than 10% of recruiters have even heard of Github.

Or, that anyone hiring or interviewing you (recruiter or developer) will actually evaluate your work beyond that you have a couple repos with more than a couple files in them.

I think several recruiters have heard of Github, but that it is too resource-intensive to research candidates this way, when tons of software has been developed to chop up résumés for querying =/

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