For those who don’t know (or just plain forgot) I run a weekly podcast for developers at http://www.talkingshopdownunder.com and in one of the episodes I talked with Matthew Wills about an idea I blogged about – the Developer Experience Index and wether we need one or not to improve the way we find and hire talent and raise the general skill level of the industry.

Interestingly I just ran across an opinion piece on GigaOm about the way hiring is changing and wether resumes are headed the way of the dodo - http://gigaom.com/collaboration/the-future-of-work-wont-contain-resumes/

It’s worth having a read, and most interestingly talks about the social networking aspects of hiring and how LinkedIn and your online presence in open source efforts can be a reflection of how well respected you are and wether you’re a good potential hire or not.

I still don’t think we’re there yet, but the aggregation of social networking information into a ranking of some kind is a very interesting approach to finding people, though likely will tend to favour those with the best connections or most popular projects, not necessarily the best developers for your team.  Still, if nothing else, it reflects passion and involvement, and without passion for what they do a developer is pretty much worthless.