> One way to see if someone is an engineer is to ping GitHub directly.

This strikes me as slightly creepy. If I give you my email as a customer, I am not sure I want that information to be mined for this purpose.

Personally, I don't mind. I assume anything I give to a social networking site [e.g. GitHub] is public knowledge or might as well be.

I mainly value my privacy about non-public information [e.g. lovers, close friends, current location] and that isn't acquirable without violating the privacy of my phone/email/etc.

While you may consider user e-mail addresses to be public, some people take umbrage when their e-mail addresses are disclosed.

Personally I use a different e-mail address for almost every site, so searching by e-mail address wouldn't find my account, but I know many people use the same e-mail address for several things.

True, some people use a different address for each service (ie. yourservice@mydomain.com), and they tend to be the the kind of people one would want to hire as engineers! I wonder if Sourcing.io figured it out somehow, but at least compared to option 1 it seems better to look them up manually.

That is what the parent comment basically said.

Yes, I do understand people in the world don't all share my opinions given I was replying to the opinion you present. ;)

Would you find it creepy if an employee were doing this manually?

Yes.

"I chose to only consider people who have at least one [GitHub] repo. You can be more liberal and look at everyone, but empirically profiles with 0 repos have been pretty useless."

"You’ll probably want to find the person’s LinkedIn to see where they work and how long they’ve been there ..."

This is just lazy recruiting for people who don't actually have contacts and can't use those contacts to find good candidates, so instead they use social networking as a surrogate indicator of actual talent.

Bleh.

Um, no one has enough contacts to ping and hire the amount of candidates a start-up or any other company needs. This isn't lazy recruiting, this is just recruiting.

I beg to differ. Networks are transitive.

Riot games is another company where a huge portion of their hires come from the user base.