The best way to learn quickly and excel is to surround yourself with people that are smarter and more experienced than you are. When you no longer feel challenged and others view you as the smartest person in the room, you know it’s time to move on. The problem then becomes: how do you pick a new team that will challenge you and help you grow? We built Coderwall’s team leaderboard as a tool to help you find those teams.

Warning signs in an interview

I remember one of my first interviews; the company’s product seemed technically challenging and the interviewers talked a great game. I had only been programming professionally for 2 years so I assumed that when they asked me a few situational questions about their architecture that stumped me, it was due to my inexperience. The questions made me think everyone there must be brilliant because I had no idea what they were talking about and I’d certainly learn a lot if I worked with them. Within a few days of accepting the job and starting there I realized the reason the questions stumped me was because they were flawed from the start. Everything about how the team handled building software was absurd. I stayed there about as long as it took me to find another job and from that point forward I put a lot more effort into understanding the team I’d be working with.

Evaluating the team

Employers that seek the best candidates place much more weight on open source, writing, and your other online professional activity more than a traditional resumé. This is getting easier to require, as the last few years have seen a surge of the best developers putting much of what they do online. Why not hold the team you may end up working with up to the same bar that they’re holding you to? Finding out who you’d be working with and what they share professionally online, either with open source, writing, or other means, can really help you determine if it’s a team that will challenge you.

How the leaderboard score works

The current Coderwall leaderboard is a work in progress and not perfect. Most certainly there are good companies that are missing from the list, so we can’t necessarily rule a team out, but we can identify some great ones. A quick glance at the teams and their members’ profiles clearly demonstrate that every team on the leaderboard consists of fantastic developers. If you think your team is underrepresented then it’s easy to join, create a team, and invite your coworkers to better represent.

A few things about how the current score works:

  • Each achievement badge in Coderwall has a weight that is factored into the score. We’ll still have to make some tweaks to the weights, but they tend to reward newer and less widely-understood languages and frameworks, and achievements that involve accumulating reputation amongst your fellow geeks.
  • We’re interested in overall team quality rather than sheer badge accumulation, so we score the central tendency of the team. A large team size will have a small positive effect only if nearly everyone on the team is strong.
  • The team members’ accumulated Coderwall endorsements also have a strong positive effect on score. Endorsements are received when another member views your profile and endorses one of your skills. Endorsements mean a lot because every member has only select number of endorsements to hand out and they only get more when they unlock more achievements.
  • There is no upper limit to score.

What is next

Many of the current badges are based on open source that you may have shared publicly on GitHub. But we are expanding and focusing on integrating with other sources. You’ll also be able to earn more individual achievements for things like speaking/attending conferences or publishing on a blog. We’ll also be creating a company profile pages to make it easier to learn more about the teams and what technologies they use.

Head on over to the team leaderboard, and let us know what you think.