LinkedIn must have an awesome data team
When I first saw a message from LinkedIn titled Add skills like “Ruby” to make your profile easier to find in my inbox I let out a little chuckle. Cute. LinkedIn crawled my Github or maybe the text content of my LinkedIn page and wants me to make sure they got it right by adding a skill into their formal system.
I click on the email to see this.
They got every single one spot on. I could come up with simple possibilities for any of those except for Python.
I started coding full time in python about 3 months ago and haven’t had time to open source anything. I haven’t tweeted about it. I haven’t posted about it on Hacker News. Nothing. All I’ve done is Google for “Python Object Inheritance” or “Networkx MultiDiGraph Methods” (best library ever, btw).
So here is some guesses as to how I think they did it:
- They got lucky. Though Ruby and Python have completely different core models* they both feel pretty similar to one another.
- They relied on a (possibly supervised) LDA-like model that essentially said “look, this guy is in startups, he is a data guy, and he knows Ruby, he really should know Python at this point”
- They watched who started following me recently on Github and noticed that there was a bump in people that were proficient in Python. Similarly for twitter.
- They bought a portion of my search data from one of those pixel tracker sites that power search re-marketing.
The thing that will be very interesting to see is how they use the other aspects of what they know about me to their clients (recruiters, and possibly clandestine intelligence organizations). This would be a gold mine for them. They could, for example, say they know that I’m trained as a structural engineer, a data scientist, and a developer. An organization looking to develop software that simulates wind over 50 years on a free standing structure to develop more detailed failure scenarios and risk profiles would be desperate for me. The time it would take them to find a guy like me would be immense, so the value of LinkedIn is in closing information gaps, but unlike Google’s search, they do it in an area that the market is willing to pay for up front.
If this post happens along the desks of anyone working at LinkedIn’s data dept. please feel free to email me if you want to have a chat about how you guys did it. I trust you know where to find me.
*(Ruby is a Object Oriented language with functional aspects for pleasure, while Python is a functional programming language that bolted on an Object Oriented paradigm)
