Yeah, I was miffed and mystified by the whole process. Excited to participate but annoyed by the sheer opacity of the pipeline. You're experience went a little further than mine, I got no offers. Ah, what a blow to the ego. ;-)

Regarding the banging on URLs: I don't know if they are becoming more sensitive to that. I did a little digging around via various URLs but never got cautioned on it. You may have gotten a little deeper in to it, or you touched a raw nerve that I didn't stumble upon. :)

I was surprised by how few companies actually viewed my profile. They provide the list at the end of the auction and it was interesting to see how it matched up with my own. Philosophically you have to look at it through a cautionary lens:

How many companies do they have on their list?

How many companies do they have on their list are hiring for a technical position right now?

How many companies do they have on their list are hiring for a technical position right now and looking for the skills I have?

How many companies do they have on their list are hiring for a technical position right now and looking for the skills I have are hiring at the level I am at?

How many companies do they have on their list are hiring for a technical position right now and looking for the skills I have are hiring at the level I am at and making a realistic offer?

I also noted that DeveloperAuction uses Craigslist and LinkedIn to hire their own programmers. Obviously their pipeline is broken or not mature enough and they aren't eating their own dog food.

I sympathise on being dumped in to other companies' generic hiring pipelines once the auction is over. That is a huge disconnect between promises made and the cold, reality of finally getting to a real, sign on the dotted line offer.

Agreed on the Junior developers. There is a fallacy about the tech talent shortage. If you are young, naive, willing to be overworked and underpaid then $100K is a lot of money when you're straight out of college and the only two things you are worried about is whether you will ever have a girlfriend and how much longer can you defer your student loans for.

I think there's only a shortage of tech talent at the lower levels where the machine that has been created by SV and its ilk cannot feed it fast enough with warm, young bodies (that sounds wrong somehow, but you know what I mean.) But this is a discussion for another time and another thread.

The hiring process and pipeline is definitely broken. It is exhausting to go through each company, follow-up, schedule interviews, take time away from work. I am ramping up my “looking for work” efforts right now in anticipation that the start-up I am co-founder of runs out of runway before it can take off. “Dig your well before your thirsty.”

The code on github is never looked at. Not by the “technical recruiters,” not by the hiring managers, not by the engineers and so on. I have sat in an interview and been asked point blank, by the same group of people gathered at once, “do you still code?” “Can you write software?” “Have you ever worked on OpenSource?” and then been told at the end that they felt I “didn’t code enough on a weekly basis to make a significant contribution.” You stand there with your mouth agape at the sheer, unadulterated willful ignorance and lackadaisical interviewing attitude of people some days.

I co-authored slash maintained RGBDS for about 8 years until retiring from active development. During the golden years of GB/GBC/GG development it was the tool to use.