Thanks... Was just about to send out an application today that mentions me quickly winning a contest. Probably there's lots of dumb stuff I'm putting on my applications that I think makes me look good, but is seen as very bad. Wish I had someone who knows these secret factors to run my applications by.

Makes me kind of upset that many employers and investors keep some of their favorite indicators totally secret, except for a few insiders that they share them with.

Unfortunately Google hasn't hired a million programmers yet so perhaps their ML algorithms aren't good yet at knowing what actually makes people good. In fact, I think it is actually rather fool-hardy when I hear people talking about analyzing resumes to predict candidates, or other such nonsense.

Just interview some people. Don't ask crazy algorithm questions either, watch the person do what they are suppose to do. It worked great while I was at Pivotal Labs. We would sit down with engineers and pair program with them for a while. It became rapidly clear whether or not they were good, mostly because we were evaluating them on the exact criteria for which we were searching.