What is Coder Score and how is it calculated?

Article author
Nick Doumlele
  • Updated

SeekOut has analyzed each GitHub member's code contributions to determine how well-accepted or influential their code is. Using that analysis, we assign each member a Coder Score of one to five stars based on their demonstrated contributions. 

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  • Five stars corresponds to the top 2% of all GitHub members.
  • Four stars is for the top 10%.
  • Three stars is the top 30%.
  • Two stars is the top 60%.
  • The rest are given one star.

How does SeekOut calculate Coder Score?

SeekOut looks at all public code contributions on GitHub to assess a candidate’s SeekOut Coder Score. We compute a score by looking at where the code goes in order to measure its impact. SeekOut calculates this score per language as well, so candidates are rated on their expertise with Java vs. Python for instance.

The two biggest factors on determining a score are how many other people are working in a GitHub project and how often the code is copied.

Some GitHub projects have only a single person working on them; other GitHub projects have thousands of contributors. The number of contributors is related to code quality because there is much more scrutiny of any new code in a project with more contributors.

  • If a candidate adds code to a project where they are the only contributor, they get very few points toward their Coder Score.
  • If they contribute to a project with 5000 contributors, they get a lot of points toward their Coder Score.

GitHub supports a culture of code copying called “forking.” Candidates get points toward their Coder Score based on how often their code is forked by others.

We link to the candidate’s actual code in GitHub. You can click through to their code and see what the candidate wrote before starting outreach with them.

Additional Notes on Reading Coder Score

Because we measure demonstrated ability based on actual GitHub contributions, you can be confident a developer with a 3, 4, or 5 star rating is very strong. Developers with lower scores, however, may still be very good or even great, but they don't do a lot of Open Source development. 

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