Six degrees of separation

It might be possible to judge the technical value of an engineer by creating a tool that gathers some data about it as:

• number of LinkedIn 1st degree engineering connections in Amazon/Google/Microsoft/IBM/Oracle 
• belongs to interesting groups on hot technologies
• StackOverflow posts

For sure the companies like online portfolios as GitHub but, in case of companies with  rigid IP politics, engineers are discouraged to have such a public presence.

Hence the idea of an indirect measurement as a composite metric shown above.

I'll have to chew it better.