The Leaderboard // Hiring babies

Happy Friday! In today's Leaderboard: Daily Dev just launched a Discord but for developer-led communities (duh), Rippling's employee analytics tool might lead to hiring babies, and Alibaba isn't content with just owning the knock-off sneaker market, it has set its eyes on becoming an AI giant. 

Dev Squad: A tool to build developer-orientated communities. 

Dev Squad is like if Twitter and Medium had a baby, dressed it like Discord, and made it for devs. It lets you quickly spin up a community for any sort of niche filled with developers. My hunch is that devs who already have a solid Twitter feed, read Hacker News, and are part of high-quality Discords won’t find a ton of new value here. But with enough momentum and high-quality personalities, it could take off. As with all social media platforms, users — not product — ultimately make the difference.

Rippling Talent Signal: AI-powered talent analytics tool for evaluating new hire performance.

Talent Signal is obviously geared toward large enterprise clients, not startups. My first impression is the tool seems like a lazy approach to evaluation — it could make managers less accountable and allow them to selectively rely on these “signals” to confirm their hiring biases. On the employee side, my worry is this would incentivize new hires to cheat their way through the first 90 days and then coast under the radar after that.