Given Google’s hiring standards, it’s a decent bet that even the janitors have more coding ability than the developers at some other firms.  An impending personnel loss may be all that much worse for the search giant, then, as an employee with the title "Tech Lead" has decided to leave for LinkedIn.

Today is Daniel Tunkelang’s last day at Google, he announced this morning.  A little background information: he was cofounder and chief scientist at Endeca, put in time at both IBM and AT&T, and picked up degrees at Carnegie Mellon and MIT earlier in life.

Anyway, Tunkelang wrote on his blog today, "I am joining the data scientist team at LinkedIn, where I’ll be working with DJ Patil and his world-class team to build products and discover insights from a data collection that I have coveted for years."

Then Tunkelang continued, "I’ll get to work with folks like Pete Skomoroch and Monica Rogati.  And I’ll get to tackle challenges in my favorite areas of computer science: information extraction, matching, recommendation, social network analysis, and network visualization.  Not to mention working with one of the largest faceted search deployments on the web!"

This development counts as a big win for LinkedIn.  Luring an employee away from Google has always been quite a feat, and that’s even more the case following the recent round of bonuses and raises.

Hat tip goes to Leena Rao.