It seems to me like a pretty weak way to get an apples-to-apples impression of a candidate, but I’d love to hear others’ thoughts.
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It seems to me like a pretty weak way to get an apples-to-apples impression of a candidate, but I’d love to hear others’ thoughts.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Mtende Otis II -
Dani Passos -
Thomas Bnt ☕ -
dev.to staff -
Top comments (50)
My issue with it is that not everyone has free time to do a lot on GitHub. That's mostly why mine's full of half finished projects.
Half completed person projects > nothing.
When I have to look it is more about 'what problem are you trying to solve' or 'are they following best practices for the ecosystem'.
I never discount 1/2 completed personal projects. They show character.
Squeeze every minute out of the day ⌚️⌚️⌚️
If a candidate is active on Github I like to check their profile to get a sense of what they are interested in and what their code looks like.
If a candidate is not active I don't hold it against them, I just ask different questions.
I do the same. Since I'm usually asked to do the tech part of the interview process, I think it is a nice and easy way to extend the picture of the candidate. But it is not a must-have.
I also like it, because I'm curious and love to get more inspiration. I try to keep this out from the evaluation though. I say "try", because once looked at the profile we're unconsciously biased anyway. But I hope I still gave every candidate an equal chance, no matter if and how much they have shown publicly.
It also could just tell you that Jean has more free time and John has none.
It might also mean John doesn't publish what he writes.
Also upon further inspection of Jeans code we may find horrible spaghetti code.
Your period was way too much.
Or it means John has a family and obligations outside of work?
I like doing this but not as a requirement. Basically, if you have a project on GitHub, I can bring it up at your interview and ask you things like:
Why did you go with this arcitecture? Did it end up being ideal and could you have done it another way?
This code looks really interesting, can you explain it to me?
Especially when I interview senior developers it's helpful to know how well they can explain a concept to a stranger as that's a big part of their job.
But a GitHub account is never a requirement. It simply helps steer the interview.
That is not true. Good developers use their working hours to get more work done. Not to work on OSS (unless their employer wants them to do that). If I finish my work early (which I regularly do), I pull tickets from the backlog. There is always more work to do.
When I (freelance) work for a client that doesn't use github as their remote, I get no history. When (most of the time!) their repos are private, you can't see the code I've written. I'm not going to spend my free time writing extra code for free just for potential future clients/employers.
It's an awful way to get an impression of a candidate, unless your criteria is purely 'how much OSS do they contribute to?'.
Not entirely true. You can choose to show private activity. This is useful for people seeing how often you are active, whether or not you participate in code reviews, etc.
Personally if I’m looking at a resume, I won’t discount people with non-super-active github profiles, but ones with it stand out.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Here is my personal opinion about why I'd appreciate some GitHub account and why I value organizations that do.
A public repo shows initiative. Either you took the initiative to learn something or you built something and have the courage to share it. In the end, you did more than what is expected of you.
Open source enriches us all. Think of Linux and the millions of servers deployed thanks to it.
It shows initiative. It is a special kind of action. Most people only react to change. But to initiate it, is quite different.
Any organization that cares enough to take a look at my profile instead of the average white board test is the kind of people I'd like to collaborate with.
I agree, it is a good way to determine a candidate's ability and interest in their work. It does a pretty good job of predicting if a candidate will be a good fit. The big problem is, if employers consider a lack of github to mean "this candidate does not show initiative", that's going to exclude candidates who for a variety of reasons may not be able to work on technical projects in their spare time. Those candidates are more likely to come from underrepresented groups like people of color or women, which will continue to cause our industry to lack diversity and equal opportunity.
Theres no hard evidence that underrepresented groups will lack a gh profile. Why do you say that?
It doesn’t actually show initiative and I really wish people would stop making that up. It only shows a set of developers that like working on open source projects or contribute as part of their jobs. Nothing more. I absolutely love what I do and have been doing it for decades. I’m a work-a-holic and have been known to literally put in 90-100+ hours/week when needed (which is too often). However, when I sign off, I sign off. I spend time with my family. I bike. I binge Netflix. I travel. I fly planes. I go camping. I do ANYTHING but write more code.
Initiative: the ability to assess and initiate things independently.
:-) Perspective: linkedin.com/pulse/i-have-side-cod...
A well documented public portfolio is a much stronger representation of what a candidate can contribute than anything else because it is literally the closest thing you can get to the employee working for you. A public portfolio with contributions to OSS and personal projects shows so much more value than a 2 - 3 hour interview ever can.
The current interviewing process for software engineers heavily favors code golfers, and this attitude leads to an industry where startups, after the release of Pokemon Go, chase AR for investment dollars on unused product functionality. It results in tech giants that say things like 'Move Fast and Break Things'. An employer who values a GitHub portfolio looks like an employer who wants engineers deeply involved in their community that can also provide real world value.
Yes? But the employer is paying the employee for their time and expects them to work on, well, WORK while they are at work. And, while you might not see a reason, I've worked at plenty of jobs where my employer did not want me working on OSS during the day. They were perfectly good jobs and I liked what I was doing.
And that project? That was a random code challenge that I decided to put up on my github. Not really OSS... just a garbage Rails project.
You are speaking from a place of IMMENSE privilege and I hope you can recognize that at some point. In the meantime, I am happy to not be working on a team with you.
Also, I'm a terrible example. I don't have kids and actually have 8 hours to work on some dumb project.
I know we don't really look at them that much unless the candidate specifically pointed to it for samples of their work. Sometimes I'll check and see if they have any cool stuff up there if they link it on their resume or portfolio site, but it's extremely non-required. (Esp since, if you work for a private company that uses source control, most of your interesting work is going to be in private repos anyway, haha.)
I don't think many employers see it as very, very important but IF you have side-projects and / or other work on Github it's a good indicator to see how structured someone works. In many interviews I did earlier this year, my Github was mentioned. Mostly in a positive way as I like working in a structured way. The actual code was barely mentioned
funny thing, a few weeks ago i wrote back a company who want me to lease their developer. i am really thinking about that, because it could really help to scale.
i received a CV file. a normal CV only makes me think "what should i do with that?". i don't care which school a person visited, if the person has a degree or not. there are really awesome delevopers out there which have no degree or not even a basic graduation and there are persons which have multiple academic titles but which are not able to do basic git branching (and are not willing to learn and do it)
a gitlab or github profile would helped me much more. beeing a developer myself i would like to see code of the person. read some discussions, read issues the person raised.
I think it can be a useful signal when considered in conjunction with other things, but I don't put a ton of weight on it. As someone who's in their 30s now, has a house and had a kid within the last year - I know firsthand that finding time to program outside of work can be difficult/impossible.
Try doing it with 2 kids. I wake up early and then get 1 maybe 2 hours to either go for a workout or do something for me.
Periods rarely are fine but setting that aside you took one of many possible explanations for why one person might have more free time than another and portrayed it as vastly more likely than any other explanation.
Also, the assumption that better developers have more time during working hours is faulty, if I find myself with excess time at work I do one of three things.
1) find a way to add value to the project I'm working on either by testing or by finding ways to improve the Project.
2) Go off the clock and study up on new Technologies.
3) Do some small tasks for one of my other customers who always seem to have something lying around that needs a helping hand.
All this being said I have now been convinced that is time to clean up my Github and add a nice new project since the qualtiy of code I currently have on it is horrible stuff I wrote while watching cartoons.