
GitHub Is Your Resume Now (2012) - mechazawa
http://anti-pattern.com/github-is-your-resume-now
======
ccozan
That's silly. I don't even have a GitHub account.

All my professional life ( 20+) I've been writing code or building solutions
for private companies, all the cool stuff I programmed lies in a private
repository.

And for the reference, I am always sending nicely PDF-formatted, very
relevant, but succinct, CV and not a "poorly formatted, badly designed
Microsoft Word template filled with irrelevant information you’ve carefully
curated to make you look like the best programmer ever".

What's wrong with this guy??

~~~
peteretep
I don't agree with this guy, and I spend a lot of my time hiring developers.

However: if you don't have open-source code, I tend to assume you don't do
much programming in your free time. And if you don't program in your free
time, how are you going to become a really strong developer? How will you get
exposed to a range of technologies outside what your employer uses, and a
range of problems outside your work domain? At the very least, upload your
working from that time you worked through SICP or your experiments with
Haskell or the AngularJS page you made for your husband's dog grooming
business or whatever.

Job-seekers: when your CV arrives, I will use it to find you on LinkedIn. From
LinkedIn, I want to see your CPAN/RubyGems/npm/whatever link and your Github
link. I want to see a bunch of endorsements from coworkers and open-source
collaborators. Show me your Slideshare account from that time you gave a
killer talk on ... whatever. Maybe you spend a bunch of time on StackOverflow
or PerlMonks or maybe you wrote and published a killer Ruby tutorial in
Brazilian or whatever.

Show me you love programming.

~~~
ccozan
C'mon. I assume you are relatively young. But, here are the obvious answers:

1\. I have tons of free time. But I am spending it with my kids and family or
reading books. Sometimes I am going out with some old buddies.

2\. You have no idea what level of technology or engineering I am using at my
work. I could be programming microcontrollers or writing risk calculation for
a bank. Both require same skill: attention, read documentation well, invent
the solution, implement it and maintain it. That is a "strong" developer.

3\. You better do following when I am seeking a job at your gig: invite me for
a in person interview, tell me the story of your company, tell me the current
pains, I tell you what can I do for you, how long I need and how much it costs
you. If it matches then we have a deal.

~~~
nrzuk
^ This covers my exact thoughts!

I have next to no public repo's available simply because I don't have the time
to maintain an open source project, my free time is spent away from the
computer attempting to enjoy life!

In answer to How will you get exposed to a range of technologies outside what
your employer uses, and a range of problems outside your work domain? Get
thrown in at the deep end, put my headphones on and work it out. Hasn't failed
me yet!

------
danielsamuels
While I agree that Github is a part of your resume, I don't think it's the
whole thing. If I was providing a link to my account when applying for a job,
I would probably link to some specific projects and provide some narrative
around them, rather than just saying "here's 20 projects I've worked on, go
nuts". If the recruiter wants to look through everything else then fine, but
they shouldn't expect perfection from everything.

Some other thoughts I had on the article:

"Too many forked repositories": You just need to click on Sources[1] to see
the user's actual repos.

"Missing or unclear descriptions": If repos are just simple little side-
projects, they don't necessarily need descriptions - I know what they are, I
know what they do, they aren't there for anyone but me, I don't expect them to
be starred or forked.

"Old repositories": So because I wrote something a year ago, I can never go
back to it? What's wrong with having a record of achievement? A display of
progress.

"Mediocre code": If we were only allowed to store perfect code, there would
never be any code on Github.

[1]
[https://github.com/danielsamuels?tab=repositories](https://github.com/danielsamuels?tab=repositories)

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "If repos are just simple little side-projects, they don't necessarily need
descriptions - I know what they are, I know what they do, they aren't there
for anyone but me, I don't expect them to be starred or forked."

Why put it in a public repo then?

~~~
josteink
Because private repos costs money, to encourage public activity and sharing.
That's the github model.

With that model in place you cannot expect anything else.

~~~
k-mcgrady
Free private repos: [https://bitbucket.org/plans](https://bitbucket.org/plans)

------
ajlburke
"The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant
today."

Are you 16 years old?

Tech changes quickly, but not that quickly. A GitHub repository with older
projects would be useful to show depth and variety of experience. Just because
it's not all using the latest Rails 4.1 doesn't mean that it won't show
insight into professional skills like, say, well organized code, playing well
with others - not to mention a longer-term outlook that isn't just chasing the
latest shiny thing.

~~~
spacemanmatt
When you are a beginner, a year ago seems like a very long time.

~~~
tjr
And code that a beginner wrote a year prior might indeed be worth not sharing.

~~~
MicroBerto
Commits are timestamped.... a hiring manager who's truly interested will look
at the most recent stuff first.

------
maugzoide
No, it is not my CV. I share and star everything I find interesting. I push
any code I want without worrying if it is cool or not. I am a programmer, not
a pop star.

~~~
thu
Which _is_ quite interesting to see.

Actually the posts about GitHub being or not being your resume are playing the
devil's advocates and they will be more or less closer to the truth depending
on your potential employer profile.

I keep receiving recruiter emails for "J2EE, Hibernate, JBoss, Struts"
developer positions "that might fit me". None of those keywords apply to me
and that kind of recruiter will certainly not know about GitHub.

In the end your resume is whatever preferred avenue to know you a recruiter
might choose. That could for instance include LinkedIn, or the infamous "CV as
a Word document" that a lot of companies keep asking for.

------
ryanthejuggler
I read this as a satire, and laughed thoroughly.

I do agree that GitHub provides a good look into a coder's abilities, though,
and many companies agree. It's disappointing that, 2 years after this article
came out, you still can't select which repos you want to display on your
profile. <sigh>

------
tbranyen
Remove all projects over a year old that you haven't touched? Such bad advice.
I've fixed up some old projects of mine that are 2+ years old. Was a great way
to see what I was doing wrong back then and apply new knowledge.

I don't think this is satire, but it's definitely misguided.

~~~
LukeB_UK
I've found so many projects that haven't been maintained but have useful bits
of code in them that I can learn from.

Deleting old projects is a disservice to the open source community.

~~~
danieltillett
Yes this is so true. Please leave your old code up even if you think it is
crap.

------
skizm
I only use bitbucket and all my repos are private. Am I not allowed to have a
job?

~~~
lukeholder
This made me laugh.

I'm imagining someone with massive open source projects pouring hours into
open source tools and software that benefits thousand and storing it all in
bitbucket while his recruiter is tossing his resume in the bin when he sees
that on github he has only starred 1 repo "EugeneKay/git-jokes". lol.

------
Mister_Snuggles
It's too bad for all of the corporate programmers who aren't able to share the
code they've written without violating an NDA or other agreement. Some
companies even take ownership of code written outside of company time, via the
employment agreement, so even developing things on personal time is a no-go.

~~~
Swinx43
This is spot on. There is a lot of us that are in such employment agreements
and do work for corporate clients that require NDAs. I find it short sighted
to believe that your skill should be solely measured by your Open Source
projects placed on github since that is sometimes just not possible.

------
walfisch
Wow, so much bad advice in one blog post. "Missing or unclear descriptions"
I'll add a description to my github repos now: "Don't take it as my resume"

------
nilved
This makes no sense at all. GitHub is your resume, so here are some silly
rules you need to follow to cram that square peg into that round hole. If you
need to artificially limit what code you host on a code hosting site to use it
as your resume, maybe it's because code hosting sites don't make good resumes.

------
drmarianus
This is troublesome to me. I'm just completing my MS in CS and have been
coding at my job, but all of that has been on private repos (and have been
rush jobs at times so they're not the most well formatted).

I can't share any work code I've written, and the projects look terrible.
Would having several commits that say something along the lines of "made it
look like less of a hack job" be a good idea? They can go back and see how
terrible it looked before, but it was for a class and I had to get it done
before I could start on my other class's assignment.

I feel like what I've written could get me a junior dev job, but I know I
would quickly outgrow that based on the work I've done before (or maybe I'm
giving myself too much credit).

------
mattgreenrocks
I have a blog post brewing in my head about all of the vanities of GitHub:
commit activity, stars, forks, organizations, working on 'important' projects.
GH's handling of these is considerably less hacker-oriented (more stars =
better projects!!!!).

> The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant
> today

Oh man, wait til you discover Lisp.

This guy's insistence on making a GitHub profile so important really bothers
me. I love GitHub, but it's just a stupid account on a webapp. There are
plenty of great devs who aren't committing OSS. Since when were hackers so
obsessed with image?

------
davexunit
GitHub is my resume because all FOSS development happens exclusively on
GitHub, right? My "resume" is going to be missing a lot of things.

------
r0bbbo
For someone who considers GitHub an important part of their online presence, I
don't see a link to the author's account anywhere.

~~~
Hoozt
[https://github.com/brandonweiss](https://github.com/brandonweiss)

~~~
r0bbbo
I googled it without problem. My point is it's not mentioned anywhere on that
page, his "about" footer, or the homepage. Strange for someone who values
their GitHub contributions so highly.

------
jasonlotito
Like all posts on this subject (resumes, interviews, and the like), you should
also amend the headline and advice with " when interviewing with me." I've
never seen the same set of advice given by two different people.

That being said:

> "The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant
> today. If it is, you aren’t working hard enough or learning fast enough. Get
> rid of anything you haven’t worked on in over a year."

After reading this part, I can't imagine this is a serious article. This is so
absurdly false, it can't be anything more than a troll on the idea that Github
is your resume.

Can someone add "satire" to the headline?

------
CSDude
I don't use GitHub to show off, and most of the points in the post are very
bold.

"The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant
today." \- yeah I should delete all my work because it is not fresh enough,
although there is nothing I have to do.

"Don’t waste your time building unimportant things." \- Important for whom?
You? Me? Public?

"GitHub is your portfolio." \- No, it is a place to share projects and
contribute to others. If you want to use it as a portfolio, It shows your most
starred projects anyway.

You take the GitHub as a personal promotional page, rather than collobarative
environment.

------
badman_ting
I fought this for a while, then gave in and spruced it up a bit (I mostly
commit to private repos not on Github). The argument "If you don't have open
repos you don't write code in your free time and are therefore probably not
very good at coding" is full of gigantic holes. But, I get that everyone has
their little arbitrary things they use to whittle down the herd of candidates.

I'm not doing LinkedIn, though. I'm not.

------
Luuseens
> "The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant
> today."

Funny how the first project on author's github page
([https://github.com/brandonweiss](https://github.com/brandonweiss)) is over
two years old.

This is satire, right? Right?

------
jamieomatthews
This is somewhat unrelated, but wouldn't it be nice if there was a tool that
would let you connect with Github, choose 3 or 4 of your favorite projects,
and it would generate a cool looking resume/site for you? Does this already
exist??

~~~
jamieomatthews
To answer my own question, there is
[this]([http://osrc.dfm.io/](http://osrc.dfm.io/)) and
[this](resume.github.com), but neither of those lets you pick and choose
projects, which would be nice

------
talmir
So because github is now our cv's we should stop using it as the dev tool that
it is?

