
GitHub Won’t Help You with Hiring - user5994461
https://www.benfrederickson.com/github-wont-help-with-hiring/
======
zwayhowder
I made the mistake of thinking an active github account was a good proxy for
"Is this person interested in tech enough to work here?". I was called out on
it at a conference (fortunately for me at a bar and not when I was on stage),
by someone who pointed out that many people just don't have time to work on
side projects and push them to Github.

Maybe they work 8 hours a day on a bank or government project that is all
private and then they spend the rest of the day acting as a care giver to a
relative, studying, or volunteering in a women's refuge. All noble activities
that I would consider positives for a candidate, but I'd never know if I just
checked "Do you go home and cut code out of hours?".

I mistook my own privilege of free time as a universal truth and I'm glad I
was called out on it early on and able to change my (interviewing/screening)
ways. I wonder what else I need someone to call me out on...

~~~
hartator
I will still think odd that’s someone who is a professional hasn’t found one
bug in an open source lib that is worth a PR or even an issue in a decade of
work.

~~~
oxfordmale
Most software engineers will be on a commercial contract that doesn't allow
contributing to open source projects. Even if you issued a PR or raised an
issue, it would have to be on a throw away account and you wouldn't include it
in a CV.

~~~
jrott
There are also a lot of software developer's that have contracts where they
can contribute to open source but it has to go through legal. Which makes it
to much of a pain to actually be worth doing.

------
andrewstuart
Let's be clear - it's OK to write shit code. There are many many contexts in
which writing shit code is perfectly valid. Indeed there are times when
writing shit code is almost a requirement. You're experimenting, you're
researching, you're learning, you're having fun, you're in the initial build
stages of something, you're under time constraints.

And lots of code should not have tests, or be works of art, or be bug free, or
be commented, or be comprehensible to less experienced developers.

It's a problem that Github is used for assessing programming skills at all
because those assessments ALWAYS look for consistent perfect code as a high
arts with full code coverage etc etc.

Public code also has time context - maybe you wrote that four years ago when
you were new at some technology or skill - what exactly does that mean to the
assessor who is seeking perfection?

I don't want to direct anyone to my code as an assessment because it's
_always_ misread by the assessor. Even worse I find myself rethinking posting
code online because I think "but what if I get assessed on this will it hurt
my career"?

I think that analysis of people's public/Github code is a hiring antipattern
and the fallback of those unskilled in assessing candidates.

------
jon-wood
When interviewing someone I will try to track down their GitHub profile, and
having some decent code on their is probably going to make me more inclined to
hire you since it gives me a data point on how you work. However for all the
reasons listed in this article I’m just going to disregard the lack of a
profile or a profile with limited content, I’m trying to hire a professional
software developer to do work here, and whether or not your hobby is running a
large open source project doesn’t really influence how good you are at your
day job.

~~~
stevekemp
I had an interesting interview a few months back, the interviewers said
"Please pick a smallish repository and walk us through the design and
implementation".

I talked for nearly an hour about one of my projects, first of all the broad
design, then various interesting aspects of the implementation. (Most projects
have lots of "dull"/"boring" code, but I certainly highlighted the areas I had
the most fun/pleasure/difficulty implementing.)

Was a nice interview, although it was only possible because I've posted a
whole bunch of projects online. I know other people keep their stuff private,
or don't even write code in their spare times.

~~~
criddell
I've interviewed people who don't have public repositories so instead I'll ask
them to bring some code with them that they can talk about. It could be a
school project, it could be a single function or an entire system. For me, the
exercise is mostly about evaluating communication skills.

~~~
toast0
I mean, I can't bring my work code with me, because NDA. I might not have side
projects because life, and school was a long time ago --- actually, I don't
know if I even have that code, most of it I archived on the school shell
server and they kicked me off around 10 years after I graduated.

Also, my side project code is garbage, because only I am going to look at it,
and so it only needs to make sense to me (and maybe, future me), and it's more
fun to write awful things.

I'm sure this gets you good insights on some candidates, and probably is
pretty decent for fresh grads (who should have something from school), but I
can't imagine it working well for a lot of experienced candidates.

~~~
criddell
Hearing why your side project code is garbage is useful too. The code itself
is rarely very interesting. It's all about hearing you describe what's
interesting (for positive or negative reasons) and to see how you answer
questions or challenges.

------
aaronbrethorst
I don't see why everything has to be bucketed into 'good' vs. 'bad'.

A well-populated GitHub profile can be a positive signal to me. It makes it
easier for me to see how a prospective candidate works and thinks, and
provides me with a more useful and instructive set of questions to ask during
an interview.

It is also possible that I will discover that the candidate is not
sufficiently experienced to meet the requirements of the position that they
are applying for, but at least this way I don't have to try to ferret out
these answers or waste their time.

An unpopulated GitHub profile is a neutral signal for me, and means that I
need to spend more time trying to tease out the answers that are simply given
to me with a well-populated profile.

~~~
tdeck
> It makes it easier for me to see how a prospective candidate works and
> thinks

Be careful making even these assumptions. My GitHub is a subset of my side
projects combined with some old work stuff that was reprioritized. Many of my
repos lack tests because they're for such a small number of users it's more
efficient just to test manually and handle issues personally. That doesn't
mean I don't write tests in my professional life. Similarly, many projects may
be older and my habits have evolved since then.

~~~
alexpetralia
I don't think he's making assumptions.

Is it unreasonable to say "more data allows me to make a better decision?" It
could be completely noise! But it is still data.

I think in fact you are making assumptions based simply on the fact that he is
observing data.

~~~
wodenokoto
> Is it unreasonable to say "more data allows me to make a better decision?"

Yes. If you read data about A as data about B, more data will give you a worse
understanding.

> It could be completely noise! But it is still data.

You are not technically wrong in saying that noise is data, but your
implication that it is somehow better than no noise is wrong.

~~~
alexpetralia
Ah ok that make sense.

As a more philosophical question, how do you know a priori if it is noise or
signal? Wouldn't you have to look at it?

~~~
wodenokoto
The discussion in this thread is basically this:

A says: “I like it when a candidate has a github, because it gives me and idea
about how they code”

B replies: “please don’t. My github code, like an unknown proportion of all
github profiles, is hobby code and doesn’t follow any of the standards my
professional code follows.”

In this case, you need a prior that says “even if it looks legitimate, the
data might be completely invalid and we cannot tell from the data”

------
bregma
First thing I do when a resume crosses my desk (as a hiring manager) is check
their GitHub (or GitLab) profile, if they supply one. It is an important
weapon in our arsenal for helping determine which hire from a shortlist gets
called in for interviews. Just having an empty profile is better than no
profile, but one with repos of your work is best and worth extra points. It
has made the difference in our hiring decisions.

Unfortunately for me, I came from a world where everything had to be open
source, but moved to a closed source world where everything I produce, even in
my private time, belongs to The Company. IP lawyers have to check the bowl
before I flush. I am paranoid that my public commit log being empty will
affect my chances of getting a job in the FLOSS realm once again.

~~~
pokeball1
> [...] but moved to a closed source world where everything I produce, even in
> my private time, belongs to The Company. [...]

So you can't even commit something own, when in private, because company you
work for can sue you, just because?

~~~
VonGallifrey
I also have a contract like that. They don't sue you, but everything I produce
is intellectual property of my employer.

Not very useful when working on open source, which is why I don't.

I argued about this before signing, but this has been in every contract I have
ever read and when I argue about this they will always say it is standard
practice to include.

------
maerF0x0
Lets face it, recruiters do a terrible job of screening. They dont understand
the job, so how could they ever detect the tells of in group / out group?

Plus, you can generate activity for your profile. It's a game of cat and
mouse.

[https://hackernoon.com/how-to-hack-github-kind-
of-12b08a46d0...](https://hackernoon.com/how-to-hack-github-kind-
of-12b08a46d02e)

~~~
johnnyfaehell
Honestly, I think the biggest problem is our own expectations. The way IT
recruitment is just now, is not substainable and makes little sense.

* There are more developer jobs than developers

* We're constantly afraid of developers who can't code

* We decide to test every developer often with non-real-world scenarios and weird things they'll never do in their job and if they did do, you would be very concerned.

* Not only do we test them for things things they won't be doing, we also expect them to spend hours and sometimes days doing these tests.

* We reject people for weird random reasons. They don't understand one concept correctly, so clearly they can't do the job ever.

* We then hire recruiters, who realise how screwed out recruiting is and that it's often potluck. And realise this is a basic funnel, so they go and search out anyone who has a rough chance of doing being able job.

* We then blame the recruiters because people don't meet our weird standards.

For real, most companies need to realise they are not FAANG. They do not have
an endless source of people wanting to work for them because of the
reputation. Many of these companies that are acting like they can expect
people to jump through hoop and hoop, have employee churn rates of 6-12 months
and are competing with many other companies in their local area for the same
talent. We continually act like like doing this job always requires the best.
From what I see at most companies, you need one or two people who can
archectect your system and explain the designs to people and after that you
just need people who can follow the designs. We can say "But everyone should
be able to do archectecture designs", if you want to spend your days discuss
design plans and the benefits of this and that fair enough. But that's not
what a company needs, a company needs people to write code they don't need 8
out of 10 to be designing code, they need 8 out of 10 to be "boilerplate" code
so to speak. And if someone is able to take a code design and implement it
without making it more complex then they're good enough for the job. Google is
famous for making people jump through hoops and then have them do basic tasks,
because doing basic tasks is what is important.

That's just my rant of the week on IT recruitment.

~~~
maerF0x0
> a company needs people to write code

Most of these companies would only need 1/2 - 1/4 as many "coders" if they'd
get rid of their Not Invented Here syndrome and let the coders dictate how the
product functions (technically). So many times I've had to build products that
are arbitrarily designed by non-technical folks who don't realize that
dictating their preferences, instead of flowing with the existing tech,
quadruples the implementation time.

That's just my rant of the week on stubborn folks who think their company is a
snowflake that requires a bespoke software solution.

------
dewey
Of course if you already have a job in tech and 3 other companies on the
resume it doesn't matter so much.

For people straight out of university their side projects _are_ interesting to
recruiters though as there's not that many other references you have. This is
even more true for people not coming through the normal CS pipeline, working
on their own projects and shipping something is a good way to show that you
know what you are doing.

Especially when so many people coming out of CS studies don't even know how to
code.

~~~
pjmlp
That is so bizarre to me, in Portugal pure CS theory without any kind of
project deliverables is a math degree specialisation, what one would do the
last two years of a 5 year degree in maths.

Spending 5 years in any kind of engineering degree without being evaluated
just doesn't happen, unless one would be cheating on their project
assignments.

~~~
dewey
> Spending 5 years in any kind of engineering degree without being evaluated
> just doesn't happen

Passing programming assignments or university projects is very different to
actually knowing how to code or think about solutions on your own I think.

~~~
SJC_Hacker
Main difference would be the time pressure. Our coding assignments could be
done generally at our own pace, though of course there were deadlines. Also
the "tricky algorithm" and "off the top of your head" aspects generally
weren't there - of course way back when, there wasn't a whole lot of code
public so you couldn't just copy off the internet. though of course some
cheated and copied each other's work.

Perhaps universities should start acting like more like what the companies are
testing for nowadays, in order to prepare their students better. Timed coding
quizzes every week, automatically validated like HackerRank, Leetcode, etc..
It wouldn't even have to be these tricky algorithms - maybe just a something
like implement quicksort, etc. (without using the API calls) in like 30
minutes.

------
simonkafan
Why do we have to make everything so forcefully career driven? Just enjoy
writing code and showing it to the world if you want - no strings attached.
Github helps in this case.

~~~
dentemple
As the article points out, it's because recruiters have started to ask for
links to Github profiles.

Hence the topic.

Having a Github profile is "being forcefully career-driven" because it's now a
potential gate put in place to work at increasingly more companies.

------
lukeholder
This article is from 2018.

You can now make your private contributions a data-point on your public
profile[1] without giving away private information

[1] [https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-
yo...](https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-
profile/publicizing-or-hiding-your-private-contributions-on-your-profile)

~~~
ziml77
How many businesses even store their internal code on GitHub's public service?
Everywhere I've worked has used self-hosted solutions.

~~~
pmontra
Every customer I worked with stores their code either on github or bitbucket.
The only one who doesn't let me use my self hosted git repository (I mean the
copy on a server of mine.) They also have a copy they can pull from there.

All of them are medium / small sized.

------
perlgeek
I've been using Github long enough that I have my first name (not a terribly
uncommon name) as a username.

I have no idea what it even means to follow somebody on github.

Why? I use github to host my code, to collaborate with others. I use issues,
sometimes wiki, pull requests (obviously) and so on. But it's not a social
platform for me. I don't _want_ it to be a social platform.

I guess following means I get some kind of notification when they do
something? I'm drowning in gh notifications already, and switched off most.

So I'd discard followers on github as any kind of metric right from the start.

------
cmckn
I asked ~50 candidates for some code I could look at, and not one had anything
public to show me. I think being active on GitHub and having personal projects
is a great sign, but it's so uncommon that you can't really knock people for
lacking it. I personally use GitHub, but don't have anything of substance
public. My previous employer actively fought against us contributing to open
source (even though the company operated 100% on OSS). I still did so anyway,
for tiny fixes that irked me.

~~~
dilyevsky
I was on the panel for 300+ candidates and only 2 had any substantial gh
presence - one had a bunch of prototypes that he specifically created to show
off during interviews (“let me show you how i implement deque in a new
language over two weeks”) and the other one was legit and worked for OSS
company.

------
ivars
Maybe I missed the forest for the trees, but it sounds like OP is almost
discouraging people from contributing to their GitHub profiles?

If you are a well know or experienced dev with a long resume of working for
closed-source companies, then, yes, you don't need a GitHub profile. For
younger people or developers switching domains, GitHub contributions and
personal projects might be the only way of showing their worth to future
employers.

~~~
II2II
> Maybe I missed the forest for the trees, but it sounds like OP is almost
> discouraging people from contributing to their GitHub profiles?

It wouldn't surprise me. There is a lot of content online that appears to be
created for the sole purpose of finding work or as part of school/university
projects. A lot of that is of limited value, which diminishes the
signal:noise.

But I think the main point of the article is that it is unlikely to be used in
the hiring process. People either don't see if as being of value or realize
that it can be gamed.

------
belval
I think I agree with "Followers on GitHub Show Popularity Not Talent" to some
small scale, but that example is idiotic, who is going to submit a fictional
character's GitHub profile as their own.

Most of the time when there is +50 people following someone it means that at
the very least they have one significant repository, published article or
somewhat known through other means (blogs are one).

~~~
prepend
I think the point is that people follow profiles for arbitrary reasons, not
because they are great programmers.

~~~
MrPowers
I follow people that are great programmers personally. I find that the famous
open source programmers are typically the ones with the most followers:

* BurntSushi: 4.4k followers

* wesm: 9.6k followers

* tj: 43.6k followers

The followers section of the post may have cherry picked a non-representative
example.

------
ubercow13
My activity graph is almost solid green just due to commits to my private
dotfiles repository, so yeah it’s not that useful. On the other hand even if
no one looks at my profile, the projects on there allow me to put extra
keywords on my CV which could help with resume screening if nothing else.

~~~
p00f
> My activity graph is almost solid green just due to commits to my private
> dotfiles repository

Same here lol

------
jmnicolas
Fwiw I was interviewed at the beginning of the year because a recruiter found
a 5yo stackoverflow post that I completely forgot about (I probably have
something like 3 posts on SO).

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Actually, GH doesn't just show open-source contributions. It will also show
private repos, if you set that (I think it's on by default).

Some folks use this to "game" their activity logs. I've heard of people
writing scripts to draw pictures in the activity log. I haven't actually
_seen_ it, though. That's mostly because I haven't bothered to look.

I encountered one activity graph that was _insane_. It had about 15,000
commits per year. I work 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and have about
3,000. I know of folks with 5-6K, that I believe are legit.

Then I clicked on one of the squares, and saw that it had about 600 commits in
_one day_ , in a private repo, along about a 24-hour cycle.

The person obviously had written a script, that checks stuff into a "dump"
repo, automatically.

So, the lesson is, _caveat emptor_. The activity log is an _outstanding_ way
to view someone's working style and velocity. Since I do pretty much
everything in open-source, you can run number-crunchers on my ID, and see what
I do, when. GH has an API. I suspect there's some interesting stuff out there
(someone posted a pretty cool CLI tool in HN, a while ago, that showed graphs
of the time of day most people did checkins).

Back when I was a hiring manager, I would have _killed_ for the kind of info
the GH activity log can give. Totally knocks "Draw Spunky" tests into a cocked
hat.

~~~
captn3m0
Important caveats to the private repo contributions:

1\. It is opt-in, so your private contributions do not show up on your profile
by default[0].

2\. Not every org is running on GitHub public. If you're using a GitHub
Private server, or if your employer uses something else like GitLab/Gitea/...

3\. If you leave the org, your contributions to private repos might get
removed from your profile. Unless you read the docs and remember to STAR the
repos you worked on. Apparently, now they also count opening an issue/PR for
this, but I haven't tested this[1]

[0]: By default, visitors only see public contributions on your profile.

[1]: [https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-
yo...](https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-
profile/why-are-my-contributions-not-showing-up-on-my-profile)

~~~
sergeykish
Thank you, never heard of "have to star", contributions line become empty
after years of work.

------
ohnoesjmr
I can tell from experience that this is not true.

Sure, a lot of great people do not contribute to open source, yet I do
(maintain a sizeable popular project), and nearly half of the interviews spend
a good time discussing the work I do in opensource.

------
kristopolous
Their code and whether they are not crazy are basically the only things i care
about.

Everything else is a less accurate proxy measurement. Unsupervised, self-
motivated, goal-oriented adulting ... that's what I need

Doesn't matter what company, these basic requirements don't seem to change.

------
mtnGoat
I laugh at that as an job application requirement and move on. Anyone thinking
a look at a GitHub profile will prove skill, is sadly mistaken and not
sometime if want to work with. Considering most code is property of employers,
nothing to see.

------
danielrpa
I've been a hiring manager for 10+ years and I've used the candidate's code on
GitHub for helping pre-interview screening decisions numerous times. Good code
on GitHub is a good sign, of course I can change my mind after actually
interviewing the candidate.

This phrase from the article over simplifies this and is frankly childish:
"People still seem to think that you can figure out how talented a developer
is merely by looking at their open source contributions"

Duh. It says that some people "still" think that you can do that by "merely"
looking at their OSS contributions. But maybe, just maybe, others can use it
"merely" as a data point.

------
amadeuspagel
To argue that GitHub won't help you with hiring doesn't just require showing
that it's not perfect, it requires that other methods of assessing people
(Interviews? Degrees?) absolutely dominate it. But the arguments made against
github would work against any such method. Yes there are impressive people
without an impressive github page, there are also impressive people who fail
interviews, don't have degrees, etc.

> Not only are GitHub profiles not that helpful for hiring developers, it also
> seems like they aren't that much help for developers that are looking for
> work.

Why try to dissuade people from something they aren't doing anyway?

------
jameslk
> While he has written a ton of code at his work in the last year, he hasn't
> posted anything that can be viewed publicly: he has no public commits, he
> hasn't created any repositories of his own and he has an insignificant
> number of followers. Despite all that he's still the best developer I've
> ever had the pleasure of working with.

This is more a problem for the developer, not the company. The company may
have a smaller pool of candidates by evaluating based on GitHub profiles, but
they will have more data to use in their evaluation. If they don't have the
resources to pay for the premium of being selective, they may evaluate
candidates from a wider pool (those without GitHub profiles/history). The
candidates without GitHub profiles will receive the attention from those
companies not willing to pay a premium for their services.

This can be generalized in other ways beyond GitHub. GitHub, in this sense,
serves as a marketing tool, similar to LinkedIn, a personal site, a blog, a
resume, etc. Provided it's a free marketing tool, the developer has little to
lose by investing their time into marketing theirself and a lot to gain by
receiving more demand.

~~~
bleah1000
Have you ever been able to look at someone's code and immediately figure out
whether it's good or not? I think it can be easy to see if it's really bad,
but sometimes it can be hard to tell if it's okay code, or really good code.
The problem is that you might have extra information to make a hiring
decision, but it requires orders of magnitude more time to evaluate.

For example, if the whole project is done by a single person do you evaluate
their design and code? What if it was just a one-off project that they didn't
care about so it has copy-paste code in a few places. Is that bad?

If you ask candidates to point out examples of good code, then is that really
meaningful? What if a mediocre programmer can find a few places where they
wrote some strong code. What if that code was made good through a strong
review process?

I think the problem is that it's too difficult to determine if open source
contributions are actually representative of the way someone will code in a
job.

~~~
hombre_fatal
I don't think the most useful info you can get from someone's Github involves
the sort of deep analysis you're attacking in your comment.

Nobody is deep diving your code like this, btw.

Looking at someone's code projects can tell you some things like how they
might write a README, if there is one. It might present a concrete project
they built that you can discuss in an interview; what was the hardest part of
this project? It can tell you where they are roughly on the scale of "barely
started programming" and "clearly are experienced" (an experienced developer
can glean this very quickly from someone else's code—even what they choose to
paste from Stack Overflow—it isn't as hard as you think).

Reading the code line by line looking for "strong code" is something that
beginners think employers will be doing, but they don't. Just like developers
don't evaluate libraries like this, they do a more topical, holistic page-
through.

Of course it isn't going to tell you exactly how someone will perform on the
job. That's not the goal post (the absence of Github usually means you have
nothing to look at at all). It just has a few useful signals like looking at a
chair that a carpenter has built.

It seems like you are suggesting that the chair a carpenter built in his own
time couldn't possibly give you any reliable signal about how the carpenter
works, because what if the carpenter was in a rush? Well, let me point out
that a rushed veteran and a rushed beginner will cut completely different
corners. Kind of like how a skilled artist with only 10 seconds to draw
something can still express a great deal of their expertise merely by how they
attacked the problem.

~~~
bleah1000
Let's look at that chair analogy, you are presuming that someone can look at a
finished chair and say it's a good chair, and the carpenter who built it is
probably good. But in order to do that evaluation, you need to spend time
examining the chair. And you don't have any guarantee that the chair was
actually made by the person presenting it to you. Maybe someone else helped
them build it, or they built it using step by step instructions they found
online. My issue is that the evaluation can take a lot of time, and if you are
not familiar with the project, it makes it really difficult to get anything
useful.

If your hiring process always requires github code, then the chance of people
faking it, or presenting code that isn't theirs is going to increase. And if
you are looking at it for a project a candidate can discuss, you can do the
same thing by choosing something from their resume.

In my opinion, it just doesn't add that much and will wind up taking up a lot
of time. You would also need to decide when in the process you look at the
projects. Doing a proper eval would still likely take hours for a small
handful of candidates, so you wouldn't want to do it until a person was well
down the interview path. And at that point is it really adding much more than
you already know?

------
nullsense
>Most GitHub Projects Aren't Impressive

So make an impressive one.

My team lead would sometimes ask me to help evaluate potential candidates and
sometimes we looked at GitHub profiles if one was supplied. No problem if not,
but if so then it's a data point.

The claim above from the article is true. Mostly nothing is actually
impressive and if you're not careful it's easy to have something count against
you. It's actually a bit of a trap.

As a result of that I decided to make all 50 public repos I had private and
instead just work on a single public repo of decent depth/quality.

What I wound up doing is create a small web app in a domain I would never be
interested in trying to turn it into a commercial product, then I use it as
not a single project, but a series of inter-related projects that build on
each other. Mostly it's a playground for me to learn new things and explore
ideas. So I first did an API. Then once I had an API I took the opportunity to
learn a new front end tech and made a front end with it. Now I'm working my
way through learning IaC with it. After that I'm gonna use it to learn
serverless.

Each additional project with it makes it more valuable to me. More valuable in
the sense that each project completed increases my motivation to do the next
one because it becomes a more fully fleshed out piece of software and feels
more "worth it".

I haven't switched employers since I started it about a year ago, but I think
it'll definitely help with positioning. As it is it helps me with my career
anyways as I have a semi-realistic environment in which to try things out to
evaluate their pros and cons.

------
miguelmota
I somewhat disagree with the article only because as a co-founder and also as
early engineer in previous startups I've worn the interviewer hat a lot and
candidates with solid github portfolio projects demonstrated to be better
suited for the role than those that didn't have projects to demonstrate their
skills. I agree that there are a ton of 10x engineers that don't do any public
open source stuff but at the same time you'd know they're good just by having
a conversation with them or reading posts they've written. One of my previous
employers has also expressed that they were impressed by my github projects
and I feel like that gave me leverage over other candidates. It really depends
on the employer and I think the larger the company the less they care about
your open source projects or how good your portfolio since there's a lot of
churn and they can afford it unlike early stage startups where they do a
little more diligence on early hires.

------
crb002
It could if you were smart about it. See the scripts at:

[https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-
maat](https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat)

You could identify high quality devs that are suddenly funemployed with a
burst of github activity - and reach out to them in a non-sleazy manner.

------
jariel
No doubt 'activity' is a worthless metric.

But someone who created and maintained a good repo, that's actually used by
other people (doesn't have to be many), where the code is relatively clean and
actually works ... this says quite a lot actually.

Of course the major caveat is that this doesn't mean that someone who does not
have this is 'not good'.

Finally, if someone has made any number of contributions and they are
objectively 'not good' \- this is also a negative signal.

So 'if there is a github profile' and the code/usage can actually be looked
at, it might be useful criteria it just needs to be contextualized.

------
breezest
By showing that almost no recruiter check the GitHub repos cannot tell if such
contributions make a candidate stand out.

If someone has tangible contributions through GitHub, they probably write that
down in the resume. The interviewers may check their claims either during
interview or on GitHub before/after the interview.

The problem is that if a candidate performs moderately well in the interview
(e.g. coding interview), while he/she has made many contributions through
GitHub, should the interviewer recommend the candidate? My belief is that most
interviewers will not take the risk or take the responsibility for a
potentially wrong hire.

------
lovetocode
Thank you! I have been complaining about this forever. 99% of software I write
is closed source! It seems like we get punished for this when in reality it’s
the company’s policy not to publicly expose proprietary information.

------
ablekh
While the author makes some valid points, I disagree with the general stance
of the post (and, more broadly, quite dislike most generalizations like that).
Obviously, no decent hiring manager in their right mind will base their
decision purely on someone's GitHub profile. At the same time, relevant
profiles with enough information could be a very useful signal and data point.
In other words, I think that using GitHub profiles to _augment_ other
available information is a worthwhile element of the overall hiring strategy
for [software] engineering teams.

------
tpkahlon
I fell into this cycle where I posted my projects on GitHub. I was constantly
chasing the green tick every single day. All my projects were representation
of bad code. At the end, I learnt that successful developers usually pay mere
attention to Github and more attention to problem solving and consistent
learning. These days, I use Github as a reference to concepts I learn. When a
day come where I can consider myself a master on a language, I’ll take on an
open source project to solve a real world problem with the knowledge gained.

------
higerordermap
This 100%. Especially the 'most projects are uninteresting' part.

I see a lot of enthusiastic students writing yet another Tensorflow something
of 2 files and uploading it to GitHub. That does not mean these projects are
interesting.

It is hard to get great project ideas. On the other hand it is quite easy to
slap together yet another python data visualization 'project'.

Another thing is, plagiarism. Some people create repository out of cloned
files. (if forked, it will be shown as forked on GitHub).

------
SergeAx
While the article is technically correct, it is completely wrong on its
message. I can't use GitHub profile as a negative factor, but totally can as a
positive one. So, active GitHub profile literally helps with hiring like in
"requires less effort from both candidate and company sides".

------
samtuke
Non-representative counter example: we produce only Open Source products, and
I review the public code contributions of all technical staff during pre-
interview assessment. If you're hiring Open Source developers then past Open
Source contributions to other projects are useful and important.

------
bdcravens
I've taken to maintaining a singular "portfolio" repo that contains bits of a
code with pointless code (like standard framework boilerplate files) omitted,
with a README in each folder for context and explanation.

------
mqus
I agree with the article that the quantitative metrics(contribution
statistics, followers, stars, LOC, etc) are not really good vor evaluating
someone. But its still good for checking 1. The type of code one writes and in
what languages, maybe documentation and 2. The interactions with other people
in form of PRs and issues.

I guess that most recruiters don't have the time to look at that but it
definitely could be valuable.

------
ffggvv
having worked at multiple of most peoples "dream companies", i can tell you
very few of the engineers i met had every contributed to open source, and no
one cared. and furthermore the company wouldnt let employees contribute, as it
created copyright issues

------
Jdjdjdjjdhebe
HN comments here probably more valuable to the world than any HN story I can
remember

------
wendyshu
I don't get it. Obviously assessing candidates by only looking at their GitHub
is a bad idea. But if a candidate does have a good GitHub, that's useful
information.

------
Kiro
Year should be added to the title since this is really outdated.

------
vbernat
GitHub also record contributions in form of issues and pull requests. Not
contributing to projects you are using for your work looks like a bad signal
for me.

~~~
ubercow13
Not everyone uses open source for their work. Even if they do how likely is it
they’d have anything to contribute? Can you mark down most developers who use
Java or Spring because they haven’t found a bug in them to report?

~~~
ivanche
If they do, I'd say it should be very likely the moment they start using
anything smaller than Java/Spring for anything serious. I opened issues and/or
PRs for about a dozen libraries and frameworks, and that's probably 50% of
what I could open if I had more willingness.

------
codesections
> The vast majority of software being produced is closed source software

I found this claim surprising. I would have guessed that the narrow majority
of software produced these days is open source, but I don't have a citation
for that. Do others agree with the article's "vast majority" claim?

~~~
asutekku
A minority of software is open source. It’s the bubble of Github and HN that
makes open source to be more prevalent than it actually is.

~~~
chrisseaton
> A minority of software is open source.

How do we know this to be true? Has anyone checked?

~~~
mh7
Look at all the software running on your computer right now, how much of it is
open source? (Including OS, drivers, ssd/efi/cpu/misc controllers firmware).
Email every website you visit and ask to get the source code. Go and check all
gadgets in your house which contains a microcontroller or cpu, how many of
those can you get the source code for? Ask your car manufacturer for the
source code of all its systems. Go out in your city, look at all computerized
utilities (screens, payment systems, traffic lights, elevators, power plants,
public transport, the list goes on..)

Does it really need to be checked? Seems blatantly obvious to me that most
software is proprietary.

~~~
codesections
> Look at all the software running on your computer right now, how much of it
> is open source?

Most of it? The hardware, OS, web browser, window manager, terminal emulator,
and text editor all are, anyway. There are a few proprietary bibs and bobs,
but really not that many.

> Go and check all gadgets in your house which contains a microcontroller or
> cpu, how many of those can you get the source code for?

My impression is that most of this IoT-type devices run Linux of some variety.
They might have some proprietary stuff on top (though not a ton, given the
GPL), but that seems to be basically another check in the "open source"
column.

> Ask your car manufacturer for the source code of all its systems.

Well, it's a Toyota, so it's running Automotive Grade Linux, so…

> Does it really need to be checked? Seems blatantly obvious to me that most
> software is proprietary.

It doesn't seem blatantly obvious to me, but it's interesting to hear your
perspective

~~~
asutekku
Just because some part of the underlying software is open source (AGL) does
not suddenly make the whole thing open source. And you’re in a minority if
you’re using linux or some variant of it as your OS. The world outside of tech
circles is much more closed source.

~~~
chrisseaton
> And you’re in a minority if you’re using linux or some variant of it as your
> OS. The world outside of tech circles is much more closed source.

Do you realise most people's primary computing device - their phone - is
running open source Linux?

~~~
asutekku
And a large part of it is Google’s proprietary code. Hardly anyone runs pure
android without any closed source components.

~~~
bdcravens
Correct, but that wasn't what was being responded to, it was this claim:

"you’re in a minority if you’re using linux or some variant of it as your OS"

Ultimately the point you made here is what's important: that there is plenty
of closed source that runs the world, even if underlying infrastructure is
open.

