
Why GitHub is not your CV - nephics
http://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv/
======
cheshire137
I disagree with this article completely. I'm a woman and a software developer
and I think my Github is very valuable as a portfolio to me. Before I used
Github, if I wanted some of my code to get shown off, I would make a blog post
about it and call out specific chunks while linking to a ZIP of the whole
thing. If a potential employer wanted to see samples of my code, they'd have
to find my blog and dig through its archives. Now, they just find my Github.
The author acts as though when an employer asks for someone's Github, it's
going to be the main or only component to determine whether to hire or not. In
interviews where I've been the interviewer, we've used it as a filter to
determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own, if they contribute
to open source projects, what their coding style is like, what languages they
gravitate to writing in, and just as a general personality guideline. It's
cool to see the kind of stuff a person codes in their personal account,
whether it's joke repos that give a glimpse at the person's personality and
sense of humor, or actual serious projects.

~~~
hvidgaard
You either missed the point, or do not think it's a problem.

> determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own

Which he is arguing that you are not a bad developer for doing other things
outside of work. The vast majority of people _need_ to not code to regenerate.

I can use myself as anecdotal evidence: I'm the goto guy when it's particular
difficult to solve a bug, when it's a new framework, or when the teams are
unsure how to solve a problem. I love coding, I constantly get compliments for
my code and solutions. I do rarely code outside of my work. I used to before I
got a "real" job after my degree, but now I (almost) only code at work. I
usually think about solutions and architectures outside of work though, and I
write a lot of pseudo code on paper if I get an idea for an algorithm - but I
do not make binaries or contribute to OOS or a public Github repository. I
have a spouse, children, friends, and hobbies that simply doesn't get as much
of my time as they deserve.

I would never pass the bar at a startup that's looking for the typical startup
stereotype developer. I'm 100% certain that I make more business sense to hire
than all of your average workoholic startup developer, but I would never be
considered. I have seen so many developers with great personality and glowing
Github repo fail so miserably because they have poor work ethics and are
unable to do "the boring stuff" that needs to be done in a business.

I can make a sensible plan, estimates that aren't completely bonkers, and I
can tell when we're no longer on track to meet the deadline the same week it
starts to slip. If I make a promise I keep it, or let you know that I'm unable
to. I can also work completely agile, and not some "agile-but" that is so
prevalent in the industry. In short there is soooo much that you need to
consider when hiring. Screening based on a Github account is excluding
developers that would be just the guy/gal you're looking for.

~~~
cnkeller
This.

While I understand that many people enjoy writing code and do so for fun,
there are a large number of fantastic engineers that don't (myself included).
Just as I wouldn't give someone preference for a robust profile, I'm not going
to penalize someone for lack thereof. There is only so much time in the day
and if they can do ten hours worth of work in eight hours and choose to spend
their off time with their family, friends, or hobbies, good for them. Knowing
how to decompress and enjoy both work and life is just as valuable to me as
crafting solutions to engineering problems.

~~~
scardine
If you are working with the same technology stack we work and are not finding
bugs or implementing new features you are not playing in the same league.

We don't contribute to FOSS because we are hobbyists or good Samaritans, we do
it because we need the features or fixes. We do it because in the long term it
is cheaper and more efficient than maintaining a fork or developing a closed
source component.

~~~
chas
Many software developers don't work with FOSS technology at work. I work in
embedded systems and much of the library code I work with has been provided by
manufacturers of the devices I'm using. I do find bugs in it and report fixes
to the library developer, but they often have strange licensing and don't use
github (or even public version control) so this work doesn't end up visibly
attributed to me in public.

This doesn't mean that the people working in non-web industries "are not
playing in the same league" with respect to skill, it just means that they
don't have a huge public representation of the work they do.

------
jballanc
Beatniks.

That's what we'll get.

The Beats were a genuine movement of talented, hard working literary types.
They were hip. They were cool. They were who everyone wanted to be, so people
started emulating their dress, their mannerisms, their speach.

But they were not driven by the same passion. Their motivation was different.

Ginsberg said of the Beatniks: "If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets
overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac but by
industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash man."

If we let companies continue to use GitHub as a hiring tool, the OSS community
will gradually become overrun by people attempting to achieve the same success
as the OSS pioneers by mimicking their actions...but lacking their same
motivation.

It's hard for me to say this. I like GitHub. I like Open Source. I am proud of
what little I have managed to contribute to that community, and I think it is
_to my advantage_ if a company considers my GitHub profile when making a
hiring decision. That said...I'd rather give up that advantage in exchange for
keeping GitHub as an open community to share source, instead of a cauldron for
the latest start up founders to pluck their next engineering hire from.

~~~
kybernetikos
This is always what happens, and it's usually a good thing.

The people ahead of the curve _have_ to be more motivated, but if we get more
people sharing, more eyes to find and fix bugs, more people from other walks
of life that understand a bit more of the hacker mentality, more acceptance of
sharing code as a normal part of life, then the world is a better place.

Yes, it's a shame that not everyone who plays the piano has the dedication and
vision of Rachmaninov, or that everyone who paints is Picasso, but I think the
world is a better place for amateurs and dilettantes. Sure, we'd perhaps have
better art if it were restricted to those who must, but we have a better
society because those who are moderately interested can.

~~~
arve456
The nice thing about programming: You don't have to perform in the 99.9
percentile (like Picasso) to make something people want.

~~~
RodericDay
are you implying the only worthwhile fine art is the 0.1th percentile?

~~~
WalterSear
There's a lot of art out there.

~~~
mkramlich
And almost all of it can be enjoyed for free, without its creators ever seeing
a penny.

Artists practically invented the 'race to the bottom' effect.

The Internet and digital media came late to the party, magnified the effect,
then widened the number of domains impacted

~~~
WalterSear
They also invented the 'sea of mediocrity' effect.

------
seivan
"OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not
sure what to say.

But I do find it funny that they don't think that Github should be used as a
resumé but their "conferencing", tweets, books about diversifying and podcasts
should do.

Talkers or Makers?

I write OSS on my free time because I feel like other alternatives might not
be good enough. I spend a couple of hours in the morning, weekends and etc.
It's hard and time consuming. I can take two days if just figuring out what
the selector should be called or argument names.

Right now I am getting paid for OSS, but I even spend my free time on it
because I'd like to make sure it comes out good.

It's very slow and time consuming, and sometimes keeps me up at night, but I
LIKE IT. And I like acknowledgment to it.

These sorta articles invalidate what I make just because I FEEL like making
them. Not sure what to feel about that.

I have friends who make stuff to Go-lang because they want to learn the
language and make stuff that doesn't exist. These articles invalidates their
passion.

And saying bullshit like LGBT or other genders are actively being excluded...
well it makes me hard to take you seriously. I'm not white, and I am part of
LGBT.

~~~
jballanc
The article does not say that conference talks, tweets, books, etc. should be
used for hiring decisions and only GitHub should not. It says (right there at
the end), that _hiring is hard_ and _any_ shortcut to try and get around that
fact is wrong. It just so happens that "don't send us your resume, tell us
your GitHub username" just happens to be the shortcut of the moment.

Also, I'd challenge you to find where the article says or even implies that
you shouldn't be making stuff because you FEEL like it. Quite the opposite, in
fact. You _should_ be making stuff because you _feel_ like it and _not_
because you have some expectation of getting a better offer or being able to
show off your GitHub profile at your next interview.

As for the white, male bias...not sure what to tell you. It's real. The
statistics don't lie. I'm glad that you have had success as a non-white member
of the LGBT community, but as the saying goes: the plural of "anecdote" is not
"data".

~~~
seivan
> The article does not say that conference talks, tweets, books, etc. should
> be used for hiring decisions and only GitHub should not. It says (right
> there at the end), that hiring is hard and any shortcut to try and get
> around that fact is wrong. It just so happens that "don't send us your
> resume, tell us your GitHub username" just happens to be the shortcut of the
> moment.

Actually, Ashe has that on the Hire Me Page.

>As for the white, male bias...not sure what to tell you. It's real. The
statistics don't lie. I'm glad that you have had success as a non-white member
of the LGBT community, but as the saying goes: the plural of anecdote is not
data.

I understand this is a fact, but how this can be used against Github as a
resumé or against OSS on your free time, I have a hard time seeing that. It
comes off as incredibly stupid.

~~~
jballanc
> I understand this is a fact, but how this can be used against Github as a
> resumé or against OSS on your free time, I have a hard time seeing that. It
> comes off as incredibly stupid.

I _really_ don't think anyone is saying _not_ to do OSS on your free time.
That there is a greater lack of diversity in OSS than in software engineering
as a profession suggests that whatever it is that keeps minorities out of
software engineering might be amplified in the OSS community, but it is not
proof of this.

As for being an argument against using GitHub for hiring decisions, I'd pose
you a scenario...two recent college grads are looking for their first job. One
had parents who could pay for college, so in between rounds of beer pong and
slacking off from class, this student found time to write a handful of OSS
libraries and posted them to GitHub. The other was raised by a single parent
in poverty, and is now working two part time jobs to fund their education.
Between work, this person studies hard, does well in class, but has no time
left to work on any open source side projects.

Which of these two students will be the better asset for your startup? Which
of these two students will reply to your job post that says "don't send us a
resumé, just link us to your GitHub profile"? Statistically speaking, which of
these two students is more likely to be a racial/ethnic minority?

~~~
feralmoan
It doesn't sit well with me that Ashe is trivializing the time commitment with
'oh they're just white dudes', when it's usually more a case of 'they love
what they do and they make time for it'. If writing open source gives you the
competitive edge in the market then that's great no-one should feel guilty
about edging others out of higher profile work because they represent their
skills better at recruitment. The drivers aren't geared to social wedging
(seriously who even has time for that crap?), I think open contribution is
more about skill, creativity and passion than anything else. Race, minorities,
gender, orientation has ZERO to do with anything, stats are only corrolary.
Where are the stats that OSS engagement is becoming a trending hire filter?

It kind of reads like a no-child-left-behind or no-child-gets-ahead (can't
remember which) proponent piece. We all have busy lives and saying its a
race/gender etc. issue is way off the mark. I wish that whole section was left
out as it just confuses the pretty simple point I think she was trying to make
that open source engagement should not be an authoritative filter.

~~~
jballanc
I honestly don't think anyone is trivializing anyone's commitment. Rather, I
think what Ashe and James are pointing out is that the _opportunity_ to
contribute to OSS is not distributed equally between the sexes and races.
Who's to say that more minorities wouldn't contribute to OSS if they had the
time, access, and resources?

Or, to take it to an extreme, why is Silicon Valley in California and not
Botswana? Do you believe that the people of Botswana are inherently less
intelligent? less motivated? less capable?

Or is it their environment which is working against them? Jared Diamond has
probably one of the most interesting takes on how these sorts of inequities
can arise on a regional level (Germs, Guns, and Steel:
[http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-
Societies/dp/03...](http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-
Societies/dp/0393317552)), but is it such a stretch to imagine that the same
sorts of inequities don't exist at smaller scales as well?

------
Peroni
Ashe Dryden's original post has merit, I'm not contesting that. James' post
however, is wrong on so many levels.

It's worth noting that James is a UK based developer. Most of his points may
be completely valid in the US but they are completely at odds with the UK
climate. I've worked with an inordinate amount of tech companies in the UK and
consulted with many more and I've yet to come across any that hire based
primarily on the merits of a candidates github repo.

In fact, I'd argue his understanding of the request for a candidates github
URL is completely wrong. One of my first requests when speaking to a potential
candidate is for their github/bitbucket profile so I can see some actual code
examples. I know that it's rare to find a true indication of someones ability
from just their github contributions but for example, it can help me discern
whether a ruby candidate adheres to ruby best practices or not. A small
example of a minor indicator that someone might be a good fit for our company.

A man with significantly more experience in the industry than me once put it
better than I ever could:

 _The more information I can get, the easier it becomes for me to make a
decision, and to feel comfortable in it. And the best sort of information to
give me is to show me what you can make, whether that 's code for a backend
position, or interesting design/UI for a front end position. It also gives us
another thing to talk about during interview; and more opportunity to ask
about design decisions and rationale._

Some of the best people I've ever sourced didn't have any publicly accessible
code but if they had, I would have found them a hell of a lot quicker.

~~~
chadwickthebold
'I know that it's rare to find a true indication of someones ability from just
their github contributions but for example, it can help me discern whether a
ruby candidate adheres to ruby best practices or not.'

The problem with this is that you can't really make a logical decision when
the code (on Github/bitbucket) is removed from its context. Maybe none of the
code follows best practice, but there is a compelling reason why this is so.
If your decision on whether to pursue a candidate or not does not include a
discussion with the candidate about their available code, you are missing an
integral piece of the puzzle.

~~~
Peroni
_If your decision on whether to pursue a candidate or not does not include a
discussion with the candidate about their available code, you are missing an
integral piece of the puzzle._

You are absolutely right. I can honestly only ever think of one circumstance
where I dismissed someone based exclusively on what I saw in their github
repo. I felt guilty so I phoned them a week later to discuss my thoughts and
it turns out my suspicions were correct but that was categorically an edge
case.

------
spindritf
> the demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed
> toward white men than the software industry is, which is saying something

What?

> You just get what other people think is useful. Aside from which, GitHub
> displays a lot of useless stats about how many followers you have, and some
> completely psychologically manipulative stats about how often you commit and
> how many days it is since you had a day off.

You get social proof, some measure of conscientiousness, and a crowd-sourced
filter. All on one page. That sounds great. I don't see the problem.

Companies want to hire influential workers. It's relevant. So is putting in
the work.

And products which people find useful are vastly superior to those that the
author finds well engineered. I'm guessing many company owners will share that
view.

~~~
themoonbus
It's a system which disproportionately rewards the lucky few whose employers
allow them to either open source their work, or contribute to open source
projects... or the people who spend their free time coding. I know plenty of
folk who are damn good at their job but like to spend their free time on
other, unrelated hobbies.

I'm actually lucky enough to fall into the former category, but I feel that if
you only hire people with a respectable presence on github, you're
disregarding a large number of people for something beyond their control that
doesn't accurately reflect their ability.

~~~
Anderkent
>you're disregarding a large number of people for something beyond their
control

What you spend your free time on is not beyond your control (at least when
you're a software dev and presumably paid enough to actually have free time).
And you might decide to spend it on other, unrelated hobbies. That's cool, but
you should be aware that unless you can present that hobby as interesting,
unless you can sell it as something that helps you grow, you are making
yourself look less good that someone doing the same kind of work, and then
doing OSS in their free time.

A company is not going to disregard you for not having a respectable github
presence if no other candidates have a github presence either. But if there's
a clear disparity, why should they take an extra risk by hiring you, rather
than hire the person that can show them their actual contributions?

~~~
themoonbus
"at least when you're a software dev and presumably paid enough to actually
have free time"

...or you know, don't have family obligations.

I do agree to some extent with what you're saying, but as others have stated,
it should be one of many factors taken into consideration, and it depends on
the culture the company is trying to foster.

I personally have looked at github profiles of people I'm interviewing, if
they chose to share it with me.

------
mcphilip
I've been able to get through my career without LinkedIn or GitHub accounts as
proof of my skills. I've pored my time and energy into the jobs I hold and
hadn't gotten inspired to start contributing to OSS until just this week[1],
so I have no publicly available proof of my skills. However, I can give in
depth descriptions of interesting algorithms and data structures I developed
and deployed related to:

1) Motion detection algorithms for security cameras in outdoor environments
with a lot of ambient noise that needed to be ignored.

2) Medical informatics data model with a recommendation engine component for
predicting which ICD/CPT/SNOMED code to use for optimal chance of insurance
coverage.

3) R&D, implementation, and deployment of an EAV/CR [2] open schema based
analytics platform using the neo4j graph database for persistence

So far I've had the luxury of only using meatspace networking to find
interesting jobs to work at, but I stress over suddenly finding myself
unemployed in the future and having to face the modern interviewing process
with social networking activity used as a screen.

Can anyone describe how one's GitHub is used in an interview? Is a candidate
with an interesting, non-trivial personal project on GitHub considered, or are
candidates judged on their contribution to others' projects?

[1]Started working on a neo4j data science project involving gathering,
refining, and translating film, actor, and director data into a graph data
model for efficiently answering deeply recursive queries.

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model#Representing_substructure:_EAV_with_classes_and_relationships_.28EAV.2FCR.29)

~~~
fecak
Recruiter here. I've seen GitHub used in interviews where the interviewer may
look at the code before the interview, and then bring up the repo during the
interview to discuss it. This is usually to challenge why certain decisions
were made, what could have been done differently, etc.

It isn't much different than how a conversation would go after a live coding
exercise to review the work, with the exception that the candidate in the case
of a prior GitHub work will have had the advantage to clean things up and
perhaps has gone through several iterations already.

~~~
adeaver
Except in a live coding exercise most people are trying to be efficient or 'to
it right' and paying attention to what they are doing and how.

I realize this is anecdotal, but 95% of the public code in my git repo is
stuff I did as fun. I didn't care about being right, or care about memory
issues or being thread safe or anything other than 'I wonder if...'

In that instance, and I suspect a lot of other people public where they aren't
contributing to something using the repo code as a talking point is counter-
productive.

Why did I do it that way? Because I wanted to see what would happen.

~~~
fecak
Sure, but if you were aware that your public git repos would be up for
discussion in an interview, you might go back and switch some things up, no?
At least a handful of times, I know that the repo that would be discussed was
referenced before the interview as an agenda item - "we'll talk about PROJECT
A from your GitHub account".

~~~
adeaver
Odds are no, I won't do anything to the code. Why? Because for one, it would
likely take a bit of time to 'make it decent' and secondly, by the time I've
been informed that Project X will be talked about the interviewer has already
looked at it.

If I change it at that point then I'm either being disingenuous or taking away
the aspect he wanted to talk about.

All that said, if I put my github url on the resume then it's fair game to
_talk about_. My point is (same as the articles) using it as a filter is
generally a bad idea.

------
fyolnish
"If you want to find out whether someone’s worth hiring as a software
engineer, their code is of very limited value compared to talking to them,
discussing design and architecture, previous engineering constraints they’ve
faced, and what they’re like at solving problems"

I have a hard time thinking of a better way to see how good someone is at all
of those those thing than to look at code they've written in the past.

Also, the title of the article is "Why GitHub is not your CV" yet all it talks
about is how it can't replace an interview. Which I don't think many people
advocate.

------
atmosx
__First thing __: The _white /black men_ discrimination issue seems totally
out of place, almost ridiculous!

As for the main argument, I think it's flawed. Github (or any other online
repo) is an important asset and Open Source contributions matters. Especially
if you don't have prior job experience. It's a very good way to show that you
can _actually write code_ and you will be hands on from the first week, or
day, or hour.

------
cowsandmilk
(a) if someone I am interviewing has no idea what github is, that's a negative
sign. this is completely unrelated to whether the person has time to
contribute to projects (b) many great engineers have small forks of other
projects. This shows me that: (i) they know how to find and adopt open source
projects into their workflow, which will save me money (ii) when there is a
bug or something that does not fit how they want to use the project, they are
able to make that 15-line change or fix. (iii) if their fork is merged back
into the original project, that can indicate quality of patches, ability to
work with a community, explain benefits to their changes, etc.

Honestly, those skills are very valuable indicators and do not require someone
to be giving up their nights and weekends to OSS.

~~~
scardine
His theory is based in the premise that most GitHub (and FOSS) contributions
are made by hobbyists in their free time. This is a common misconception of
the FOSS economy.

Open source is not about donation, it is about cooperation and cooperation
makes economical sense for a lot of business. Yes, there are the free-riders,
but they are the copycats, we are the ones setting the pace.

Startups tend to be pushing the envelope, people from all genders from all
over the world are being PAID to fix bugs and implement new features during
the business hours, not over weekends. I do, I'm Brazilian and not white by
north American standards, so this whole "github bias" thing is BS based on a
naive assumption.

------
ak217
This post is horribly misguided to the point of being malicious.

Nobody is using Github as their only hiring filter.

On the other hand, Github is just about the best generic indicator of useful
contributions of a coder back to society: visible code that someone else found
useful. If someone wants to provide whomever is interested with more custom
evidence of their work, that's great, and there is a way to link to your
homepage for that. But Github stats do not lie, and the constrained profile
format is a feature, not a bug.

------
agilebyte

      willing and able to work for free
    

For me, GitHub is a gallery of my art, not work, so:

Me working for _free_ for an employer that tells me what to do does not lead
from me working in my spare time doing what/how I want.

------
marrs
I think this article needs to be split in two because it seems to be
conflating 2 opinions.

I'm not sure I really understand what the author is trying to say. Is it that
OSS encourages a culture of being exploited and that GitHub is inadvertently
pushing that culture? Or is it that recruiters don't know how to assess the
code they see and this is somehow GitHub's fault? Or is it that working on
code on your spare time is really a bad thing? Or maybe it's that only white
men create GitHub accounts.

------
bereft_orange
OSS/GitHub is what let me crack into the industry without having a CS degree
or particularly good contacts. I started learning to code a year or two ago,
then started contributing to open source and now I have a pretty solid track
record on interesting projects that's helped me get some interest and
interviews. Not sure how I could have done that otherwise...

------
zodiac
The article is mixing two conceptually distinct points: that using github
instead of CVs produces false negatives, and that it produces false positives.

It produces false negatives because lots of people who are good coders and who
deserve to be hired don't have impressive github accounts for various
legitimate reasons. I completely agree with this point.

However, to employers, false negatives are not that big of a problem. In some
sense it's morally unfair that I exclude so many people who "deserve" the job,
but if in the end I land a satisfactory candidate, I'm happy.

So to employers, the real question is, does github produce false positives? If
my screening practice (I think we all agree that githubs and resumes should be
used mainly as a screening step) is to ask for githubs instead of CVs, do I
let better candidates through? If you read the article carefully, there is
very little evidence presented for this; the author mostly argues that using
github produces false negatives or weak signals.

------
seivan
If you have time to peddling your diversify book, write angry tweets, go to
conferences and do podcasts. You have time to write code. That is, if you're a
software engineer (the people who use Github mainly)

~~~
zem
what makes you think coglan and dryden are speaking on behalf of themselves,
and not on behalf of all the people who _don 't_ have the time and luxury to
write code, and are being unfairly and systemically penalised for it?

------
mihaifm
> That is, GitHub picks your most popular repos and puts those at the top. You
> have no say about what you consider important, or worthwhile, or
> interesting, or well-engineered, or valuable

Well said. This is also valid for stackoverflow, where your "top" questions
are often silly ones that everyone can understand, while the ones you consider
valuable are buried in anonymity. Some sort of showcase feature would be nice,
in both cases.

------
throwawaykf
I would advise the author not to worry about this.

I recently went through a job change, and to enhance my chances, I spruced up
my Github profile, and put a link to it at the top of my resume. It's not the
most active profile, but all the work there are wholly self-initiated
projects, all of which tackle some interesting, often original problem. One of
the projects randomly ended up with a few stars without me posting that link
anywhere. Having code out there would give me a little leg-up over the intense
competition, right?

Of the dozen or so tech phone screens, not _one_ asked about it. Only one
asked me to talk about a personal project, and it was abundantly clear he had
not looked at the Github link.

At least he asked. One phone screen was with a recruiter at a famous open
source company, and even she had not looked at it. To be fair, it was a
recruiter call and not a technical one, but I thought she'd at least
acknowledged it.

Most of the phone screens turned into onsite interviews, and again, nobody
even mentioned Github. Well, it did come up in one interview, where the
interviewer was doing a deep dive into IP networking details, and I told him
in an offhand manner that, y'know, I had code out there that did exactly what
he was asking...

The companies I interviewed with ranged from a couple of startups to a bunch
of US technology giants in a variety of fields, and many of them get discussed
on here regularly.

My advice is, don't put too much stock in your Github profile to help your job
prospects. For whatever reasons, maybe the same as TFA's, practically nobody
cares. Instead, invest in practicing the same old Google/Amazon/Facebook
whiteboard-a-problem style that everybody and their grandmother uses, even if
the work involved is nowhere near the kind of work (some people at)
Google/Amazon/Facebook do.

~~~
fexl
As a personal anecdote, one recruiter from a well-known organization did
mention my Github page as an indication of drive and initiative, but it was by
no means a deciding factor. Just another piece of evidence on top of a lot of
other things.

------
scardine
Any resumé screening and interviewing process boils down to only 3 essential
questions:

\- How well can you do this work? \- Will you blend in (can you endure our
work environment)? \- Is it easy to work with you (you are not a dick, are
you)?

So get over it, everything you do online IS more real than your resumé. Why?
Because we are an online company and your online reputation is more important
than a single document traditionally written in a corporate mumbo-jumbo style
where the author tend to exaggerate his accomplishments.

When I ask for your github profile, I'm not asking for free work - FOSS is not
about free work. I want to see your pull requests. Why? Because from time to
time we do pull requests, and do it not because we are good Samaritans but out
of sheer greed.

We use an open source technology stack. We push it's boundaries, we find bugs,
we fix bugs. We find components lacking, we implement the desired feature and
contribute back. We port code from other languages or create it from scratch
and open source because it is cheaper than maintaining a closed source
library. Is it free work? No, it is cooperation, and it makes sense
economically.

Do you have a patch accepted in a high profile FOSS project? This means:

\- You are doing serious work based on FOSS stacks \- You have some
communication skills \- You have coding skills, can write tests and
documentation \- You can fix bugs and implement new features

I want to see the issues you open: are they well documented, with reproducible
test cases?

I want to see your stack overflow profile: do you write good questions and
good answers? Because a good question is 90% of a good answer, and good
answers is what our customers demand.

Do you write really odd blog posts or troll around in online forums? Sorry, I
guess you will not fit our work environment.

------
peterwwillis
Two different kinds of open source projects are relevant to a resume. Group
projects, and individual projects. A hiring manager will want to see both. If
you only have an individual project, it's still better than nothing, and there
is no color/gender/economic barrier to just writing code for yourself and
uploading it to GitHub.

I had joined several group projects, and started one of my own, back when I
was first getting into the job market. It helped a lot to tell any employer
that you had been fiddling with this new-fangled "Linux" and "Apache" and
"MySQL" stuff for years, versus the older Unix guys who had been using the
same industry tech for 10 years. Really, open source was just like a new fad
to older hiring types, and knowing something about it meant you had a
different mindset.

But now everybody uses GitHub and it means jack shit.

------
tokenrove
The argument that only the well-to-do contribute to OSS is bullshit, although
I haven't looked at the data. Perhaps on a global scale, but within the gamut
of rich and poor in North America, my own anecdata on the matter is just the
opposite.

Github-as-the-new-resume is galling for plenty of other reasons.

------
nathan_long
Can you name _any_ job qualification which does not put some groups at a
disadvantage?

I want to be fair, but "do you have work you can show me?" is about as close
to ideal as I can think of.

~~~
steveklabnik
It's not that: it's that without acknowledging the bias, the 'meritocracy'
philosophy suggests that those who do OSS are the best at what they do, which
is not necessarily true.

~~~
nathan_long
No, but they are those _most easily demonstrably_ good at what they do.

I mean, if you had a Ruby job opening and you got applications from Aaron
Patterson and 20 other people, would it be unfair to put Patterson's
application at the top?

There _might_ be another applicant as good, but 1) you have to look harder and
2) you can't really tell until after you've hired them.

Picking a sure thing over a gamble is pretty understandable.

------
otikik
I got my current job precisely because of what I have on Github. I was never
asked for a CV. The people in that company were already using some of my OSS
libraries before I arrived.

Today someone told me to review someone else's CV. My last comment was: "This
CV does not mention a github account. This either means that this person does
not have it or that he doesn't think of it as relevant enough to be on his
CV". It was not a deciding factor, but it was listed on the "cons".

------
nicholassmith
GitHub is not your CV, but I think it should be _on_ your CV. If you're an
artist when you interview they usually want to see a portfolio of your work,
GitHub is a pretty handy way to portfolio code for others to view.

There's many good things about it, and reasonably few downsides to trade off
against, but overall if you've got a GitHub I'd be more interested in seeing
that than knowing what grades you got at school 15 years ago.

------
kstop
Also why, after flirting with the idea for one hiring cycle, I stopped asking
people if they had Stack Overflow accounts. Yes, if they had one, it provided
useful information about their interests and communication ability. But it has
a demographic skew that could have led me to rejecting other candidates
unfairly.

That said, my own presence on Github is pretty anemic, so maybe that's another
form of bias!

------
Millennium
GitHub isn't a CV: it's a portfolio. That can be incredibly valuable in the
hiring process, if it is used properly, but it is not the be-all and end-all
of hiring. The article is right as far as this goes.

I cannot say that I agree with much of the rest of the article, and I agree
with even less of the article on which it is based. But summarily rejecting
non-GitHub candidates really is a bad idea.

------
dragonwriter
GitHub isn't a CV, but it serves as a portfolio or set of work samples.

This has traditionally been important in hiring people for creative work,
though prior to GitHub and similar sites there wasn't necessarily a single
particularly good/common way for this to be done in the software development
field.

------
ChikkaChiChi
Github isn't necessarily a new concept nor is submitting links to code sample
repositories as part of a programmer's 'portfolio'

Forgive my naiveté, but why is this a topic of debate now? Did something
radically change? Weren't you all doing this before Github existed?

------
marknutter
Unless you have your CV on github..

~~~
kybernetikos
Yes, all the complaints about how you can't tell a story with your github
profile seems to completely ignore gh-pages, a phenomenal service that _does_
let you tell a story.

Maybe your github profile isn't a good portfolio by default, but it's an
excellent service for creating your portfolio. On top of that, even a poor
github profile provides more signal than most CVs I've read.

~~~
hyperpape
The point (imho) isn't that literally nothing on github can be a good hiring
indicator. It's that people are treating github as if, by itself, it is an
adequate way to assess candidates and decide who to interview. Maybe if you
make a page like you're suggesting, then you can link to that page, but then
github is more or less just a host.

~~~
kybernetikos
Well, I can certainly accept that it's _possible_ to overweight github as a
hiring indicator, however that's not been my experience from either side of
the interview, so I strongly suspect that if there's an optimum amount of
attention to pay to services like github, most recruitment programs are on the
'too little' side rather than the 'too much'.

~~~
hyperpape
Yeah, while I agree with a lot in the article, I also agree with your
generalization. Most companies are still looking for the boring "CS degree + 2
years experience, HR doesn't know what github is".

But there are also a lot of "hot" companies, of the sort that are talked about
a lot on HN, that are pushing github as the end all be all.

The real point isn't about what the average company is doing, it's about which
attitudes are sensible.

(Bias: I got my first job as a developer based on a combination of a non-
technical friend's contacts and my github repos looking acceptable. I was
three years out of grad school in the humanities at the time).

------
badman_ting
Yeah, but tell that to pretty much everyone who is hiring devs nowadays.
Everything is like, "Send us your Github link. Peace out." Uhhh, but I mostly
commit to private repos…?

------
CmonDev
Have two profiles - one for your projects portfolio, another - to contribute
to OSS.

------
dreamdu5t
Tell that to all the job offers in my inbox via github projects.

~~~
steveklabnik
That's irrelevant to the point of the article.

------
fecak
Actually, GitHub is just a supplemental CV. A potentially positive indicator,
that among many others (including a CV itself) will be part of the body of
work to determine a candidate's qualifications.

Those in hiring positions need to use various indicators of what would make
someone a good hire. For most of history in the tech world, this simply meant
a standard resume/CV, followed by a phone screen and then an interview where
the candidate may be asked whatever questions are deemed relevant by the
interviewer. Could be tests, exercises, etc - depends on who you were talking
to.

Fast forward to today, where we have more ways that a candidate may show
'indicators' of talent. What about participation in user groups and meetups?
Anyone can go to these things, but people who choose to go to them may have a
bit more curiosity or interest (and admittedly free time) than those that
don't, and that curiosity often goes hand in hand with talent. Not always, but
again it is one indicator.

A healthy Stack Overflow reputation score might be another indicator. People
who know nothing about programming probably won't be able to rake up major
points there.

What if someone wrote a book about a technology? Another indicator probably,
and if the book became a best-seller that would be even a stronger indicator
since others are judging the material as worthy of their money.

As the author points out, all of these things take time, and many in the
industry don't have that kind of free time. Understood.

Experience working at a known entity with a high barrier to entry is another
indicator. We know that if someone passed the grueling interview process at
certain firms, chances are they will get past our process as well. Another
positive indicator.

There will also be some false positives. Candidates that belong to several
meetups and have very active GitHubs may not be able to code.

Someone who has never heard of GitHub (or say Node.js or Mongo or whatever may
be current and newsworthy at the time) will probably be given a negative
indicator Would you consider hiring someone who had never heard of these
things? Perhaps not.

Candidates without families that we might expect to have more free time may
not choose to spend it at meetups and building GitHub repos either. I don't
think we should immediately assume that they are less qualified than the ones
that do, but I don't think any will assume they are more qualified.

The author says "you can't judge code without talking to its author". Perhaps
you can, but I don't think anybody is necessarily suggesting that you should.
No one is hiring candidates based on their GitHub activity alone without
interviews, just like no one is hiring anyone based on their CV alone without
interviews.

Can we just agree that all of these positive indicators are just indicators?
As long as we don't use the absence of them as a negative indicator (as a
measure of fairness to those who lack the time or desire), we are not doing
anyone a disservice.

------
mkramlich
I found it interesting that the OA OA concluded that it biased to white men. I
concluded something a little different.

I concluded it biases to: folks who most have the free time and the mindset
and the kind of _desperateness_ to be doing it. Or income-increasing ambition.
(Like the kind that's strongest when you're unemployed or under-employed.)
Therefore, it biases (again, only statistically) to young males around college
or high school age. Most likely living in their parent's house, or in a dorm,
or perhaps out in their own place but without a spouse, kids, sick family
members, or any significant hobbies other than computers. And without a long
established work history "out in the real world" and thus lots of fellow
coworkers/clients/managers to help keep them fully employed out in that pesky
meatspace. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing necessarily. Or that this
pattern is universal and without exception. I'm just saying this is the
pattern I see in the majority of cases. I didn't sense any inherent pro-white
bias, or something pro-male. With avatar icons and code commits and pull
requests the Internet truly doesn't know or care whether you're a dog. (Only
whether you're a smart enough dog that can interact and deliver.) It was just
pro-... a certain set of qualities. If a certain demographic is more likely to
have those qualities, then, that demographic will be disproportionately
present and active there on GitHub. It's not a conspiracy, just the physics
and economics of it.

And there's nothing necessarily wrong with it. But it's important to realize
it's at play. And to neither blindly assume that anyone without a GitHub
presence, or an active one, or large one, is somehow incompetent/unqualified
at software engineering. Or that everybody active on GitHub is a young white
male in their parent's basement. Instead, treat each person as an individual.
And realize that the entire world hasn't fully converted over to your
wonderful new "rule of thumb" about hiring. Yet. And perhaps never will. And
that too is not necessarily a bad thing.

------
thenerdfiles
Your _Website_ is where your CV goes.

Whether it (your CV link, internally — extracts data from github? — or
externally) points to your github profile or not is your decision.

Why is this still being discussed ?

Websites, people. _Websites._

~~~
thenerdfiles
In fact, I'd go so far as to say (just to see what happens to this industry):
On all these "job posting" sites, [Your Website] should be a Required Field
for Web Developers. Period.

Show me that you take the time to register a domain, configure a host, log in
to that Linux box, and _build_ the Web.

A more pertinant question is: Why would you hire a Web Developer who has no
place on the Web? It has to be Your Domain, Your Place on the Web. You. What
genuine rebuttal is there against this? (There has to be a pretty Good Reason
to hire a Web Developer who does not have a Website.)

Forget the "online portfolio" debate; _build the Web_ and actually be _about_
that.

~~~
pjmlp
NDAs

~~~
thenerdfiles
Did you just blame The Man?

------
icecreampain
> The demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed
> toward white men than the software industry is

What the fuck am I reading? Is this asshole author trying to inject racism
into something that is inherently race-, age-, gender-, wealth- and location-
agnostic? Github doesn't care who you are, what you code or in what language
you code it. And yet here we are with a dumbfuck author who, for the sake of
clicks, just absolutely needs to shit on white men, that have been the bane of
all tech-interested non-white men since the dawn of time.

When I hire I ask for code samples first and the person's name last. Shit, I'd
hire the person based purely on code, put up anywhere on the net, and an
anonymous chat, conducted fucking anywhere, and only require their name and
social security number when signing the contract.

Shit I'm pissed off now. Some people just can't accept that technology is the
ultimate equalizer and instead have to project their white guilt into
everything.

~~~
gopher1
If you think the issue is about what Github "cares" about, you missed the
point entirely.

The point is that those who have the free time and opportunity to contribute
to OSS projects are more likely to be of some means. Given the economic
realities of this country, those with some means are statistically speaking
far more likely to be white males than anything else (which is confirmed by
the data).

The conversation that has been occurring recently is about how having a Github
profile is now becoming a de-facto must-have because hiring managers are
increasingly seeing it as a shortcut filter.

It's great that you would hire someone based on code put up anywhere on the
net, but that's not what people are commenting about. People are saying that
Github should not become mandatory, for many reasons, among them because
you're limiting your pool of candidates to those with some means.

~~~
darkarmani
> People are saying that Github should not become mandatory, for many reasons,
> among them because you're limiting your pool of candidates to those with
> some means.

Is that a concern when hiring? Isn't the biggest concern false-positives?
Hiring bad people is the worse hiring mistake. The argument around github
seems to be that while the true positive rate is very high, there is also a
high false negative rate (rejecting qualified people because they aren't on
github). From a hiring perspective (purely arguing economics), that is an
acceptable trade-off. Your upside is limited by a smaller pool of applicants
(that are still qualified), but your downside is greatly smaller.

