
Why Resumes and Code Screenings Are Obsolete with GitHire - heyrhett
http://githire.com/about
======
sown
This demand that people write tons and tons of code on our off hours is
understandable but is getting, I dunno, obnoxious? If not _tons_ , then
perhaps something of very high quality. I could write a nifty little linked
list implementation but would it really show that I'd be a good programmer for
your particular needs?

If you think it does, I predict having code written in off hours is a
requirement will result in github being flooded with just horrible code. It's
hard to evaluate code in a quick glance. Let's keep it as a bonus type thing
so the pressure won't be so high to produce just anything, to torture a text
editor until it gives something that pleases the eye and sleights the mind.

Please, keep the industry from moving to make this sort of thing a
requirement. I write crappy code in my spare time for _fun_ not because I
think it'll get me hired.

\----

Not everyone can write code for 50 hours a week and then 10+ more at home,
especially if they have outside interests, a family or are just plain tired of
it.

Writing code in spare hours is neat, and I do it myself, but I think it needs
to be seen as a bonus, not as a requirement.

Perhaps employers are wanting to hire burn-out proof people. I don't think
there are enough programmers on the planet to meet employer's demands to hire
the best. The implication of wanting 'the best' and asking for code in off
hours is that if you don't write code in off hours, you are not the best and
not worthy. It's thinly veiled and having been through a few interviews
(sometimes I showed them code I had written in off hours, sometimes not)
recently, my experiences are probably anecdotal but it makes me wonder.

~~~
hello_moto
I like your opinion (probably because I'm biased of this trend as well).

Unfortunately, we live in the world where people eat people.

For those who have large number of repos and code written in GitHub, they
would rejoice when they see this. Just like Haskell people would feel excited
when they see the number of jobs for Haskell programmers out there cannot be
met with the supply.

These people will push this idea forward because it is for their best interest
(only a few who would keep the purity of the community).

At the end of the day, we're all human beings so we have greeds and egos. We
want to have high salary or challenging work or the best work
place/culture/free-food and we work to achieve that. Part of the work is to
have GitHub repos apparently (used to be StackOverflow karma).

Some hackers dislike the notion of getting interesting jobs/deals because of
your rolodex because that would suggest sales/marketing/licking butt
mentality. They also dislike it because communication (with real people, not
over the internet) is not their strongest suit.

For those who disagree with this wave/bubble, we should create our own. We
should push our own ideology. We should figure out how not to be attracted
with this wave/bubble.

... or we can stand up and be an entrepreneur (one option, not the only
option) and say to hell with this job-seeker mob-mentality?

~~~
cydonian_monk
Exactly. All of it. If you don't like it, fix it. If you can't fix it, replace
it (or ignore it). Just because some companies only want to hire people that
write code 24/7 doesn't mean all companies have to. And there are some of us
that work in closed-source or secure code that simply don't have a public
codebase. And an occasional few that are contractually prohibited from writing
public code in their "off" time.

(Does having a large codebase freely available make evaluating a potential
hire easier? No doubt. I'm not questioning that.)

I'm a programmer by trade but a hardware guy by birth and education. I don't
do endless amounts of coding in my off-time, but instead build things. When it
comes time for me to move on, if /everybody/ I talk to requires a large open-
source codebase for me to even sit in the same room as them - I won't care.
I'll find some like-minded folk and create my own job.

------
viraptor
> Over a million software developers have public repositories on
> <http://github.com>, allowing you to see how people use code to solve real
> problems

That assumes they put code on github. And that they publish the code. And that
you know anything about their code.

Then there are those of us who use bitbucket. There's lots of code which
doesn't get published because it's not relevant and if it is, it might be a
one off project that I'd rather not make public rather than make it look like
it's abandoned. Finally, some code just makes no sense out of context - some
of the code I'm most proud of were just binary patches to firmware of an old
mobile phone with delphi gui for hooking it up to specified functions. Without
context that's just an ugly delphi form that does a weird version of "patch"
operating on a text file and example files. In context, it's a lot more. Not
only I wouldn't expect anyone to understand what that project was doing and
why it mattered, it would not get uploaded to github because it was outdated
before github even existed.

So while the quoted sentence is still true, I think anyone using this service
misses out on masses of experienced developers who simply didn't publish their
code on GH, for various reasons. If you want to find a standard <recent
language> developer doing lots of opensource work, it might be a good offer
though.

The difference might not be clear to the people paying for this service.

~~~
ErikRogneby
<http://www.workforpie.com> checks both github and bitbucket. They also check
HN and Stack Overflow to get a rounded out picture. It's an opt-in service
though, targeted at the employees not the employers. I've found that their
rating system is pretty fair and accurate. I think of it as klout for
programmers.

Forking a bunch of repositories isn't going to earn you much there.

~~~
dasil003
GitHub + HN + Stack Overflow eh? I reckon I rank _way_ higher than the likes
of Linus Torvalds and other legendary open source hackers. Hallelujah!

------
socratic
Is hiring software developers an evaluation problem or a supply/demand
problem?

GitHub provides a great signal for evaluating whether someone is one of the
top 100 or top 1000 developers in the world. Just check how many follows or
forks they have! But Linus and DHH can work wherever they want, and they're
probably unlikely to work in SF for $60--100k plus options in your SaaS
startup.

Because of supply and demand, the people who are going to work long hours in
that price range seem to be recent graduates. As a result, all of the hiring
processes I've seen are geared toward trying to get a vaguely passable
evaluation of how good a recent graduate is, using the minimum possible
developer time. This leads to the coding interview as we know it: 30--45
minutes long and usually involving a trite programming problem utilizing the
most advanced class most undergraduates will have taken, introduction to
algorithms.

Personally, I would love if tech companies switched to evaluating based on
work samples (e.g., code), but I don't think it makes sense given the
demographics that they're targeting as new employees and the amount of time to
have a developer genuinely evaluate a coding sample (rather than count
followers, etc.).

Is it likely that GitHire and similar will increase the supply of good
candidates in the right price range, rather than periodically e-mailing the
top developers on GitHub and possibly polluting the ecosystem?

------
bad_user
I searched for "Ruby" devs from my city. I search for Ruby because I know a
couple of good Ruby developers and was curious if any of them popped up.

And the results are pretty bad.

Not only did I get awful results from other countries, the actual 2 results I
got from my city are 2 devs ranked as being in the " _top 20% of GitHub users
by estimated expertise_ ".

One of them has 2 forked projects with NO contributions and is contributing to
a third that he just started. He also has no followers. The other is an intern
at a local company, with a single project of a few lines of code and no other
public activity to speak about. I also searched for them on Google and
couldn't find anything else, other than a LinkedIn profile.

Now, I'm not saying that these 2 results are bad developers. But if these are
classified as in the top "20%" of developers based on information available
online, then the algorithm is doing a pretty shitty job.

To make things worse, I didn't see any personal acquaintance out of dozens
that I know have meaningful GitHub accounts and are living in my city.
Instead, I got somebody from Istanbul (different country, not even a neighbor)
that submitted his configuration files to GitHub and is also in the " _top 20%
of GitHub users by estimated expertise_ ".

~~~
3pt14159
Same in my city (Toronto). I recognized maybe 4 people that I knew were good
and 5 that I knew were junior.

------
untog
One thing something like this misses in comparison to resumes - what was the
effect of the code they wrote?

Sure, I can see that you wrote a kick-ass routine to geocode addresses. What
problem was it trying to solve? What benefits did it bring to the end user?
Did it have an effect on any measured metrics? This is the kind of stuff
people usually put in their resumes.

I'm not _that_ interested in the code a developer writes. I want to know what
effect they and their code has on the organisation. It's the same reason I
dislike recruiters, because they sell candidates to me on "x years in y!"

~~~
MrEnigma
To that end, there is more than just perfection of code. It's great to see a
developer write perfect 'debt-free' code, however sometimes it's more valuable
to get the code out the door in a simpler easier state.

A lot of developers I've worked with have problems getting to a stopping
point. For hiring someone the 'perfect' code usually wins out, yet that person
might not be the best fit.

~~~
untog
Absolutely agreed. In fact, these kind of hiring services aren't of much
interest to me because I think that a lot of developers are "good enough"
coders- but that their personality (be it perfectionism, whatever) is more
variable.

I'd prioritise finding a developer that is "good enough" and fits well into a
team over a razor-sharp developer that can't work to deadlines or participate
in meetings.

------
LeafStorm
One major flaw: it assumes anyone you would want to hire uses Github, as
opposed to Bitbucket, Gitorious, Google Code, Launchpad, the numerous other
code hosts I missed, or hosting their code on their own server.

And if Github becomes "the standard" for hosting software such that everyone
looks for code and coders on Github instead of other places, that would be
detrimental to the FOSS community as a whole - not only in Github's lack of
competition with other code hosts, but also in git's lack of competition with
other VCSes.

~~~
xxqs
don't forget the good old sourceforge and freshmeat.

besides, only about 10%, if not less, of registered github users do actual
coding. Most of the users just follow the updates or fork and add patches.

~~~
mnutt
_only about 10%, if not less_

Is there a number published somewhere?

~~~
xxqs
no, it's just my own feeling based on browsing and looking at who's following
my projects :)

~~~
BiosElement
So it's not only a guess, but you imply patchers are not coders. That's just
cheap.

------
gcp
Simple test: myself. Claims I have 5+ years of Emacs Lisp experience. Ahem, I
wish. Second test: my boss. Claims he has 3-5 years of C experience (less than
me, and less than he has C++ experience). Ahem.

I know these are estimates, but it highlights the flaw: it just looks at your
repos and has no insight what's happening. Maybe it would work better if it
could detect if your patches are actually being pulled by anone. (That means
your code is desirable to at least 1 person).

Eliminating a code screening with this? Come on, don't make me laugh.

~~~
rpwilcox
Same thing happened to me. It claims I have 5+ years of Ruby experience.

But, I learned Ruby in May 2008, because I got a job doing Rails development.
(I just looked it up). So, 3 years, going on 4.

------
jrockway
I don't see public repositories as being a 100% indicator. The information
they provide is useful, but I still want to do a whiteboard interview with
candidates. There are a few reasons for this. Most of my personal projects are
much simpler than what I get paid to do. Many of my repositories contain lots
of good code written by other people and it's unfair for me to take credit for
their work.

I like the whiteboard interviews because you can observe the end-to-end
problem solving. You can see how people behave out of their element. You can
see how they approach "an empty page". And you can ask questions that involve
more algorithmic insight than "I wrote a Twitter scraper".

~~~
DennisP
You must have a more interesting job than me. Most of my personal projects are
way more complicated than what I get paid to do.

------
jmileham
Finding exceptional talent on GitHub certainly a solvable problem, but the
real challenge for GitHire is the one you can see immediately when you pull up
this page:

<http://githire.com/order>

In the first few reloads, I've seen John Resig, David Heinemeier Hansson, and
Yehuda Katz pop up. Maybe they're free to do a quick phone screen?

Here's hoping that there's a lot of secret sauce keeping companies from trying
to date supermodels (most of whom are already in a relationship).

~~~
mechanical_fish
That page looks like a teaser. I tend to suspect that the "supermodels" are
popping up for the same reason that, when you look at those T-shirt ads on the
edges of blogs, every T-shirt is being worn by... a supermodel.

In practice, I presume they offer to try to screen for people who actually
want to be hired, not just the ones with big scores on Githubbiness. I note
that the very first thing they tell you to do on the "Job Seekers" page is to
set your "hireable" flag on Github to true. (I didn't yet realize Github had
such a thing, BTW. Thanks to GitHire for teaching me that, if nothing else.)

~~~
jmileham
I didn't know about the hireable flag either. Cool feature for the genuinely
unemployed, but imagine the team morale repercussions of setting your hireable
flag to true while in a job you're looking to move on from...

------
MrEnigma
The thing that could be worrying here, is that it could clutter up github with
people trying to game it to get a job, instead of actually caring about the
project their contributing to.

It seems that in it's current state this could work very well, if this becomes
a popular recruiting tool, it won't be sustainable.

------
hello_moto
Each community is pushing their own way of establishing the "great developer"
presence and calls their solution the best one out there and the rest are
obsolete.

Software Developers around the world becomes this victim of a bubble. Be it
the StackOverflow bubble (collecting rewards from answering questions) or the
GitHub bubble or the blogging bubble.

I'm tired playing the alpha-geek Fire-and-Motion.

------
thibaut_barrere
Note to recruiters: don't rely solely on the GitHub profile. I've seen a
couple of recruiters miss very good profiles because they were focusing only
on that.

------
psychotik
I know more than a handful of exceptional engineers who don't even have GitHub
accounts. And I know a few really average engineers who are active on GitHub.

As best (if it works like magic even), this only gets you the cream of a small
subset of engineers. But if this is the only source you would use to hire, you
leave out a large pool of talent before you even begin.

~~~
ww520
Open source has become a marketing game for some devs.

------
flixic
From my estimated experience: CoffeeScript: 5+ years

Ha ha. (the language has been out for 3 years, became known maybe year after
release)

~~~
stillinbeta
I have 5+ years experience with Erlang, a language I know literally not a
single line of. It's from a repo (that I forked) that is half/half Erlang,
Python.

------
angersock
So, almost all of the code I've released has been part of a group effort--
either something in-house I may not be able to release, or as part of a small
team writing OSS.

How does this actually help me? I'm not going to take credit for entire
projects, especially not when I'm working on them with friends.

------
ww520
Instead of writing a half-ass project on your free time and putting the source
code in Github, build and maintain a product/website/app. It has more creds.
It shows you can ship a COMPLETE product instead of some code snippets.

~~~
derickson
Totally agree.

------
tikhonj
My profile is very flattering: it thinks I have 5+ years of experience
JavaScript, Java, Haskell and elisp. I'm a second year undergrad :)

Is there anywhere to submit bug reports? I looked around, but didn't see any
email addresses anywhere.

------
samstarling
It looks like they're basically just selling this:
[http://www.hackdiary.com/2010/02/10/algorithmic-
recruitment-...](http://www.hackdiary.com/2010/02/10/algorithmic-recruitment-
with-github/)

------
smackfu
What percentage of programmers are doing work out in the open?

------
danso
So...has anyone found a profile that's NOT in the top 20% or better? If I'm in
the top 20% for putting in test commits than the software dev world is in dire
trouble.

~~~
technomancy
> the software dev world is in dire trouble

I thought we were taking this as a given.

------
xster
I think it would be a great tool but only for a segment of the job market.
It's good for finding passionate coding enthusiasts who maintain many open
source projects for fun and would be a good fit for a silicon valley type
company but for the rest who are just professional white collar programmers
who work for big companies, the best code can never be made public and
conventional interviews, while not perfect, is the best we got so far.

------
seltzered_
I'm waiting for someone to write "Why behavioral interviews are obsolete with
facebook" next. </sarcasm>

------
fuzzylizard
As others have stated, how well someone codes is less important than how good
a cultural and personal fit they are for the company. I want to know how
passionate someone is, how well they do when pair programming, how well they
communicate, etc in addition to knowing how well they can code. I can teach
someone, who is willing, how to be a great coder, but I cannot teach someone
how to fit well into the company culture or with my team.

In addition, I know too many developers who I would hire in a heartbeat that
do not have repos on Github and far too many developers that I never want to
work with that do have repos.

I also find it curious that on <http://githire.com/order>, when I refresh the
page and see people like 37Signals and Omni show up. Not sure they are looking
for new gigs.

------
mcginniwa
Hey Githire,

I think the service is good, but I have a couple points of feedback.

When calculating the profile of a user, rather than only looking into
repositories under the user's name, you should also take into account the code
under any organizations the user is apart of. Most of my coding is publicly
committed under an organization repository.

A solution is either to look at all of a user's commits rather repositories or
take into a user's organization repositories, too.

Other lesser pieces of feedback:

* The typography and a lot of the images look "fuzzy" to the eye and give off a cheap impression. I would definitely rework those until they give a quality impression.

* Add a "contact us" link in your header or footer or both. I shouldn't have to rely on HN to give you feedback.

------
resnamen
Such saucer-eyed bullshit. Many employers have moonlighting clauses that
prevent employees from contributing to OSS projects. All of the companies I've
worked for have. If you only go by Github commits, you'll probably be getting
only a certain type of applicant and excluding most others.

Github commits might be good _supplemental_ data to have, but if I am to do a
fair apples to apples comparison between candidates who might be encumbered by
moonlighting clauses, then I'll let the whiteboard coding do the talking.

------
peteretep
I would be curious to know how it gets years of experience so wrong.

~~~
sliverstorm
# Perhaps like so...?

    
    
      if ( does_it_compile() ) {
         years_experience++;
         if ( !does_it_segfault() ) {
            years_experience++;
         }
      }

------
MrEnigma
Re: Code Screenings are obsolete. I think this is true for some code
screenings. However my most recent job, they sent me their own framework, and
I needed to make code within that. You're not going to find that on google.
Sure I could have had a friend help me, but I think it would have been pretty
obvious when I started, and the few that would do that would get weeded out in
the first few months.

------
erichmond
Most of the best programmers I know don't even have github accounts because
they're so busy writing great closed-source code during the day, and living
interesting and varied nightlives that allow them to stay refresh and
producing high quality code during the day.

I'm not saying you _can't_ find great developers via github, just that you're
limiting yourself to an extremely small pond, even if it seems big.

------
feralchimp
Best of luck to these folks.

The idea doesn't suck. The current implementation might suck a little. They
have their work cut out for them in any case, if for no other reason than the
barrier to entry for competition seems pretty low.

They've got two huge things going for them: \- $500 is right around the noise
floor for a hiring process \- Money co-located with mouth. If the client isn't
happy, they don't get paid.

------
rbanffy
Like many, my Github repos don't get the love they deserve. Many projects lay
abandoned waiting for the day I have the time to finish them.

It seems this system can be easily gamed by putting more commits into your
github repos, even if it's not original code, original ideas or even runnable
code.

------
aidenn0
Biggest problem here is that the majority of the code I write is not open
source, and OSS code I write is very very different than the code I write
professionally (so that my employer has no claim on it), so the github version
of me is nothing like the real version of me.

------
aantix
How do they choose which project to profile? I have many public repos yet they
profile the single, oldest project in my profile.

Lots of room for improvement if you ask me....
<http://githire.com/profiles/aantix>

------
pvarangot
Anyone here heard about Ohloh (<http://www.ohloh.net/>)? This seems like a
service they could offer more effectively than this guys, who seem restricted
to Github for their data mining.

------
antihero
How do they plan to work out if people are jerks or not? Or if they are
looking for work, or if they work well in a team? The code itself is a major
aspect to a coding job, but not the only thing.

------
recursive
Obsolete? This works only with github, which hosts only git repositories. So
the only developers who are hireable use git? Am I getting this right?

------
civilian
On the search page, how do they determine "Hireable"? And why is mine true?

Why is my python professor Hireable: false?

~~~
dpritchett
I'd guess it's the github careers page. You opted in, right?

------
tferris
@heyrhett, did you already win some customers? Anyone purchased your 500USD
package?

------
suyash
Is this product developed by Github folks?

~~~
mattdeboard
God no.

------
jQueryIsAwesome
<http://githire.com/best> : you guys should check if they are actually human
beings, (as much as you would like to hire him, android is not a real person).

