
When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day. - swah
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/03/careers-2-0-now-does-github/
======
onan_barbarian
Maybe this is paranoia, but I'm beginning to find a lot of threads like this
(and a few yesterday about 'how to hire people') actively coercive:
"Contribute to Open Source or Don't Get Hired".

There are a lot of increasingly shrill remarks out there about how everyone
should be doing open source projects in their 'spare time', so no-one has any
excuse not to have a track record of FOSS contributions... frankly, it's
bullshit.

I work in a closed-source shop (for some very good reasons, we can't open) and
our devs do sterling work of a sophistication not seen in most projects, open
or otherwise, solving a very difficult and rather open-ended algorithmic
problem. On a good day, we get a lot of sophisticated work done.

Strangely, at the end of one of these good days, no one wants to go home and
write a big fucking pile of code - we have girlfriends/wives/families that
haven't seen us for 12 hours and probably aren't going to want to use the
remaining hours (and typing time) to write MORE code. Even if that was a good
idea - we are paid for full-time work here which means ideally we go home and
relax, not flail away on endless side projects.

~~~
bphogan
The problem is that I can't believe a word you said. I can't see examples of
this awesome super top-secret code because it's all closed-source, as you say,
for good reasons.

I also can't trust your references, because you'll only give me ones that will
say good things about you, and any digging at your work history will only
uncover "yes he worked here" responses.

I want to see open-source contributions because I like being around people who
are passionate about solving problems with code, and it is my experience that
people who contribute to open-source projects, or start their own, are of that
mindset.

I don't think that they are the _only_ people who are passionate, but I want
to make a choice so I can get back to solving problems.

If you're making the hiring people work harder, you're going to miss out.
Being able to show examples of your work is the best way to do it.

How do you feel about tests? or "write this program that does [x]" spec
projects instead?

~~~
technomancy
> The problem is that I can't believe a word you said.

It comes down to this: filtering by OSS contributions gives you many false
negatives (as the OP has complained) but virtually zero false positives. In
hiring, a false negative is a bummer, but a false positive is disastrous. It
would be irresponsible of me as an interviewer not to take this into account.

If it someone's pissed because they fall into the false negative bucket,
that's rough, but I'm the one calling the shots and taking the risks.

~~~
tzs
Unless the person is a major contributor to widely used project, all the OSS
contributions show you is two things:

(1) The person can apparently code when he's allowed to pick what he wants to
work on and doesn't have any real pressure, and

(2) He has time to work on open source.

Most companies need people who can code well under pressure and when they have
to work on something they don't necessarily want to work on.

By screening by OSS contributions you will indeed eliminate one kind of false
positive--they people who can't code at all. Other kinds of false positives,
such as people who can't work well except on self-selected projects, will get
in.

~~~
varjag
In my personal experience, all people who can code well, can do that under
stress too. This must be one of those theoretically valid arguments that is
rarely encountered in practice.

And from the developer perspective, just the fact that it helps you avoid
idiotic CS101 tests over the phone at every interview is enough to make it
worth.

------
orijing
This puts developers in companies that commit to open source projects like
Chromium to be at a significant advantage to those developing proprietary
software. I understand where the author is coming from, but this is unfair for
those who work on closed-source projects.

Of course I have my own personal projects, but for most of them, I am not
about release their source.

~~~
raganwald
Look, I work on a lot of proprietary stuff as well, but even if Github didn't
exist, we'd both be subject to the same "unfairness." Here's a job interview,
circa 1981:

Candidate 1: "I brought this fanfold printout of the source code for _____ I
wrote with me, have a look.

Candidate 2: "I can't show you any of the code, but trust me, it's good."

Github merely drags that conversation forward from 1981 up to 2011. When you
and I choose to write code that is locked away in somebody else's vault, we
ought to charge extra to compensate for the fact that we might as well have
been surfing Oahu.

~~~
wildjim
Isn't this part of the reason for references, but more importantly: probation
period ?

~~~
daleharvey
references are useless, companies are very wary to give bad references due to
the chance of a lawsuit, and a probation period is a massive cost to the
company

~~~
Silhouette
> a probation period is a massive cost to the company

Perhaps, but it's a lot less than the cost of _not_ having a probationary
period and winding up stuck with a poor member of staff indefinitely because
you couldn't do the impossible and spot every problem candidate during a
momentary interview.

------
sfk
Could someone explain why "being on Github" is synonymous with "contributing
to open source" in some circles?

The Github projects are a very small part of the open source universe. You can
easily build *BSD or LinuxFromScratch with a substantial userland without ever
downloading anything from Github.

~~~
pjhyett
Speaking frankly, even on our slowest days, the number of open source commits
being pushed to GitHub dwarfs other sites [1]. That's not to say OS
development isn't happening elsewhere, but there happens to be a lot of it
going on in one particular place these days.

To your second point, you're right. I'd love to be able to convince older OS
projects to move to GitHub. Some do[2], but it's an uphill battle.

1\. <https://github.com/blog/802-still-committing-like-crazy>

2\. <https://github.com/bagder/curl>

------
emehrkay
Didnt someone make, and post to hackernews, a resume builder from your github
account?

<http://resume.github.com/>

~~~
AashayDesai
The "My Organizations" section just keeps a'spinnin...

------
TomOfTTB
Think of all the good that could be done for the open source world if this led
every company to expect open source contributions from their new hires.

Careers 2.0 probably isn't popular enough to change the world that
significantly but it does make me want to hunt down someone for a profile
invite (though I guess I should save those for people who are actively looking
for jobs)

P.S. Careers 2.0 is hosted by Stackoverflow which means hosted on a .Net
platform...just sayin'

~~~
route66
Think of all the good that could be done for open source if the company
requiring their hires to contribute would be required to contribute themselves
or to facilitate contributing under work time.

------
eddanger
This is an interesting approach but not _all_ talented developers partake in
open source projects.

~~~
JasonPunyon
This is true and thanks for the feedback. Do you (or anyone else reading) have
any ideas for things that all talented developers would want to list on their
profiles that we don't have on Careers yet? Thanks again!

~~~
dpritchett
While filling out my profile it struck me that I'd love a friend finding
service: Find me programmers within 50 miles of my stated location who share
interests and experiences in some of the many tags I chose for myself. I'd
like to meet them and have a beer.

~~~
mwsherman
We'd need a word like "bromance", but for nerds.

~~~
cycojesus
Yuck, no.

------
HowardRoark
I agree its better than having nothing to show or talk about, but I wish
hiring the right person was that easy. There is a lot of junk in Github and
there are lots of smart developers outside the Github community.

~~~
bphogan
Yes there's junk on Github. But I can _see_ that and I can say "no, this
person is not a good fit" before I hire them. :)

------
nwp
I frequently fork projects on Github, add features/fix bugs, send a pull
request and then delete my fork after my changes have been integrated. I've
started to consider keeping my forks around for this reason alone but that
strikes me as a waste of Github's disk space...

~~~
technomancy
I keep stale forks around mostly to game the language high-score board:
<https://github.com/languages/Emacs%20Lisp>

Go elisp! You can do it!

------
anon-user-11248
I'm going to chime in here with all the various for/against comments going on
and at least TRY to make some sense out of all this - or at the very least,
show others how some of us "haters" see it, and explain to other "haters" how
it's just the way it is - period.

Using GitHub or other OSS contributions/commits as your actual resume, or the
litmus test for, "can I have the job, boss?" has been something I think we've
all seen coming down the pipe for a few years now - I know I saw it way back
when. Personally, I live in the midwest, not the SF bay area, so "trends" like
this are a bit slower to catch on out here, but the last several job
interviews I've been at, somebody has always asked me: "Do you have a GitHub
account?"

This situation has people on both sides of the argument - for and against. And
I'm going on record right now as saying, absolutely, 100%, without question,
BOTH sides are right.

The truth is, from an employer's perspective, this just makes sense: prove
that you can do the job. A resume doesn't do that - it proves that you can
hand a piece of paper, sometimes even written by some one else, and BS your
way through an interview.

On the other hand, employers frequently trot out teams of developers - some as
many as 15 (that I've seen personally) to pepper a candidate with lots of hard
questions during an interview. Inevitably, there's always that one nerd in
there with serious penis envy who tries to re-assert his "dominance" by trying
to "outsmart" the job candidate to make him or her look bad by throwing some
super hard core question that makes said nerd look like a badass at the poor
guy doing his best, and then trying to make the interviewee look like an ass
when s/he can't answer it. The truth is, these guys have time - days - to
prepare these interview style "litmus tests" for candidates, but when
interviewing for the job, you go in blind not knowing what to expect and have
to come up with everything from memory. /rant

This makes for a craptastic experience for the candidate, and a very time
consuming and costly experience for the employer. Looking at a collection of
code related to the job in question is a much faster way for them to get a
handle on where the candidate is at, without the need for such involved
processes in many cases, saving time and money for them and the candidate, and
saving the candidate some serious anxiety.

However, there's another side to this coin. From the perspective of those of
us who would rather NOT go home and spend all night 4+ days per week writing
MORE code, this puts us in a bad spot.

The way I see it, you have two kinds of developers (basically): those who are
SUPER into what they're doing - which is great (really! no sarcasm intended) -
and those who enjoy what they do, but recognize that it's work. Good, old-
fashioned, hard work. W-O-R-K. Blowing up some asshole in Halo Reach or having
sex with your girlfriends (yes, plural) is a hell of a lot more fun than
researching "most efficient sorting algorithm". So when we're not at W-O-R-K,
earning a living, we need SOME way to kick back and release, or we'll
absolutely explode. That's called "common sense".

This presents a problem: those who, for whatever reason, be it inability to
get a date, or absolute true "nerdvana" enjoyment of writing code, end up
doing ADDITIONAL development work, strictly for work's sake, now have a
somewhat (emphasis on somewhat) unfair advantage over those of us who can do
the same job, and are willing to work just as hard (for pay - after all, I
can't pay rent with hugs and good will), but have other obligations (kids, for
example, is a big one) and just plain can't put in another 20+ hours per week
required to COMPETE - yes, I said the C word - with others who can.

Some arguments I've seen or heard that I'll comment on:

"But it's not THAT hard!" Nothing easy is really truly WORTH doing. I can
write some seriously easy code in under 5 minutes that'll look bad ass from a
quantity point of view - until you actually examine it close up and see that
it's just bullshit. The stuff that REALLY makes you shine is finding new,
interesting, and USEFUL ways to solve hard problems. Nothing else is really as
worthwhile. And there's a point that you get to, after doing it for 50+ hours
per week, that you just say, "enough!" and have to decompress. Other people
see it differently - they still enjoy it and do it in their free time. I truly
wish those people well and want to encourage them to keep doing it!

"Well, if you aren't the kind who'll do the OSS commits, you aren't a culture
fit anyway." This is 100% Grade-A bullshit. Just because a person doesn't want
to spend their free time - that they'll never get paid for - creating
additional software, outside the scope of their workplace, essentially doing
MORE work simply for work's sake, does NOT mean s/he is a bad culture fit. _It
means they have self respect._ If you're going for the super hard core,
hipster silicon valley, "my shit doesn't stink" start-up environment, that may
be true. But in a nice place I like to call "the real world", those companies
cutting the checks GET IT - at the end of the day, you gotta get paid for your
work. Even though they understand this, they'll sure as shit take advantage of
other people who have no problem with playing the role of "happy little nerd
behind the desk that we don't let talk to anyone and just codes all the time".
They're perfectly happy to use this kind of job competition to squeeze more
out of some one beyond what they're paying them for, and don't give a damn
when that poor person eventually has a breakdown because they've been working
80+ hours per week for several months, maybe even years.

My bottom line on this is pretty simple: like it or not, this trend isn't
going anywhere because it has advantages for parties who are interested.
Unfortunately, I really think that it's going to create an even more hyper-
competitive environment for people looking for jobs. We'll get to a point
where we'll have maybe 20-35% of applicants who are truly really HARD CORE
into what they're doing and truly, with every fiber of their being, enjoy
writing code on their own time, but then we'll find a larger segment of people
who do it somewhat begrudgingly, seeing it for what it is - work for work's
sake. This is going to breed a very strong sense of competition in the
engineering and development job market that allows companies to treat
developers - especially younger ones, recent college grads, etc. - as what
they'll be painting themselves as: subservient nerds who work for peanuts just
for the CHANCE to have a job, even being paid in stock options that are
totally worthless at Startup #1119128418911818119.2.

There's no way in hell I'm going to work 40+ hours per week doing something
that, sure, I enjoy, but get bitched at by some asshole in his Armani suit
that "it isn't gettin' done fast enough!", then go home and write more code
just for the CHANCE to do it all over again. Fuck that.

And those who will do that? Many will end up submitting crappy OSS
contributions that do nothing to move the industry forward, because they're
only doing it for the sake of being able to compete in a job market - NOT
because they truly love what they're doing. And that's really the major thing
that irks me about this trend.

But again, it's happening and there's nothing that can be done to change it.
That's why personally, I'm looking at changing job functions. Systems
administration, or project management maybe. I'd much rather be the asshole in
the Armani suit DOING the chew out, making bonuses of over $500k/year that
keep going up, with a relatively easy job (especially compared to modern
development), than the poor guy he's chewing out, despite that person doing a
seriously awesome job under very difficult circumstances, for very low/poor
pay that keeps decreasing due to increasing job market competition, who works
twice as much and twice as hard, and STILL has to put up with assholes like
"Mr. Suit".

Fuck that shit.

~~~
tomjen3
>can I have the job, boss?

Thats your problem right there - it is a sellers market right now, so if they
start making too many demands for stupid things you can get a job elsewhere.

You are a great programmer, good companies know they need to qualify themself
to you.

Do you think suit guy got his job with that attitude?

------
anon46566677
If you're a company looking for developers, you have to learn to live with
developers who are simply good enough. I'm talking about guys and gals who
just see programming as a way to pay the bills.

Everybody wants to hire the brightest developers, but there aren't enough to
go around. It's a mathematical impossibility.

~~~
wh-uws
You can be a great developer and/or leader and build product or company that
bright developers will want to work at.

