No bubble here, I think. I'm also based in EU, Spain, where job market is super competitive right now, and it's quite hard to find candidates.
As I said, it doesn't need to be only public repositories. If I interview for containers, then I ask if they have something public on DockerHub, GitLab/GitHub registries. If the answer is no (happened just a few days ago), then I ask what they used. I expect them to say something like Artifactory, Nexus, a directory on a server or HPC, or just explain why they didn't need a registry. For me there is really no wrong answer here. But if they reply they don't have anything public, and have no idea what's a container registry, then that's probably bad -- this is what I think OP of this thread meant by eliminating candidates that are full of---.
> Where I live in Europe 90%+ of workers barring those currently in academia, have no public work because most companies don't publish their work, so you'd never hire anyone with that barrier.
My wife also works here, and she's a recruiter in a EU company, in cancer/research. Most applicants won't have things public in that case, but they can still explain things. If there is a candidate with similar profile, that managers liked, and they have a lot of good work, public, then it's up to managers. I just explain what I saw in the repositories, whether I'd work with the candidates, and the managers hiring choose based on risk for companies.
As you are based in EU, you probably have the same problem that the hiring process can be expensive for company, and risky if you eliminate candidates, and have to go back during the experience/trial period of candidates.
> job market is super competitive right now, and it's quite hard to find candidates
Sounds like a contradiction. If it's super competitive shouldn't it be easy to find candidates?
> If I interview for containers, then I ask if they have something public on DockerHub, GitLab/GitHub registries.
How many candidates coming from EU companies have the work they do at their company made public like that? I never worked anywhere where this was the case. So what do I do then?
Only if you work in FOSS is your work public, but if you work from some bank or any other private company they don't expose their work on GitHub due to IP and legal concerns.
So to me it sounds like you're only selecting those who worked at FOSS projects/enterprises
> Sounds like a contradiction. If it's super competitive shouldn't it be easy to find candidates?
I know, it should be the other way around. I asked some locals, and so far some of the best answers I got for this are that the best brains here are abroad, at the Netherlands, Germany, etc.. There's a lot of applicants for every position we advertise (especially if we need someone from DevOps or Web -- not so much for Fortran, Scientific Programming, but that's normal).
But most don't pass the first filter. We try to select those that fill the basic criteria, even if they don't fill all the boxes (it's alright to learn on the job for us), even select some that do not pass to call for a short interview with HR or even with manager, but it's quite hard to find good candidates.
> How many candidates coming from EU companies have the work they do at their company made public like that? I never worked anywhere where this was the case. So what do I do then?
It's quite common for some companies in my current field, earth sciences. Many companies have public GitLab servers, or host their own containers (e.g. Mercator Ocean International, DKRZ, ECMWF, etc.).
As I mentioned in other comments, I'd interview someone that doesn't have public repositories or containers anyway. But in the end, if there are other candidates with good CVs, and interesting projects public on GitHub, etc., or if they collaborated to good Open Source projects (Dask, Xarray, Singularity, Jenkins, Python, fortran, etc.) changes increase.
> Only if you work in FOSS is your work public, but if you work from some bank or any other private company they don't expose their work on GitHub due to IP and legal concerns.
I worked in banks, insurance, credit bureau, telco, and government. In most of these the work was done in private CVS, Subversion, or Git servers.
But in most of these, we used Open Source projects, and normally we were allowed to send contributions back upstream, when we found bugs in numpy, python, etc.. There were some companies where I couldn't contribute, so I can only explain the systems I worked, and the tech stack we had.
> So to me it sounds like you're only selecting those who worked at FOSS projects/enterprises
We hire people without public repositories too. Having worked at FOSS projects/enterprises definitely helps.
It's the same as the degree you have. In the end it may be an advantage depending on the company. I, particularly, do not care much if someone is coming from physics, mathematics, economics, biology, or even architecture (we just hired an architect that enrolled in a CS degree in Portugal to work with data pipelines/NetCDF/xarray/etc.).
As long as the person has the technical knowledge required for the job, and some experience if needed, that's fine by me. But I worked with manager that only hired those coming from CS.
So even those with good public contributions or coming from enterprise/FOSS, acing a technical test, etc., nothing would help you to be selected when applying for that team.
In our case we had a junior position in the data team, and advertised it in Linkedin and asked others to spread word to friends/bluesky/etc.
Somehow, that person heard about the position, and was already trying to transition from architecture to IT (had enrolled in an open university course of CS -- online, remote).
We really try to interview as many as we can, give a fair chance to all (ignoring background, gender, etc., focusing on what's needed for the position).
Human resources did the first triage (assessing character/personality [one of those simple psychology assessment tests], level of English, visa/work permit/etc.).
Then the managers for the position (department leader + group leader) reviewed CVs and prepared brief interviews, followed by a final technical interview. That's it.
That person did not have a lot of experience, little visible in GitHub, having only studied IT for a few months, but he was really trying hard. The managers liked his attitude, and believed he was the best fit for the position.
He's now learning Git, Docker, Python, NetCDF, etc. In fact, today we will have a quick chat near the waterfountain/coffee machine as he asked me if we could chat as he had questions about pyproject.toml and building Python packages.
I believe if instead he had showed some projects with Python and NetCDF, and said he was looking into enrolling in a CS degree or take some courses, that could have been a replacement for the CS degree.
So tell your friend to try to choose what s/he prefers (data, programming, performance, DevOps, web, algorithms, compilers, etc.), and try to either create a public portfolio, or study hard so that in an interview s/he can answer questions well, showing some knowledge & interest (e.g. in this case, knowing what's NetCDF is, what's GRIB/BUFR, xarray, etc., even without a lot of hands-on experience could have been an advantage).
As I said, it doesn't need to be only public repositories. If I interview for containers, then I ask if they have something public on DockerHub, GitLab/GitHub registries. If the answer is no (happened just a few days ago), then I ask what they used. I expect them to say something like Artifactory, Nexus, a directory on a server or HPC, or just explain why they didn't need a registry. For me there is really no wrong answer here. But if they reply they don't have anything public, and have no idea what's a container registry, then that's probably bad -- this is what I think OP of this thread meant by eliminating candidates that are full of---.
> Where I live in Europe 90%+ of workers barring those currently in academia, have no public work because most companies don't publish their work, so you'd never hire anyone with that barrier.
My wife also works here, and she's a recruiter in a EU company, in cancer/research. Most applicants won't have things public in that case, but they can still explain things. If there is a candidate with similar profile, that managers liked, and they have a lot of good work, public, then it's up to managers. I just explain what I saw in the repositories, whether I'd work with the candidates, and the managers hiring choose based on risk for companies.
As you are based in EU, you probably have the same problem that the hiring process can be expensive for company, and risky if you eliminate candidates, and have to go back during the experience/trial period of candidates.