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How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)

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Re: How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)

#61

Post by TheCowboy »

acidus wrote: post #58
cjcenizal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a correlation between being able to explain something and fully understanding it. Being able to think clearly and communicate clearly are interconnected -- if you're programming by instinct then you're not thinking critically about the problems you're solving.

And how can you get better at it?

Writing. When you engage in writing out your thoughts you quickly realize that you may not have as coherent or clear explanation as it may feel to you. You end up doing some research and thinking about how to express it. At the very worst, you come away with a better way to express one specific thing. Even just trying to provide quality explanations to comments on Reddit is a good practice.

That won't always help when it comes to verbally expressing things on the fly. If you can't practice with someone, you can try recording yourself trying to explain a topic on the fly, and playing it back. It's best to have a partner. Attending technical Meetups is another venue where you work this mental muscle.

Re: How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)

#62

Post by AlexCoventry »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #53
__s wrote: post #15

I definitely make this mistake. I have a handfull of maintained projects, but nearing 100 repos, most without readmes, many are just random ideas The last time I interviewed the technical interviewer actually had me go over my openEtG project, & dive into the guts of the AI's eval. They also stumbled upon https://github.com/serprex/brainwebfuckassembly which ended up having a profanity filled interview They started t…

Steve McConnell's Code Complete can help with the clean code part. Read it and jot down some notes.

I think I would ask a few questions about what exactly the questioner means, because "clean code" is a very vague term. If they're borrowing from Uncle Bob's book, then I'd have a pretty good idea.

Re: How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)

#63

Post by RaleyField »

penpapersw wrote: post #30
__s wrote: post #15

I definitely make this mistake. I have a handfull of maintained projects, but nearing 100 repos, most without readmes, many are just random ideas The last time I interviewed the technical interviewer actually had me go over my openEtG project, & dive into the guts of the AI's eval. They also stumbled upon https://github.com/serprex/brainwebfuckassembly which ended up having a profanity filled interview They started t…

My difficulty with interviews is, I'm a fairly good programmer. But when asked to put these kinds of things into words, that's just not how my mind works. I see the patterns in abstract ways, and I know which ones to use when. And I can write clean code pretty well. And if presented with a concrete problem to solve, I can communicate effectively on how to solve it. But during interviews, or any kind of abstract discu…

Obligatory Feynman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr8sVailoLw&t=47

Re: How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)

#64

Post by orange_bear »

reboog711 wrote: post #56
nawitus wrote: post #2

"Nobody cares about your code" That's a peculiar claim about people who hire employees to create code. "It’s not the code that counts, it’s the product" So is everyone only hiring programmers who write code which can be sloppy and full of technical debt and impossible maintain, as long as the product works okay for now?

> So is everyone only hiring programmers who write code which can be sloppy and full of technical debt and impossible maintain, as long as the product works okay for now? My experience says yes. The people hiring programmers usually have no ability to validate a programmer's skill. The only thing they care about is a working application that solves a business problem. The bulk of code I come across as a consultant is…

This completely depends on who you are interviewing with. Every low-level manager at my last workplace had a programming background, and they absolutely did have the ability to validate a programmer's skill during the hiring process.

Re: How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)

#66

Post by sidlls »

nawitus wrote: post #2

"Nobody cares about your code" That's a peculiar claim about people who hire employees to create code. "It’s not the code that counts, it’s the product" So is everyone only hiring programmers who write code which can be sloppy and full of technical debt and impossible maintain, as long as the product works okay for now?

Yes. That's why data structures and algorithms are front-and-center at these interviews. They don't actually care about engineering ability. It's all about ego, trivia, and who can fart out product faster.

Re: How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)

#67

Post by funkaster »

ibejoeb wrote: post #55
funkaster wrote: post #33

> Conclusion: Noone cares about GitHub. Noone is gonna read it. Everyone is gonna ask for it nonetheless, cause it’s hype. True. We don't ask for GitHub links because they are pointless from a screening perspective. I'm happy to talk about them during an interview, but if I see a github link in a CV, there's little chance I will visit it. (Source: I'm a hiring manager at a tech company, have been in a similar positio…

>I would have no time at all to do anything if I start looking at all my candidates' github links. How do you decide to get the candidate in the pipeline? Presumably you're reading a CV and a letter, then having a phone call, etc. You don't think it would add context and clarity if you took 20 minutes from those activities and devoted them to examining a specimen? Do you do whiteboard interviews? I've never done one…

> You don't think it would add context and clarity if you took 20 minutes from those activities and devoted them to examining a specimen?

Sure. If I had to go through only a few CVs, maybe. And some times I do that for the ones our recruiters screen. But tbh, looking at github/source code and figuring out something (of value) out of it will be more than 20 min. Instead, maybe a blog post or products portfolios would be way more useful and give me something to ask for details on an actual interview.

> Do you do whiteboard interviews? I've never done one less than an hour, and I think you'd be able to glean quite a bit of the same information by looking through the log.

We do, and let me say that `git log` will absolutely not tell you the same info. One is the final version of a thought process (the log). On an interview, at least for me, the result is only one part of what I'm after. How you get there is way more interesting to me, the questions you ask, etc.

Re: How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)

#69

Post by yellowapple »

Amusingly, my most recent job interview - which ain't even for a programming job per se - did involve one of the interviewers having gone through my GitHub profile. We only briefly discussed the contents thereof (he seemed to be mildly interested in my involvement in an Elixir web framework), though we did have a bit of an awkward moment when he mentioned finding github.com/yellowapple/heroku-sucks (especially seeing as how the company uses Heroku for its website).

All in all, it was pleasantly surprising to see an interviewer actually do one's homework to the same level that I typically do mine.

Re: How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)

#70

Post by dep_b »

nawitus wrote: post #2

"Nobody cares about your code" That's a peculiar claim about people who hire employees to create code. "It’s not the code that counts, it’s the product" So is everyone only hiring programmers who write code which can be sloppy and full of technical debt and impossible maintain, as long as the product works okay for now?

People care about the problems you solve. So if your GitHub seems to represent a well executed solution to a real problem then probably people often aren't going to read into your code. I've seen plenty of repo's that I actually use that scare me to death when I dive into them. But so many people actually use it that still most bugs have been ironed out. Often it's more about being the first to solve a problem that many people have, the perseverance to really finish it, polish the README, respond to people with questions and suggestions and the ability to get those people to know about it.
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