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Why GitHub Won't Help with Hiring

benfrederickson.com

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Re: Why GitHub Won't Help with Hiring

#42

Post by scarface74 »

knieveltech wrote: post #3

Nonsense. The last two full time jobs and several gigs I've landed in the last five years I provided the hiring manager with a link to my public profile on github in lieu of a resume.

And my anecdote is that I provided a resume for the last 7 jobs I've had. I've never had a problem getting hired based solely on my resume and an interview.

Re: Why GitHub Won't Help with Hiring

#43

Post by [deleted] »

always_good wrote: post #24
toomuchtodo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Candidates have to meet employers halfway. Perhaps in a recession, but in the current market, the employer must meet the candidate. That's how supply and demand works. To confirm (as an example), check out the last HN Who's Hiring [1], and compare to the next one. I assure you, most of the positions go unfilled because demand is exceeding supply. A company can either make their filters more reasonable, pay more, or…

There may be more jobs available than developers, but all of those jobs aren't equal. For the good jobs, you're competing against other good people. Good luck playing coy. There were also more women than men in my university, but that didn't free up the cutest girl in the bar.

[deleted]

Re: Why GitHub Won't Help with Hiring

#46

Post by lucasgonze »

I am just tabbing over from looking at a github profile of a potential hire. It was somewhat useful as a way of understanding this person's technology style.

I saw PHP, game dev, JSON. I saw that he does do OSS stuff, though not much. I saw that he can write a decent readme.

That's the kind of thing a hiring manager gets from a github profile. It's not a one-dimensional test like how many checkins does the dev have.

Re: Why GitHub Won't Help with Hiring

#47

Post by sotojuan »

codefreakxff wrote: post #41

Why are we reading this post? "I've only had one job interview in the last decade or so, but as far as I could tell none of the people interviewing me checked out my GitHub profile before the interview" So that makes this guy an expert?

The amount of anecdote-fueled blog posts by nonexperts (or worse, beginner experts) in tech is staggering. I don't know what causes it but it seems to work as this is in the front page.

I'd wager this is the kind of HN post where people read the title and post in the comments without reading the post at all.

Re: Why GitHub Won't Help with Hiring

#48

Post by callmeed »

I find this stuff fascinating, partly because I work in the industry and partly because I love sports statistics.

One crazy idea I have it to experiment with some kind of "Sabermetrics for software engineers"–think "WAR for developers" [0]. Using GitHub would be an obvious data-source (how to use it and if its a good idea is an entirely different discussion).

While I think this article makes some good points, he seems to only touch the most simple approaches. There's a lot of things you can do with a GitHub profile. To me, they'd never be deciding factors, but you can definitely extract some pluses out of a person's profile.

[0] https://www.fangraphs.com/library/misc/war/

Re: Why GitHub Won't Help with Hiring

#49

Post by austincheney »

According to the article I am clearly in the identified top 1% of GitHub users by commit quantity. While prospective employers may not dissect the code in my various GitHub repositories this certainly hasn't hurt when looking for jobs.

In fact, contributing to public open source has been the proven tipping point that shifts hiring decisions in my favor if the hiring manager is on the fence. In all other cases the combination of a frequent open source contributions and a strong interview have allowed me to nail senior positions as the top candidate.

Whether or not any of this makes me a rockstar is completely subjective, but beating out all other candidates (several dozen) hands down on multiple occasions really increases my self-esteem.

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