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To suggest that pull requests are a good hiring signal (as the author does in explicitly endorsing the "screening" of open source maintainers) ignores this bias. That can be positive or negative, depending on your commitment to diversity in our field.
The author makes a valid point, however the pushback against using OSS as an important hiring signal, is that most people are not privileged with enough spare time to work on OSS outside of their day job. Eg if you have a family, long commute etc. And if they already are an excellent programmer and hitting all expectations, why should they do this? In fact, an employee who’s spending 5-6 hours/day on side projects mi…
Look at the candidate, whatever they choose to present as their experience and resume, and make a decision based on that. Don’t ignore anything they send you and don’t discount them because they didn’t send you something that someone else did.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Privilege is what is UNEARNED and there is no way to qualify if those with open source contributions are more privileged than others. The very opposite could be true. The privileged can bounce from well paying job to the next with no OSS contributions while the underprivileged have to "show their value" in the harsh environment of open source. You're constructing the viewpoint you want others to see with no data or f…
I'm saying that being in a position to have spare time to work on open source is a sign of privilege, and that employers should recognize that when they're hiring. Some great developers work on open source projects, but equally some great developers don't. Open source contributions are not a useful filter.
That is an assumption made without evidence. An equally qualified assumption would be that its a sign of privilege to not need to contribute to open source. You get an awesome education and go straight into well paying entry level position.
Committing to open source is not something casually done at ones leisure. Anything with traction becomes a significant responsibility and it takes an incredible amount of discipline and sacrifice to stay committed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I mentioned, multiple times, that you shouldn't exclude people that don't have a Github profile. All I'm saying is that if you're underprivileged you have this awesome tool, use it. And no I didn't have a lot of free time. I was working and going to school but when you're young you frankly don't need a whole lot of sleep.
when you're young you frankly don't need a whole lot of sleep You do if you have health issues, or mental health issues, or kids (some young people have them), or a long commute, or a second job, or if you're not young ... It's hard to recognize privilege when you have it.
Imo, OSS advocates really really want open source contributions to be used as hiring signal, because that would mean more open source developers. That is what this all is about, primary. Wish to come back to "open source developers are superior, because reasons" ideology that was pushed for during open/close source wars. And close source developers take issue with it not just because of privilege, but also because yo…
He would be helped the most if you would hire him as junior, with salary, was able to provide mentoring the same way other juniors are provided mentoring instead of expecting him to spend months homeless in library hoping to run into project that will be good fit for him.
There's evidence in the literature that shows that there are systemic biases against women in github pull requests, even when in the aggregate women may display greater levels of competence. https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/ To suggest that pull requests are a good hiring signal (as the author does in explicitly endorsing the "screening" of open source maintainers) ignores this bias. That can be positive or negative…
The relevant bits are two factors:
* Is the person sending the pull request someone already known to the project, or an outsider?
* Is the gender of the pull request's author easily determinable?
It would be unsurprising to find that "outsider" pull requests get merged at a lower rate. But "outsider" pull requests from women merge at different rates depending on the second factor: when it's easy to determine the gender of the author, a pull request from an "outsider" woman is significantly less likely to be accepted than a pull request from an "outsider" woman whose gender cannot easily be determined. Also, "insider" women and women whose gender is not easily determinable have higher rates of merged PRs than their male counterparts.
There's no reason to suspect that whether someone's gender is easily determinable by a PR reviewer (usually, via username, profile picture, other clues like linked blogs or social-media profiles) has an effect on the quality of their code. So while this of course doesn't prove gender bias (we'd need telepathy for that), it does very very very strongly suggest it.
This is also in line with a lot of prior research and reporting on blind interview and auditioning practices, so shouldn't be too surprising, but for some reason people love to insist that tech is somehow different from all those other fields where hiding someone's gender changed how they were evaluated.
The point people are making about using GitHub profiles for hiring is that it ignores great developers who don't write code outside of their job (that might be due to other interests, family responsibilities, a second job, whatever). The fact this guy is in a position to write code in his spare time just means he's not in that group, and the fact his open source work on Github specifically landed him a job he wanted…
So I mentioned, multiple times, that you shouldn't exclude people that don't have a Github profile. All I'm saying is that if you're underprivileged you have this awesome tool, use it. And no I didn't have a lot of free time. I was working and going to school but when you're young you frankly don't need a whole lot of sleep.
So, you are perpetuating ageism then. Let’s see how cocky you are in 10, 20, 30 years when you can’t get a job because of all the bloggers crowing about their Github profiles...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I mentioned, multiple times, that you shouldn't exclude people that don't have a Github profile. All I'm saying is that if you're underprivileged you have this awesome tool, use it. And no I didn't have a lot of free time. I was working and going to school but when you're young you frankly don't need a whole lot of sleep.
It is the open Internet that levelled the playing field. Of which Github and Open Source are but subsets.
There's evidence in the literature that shows that there are systemic biases against women in github pull requests, even when in the aggregate women may display greater levels of competence. https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/ To suggest that pull requests are a good hiring signal (as the author does in explicitly endorsing the "screening" of open source maintainers) ignores this bias. That can be positive or negative…
Did you read your link?
> The hypothesis is not only false, but it is in the opposite direction than expected; women tend to have their pull requests accepted at a higher rate than men! This difference is statistically significant
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I mentioned, multiple times, that you shouldn't exclude people that don't have a Github profile. All I'm saying is that if you're underprivileged you have this awesome tool, use it. And no I didn't have a lot of free time. I was working and going to school but when you're young you frankly don't need a whole lot of sleep.
when you're young you frankly don't need a whole lot of sleep So, you are perpetuating ageism then. Let’s see how cocky you are in 10, 20, 30 years when you can’t get a job because of all the bloggers crowing about their Github profiles...