GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged

I'll share a model that's worked for me in the past. Before you even write the job description, define the 3-7 traits you need to hire against. These can be as fuzzy as "gets shit done" or as specific as "5+ years marketing SaaS to $100k+ accounts" or "is effective at resolving incidents while on-call." You need to be able to rate people on this. Binary is fine ("yes they can get shit done"). 3-4 levels is good (bad / good / total superstar).

Don't go overboard with granularity: you need to fit this all in your head for a couple candidates at a time when you compare them. As you go through your process, try to get good information about at least one of these areas at each step.

My favorite thing to do is, between in-person interviews, be able to tee up the next interviewer with "I got mixed signals about communication style. Can you dig in?" When you wrap up, make sure you cover all the boxes. Don't get smitten with a candidate with amazing experience who can code circles around everybody else who's never worked in a 25+ person team (assuming that's what you agreed was important). When you're ready to make a decision, you now have a reasonable set of trade-offs to make. I tend to create rubrics where solid scores in 3 of 5 categories is a Hire, to allow us to compare different types of candidates.

Ok, back to GitHub.

GitHub can give you VERY STRONG SIGNALS for some of these issues. It's great to be able to know up-front that somebody is comfortable working with teams they don't personally know well (typical in big open-source projects). The convese to that is that I generally expect some strong signal up front from any candidate. If not GitHub, give me a respected company on your resume. A recommendation from a mutual friend. A well-written cover letter. When folks complain about 100s of resumes, it's because the problem is this lack of signal.

An aside: it's on you to allow folks with non-traditional backgrounds to succeed at this step. Write a better job req, or go email likely candidates. Diversity requires multiple ways in. Once you're a bit further, this cuts the other way. If "good communication in pull requests" is important to you, don't spend any time here with candidates who have strong Githubs.

You already have all the data you need. Spend your time elsewhere. There is no extra credit. GitHub can help you a bunch when evaluating candidates, but it's crucial to stay away from this notion that _anything_ during an evaluation that looks like a silver bullet. You always have to do the work of interviewing well, and it's always specific to your company.

Finally: if you have a process that allows you to fully evaluate a candidate by reading their public GitHub, you're almost certainly hiring for the wrong things.

Going to college definitely makes things easier, and I don't advise people to take the path I did but there are paths other than college that still work well for this industry.

I have always felt conflicted about our current education system because it undervalues creativity and disingenuously puts forth the notion that school is for learning when clearly it is not. Teachers constantly remind us that attending school is imperative to our growth yet fail to explain that we are merely fufiling a social obligation to become stable adults. Education has always been about the indoctrination of social values and the apparent lack of effort by teachers to purvey this speaks quantities of their system. Mind you, I'm not necessarily blaming the teachers nor those who have constructed such educational pillars but rather I'm antagnozing our modern perception of the intended purpose of school.

All I really hear about from students these days is which prestigious school people want to attend but whenever I question them as to why they wish to attend such facilities they respond with "to get a better job" or "to learn more and then get a better job." Is there something not inherently flawed with this kind of logic? We wish to obtain better jobs so we mindlessly waste hours cramming an entire textbook before an examination only to retain almost no knowledge of its contents afterwards.

There are cultural nuances regarding this matter and my anecdotal argument is probably not very strong, but I do believe there is a problem with incessantly encouraging young students to pursue academia for the sake of acquiring a _better_ job. As someone who has always been interested with the philosophy and intrinsic beauty of learning itself, I find our current implementation repulsive. My aversion to school has led me to study various types of -- or perhaps attempts at -- artificial intelligence in the hopes that we may one day supplant this flawed approach to education with a more personalized view that can take into account my preferences.

That being said, I'm still relatively young and by the duty of such a description, naive. There is still so much that I do not know about and I'm wondering now how I should proceed. Being a well informed and tech literate person, could you possibly offer me some quick guidance? Thank you.

Say you join a large tech company, gets a fair amount of stock, enjoy the stock increase and as a result make an additional $100k. That is not an unlikely scenario even in the early stages of a career for someone with a recognizable degree.

If you don't have a degree it is certainly possible to do the same thing, it just isn't probable. For every step where you have to be aware of something, understand it and make a decision the probability of getting it right decreases. And the same is true for housing, career, startups and even relationships.

It doesn't make sense to say that you can succeed if certain things happen. Because it is the if that is the challenge.

My take: go back and finish. The signal you are sending is that you can put your feelings aside and deliver even under less than favorable conditions. You'll also need that inner strength if you decide to go your own way.

Also, if you want to the non-CS route make sure you learn math, especially discrete mathematics and linear algebra. Besides the ability to finish that's the other foundation that will make you truly great at software, especially if you are interested in machine learning.

Beyond that good luck! We need more outsiders in the field.