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GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged

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Re: GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged

#141

Post by microcolonel »

koboll wrote: post #106
user5994461 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> I have been working productively as a systems software developer for 32 years. I do not have a degree; I'm a high-school dropout. It's easy to say coming from a generation where higher education was not the norm. A 20 year old saying he dropped out of high school will not be received well in any job interview. 98% of the population can do better than that.

I've never been asked about any education in developer interviews, only experience. Obviously YMMV, but after a couple years of experience, employers simply stop caring about education level.

The one time I was flown in to interview at a Silicon Valley shop was the only time that I was asked about education directly. I never attended high school.

Added: It was something like "education means a lot in this town, as much as people don't say it.".

Re: GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged

#142

Post by hackerman12345 »

koboll wrote: post #106
user5994461 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> I have been working productively as a systems software developer for 32 years. I do not have a degree; I'm a high-school dropout. It's easy to say coming from a generation where higher education was not the norm. A 20 year old saying he dropped out of high school will not be received well in any job interview. 98% of the population can do better than that.

I've never been asked about any education in developer interviews, only experience. Obviously YMMV, but after a couple years of experience, employers simply stop caring about education level.

We have plenty of data that shows that more degrees = more salary though.

https://www1.salary.com/Salaries-for-Web-Software-Developer-...

Re: GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged

#143

Post by gmjosack »

user5994461 wrote: post #140
gmjosack wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for clarifying your point, I think that makes a lot of sense. Thankfully for me I consider it a positive selection bias as I wouldn't want to work for a company/manager with such insular hiring criteria. Unfortunately it does make it harder for people just getting started in their career.

Since you mention it, people who have degrees and people who don't have degrees usually work in different companies. Any programmer is unlikely to experience both sides of the coin.

I find people with college experience are much more likely to be biased against people without than vice versa. But that is just my anecdotal experience. Google and Dropbox definitely had more people with degrees but a decent amount of people without. The hiring pipelines were more biased towards recruiting new grads out of good schools but we never turned down solid people with good experience.

I generally like to work with people, and at places, that value your contributions and experience rather than your credentials. I've been lucky enough to find that in every place I've worked. I can't say my experience has been one of only working with people without degrees. I've worked with amazing engineers with and without degrees and don't put much stock in the degree itself.

Re: GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged

#144

Post by user5994461 »

gmjosack wrote: post #110
user5994461 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> I have been working productively as a systems software developer for 32 years. I do not have a degree; I'm a high-school dropout. It's easy to say coming from a generation where higher education was not the norm. A 20 year old saying he dropped out of high school will not be received well in any job interview. 98% of the population can do better than that.

I barely graduated high school in 2002 and there was definitely an emphasis on higher education at that time. My family didn't have the money to pay for college and I knew I wouldn't do well in college, I had a hard time learning from teachers, and didn't even take my SATs. I'd messed around with HTML and copying/pasting JS snippets but was not an early coder by any means. I got a job doing tech support for a web hos…

It's great and I wish everyone to achieve the same career progression during their lifetime.

Now, let's keep in mind that we are approaching 2020. The high school dropouts are facing support guys, online MOOC students and boot camp graduates who are all searching for the same developer job with no experience. The competition is more intense than ever.

Also, your text implies that you work in the bay area. It's an order of magnitude easier to find a tech job there than in the rest of the world.

Re: GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged

#145

Post by vonmoltke »

underwater wrote: post #60
onion2k wrote: post #10

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…

I don’t code much in my spare time. I have kids and a busy home life, but really it doesn’t take long to build up a portfolio of work that is representative of your skills. Sharing my work got me, as an Aussie working mediocre jobs, on the right person’s radar to help me land a job at Facebook. This shaved probably 10 years off my career path. That was a great return on investment and a big leveller for someone who d…

> I have kids and a busy home life, but really it doesn’t take long to build up a portfolio of work that is representative of your skills.

There are two critical assumptions you are making here:

1) The kind of development you do is conducive to sharing via small projects on GitHub. The first four years of my full-time programing career I was working on firm real-time signal processing algorithms designed to run on an MPI cluster of POWER or Xeon machines. My skills were focused on low-level optimizations for that environment and hardware, design and implementation of grid-distributed algorithms, and understanding how to translate radar concepts and mathematical models into code. Anything along these lines that I could have thrown together for GitHub (had it existed back then) would ave been trivial and not really demonstrated anything.

2) Everyone operates under a regime wherein they do not need permission from their current employer to release things on the side. Needing to do so adds work and can be a real impediment to even wanting to put things out for public consumption.

Re: GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged

#146

Post by hocuspocus »

alien_ wrote: post #132

Nowadays most software depends on open source one way or another, and as developer you will eventually run into issues with the open source software that you depend on. Also, larger companies internally operate much like an open source community, having multiple projects that accept contributions from anyone in the company. Reporting and fixing public issues as part of your employment is a sign that you care about th…

> It also shows that you have no problem with learning a new code base and delivering code according to that project's quality standards.

If you can tell your employer you'll spend the next sprint or two fixing a bug upstream, good for you!

From my experience working with complex libraries, when you hit a bug or a corner case, it is probably not going to be an easy fix. There's a reason many open source projects are triaging low-hanging fruits for first-time contributors.

Re: GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged

#147

Post by w0rd-driven »

lockee wrote: post #80
mmjaa wrote: post #72

I have been working productively as a systems software developer for 32 years. I do not have a degree; I'm a high-school dropout. I've built systems you've probably used, and/or may still be using. The #1 technical lever I have found worth exploiting, worth far more than anything a university can provide, is the willingness to get the job done. It hasn't mattered if I wrote CP/M code ISR's, PROGRESS 4GL modules, Unix…

I cannot shake the feeling that you're mixing here employability and "being good at ones job" here. Whether a candidate will "get the job done" an employer can only learn after hiring a candidate, so it cannot be used as a recruitment signal. I'm in this situation right now, where I've been always highly appreciated by the place I was working at. I've also built a few systems used by a few companies in a certain nich…

What does your CV have on it? Are you highlighting technologies or are you showcasing business needs followed by solutions?

My resume style used to highlight the former because I thought I had to prove that I used technology x to solve problem y. I do mention technology where applicable but it's to highlight the business need and solution. I'm trying to show that I can pick up anything at full speed to solve real problems. That's what both of us do day in and day out or else we wouldn't have been employed at all until now. Having to prove that we're not imposters when someone clearly believes we aren't is really the most annoying part about all of it.

I'm in the same boat though around needing a solid GitHub profile even with what I feel is a very concise CV. At some point we do have to mark things as 'done' and just keep shopping out job opportunities until someone else believes us like our current employer.

Re: GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged

#148

Post by rhizome »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #69
josteink wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your company allows you to use buggy components but doesn’t allow you to fix bugs... Then that’s a company with some pretty serious problems, and it’s going to show in all of their products. If you as a developer decides to stay in that company then that will also reflect on you.

Oh right yes I’ll just quit my job and not pay my mortgage so I can work for a company that has great values.

Why are those two conditions mutually exclusive?

Re: GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged

#150

Post by user5994461 »

gmjosack wrote: post #143
user5994461 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you mention it, people who have degrees and people who don't have degrees usually work in different companies. Any programmer is unlikely to experience both sides of the coin.

I find people with college experience are much more likely to be biased against people without than vice versa. But that is just my anecdotal experience. Google and Dropbox definitely had more people with degrees but a decent amount of people without. The hiring pipelines were more biased towards recruiting new grads out of good schools but we never turned down solid people with good experience. I generally like to w…

Well, it takes a degree or 5 years of relevant experience to enter the front door. Better have both.

I wouldn't call it a bias, companies have different expectations and needs. At big name, there are a hundred people applying every day, the bar is higher than no degree and/or little experience.

There is also the fact that the lack of education puts one at a disadvantage. For instance, I know of co workers who ask questions about complexity, compilers and graphs. It's common for candidates with no formal education to be completely oblivious to these.

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