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When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

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Re: When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

#61

Post by j_baker »

onan_barbarian wrote: post #38

Maybe this is paranoia, but I'm beginning to find a lot of threads like this (and a few yesterday about 'how to hire people') actively coercive: "Contribute to Open Source or Don't Get Hired". There are a lot of increasingly shrill remarks out there about how everyone should be doing open source projects in their 'spare time', so no-one has any excuse not to have a track record of FOSS contributions... frankly, it's…

I think there's a question of degree involved. A lot of employers seem to want you to have a github account that proves that you're glued to your computer 16 hours a day (fortunately, they have no way of finding out if you dream about code too).

That said, I don't see anything wrong with wanting people that have some open source contributions. It doesn't have to be anything along the lines of having written the linux kernel in your spare time. However, it should be something that you put serious time and thought into.

Re: When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

#62

Post by hp »

orijing wrote: post #4

This puts developers in companies that commit to open source projects like Chromium to be at a significant advantage to those developing proprietary software. I understand where the author is coming from, but this is unfair for those who work on closed-source projects. Of course I have my own personal projects, but for most of them, I am not about release their source.

As your parents may have mentioned, life isn't fair.

As the ad in the in-flight magazine says (I think I remember right), you don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.

The impact on your visibility, personal brand, and ability to find future roles should be a factor when you sign up for a job. Just as you'd consider your job title, for example.

If you're signing up for something you can't talk about or show off -- worse, if you're signing a contract that says you can't do anything that you _can_ talk about on the side -- then you'd better be sure you're getting paid extra, or in some other way getting compensated.

From what I've seen, working on super-secret trading software for Wall Street _does_ pay a lot more than working on an open source project, on average.

If the price is that you have to use references and other means to show future employers what you can do, then that's the tradeoff.

If you're not getting paid much, have no spare time, aren't allowed to code in your spare time, etc. then those are some items for the "cons" column that might nudge you to look for something new, all else equal...

Re: When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

#63

Post by lbrandy »

onan_barbarian wrote: post #60
lbrandy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those posts that is made, and upvoted, based on what everyone wants to be true, instead of what is true. The simple, unassailable truth is that having strong contributions to open-source projects is a massive advantage in any resume-scanning and hiring situation. And as a hiring manager, seeing extensive open-source work is better than seeing a resume. That means the advice is ALWAYS good advice. There…

I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I am well aware that strong open-source contributions are an advantage. What I find objectionable is not this advantage. It's the fact that failing to secure this advantage is being portrayed as an obvious professional failure that can be simply rectified by working an extra few hours a night on side projects. It is propaganda from open source people, many of who have achie…

Just being honest here, but both of your posts come off, to me, much more as you rationalizing a belief about what is true based on what you want to be true, and trying to "convince" us that most of this thing that "we" possibly value isn't all that valuable. Minimizing people's work on github as just some trivial side project, that should be ignored, because you don't want to do it, just isn't a reflection of the reality the situation. I freely admit this might be offbase, but it would appear you are arguing against -really- sound advice simply because you don't want the reality that that advice implies we live in. Except we do.

The underlying issue is that from a hiring perspective, all other things being equal, a candidate that can provably show things is ahead of the guy who simple says he can. Even if "we" all sit around and minimize that as some trivial nonsense that anyone could do and that it proves, at best, they can form "syntactically correct code", the fundamentals of the situation haven't changed. Showing is better than saying. It always will be.

There is an undercurrent of a strawman, as well, in this conversation. I don't think anyone out there is taking actual trivial github stuff and basing hiring decisions on it. But I wouldn't be surprised if some superficial github stuff haven't gotten people past a resume screen that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten past.

Re: When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

#64

Post by technomancy »

bphogan wrote: post #52
onan_barbarian wrote: post #38

Maybe this is paranoia, but I'm beginning to find a lot of threads like this (and a few yesterday about 'how to hire people') actively coercive: "Contribute to Open Source or Don't Get Hired". There are a lot of increasingly shrill remarks out there about how everyone should be doing open source projects in their 'spare time', so no-one has any excuse not to have a track record of FOSS contributions... frankly, it's…

The problem is that I can't believe a word you said. I can't see examples of this awesome super top-secret code because it's all closed-source, as you say, for good reasons. I also can't trust your references, because you'll only give me ones that will say good things about you, and any digging at your work history will only uncover "yes he worked here" responses. I want to see open-source contributions because I lik…

> The problem is that I can't believe a word you said.

It comes down to this: filtering by OSS contributions gives you many false negatives (as the OP has complained) but virtually zero false positives. In hiring, a false negative is a bummer, but a false positive is disastrous. It would be irresponsible of me as an interviewer not to take this into account.

If it someone's pissed because they fall into the false negative bucket, that's rough, but I'm the one calling the shots and taking the risks.

Re: When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

#65

Post by marciovm123 »

lbrandy wrote: post #47
onan_barbarian wrote: post #38

Maybe this is paranoia, but I'm beginning to find a lot of threads like this (and a few yesterday about 'how to hire people') actively coercive: "Contribute to Open Source or Don't Get Hired". There are a lot of increasingly shrill remarks out there about how everyone should be doing open source projects in their 'spare time', so no-one has any excuse not to have a track record of FOSS contributions... frankly, it's…

This is one of those posts that is made, and upvoted, based on what everyone wants to be true, instead of what is true. The simple, unassailable truth is that having strong contributions to open-source projects is a massive advantage in any resume-scanning and hiring situation. And as a hiring manager, seeing extensive open-source work is better than seeing a resume. That means the advice is ALWAYS good advice. There…

This has been going on forever with Academia, where the right to freely publish profoundly impacts where one chooses to work.

Anyone who dreams of becoming faculty must do work that is publishable, which often means taking substantially lower-paying "research" versus "corporate" internships throughout their younger years.

Re: When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

#66

Post by hp »

onan_barbarian wrote: post #38

Maybe this is paranoia, but I'm beginning to find a lot of threads like this (and a few yesterday about 'how to hire people') actively coercive: "Contribute to Open Source or Don't Get Hired". There are a lot of increasingly shrill remarks out there about how everyone should be doing open source projects in their 'spare time', so no-one has any excuse not to have a track record of FOSS contributions... frankly, it's…

You'd go with a graphic designer with a portfolio you could look at every time, right? Say the graphic designer's previous employer didn't let them put stuff in the portfolio -- I don't know, maybe they only worked on NSA internal marketing -- that's the designer's problem. They aren't going to say "no fair," they're going to find a way to do some work to put in a portfolio.

Wouldn't have to be open source work, just work you could show.

It's tough to hear, but the goal of a new employer is not to give us what we deserve for working hard and being skilled.

The employer's goal is to maximize their chances of hiring someone good.

If a hiring manager has two people that seem about the same but they can see the code one of those people wrote, it's a no-brainer to go with the one who has a portfolio.

Agree with you that some lame open source patch doesn't matter. But if someone's done significant work in public, or even has non-open-source code they're able to share, ignoring that would be an insane choice for the hiring manager to make.

Re: When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

#67

Post by Cymen »

onan_barbarian wrote: post #38

Maybe this is paranoia, but I'm beginning to find a lot of threads like this (and a few yesterday about 'how to hire people') actively coercive: "Contribute to Open Source or Don't Get Hired". There are a lot of increasingly shrill remarks out there about how everyone should be doing open source projects in their 'spare time', so no-one has any excuse not to have a track record of FOSS contributions... frankly, it's…

It is becoming increasingly rare to work on an island away from open source. A lot of companies use open source in some way and having an in-house developer familiar with the projects they use or relay on can be quite useful. And the improvements that the company is willing to pay for but aren't a competitive advantage can be committed to the open source project. It's a win for everyone.

Do you work on an island?

Re: When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

#68

Post by onan_barbarian »

bphogan wrote: post #52
onan_barbarian wrote: post #38

Maybe this is paranoia, but I'm beginning to find a lot of threads like this (and a few yesterday about 'how to hire people') actively coercive: "Contribute to Open Source or Don't Get Hired". There are a lot of increasingly shrill remarks out there about how everyone should be doing open source projects in their 'spare time', so no-one has any excuse not to have a track record of FOSS contributions... frankly, it's…

The problem is that I can't believe a word you said. I can't see examples of this awesome super top-secret code because it's all closed-source, as you say, for good reasons. I also can't trust your references, because you'll only give me ones that will say good things about you, and any digging at your work history will only uncover "yes he worked here" responses. I want to see open-source contributions because I lik…

Thanks for the sarcasm: "awesome super top-secret code".

Realistically, the code and details of are covered by NDA. The task solved, the huge difficulty of same, the overall success of the task being solved, demonstrable fluency in related but public areas of computer science, and the commercial success (modest or otherwise) of the code would not be.

If you don't understand this, or couldn't say the same things about what you're doing, maybe you're not working at the same level, and you are welcome to go fire up the GitHub account and solve tic-tac-toe in Haskell or whatever the hell it is that's meant to be so impressive.

The closest analogy I can come is - say you wrote a pile of LEDA (not a invite to debate if this is a good product, but it's certainly substantial) and you've got references who are in a position to know that say, 'yes, Joe Bloggs really did write all the graph algorithms or geometry algorithms or whatnot in this package'.

Well, you're within your rights to 'not believe a word you've said'. But this falls into the thing I'm complaining about - the whole pathological distrust of programmer achievements. How do you think engineers or commercial research scientists in other fields ever get hired, for fuck's sake?

Re: When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

#69

Post by nottombrown »

technomancy wrote: post #64
bphogan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that I can't believe a word you said. I can't see examples of this awesome super top-secret code because it's all closed-source, as you say, for good reasons. I also can't trust your references, because you'll only give me ones that will say good things about you, and any digging at your work history will only uncover "yes he worked here" responses. I want to see open-source contributions because I lik…

> The problem is that I can't believe a word you said. It comes down to this: filtering by OSS contributions gives you many false negatives (as the OP has complained) but virtually zero false positives. In hiring, a false negative is a bummer, but a false positive is disastrous. It would be irresponsible of me as an interviewer not to take this into account. If it someone's pissed because they fall into the false neg…

This is absolutely the right way of thinking about the problem. If you can afford to be picky, this filtering saves you time and doubt.

Re: When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

#70

Post by orijing »

raganwald wrote: post #8
orijing wrote: post #4

This puts developers in companies that commit to open source projects like Chromium to be at a significant advantage to those developing proprietary software. I understand where the author is coming from, but this is unfair for those who work on closed-source projects. Of course I have my own personal projects, but for most of them, I am not about release their source.

Look, I work on a lot of proprietary stuff as well, but even if Github didn't exist, we'd both be subject to the same "unfairness." Here's a job interview, circa 1981: Candidate 1: "I brought this fanfold printout of the source code for _____ I wrote with me, have a look. Candidate 2: "I can't show you any of the code, but trust me, it's good." Github merely drags that conversation forward from 1981 up to 2011. When…

> When you and I choose to write code that is locked away in somebody else's vault, we ought to charge extra to compensate for the fact that we might as well have been surfing Oahu.

I like that idea. Part of the value from working on open source projects for companies is the public nature of your contributions: It's easy for you to take your commits to Chromium and show it to Facebook or Apple when looking for a job there.

Companies may not like that idea, however.

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