Github is Your New Resume

However, my interviewer told me "we've seen your code on Github. It's great, but just so you know, you won't be able to keep that up if you work here."

I asked more about what he meant by this and he told me that the company is extremely secretive and would not allow me to post any code to Github. Some other developers had already been told to take down some (very general, non-proprietary) code they had posted to Github.

What came out is that my public work on Github helped me get an offer but I wasn't going to be able to contribute any new code during my years at this company.

I certainly don't want a three-year blank spot in my public code "resume", so I turned down the offer.

This is a bit of the tangent from the OP's point, but I think its related: Companies need to realize that the benefit of allowing employees to contribute to open-source isn't merely getting the community to work or review your team's code, but rather, open-source is a marketing and recruiting tool.

Say you let your employees create and maintain open-source software. Say it is successful and other people start using that software. If it used widely enough, your employees are asked to speak at meetups and conferences and say "Look at this great software I built while working at company X. Company X is so cool, come work here!" (and every contributor to the project becomes a potential employee who will already know a portion of your code.)

tl;dr - Companies: allow your employees to freely work on open-source and it will improve your recruiting.

If you really want to show that you are a good coder, you need your own website as a central point with aggregation of your information from other sources. Github is really nice, but in 5 years, they may have sold themselves to BigCorp for BigMoney and the BigCorp could completely destroy github.

Be it github or the next "cool company", do yourself a favour, build your own site at the centre. Of course, you can open source the code on github or the next cool git/svn/hg hosting company too. Double win.

[1]: http://www.marco.org/2011/07/11/own-your-identity

Build a bot that can simulate an open source genius via a classic academic technique: Plagiarism.

The algorithm:

Use Github's API and/or Google to find some popular repos.

Fork those repos into a new Github account named (e.g.) "Nicolai".

For each repo, find some other forks of that repo. Grab some branch names and commits from those forks and commit them to Nicolai's fork, under Nicolai's name and with a few Nicolai-specific changes here and there, to commit messages and perhaps to code comments, to obscure the trail. Sprinkle in some choice text from, e.g., Zippy the Pinhead, the Tao te Ching, random comments from Stack Overflow or Lambda the Ultimate... whatever.

Scoring:

For every recruiter who emails Nicolai with an opportunity: one point.

For every interview that Nicolai gets offered: ten points.

For every job offer that Nicolai gets: one thousand points.

You should hire people based on absolutely as much useful information as you can ethically get your hands on. Why waste the information in a person's github profile?

Resumes suck, and are damned near useless. Bringing people in based on resumes wastes your lead engineer's time because the % hit rate on them will be very low. You will, at the very least, need to phone screen somebody that you only know from a resume, a process which takes a surprising amount of time.

Talking to people is totally useful, and necessary, but not sufficient. It's prone to passing bullshitters (esp since you have your best technical person interviewing) and useless smart people (who don't get shit done), and to failing good employees who don't speak well or are having a bad hair/brain day or are very nervous.

When you go to hire, use all the information you can. Look at their github, interview, have the person write code, have lunch with them to see if they get along with the team. Don't fail them for missing any one part of the interview, but take it all into account.

Especially in a small team, you're making an decision with an enormous impact on the future of your company which is difficult and painful to undo. Don't waste any information.

I work for a bigco that doesn't contribute to open source. I used to work for a bigco that was one of the biggest contributors to open source. I spend spare time working on an reasonably sized open source project, of which I was one of the founders, hosted on, yes, github. I have interesting (to me, atleast) side projects, mostly hardhacks, which I don't necessarily build to share. I do it for fun. Obviously, I read HN.

I never require open source experience when I hire, because my experience in both the 'closed' and 'open' worlds tells me that great scientists and engineers exist in both worlds and using a VCS account as a filter is crude. This is just another facet.