Github is Your New Resume • Hacker News Board

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#61

Post by mtogo » Thu, Jul 14, 2011, 5:38 PM UTC

So do yourself a favor and move to Github!

How, exactly, would i be doing myself a favor with this? I'm not such a big fan of git and i avoid github on moral grounds[1]. Other code hosting services work great for me and i see no reason to switch both my hosting and my VCS.

I don't disagree with the argument that your code should act as your resume, but it could have been worded a lot better.

[1] I can't in good conscience support the guy who posts things like this routinely: http://dev.pocoo.org/~blackbird/github-vs-bitbucket/bitbucke... and http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#62

Post by swanson » Thu, Jul 14, 2011, 5:40 PM UTC

econgeeker wrote: post #57

swanson wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding different VCSs, the point is that code is the new resume and Github happens to be the most popular place to find it. Links to bitbucket, sourceforge, google code, etc etc are all equally valuable and would have the same impact. Personal time commitments are understandable, but I feel like they are just an excuse in 90% of the cases. As 37signals puts it, "No time is no excuse". If you are serious about impr…

You're expressing a prejudice here and advocating discrimination based on it. It seems ideological. You're saying "Don't hire people if they don't contribute to open source projects." You assume they are watching TV, rather than, say, working on an iOS game that they are selling. Resumes are for deciding who you're going to interview. If github is the new resume, then you're not going to know about the side projects.

I don't want to turn this into a game of forum post logical proofs.

I don't advocate "don't hire if no OSS". I work with smart people that get stuff done and don't have a Github account. That's fine, it's a personal choice how you use your time.

What rubs me the wrong way is when people say "It's unfair to look at Github as the new resume because I don't have enough time to do open source". Like I said originally, I'm sure someone is going to come along and post about how every hour of their day is being used for meaningful activities, but for the majority of people I don't think that's true.

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#63

Post by pcote » Thu, Jul 14, 2011, 5:41 PM UTC

Not in my experience. Most job boards are dominated by technical recruiters so, to get in through them, you play by their rules.

In their world, web presence of projects almost never counts. The rationale is that "anyone can point to my work and claim they did it." The preference for assessment is still resume keywords, good references, and multiple choice tests.

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#64

Post by econgeeker » Thu, Jul 14, 2011, 5:43 PM UTC

llimllib wrote: post #58

econgeeker wrote: post #43

One of the key motivators that made me start my own company was this kind of nonsense. Poor managers, having made bad hiring decisions, are always looking for some way to short circuit the process. The entire recruiting agency industry exists for this very purpose (and look how little they know about engineering!) This does provide a very useful feature for confident, quality engineers: Whenever someone asks for your…

Frankly, I think you're out of your mind. 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 s…

I find it interesting that you presume the hit rate on bringing people in based on resumes would be very low. I can tell a good engineer from a bad one, pretty well, using resumes.

Phone screens, however are a waste of time. It is difficult to establish rapport with someone over the phone, for both parties, and I've seen some people actually ask programming questions over the phone.

One very good engineer I hired, back before I was running my own show, did terrible on the phone screen.

I brought her in, though, because I saw something in the resume. She's asian and had a real problem talking on the phone, but eventually got the job and was great.

You are making a decision with an enormous impact. Therefore, it is critical that you do it based on a truthful assessment of the candidate-- not ideological prejudice.

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#65

Post by kenjackson » Thu, Jul 14, 2011, 5:45 PM UTC

jashmenn wrote: post #52

I recently interviewed at a Fortune 100 company's new "Innovation" group. I pointed them to the various projects I have on Github as examples of my work. They reviewed it and liked what they saw. 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…

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

Apple barely lets their employees blog even, and last I checked they're doing OK by all counts.

Unfortunately, the intersection for people who are passionate about their 9to5 work and those that are passionate about their side-project seems to actually be fairly small.

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#66

Post by bartonfink » Thu, Jul 14, 2011, 5:48 PM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #47

cletus wrote: post #27

What about: - those that use different VCSs? - people who don't have the time (due to their job or other circumstances) to work on things they can open source? - people who work at companies that essentially own everything they might do so you can't work on open source? and - companies where hiring goes through HR who won't know what the hell Github is? Having work on Github is probably a good idea for college studen…

As someone who works in a 'bigco' culture, I would definitely be looking for a github (or other vcs) link on a new hire, regardless of seniority. Of course they might have their own website with some portfolio code, and that is fine too in my eyes. What I'm looking for is the signal that says, "I care about my profession, I go the extra mile".

I care about my profession. I go the extra mile. Last year, I read Programming Language Pragmatics and the Dragon book because the semester I wanted to take programming languages, the course was offered when I had to work and I never got a formal background. Last month I read 22 research papers in ad-hoc mobile networking in an effort to broaden my horizons beyond what I'm currently working on. Sure, I could write ns-2 simulations (and I did plenty of them as part of my MS) but once I understand what I've read, writing the simulation doesn't hold much benefit for me, does it?

None of the work I invest in myself will be available in any form on github because it simply doesn't fit there in any meaningful sense (unless you want me to upload some sort of .txt book report). I spend my "self-improvement" time on conceptual problems that don't map to github or other repositories in any way. If I want to solve a trivial problem, I assume someone else already has (it's probably on github) and there's no point in me reinventing the wheel. What does me writing another ORM tool tell you except that I'm able to copy someone else's ideas?

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#67

Post by econgeeker » Thu, Jul 14, 2011, 5:48 PM UTC

raganwald wrote: post #53

econgeeker wrote: post #43

One of the key motivators that made me start my own company was this kind of nonsense. Poor managers, having made bad hiring decisions, are always looking for some way to short circuit the process. The entire recruiting agency industry exists for this very purpose (and look how little they know about engineering!) This does provide a very useful feature for confident, quality engineers: Whenever someone asks for your…

Whenever someone asks for your github ID as part of the hiring process, you can say "Next!" Yes you can, but your words do not convince me that this is a sound job-seeking strategy. You say: ...have a stakeholder in the business, who is a competent engineer, look thru the resumes, pick the ones they want to meet with, and bring them in. To persuade me, you must establish that the companies with a strategy of "look th…

It is an obviously unsound practice because at its core is an ideological prejudice: We're going to judge you, not on the quality of your skills, but on whether you contribute to open source software or not.

Candidate are better off working for companies that are interested in getting to know them in order to make hiring decisions, rather than running them thru a political correctness filter.

I don't really care whether I convince you or not. I believe the basis for wanting someone's github id is a prejudice, and I've not had luck convincing prejudiced people that they shouldn't discriminate.

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#68

Post by raganwald » Thu, Jul 14, 2011, 5:52 PM UTC

econgeeker wrote: post #64

llimllib wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I think you're out of your mind. 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 s…

I find it interesting that you presume the hit rate on bringing people in based on resumes would be very low. I can tell a good engineer from a bad one, pretty well, using resumes. Phone screens, however are a waste of time. It is difficult to establish rapport with someone over the phone, for both parties, and I've seen some people actually ask programming questions over the phone. One very good engineer I hired, ba…

I can tell a good engineer from a bad one, pretty well, using resumes.

I am reminded of a cartoon I once saw. It showed a businessperson meeting another in a typical office. The caption read "We really liked your resume and would be interested in meeting the person it describes."

Obviously you can select the good engineers a resume describes from the bad engineers a resume describes. What you cannot do from the resume alone is deal with false positives in the form of misrepresentations, nor with false negatives from people who are better at programming than they are at writing resumes.

You already know this, that's why you still have interviews. But I hope you can appreciate that additional information can help you pick out some red flags for the "good" resumes, thing you will want to ask about in an interview, and likewise a resume that doesn't seem all that great but is associated with good work on github.... Maybe that's a false negative and you want to interview them anyways to see if they simply suck at resume-writing.

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#69

Post by swanson » Thu, Jul 14, 2011, 5:54 PM UTC

anxrn wrote: post #60

swanson wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding different VCSs, the point is that code is the new resume and Github happens to be the most popular place to find it. Links to bitbucket, sourceforge, google code, etc etc are all equally valuable and would have the same impact. Personal time commitments are understandable, but I feel like they are just an excuse in 90% of the cases. As 37signals puts it, "No time is no excuse". If you are serious about impr…

It bugs you because you don't get get it, freely stereotype and readily tell people how to spend their free time. 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, atlea…

I agree with you that it is another facet. The point I was trying to make is that there is a pretty low barrier to entry to get yourself into that facet. An attitude I see online a lot is that "If I don't do it, it's not valuable" - though this goes hand-in-hand with "I do it, if you don't you are wrong".

I am biased because I do have a github account and work on side projects for fun, but I think it is worthwhile to point out that if time is what you think your limiting factor is (which was the point that cletus made that I was directly addressing), then maybe you aren't really looking hard enough into how you are using your time.

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#70

Post by tjr » Thu, Jul 14, 2011, 5:57 PM UTC

econgeeker wrote: post #64

llimllib wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I think you're out of your mind. 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 s…

I find it interesting that you presume the hit rate on bringing people in based on resumes would be very low. I can tell a good engineer from a bad one, pretty well, using resumes. Phone screens, however are a waste of time. It is difficult to establish rapport with someone over the phone, for both parties, and I've seen some people actually ask programming questions over the phone. One very good engineer I hired, ba…

I once was given a phone interview because a friend of mine knew the hiring manager. The manager really didn't want to waste time with me, he said, because I had just graduated from school, and thus I couldn't possibly be useful to him.

But at my friend's insisting, he gave me the interview, and summarily dismissed me.

A few weeks later the manager was fired from the company for some sort of unprofessional behavior, and replaced by someone who had just graduated from school.