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Github is Your New Resume

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Re: Github is Your New Resume

#81

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

Some years back there was a discussion of how Free Software was saving IBM's research labs.

The problem being that there's a lot of cool stuff you can work on at the labs, but unless there's a $50m or $100m market for it, there's no interest in productizing the project.

What creating a culture of allowing work on Free Software projects allowed, among other things, was satisfaction and motivation among the lab engineers in being able to produce work which, even if not immediately transformed into IBM products, was available to others. Some eventually did get rolled in to at least consulting services work (particularly in the Apache space).

Sounds like your F100 was all about killing golden-egg laying geese. And I understand your response entirely.

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#82

Post by MostAwesomeDude »

tzs wrote: post #22

There are two issues with this. 1. It excludes developers who have managed to find jobs that are sufficiently challenging, difficult, and interesting that their jobs keep them fully occupied, and so they simply do not have the time or energy left over to contribute to a bunch of open stuff on Github. 2. What happens after you hire someone? Do you have any policy to ensure that the job won't take too much of their tim…

The kind of person that has two-dozen active GH repos is, strangely enough, the kind of person that must be actively challenged at work in order to not get bored with work and spend all their time on open-source stuff. My work bugtracker tends to be sorted so that I can go after the toughest bugs first. :3

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#83

Post by [deleted] »

econgeeker wrote: post #80
raganwald wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're going to judge you, not on the quality of your skills, but on whether you contribute to open source software or not. That's interesting. I don't see it that way, and neither do a lot of other people. Here's how I see it: Those people that do write code I can review provide me with more information than those that don't. They make my job easier. I judge the code, not whether the code is open source. This is exac…

" if you want to stamp out all this zeal and prejudice, you start with YOURSELF." You're talking to the person, rather than the point. In fact, looking at your original response, it is constructed to do the same thing. I'm done here.

[deleted]

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#84

Post by prodigal_erik »

freedrull wrote: post #20

Its really only true for startups at this point. I've had plenty of interviews with the interviewer scratching their head when I mention github.

I'd be fine working with devs who don't use github, but very alarmed at the prospect of working with anyone who never heard of it (or bitbucket or sourceforge). That betrays a striking ignorance of what's going on in the profession. Actually it might be a decent litmus test, if you have the luxury of avoiding navel-gazing employers.

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#85

Post by jashmenn »

kenjackson wrote: post #65
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.

So I agree with you in the case of Apple. But let's dissect for a minute why this is the case.

Apple can be incredibly secretive and still hire with no problems because

1) they are literally creating world-changing products and people want to be involved with that

2) they have a reputation for hiring extremely bright people. If you take a job at Apple you will interact with them (/ be one of them)

But outside of the big technology names (msft, google, fb, etc.) there's a huge collection of companies where either a) the brand is known but the company isn't know for being an innovative place in the hacker community or b) the company isn't known and neither is the team.

In both of type (a) and (b) companies you hear a lot of moaning from managers right now about how they can't find any good folks to hire.

So I'll qualify my advice a little bit: If you find you're having a hard time finding "rockstar-ninja-l88t programmers" by posting to Monster.com, maybe consider that you're approaching hiring in the wrong way.

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#87

Post by georgemcbay »

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."

It will also make it harder/more costly for them to retain their top talent (since external groups will be able to identify them for poaching), so good luck getting many of them to buy into this.

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#88

Post by orangecat »

mtviewdave wrote: post #59

A big problem with github-as-resume for the experienced developer is that it destroys the idea of side-projects as play. I can no longer just fool around with something for the sake of fooling around with it. I now have to judge whether my “fool-around” project is good enough to go on github and be evaluated by potential hiring managers. And if not, I need to ask why I’m working on it, rather than working on somethin…

Excellent points. If github-as-resume becomes commonplace, we can expect to see lots of methods for gaming it, as Goodhart's law would predict: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodharts_law.

Re: Github is Your New Resume

#89

Post by clark-kent »

eropple wrote: post #33
bronson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So BitBucket is your resume. Where's the problem?

My resume is my resume. My personal code is closed-source, with the exception of a couple of bits for presentations and an archived project for which I am a maintainer. You could say that "well, that one archived project is your resume," but that would be foolish (not that you are saying that, but it does follow from all of this) because it has little to do with what I actually do. More than anything, though, I kind…

Is there a particular reason why your personal code is closed source.
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