It looks like they're basically just selling this: http://www.hackdiary.com/2010/02/10/algorithmic-recruitment-...
Why Resumes and Code Screenings Are Obsolete with GitHire
11–20 of 89 posts
Re: Why Resumes and Code Screenings Are Obsolete with GitHire
#12One thing something like this misses in comparison to resumes - what was the effect of the code they wrote? Sure, I can see that you wrote a kick-ass routine to geocode addresses. What problem was it trying to solve? What benefits did it bring to the end user? Did it have an effect on any measured metrics? This is the kind of stuff people usually put in their resumes. I'm not that interested in the code a developer w…
Good point, I think that a lot of people forget that the sole point of writing the code in the first place is to solve a business problem. From someone's github account how are you supposed to tell if they were writing code that solves real problems, or if they were doing the equivalent of mental masturbation and just doing things for their own sake, pleasing no one but themselves.
They're also missing the simple fact that outside of a particular bubble, people don't actively use github and companies don't care about it. There are some exceedingly smart coders working in the financial world on problems relating to grid computing and big data, but they're not going to be posting that code to github (though they might publish the odd paper or present about it). If you want anyone like that, you're sure as hell not going to be finding them here.
Re: Why Resumes and Code Screenings Are Obsolete with GitHire
#13Finding exceptional talent on GitHub certainly a solvable problem, but the real challenge for GitHire is the one you can see immediately when you pull up this page: http://githire.com/order In the first few reloads, I've seen John Resig, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Yehuda Katz pop up. Maybe they're free to do a quick phone screen? Here's hoping that there's a lot of secret sauce keeping companies from trying to dat…
That page looks like a teaser. I tend to suspect that the "supermodels" are popping up for the same reason that, when you look at those T-shirt ads on the edges of blogs, every T-shirt is being worn by... a supermodel.
In practice, I presume they offer to try to screen for people who actually want to be hired, not just the ones with big scores on Githubbiness. I note that the very first thing they tell you to do on the "Job Seekers" page is to set your "hireable" flag on Github to true. (I didn't yet realize Github had such a thing, BTW. Thanks to GitHire for teaching me that, if nothing else.)
Re: Why Resumes and Code Screenings Are Obsolete with GitHire
#14From my estimated experience:
CoffeeScript: 5+ years
Ha ha. (the language has been out for 3 years, became known maybe year after release)
Re: Why Resumes and Code Screenings Are Obsolete with GitHire
#15One thing something like this misses in comparison to resumes - what was the effect of the code they wrote? Sure, I can see that you wrote a kick-ass routine to geocode addresses. What problem was it trying to solve? What benefits did it bring to the end user? Did it have an effect on any measured metrics? This is the kind of stuff people usually put in their resumes. I'm not that interested in the code a developer w…
To that end, there is more than just perfection of code. It's great to see a developer write perfect 'debt-free' code, however sometimes it's more valuable to get the code out the door in a simpler easier state. A lot of developers I've worked with have problems getting to a stopping point. For hiring someone the 'perfect' code usually wins out, yet that person might not be the best fit.
I often find writing code to be the easiest part of my job. Finding out what the customers are trying to do, what problems they are having doing that and trying to come up with clever ways to solve those with our software is often much harder, and if I was hiring would be a skill I'd care about at least as much as actually being able to write great code. Writing perfect code that doesn't solve a problem people are having isn't that useful from a making money point of view.
Re: Why Resumes and Code Screenings Are Obsolete with GitHire
#16I would be curious to know how it gets years of experience so wrong.
# Perhaps like so...?
if ( does_it_compile() ) {
years_experience++;
if ( !does_it_segfault() ) {
years_experience++;
}
}Re: Why Resumes and Code Screenings Are Obsolete with GitHire
#17Next time I'm hiring someone (hopefully not too long from now), I'll be using them.
Re: Why Resumes and Code Screenings Are Obsolete with GitHire
#18> Over a million software developers have public repositories on http://github.com, allowing you to see how people use code to solve real problems
That assumes they put code on github. And that they publish the code. And that you know anything about their code.
Then there are those of us who use bitbucket. There's lots of code which doesn't get published because it's not relevant and if it is, it might be a one off project that I'd rather not make public rather than make it look like it's abandoned. Finally, some code just makes no sense out of context - some of the code I'm most proud of were just binary patches to firmware of an old mobile phone with delphi gui for hooking it up to specified functions. Without context that's just an ugly delphi form that does a weird version of "patch" operating on a text file and example files. In context, it's a lot more. Not only I wouldn't expect anyone to understand what that project was doing and why it mattered, it would not get uploaded to github because it was outdated before github even existed.
So while the quoted sentence is still true, I think anyone using this service misses out on masses of experienced developers who simply didn't publish their code on GH, for various reasons. If you want to find a standard developer doing lots of opensource work, it might be a good offer though.
The difference might not be clear to the people paying for this service.
Re: Why Resumes and Code Screenings Are Obsolete with GitHire
#19Finding exceptional talent on GitHub certainly a solvable problem, but the real challenge for GitHire is the one you can see immediately when you pull up this page: http://githire.com/order In the first few reloads, I've seen John Resig, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Yehuda Katz pop up. Maybe they're free to do a quick phone screen? Here's hoping that there's a lot of secret sauce keeping companies from trying to dat…
That page looks like a teaser. I tend to suspect that the "supermodels" are popping up for the same reason that, when you look at those T-shirt ads on the edges of blogs, every T-shirt is being worn by... a supermodel. In practice, I presume they offer to try to screen for people who actually want to be hired, not just the ones with big scores on Githubbiness. I note that the very first thing they tell you to do on t…
I didn't know about the hireable flag either. Cool feature for the genuinely unemployed, but imagine the team morale repercussions of setting your hireable flag to true while in a job you're looking to move on from...
Re: Why Resumes and Code Screenings Are Obsolete with GitHire
#20One major flaw: it assumes anyone you would want to hire uses Github, as opposed to Bitbucket, Gitorious, Google Code, Launchpad, the numerous other code hosts I missed, or hosting their code on their own server.
And if Github becomes "the standard" for hosting software such that everyone looks for code and coders on Github instead of other places, that would be detrimental to the FOSS community as a whole - not only in Github's lack of competition with other code hosts, but also in git's lack of competition with other VCSes.