41–50 of 89 posts
Software Developers around the world becomes this victim of a bubble. Be it the StackOverflow bubble (collecting rewards from answering questions) or the GitHub bubble or the blogging bubble.
I'm tired playing the alpha-geek Fire-and-Motion.
And the results are pretty bad.
Not only did I get awful results from other countries, the actual 2 results I got from my city are 2 devs ranked as being in the "top 20% of GitHub users by estimated expertise".
One of them has 2 forked projects with NO contributions and is contributing to a third that he just started. He also has no followers. The other is an intern at a local company, with a single project of a few lines of code and no other public activity to speak about. I also searched for them on Google and couldn't find anything else, other than a LinkedIn profile.
Now, I'm not saying that these 2 results are bad developers. But if these are classified as in the top "20%" of developers based on information available online, then the algorithm is doing a pretty shitty job.
To make things worse, I didn't see any personal acquaintance out of dozens that I know have meaningful GitHub accounts and are living in my city. Instead, I got somebody from Istanbul (different country, not even a neighbor) that submitted his configuration files to GitHub and is also in the "top 20% of GitHub users by estimated expertise".
> 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…
To be fair, those are developers that most companies would be missing out on anyway.
It seems this system can be easily gamed by putting more commits into your github repos, even if it's not original code, original ideas or even runnable code.
> 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…
Forking a bunch of repositories isn't going to earn you much there.
> 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…
> 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. To be fair, those are developers that most companies would be missing out on anyway.
GitHub provides a great signal for evaluating whether someone is one of the top 100 or top 1000 developers in the world. Just check how many follows or forks they have! But Linus and DHH can work wherever they want, and they're probably unlikely to work in SF for $60--100k plus options in your SaaS startup.
Because of supply and demand, the people who are going to work long hours in that price range seem to be recent graduates. As a result, all of the hiring processes I've seen are geared toward trying to get a vaguely passable evaluation of how good a recent graduate is, using the minimum possible developer time. This leads to the coding interview as we know it: 30--45 minutes long and usually involving a trite programming problem utilizing the most advanced class most undergraduates will have taken, introduction to algorithms.
Personally, I would love if tech companies switched to evaluating based on work samples (e.g., code), but I don't think it makes sense given the demographics that they're targeting as new employees and the amount of time to have a developer genuinely evaluate a coding sample (rather than count followers, etc.).
Is it likely that GitHire and similar will increase the supply of good candidates in the right price range, rather than periodically e-mailing the top developers on GitHub and possibly polluting the ecosystem?
This demand that people write tons and tons of code on our off hours is understandable but is getting, I dunno, obnoxious? If not tons , then perhaps something of very high quality. I could write a nifty little linked list implementation but would it really show that I'd be a good programmer for your particular needs? If you think it does, I predict having code written in off hours is a requirement will result in git…
Unfortunately, we live in the world where people eat people.
For those who have large number of repos and code written in GitHub, they would rejoice when they see this. Just like Haskell people would feel excited when they see the number of jobs for Haskell programmers out there cannot be met with the supply.
These people will push this idea forward because it is for their best interest (only a few who would keep the purity of the community).
At the end of the day, we're all human beings so we have greeds and egos. We want to have high salary or challenging work or the best work place/culture/free-food and we work to achieve that. Part of the work is to have GitHub repos apparently (used to be StackOverflow karma).
Some hackers dislike the notion of getting interesting jobs/deals because of your rolodex because that would suggest sales/marketing/licking butt mentality. They also dislike it because communication (with real people, not over the internet) is not their strongest suit.
For those who disagree with this wave/bubble, we should create our own. We should push our own ideology. We should figure out how not to be attracted with this wave/bubble.
... or we can stand up and be an entrepreneur (one option, not the only option) and say to hell with this job-seeker mob-mentality?
This demand that people write tons and tons of code on our off hours is understandable but is getting, I dunno, obnoxious? If not tons , then perhaps something of very high quality. I could write a nifty little linked list implementation but would it really show that I'd be a good programmer for your particular needs? If you think it does, I predict having code written in off hours is a requirement will result in git…
I like your opinion (probably because I'm biased of this trend as well). Unfortunately, we live in the world where people eat people. For those who have large number of repos and code written in GitHub, they would rejoice when they see this. Just like Haskell people would feel excited when they see the number of jobs for Haskell programmers out there cannot be met with the supply. These people will push this idea for…
(Does having a large codebase freely available make evaluating a potential hire easier? No doubt. I'm not questioning that.)
I'm a programmer by trade but a hardware guy by birth and education. I don't do endless amounts of coding in my off-time, but instead build things. When it comes time for me to move on, if /everybody/ I talk to requires a large open-source codebase for me to even sit in the same room as them - I won't care. I'll find some like-minded folk and create my own job.
> 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…
http://www.workforpie.com checks both github and bitbucket. They also check HN and Stack Overflow to get a rounded out picture. It's an opt-in service though, targeted at the employees not the employers. I've found that their rating system is pretty fair and accurate. I think of it as klout for programmers. Forking a bunch of repositories isn't going to earn you much there.