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Github is my resume

pydanny.blogspot.com

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Re: Github is my resume

#51

Post by kstenerud »

robododo wrote: post #42
kstenerud wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unfortunate truth is that there are fraudsters out there who will attempt to cheat or bullshit their way in. Fizzbuzz is so utterly trivial that you could bang it out in a few minutes. And yet it's amazing how well it weeds out non-programmers, no matter how much they bamboozled over the phone or built up a web of deceit online. You should treat fizzbuzz or the like as a secret handshake, where you write it and t…

Totally agree. A shockingly small number of candidates I've interviewed have heard of fizzbuzz. The first time I mentioned it to someone, I assumed they already knew it and would just chuckle and crank it out. However, that's actually kind of rare. When I do talk to a candidate and get that "knowing grin", my estimation of them jumps up a couple of notches. It seems to actually mean something outside of coder forums.…

Actually I don't consider lack of exposure to fizzbuzz a problem. The whole point of it is that it's trivial to implement, even if you've never heard of it before. But a non-programmer (or a "programmer" with no grasp of simple algorithms) will struggle with it.

It's basically a "secret handshake" that non-programmers simply cannot do, and competent programmers can figure out in less than a minute.

Re: Github is my resume

#52

Post by balloot »

daenz wrote: post #5
eggbrain wrote: post #3

One of the most frustrating things for me, I feel, is that hardly any of the code I have written is on Github for various reasons (NDA, proprietary code, etc). So when an employer asks me for my Github, what do I do? Do I send him my account showing off my code from 3 years ago containing only a script I didn't really care about? I don't mind a Github being used in conjunction with other resources (the projects I've…

> One of the most frustrating things for me, I feel, is that hardly any of the code I have written is on Github for various reasons (NDA, proprietary code, etc). So when an employer asks me for my Github, what do I do? Do I send him the my account showing off my code from 3 years ago containing only a script I didn't really care about? The not-so-easy answer is: find time to contribute to the open source community. T…

So you're saying that he would be a better prospective employee if he spent less time working on his primary job and instead spent more time writing other code? That seems totally counterintuitive to me.

Re: Github is my resume

#53

Post by daenz »

balloot wrote: post #52
daenz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the most frustrating things for me, I feel, is that hardly any of the code I have written is on Github for various reasons (NDA, proprietary code, etc). So when an employer asks me for my Github, what do I do? Do I send him the my account showing off my code from 3 years ago containing only a script I didn't really care about? The not-so-easy answer is: find time to contribute to the open source community. T…

So you're saying that he would be a better prospective employee if he spent less time working on his primary job and instead spent more time writing other code? That seems totally counterintuitive to me.

He asked what to do if an employer asks for his Github and he has nothing current on it. I answered with "fill it with your open source contributions." You're free to draw whatever conclusions you want from that.

Re: Github is my resume

#54

Post by kstenerud »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #49
kstenerud wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unfortunate truth is that there are fraudsters out there who will attempt to cheat or bullshit their way in. Fizzbuzz is so utterly trivial that you could bang it out in a few minutes. And yet it's amazing how well it weeds out non-programmers, no matter how much they bamboozled over the phone or built up a web of deceit online. You should treat fizzbuzz or the like as a secret handshake, where you write it and t…

Do you really think someone is going to fake a GitHub account, including thousands of commit messages? I just don't buy that. To me that's definitely enough. If you take a look at my github account you might think it's nothing special. But what you'll also see is that I have several commits per day, despite working a 40 hour/week job and a 15 hour/week job. So at minimum it should be obvious that I really like coding…

I've examined a lot of github accounts while hiring, and seeing thousands of commits is rare. If I'm satisfied that there's no chance someone is faking, I'll forego fizzbuzz, but really in the end it's nothing more than a 5 minute formality (and I make a point of telling the candidate that it's just a formality and yes it's trivial, and we both laugh at the absurdity of the situation as he scribbles it up on the white board). At that point the real interview hasn't even started yet.

Re: Github is my resume

#55

Post by medinism »

I feel some of this discussion misses the point. To date the best predictor of the future is the past. And the best way to measure the past is by reviewing work done - not a self-declared history of yourself. If Github does not get you there, then creating some kind of show and tell for anyone to review is necessary. The other stuff you would assumed you can get out of a CV, ie cultural fit, etc you can only assess by meeting the person and working with him/her for a while. At the end of day Github is the best catch all for "show your work" for programmers

Re: Github is my resume

#56

Post by kstenerud »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #48
tptacek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To verify that they can bang out code when they need to, not just when they're in the right frame of mind to create code samples. Also, ours is domain specific and measures multiple things about the candidate (but the primary one is just that they can produce sane code). In this case, we're talking about FizzBuzz. The point of FizzBuzz is that it's a test that can be passed by literally anyone with an elementary abil…

I'm obviously against any quizzes in an interview; it puts the interviewer and the interviewee on unequal footing, but that's not the point in my comment. I'm not optimizing for fizzbuzz here. I'm optimizing for "I'm not some guy off the street here, here's some proof". I'm optimizing for "let's skip past the bullshit".

Except that it's not bullshit, at least not in the traditional sense. Think of it like your most basic unit test. Regardless of what the evidence suggests, can the candidate bang out a quick algorithm, without aid, in your presence?

Interviews are a HUGE time sink for companies; not just in the interview itself, but also in the examination of candidates, their resumes, their code, their references, discussions among team members to decide if they'll be a good fit, etc, etc. One interviewee can blow away two days work easy. So we're not in the mind to lose any more time than we have to.

Fizzbuzz is a sanity test. To the candidate it may seem absurd, but once as an interviewer you've dealt with enough fakers, or even people who honestly believe they can code and yet can't, you begin to appreciate the simple elegance of a 5 minute fizzbuzz test as a kick-off to the interview.

Re: Github is my resume

#57

Post by njharman »

Candidate's only "resume" was code would be a huge red flag for me [I hire Python engineers btw]. Outside of startup / few persons / open source projects, code is actually a small part of an engineers job. And not that rare/hard of a skill.

Communication, being able to work on and contribute to a team (and not just a team of developers), understanding business, being able to estimate, being able to understand, articulate, and extract requirements from/to clients/non-technicals/management, etc, etc. Are all much more important and difficult to find.

Re: Github is my resume

#58

Post by swanson »

rcfox wrote: post #23
gav wrote: post #21

As somebody who doesn't use Github regularly, it's a horrible alternative to a resume. Looking at his profile[1] it's hard for me to figure out what he's actually done and it's a bigger time investment on my part. If somebody on my team forwarded me that link instead of a one page resume, I doubt I'd talk to him. He has 58 public repos, but I can't see if he's had significant commits to them. Picking some commits at…

Agreed. A large portion of "his" repos are forked from other people's. You can't tell what his level of contribution to any of them is at a glance. Also, he's got an absurd number of files for a project called "Hello World". Perhaps a better alternative is to keep using GitHub to host your code, but then use your resume to highlight specific projects that you want to show to hiring managers. If they're really interes…

Actually you can tell, at a glance, how many commits are by the "owner" of a repo. They appear as dark blue in the timeline. If he has forked a project and made his own commits, his commits will show up as "owner" (e.g. for pydanny, he has made numerous commits to his fork of django-crispy-forms)

Re: Github is my resume

#59

Post by rcfox »

swanson wrote: post #58
rcfox wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. A large portion of "his" repos are forked from other people's. You can't tell what his level of contribution to any of them is at a glance. Also, he's got an absurd number of files for a project called "Hello World". Perhaps a better alternative is to keep using GitHub to host your code, but then use your resume to highlight specific projects that you want to show to hiring managers. If they're really interes…

Actually you can tell, at a glance, how many commits are by the "owner" of a repo. They appear as dark blue in the timeline. If he has forked a project and made his own commits, his commits will show up as "owner" (e.g. for pydanny, he has made numerous commits to his fork of django-crispy-forms)

Ah, good call. I'm just used to only seeing dark blue, so I didn't look very closely.

Re: Github is my resume

#60

Post by m0nastic »

tptacek wrote: post #34
onemoreact wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't do the initial screening, but I do use resume's as an ethics test and guideline for interviews. If you list a lot of random crud on your resume and don't know much about it then you don't get in period. In the end every team has a different process, but I don't care what you have in GitHub and I do care what's on your resume so don't get to infatuated with what you hear random people say on HN or anywhere els…

The less fodder you, as a candidate, give an interviewer for structuring the interview, the better. In most companies, interviewers are trained to "screen" candidates with a series of tech-out questions (and maybe some culture-fit stuff). As a candidate, your interests are best served by (gracefully) taking as much control over the interview as possible. Turn the interview around on the interviewer. Ask the interview…

I want to echo Thomas's sentiment here about asking questions of the interviewer.

It really is of tremendous benefit while interviewing to be the one driving (or at least steering) the interview. Even aside from any psychological power dynamic, it's a really good way to make sure you get to cover the things you want to cover.

If you've ever come out of an interview and said "Oh man, hopefully that went good; but I wish they'd asked me to talk more about area 'X'.", you know it can be nerve-wracking.

Being able to have an actual conversation, where there's interplay between the interviewer and interviewee will do wonders for your anxiety level (which considering how stressful interviewing can be for some people, can be a big deal).

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