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Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

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Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#41

Post by acdha »

mgse wrote: post #25
droithomme wrote: post #11

These arguments that the only worthy developers have tons of public facing open source projects are tiresome. Probably less than 1% of developers have GitHub repos and there's no correlation between skill level and having a GitHub repo. If you have extensive and current open source contributions, for most people it means you're unemployed, or you're violating your employer's contract terms. Evaluating a GitHub repo f…

"If you have extensive and current open source contributions, for most people it means ... you're violating your employer's contract terms." Bingo (at least for me). Both companies I've worked for require you to submit a proposal to an open source review board for approval. I went through the process at my previous job and approximately 2 months later I was given the go-ahead. Not worth it.

These days it often can mean quality bug reports. Many popular open source projects are more responsive to pull requests than simple tickets, so it's entirely possible to have a Github account which is used only for support with opensource projects which your employer relies on.

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#42

Post by rhizome »

knieveltech wrote: post #32
coliveira wrote: post #13

Employers will not retire resumes because they know better than anyone else that online activity is classified as marketing rather than individual achievement. If you generate this kind of online activity, good for you, it makes it easier to find a job or to sell a product. It may even replace a traditional job. But having a degree from a top university, having a position in a well know company, receiving a prize rec…

"having a degree from a top university" If you're applying for a position at a company that has HR minions guarding the gates to the hiring manager, then yeah this is great. If you're being hired by an individual with development experience this isn't likely to cut a lot of ice. Here's why: several of the best developers I've ever met do not have degrees. Some didn't even bother graduating from highschool. I've worke…

I'm gonna guess you have zero experience with Microsoft certifications in any form or scope beyond the online banter-mill.

"Isn't likely to cut a lot of ice." I've heard that before...is it from "Mad Men?"

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#43

Post by acdha »

nsxwolf wrote: post #4

All my work is on code I don't own and isn't public facing. I can't take our proprietary code, wrap it up, and put it on GitHub. I also can't provide logins to our proprietary systems for employers to look at. I certainly hope a resume remains relevant for people in my position, because it's really all I have.

I've been in similar positions but one note: do you really work 100% on proprietary software? If you've used any open source projects you can demonstrate skill solely through high quality bug reports for the tools you use, even if your main code is closed. I've certainly seen people participating in e.g. Linux, Python, Apache, etc. threads which made it clear they were solid developers.

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#44

Post by DrStalker »

How many people can look at a github project and tell how good a coder you are, how well you work with others, what sort of team you mesh well with, what industries you've worked in and so on?

And how many of those people are the ones making hiring choices?

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#45

Post by knieveltech »

rhizome wrote: post #42
knieveltech wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"having a degree from a top university" If you're applying for a position at a company that has HR minions guarding the gates to the hiring manager, then yeah this is great. If you're being hired by an individual with development experience this isn't likely to cut a lot of ice. Here's why: several of the best developers I've ever met do not have degrees. Some didn't even bother graduating from highschool. I've worke…

I'm gonna guess you have zero experience with Microsoft certifications in any form or scope beyond the online banter-mill. "Isn't likely to cut a lot of ice." I've heard that before...is it from "Mad Men?"

You'd be dead wrong about that. I spent the first 10 years of my career watching MCSE after MCSE consistently mismanage all manner of network and server infrastructure, frequently having to go behind them and clean up their mess.

Item the 2nd: haven't seen Mad Men, couldn't say.

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#46

Post by knieveltech »

jebblue wrote: post #39
knieveltech wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"having a degree from a top university" If you're applying for a position at a company that has HR minions guarding the gates to the hiring manager, then yeah this is great. If you're being hired by an individual with development experience this isn't likely to cut a lot of ice. Here's why: several of the best developers I've ever met do not have degrees. Some didn't even bother graduating from highschool. I've worke…

>> Resume? No thanks. Show me your code and then let's have a beverage and chat. What is this hipster hiring? Give it 10 or 20 years bud you'll be singing a different tune or afraid to try to get hired as a coder and just pulling manager duty 3 or 4 levels up in the middle quietly re-assuring yourself that you could code and get a job in that new language eebbityfribitz ... if you really wanted to.

So you assert a couple pieces of paper that contain a view of someone's career from 30,000 ft (assuming it's even accurate) is some how preferable to being able to download, run, debug and in general interact with a potential hire's code? If you say so.

2nd assertion, that at some point in the next 10 to 20 years I'm going to run into some unspecified difficulties with the hiring process, resulting in me shifting career tracks to management? Would you mind unpacking the thought process behind all of this?

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#47

Post by hansef »

jeremyjh wrote: post #36
hansef wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what stack you're working with, and the associated broad engineering culture. I haven't hired anyone who didn't have a Github repo in 2 years, out of 18+ FTEs and contractors - but we're a Rails/Scala/node shop building fancy web apps for startups. Not having a huge OSS track record is fine, but not having a Github account at all would be kinda weird these days. If we were doing embedded systems stuff or f…

Do you expect Rails developers to have their own pet projects that they put a lot of time into? I agree it would be strange if no one had any forks, had never done a pull-request etc.

Pet projects? Absolutely not, although never a minus. ;) More: are you engaged with the community enough to be aware of the current ecosystem, (handwaving) "best practices", libraries/gems, etc. If someone claims to have been building Rails apps for 5 years, but has never heard of Devise and Carrierwave, it's definitely a red flag for me. If you're trying to get a job on the Google search team and can't whiteboard a quicksort it's going to be an equivalent red flag for them. I'm trying to attract a specific type of developers for a specific kind of programming work where caring about this kind of stuff is useful as a signaling factor to me.

It's not about requiring everyone who works for us to be a 23 year old with no family or life who spends every night hacking on shit, just about a baseline standard for community engagement. Lack of Github account with some level of activity (even if that's just starred repos, forks, etc) is a pretty strong indication someone wouldn't meet that level of engagement, and so wouldn't be a good match.

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#48

Post by rhizome »

knieveltech wrote: post #45
rhizome wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna guess you have zero experience with Microsoft certifications in any form or scope beyond the online banter-mill. "Isn't likely to cut a lot of ice." I've heard that before...is it from "Mad Men?"

You'd be dead wrong about that. I spent the first 10 years of my career watching MCSE after MCSE consistently mismanage all manner of network and server infrastructure, frequently having to go behind them and clean up their mess. Item the 2nd: haven't seen Mad Men, couldn't say.

That doesn't mean anything, you could have worked for a contracting company that only dealt with acute problems where MCSEs just happened to be involved, i.e. selection bias.

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#49

Post by windle »

danielweber wrote: post #8
nsxwolf wrote: post #4

All my work is on code I don't own and isn't public facing. I can't take our proprietary code, wrap it up, and put it on GitHub. I also can't provide logins to our proprietary systems for employers to look at. I certainly hope a resume remains relevant for people in my position, because it's really all I have.

Yes, "show me the github" is one of the worst trends for software developers' careers. I'll always ask for live code from people at interviews, if only to filter out the total posers.

I've met total posers that can whip up the little snippets that people have time for in an interview... and I've met great coders who crash and burn a live code session due to interview stress.

I've consistently found open-source code to be a much better sample since the person being interviewed is not under such pressure when writing it. And yes, the pressure from being in a room with 3 ppl watching you is very different from "deadline pressure" to complete a task when employed.

I don't think the github resume is going to be the standard for quite awhile, but I know it makes my job when hiring much easier when we can discuss code and techniques used in an open-source project the interviewee wrote, than arbitrary questions that only prove he's recently memorized an algorithm book.

The real thing developers should think about, is the competition. This is what made "has college degree" an easy filter for employers. If you have 800 applications, tossing the ones missing a github repo in addition to the college degree trims it down a bit more.

Will you miss some possibly great people? Absolutely. Same with the college degree filter. But you'll still likely end up with a bunch of "would like to hire" candidates and it'll be easier to see what their work actually looks like. If you're applying for a job, you should absolutely consider how to stay ahead of the competition, and I'm sure companies in the future when bombarded with so many applications will add things like this to the resume filter.

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#50

Post by kanzure »

danielweber wrote: post #18
kanzure wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, "show me the github" is one of the worst trends for software developers' careers. On the other hand, there are benefits to posting code online that they can review. Instead of spending hours writing code for each company that you're interviewing with, you can just write code that you're actually interested in and throw it online. Say you're talking with 20 companies. Each of those 20 interviews have an associa…

Some people are completely useless. Remember, there are people out there who can't write Fizz Buzz yet still apply for jobs. They can easily fake a GitHub. Someone who won't write code upon request is an instant no-hire.

> Some people are completely useless. Remember, there are people out there who can't write Fizz Buzz yet still apply for jobs. They can easily fake a GitHub.

So you're saying they can use git-filter-branch, but not write Fizz Buzz? Sounds fishy to me.

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