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GitHub Is Your Resume Now (2012)

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21–30 of 51 posts

Re: GitHub Is Your Resume Now (2012)

#23

It's too bad for all of the corporate programmers who aren't able to share the code they've written without violating an NDA or other agreement. Some companies even take ownership of code written outside of company time, via the employment agreement, so even developing things on personal time is a no-go.

This is spot on. There is a lot of us that are in such employment agreements and do work for corporate clients that require NDAs. I find it short sighted to believe that your skill should be solely measured by your Open Source projects placed on github since that is sometimes just not possible.

Re: GitHub Is Your Resume Now (2012)

#24

Remove all projects over a year old that you haven't touched? Such bad advice. I've fixed up some old projects of mine that are 2+ years old. Was a great way to see what I was doing wrong back then and apply new knowledge. I don't think this is satire, but it's definitely misguided.

Not just bad advice, infuriatingly bad advice. Completely against the spirit of open source.

Repositories are ordered by "last committed to" in the profile. "Employers" can just not look at the older repos...

Re: GitHub Is Your Resume Now (2012)

#25
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on almost all points. However, I think that the author has a point with the 'mediocre code'. If you're hand-picking a project to highlight, you should probably be sure that the code is at least a little bit polished. It might just be personal preference, but I've seen so many great projects that have absolutely abysmal code standards. Some even mixed tabs and spaces! shudder

Except you can't hand pick a project to highlight. Github does the selection for you. I like the idea of Github as a resume for showing people how you work, but I don't want to have to carefully curate all my public repositories because it is primarily a place for storage. Github really does need a way to pick and choose what appears on your main profile page.

Oh no- I should clarify- if you're hand-picking the projects to highlight from within your resume or personal website.

And yes, I agree- it would be very nice to be able to highlight specific projects within GitHub itself.

Re: GitHub Is Your Resume Now (2012)

#26
post #7

That's silly. I don't even have a GitHub account. All my professional life ( 20+) I've been writing code or building solutions for private companies, all the cool stuff I programmed lies in a private repository. And for the reference, I am always sending nicely PDF-formatted, very relevant, but succinct, CV and not a "poorly formatted, badly designed Microsoft Word template filled with irrelevant information you’ve c…

I don't agree with this guy, and I spend a lot of my time hiring developers.

However: if you don't have open-source code, I tend to assume you don't do much programming in your free time. And if you don't program in your free time, how are you going to become a really strong developer? How will you get exposed to a range of technologies outside what your employer uses, and a range of problems outside your work domain? At the very least, upload your working from that time you worked through SICP or your experiments with Haskell or the AngularJS page you made for your husband's dog grooming business or whatever.

Job-seekers: when your CV arrives, I will use it to find you on LinkedIn. From LinkedIn, I want to see your CPAN/RubyGems/npm/whatever link and your Github link. I want to see a bunch of endorsements from coworkers and open-source collaborators. Show me your Slideshare account from that time you gave a killer talk on ... whatever. Maybe you spend a bunch of time on StackOverflow or PerlMonks or maybe you wrote and published a killer Ruby tutorial in Brazilian or whatever.

Show me you love programming.

Re: GitHub Is Your Resume Now (2012)

#27
"The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant today."

Are you 16 years old?

Tech changes quickly, but not that quickly. A GitHub repository with older projects would be useful to show depth and variety of experience. Just because it's not all using the latest Rails 4.1 doesn't mean that it won't show insight into professional skills like, say, well organized code, playing well with others - not to mention a longer-term outlook that isn't just chasing the latest shiny thing.

Re: GitHub Is Your Resume Now (2012)

#28

While I agree that Github is a part of your resume, I don't think it's the whole thing. If I was providing a link to my account when applying for a job, I would probably link to some specific projects and provide some narrative around them, rather than just saying "here's 20 projects I've worked on, go nuts". If the recruiter wants to look through everything else then fine, but they shouldn't expect perfection from e…

>> "If repos are just simple little side-projects, they don't necessarily need descriptions - I know what they are, I know what they do, they aren't there for anyone but me, I don't expect them to be starred or forked."

Why put it in a public repo then?

Re: GitHub Is Your Resume Now (2012)

#29
Like all posts on this subject (resumes, interviews, and the like), you should also amend the headline and advice with " when interviewing with me." I've never seen the same set of advice given by two different people.

That being said:

> "The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant today. If it is, you aren’t working hard enough or learning fast enough. Get rid of anything you haven’t worked on in over a year."

After reading this part, I can't imagine this is a serious article. This is so absurdly false, it can't be anything more than a troll on the idea that Github is your resume.

Can someone add "satire" to the headline?

Re: GitHub Is Your Resume Now (2012)

#30
I have a blog post brewing in my head about all of the vanities of GitHub: commit activity, stars, forks, organizations, working on 'important' projects. GH's handling of these is considerably less hacker-oriented (more stars = better projects!!!!).

> The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant today

Oh man, wait til you discover Lisp.

This guy's insistence on making a GitHub profile so important really bothers me. I love GitHub, but it's just a stupid account on a webapp. There are plenty of great devs who aren't committing OSS. Since when were hackers so obsessed with image?

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