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Why GitHub is not your CV

blog.jcoglan.com

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Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#11

Post by CmonDev »

seivan wrote: post #2

"OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say. But I do find it funny that they don't think that Github should be used as a resumé but their "conferencing", tweets, books about diversifying and podcasts should do. Talkers or Makers? I write OSS on my free time because I feel like other alternatives might not be good enough. I spend a couple of hours in the morning, we…

""OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say."

I hope one day we will be able to distil the ultimate rule: "being smart and proactive is discriminatory".

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#12

Post by atmosx »

First thing: The white/black men discrimination issue seems totally out of place, almost ridiculous!

As for the main argument, I think it's flawed. Github (or any other online repo) is an important asset and Open Source contributions matters. Especially if you don't have prior job experience. It's a very good way to show that you can actually write code and you will be hands on from the first week, or day, or hour.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#13

Post by marrs »

I think this article needs to be split in two because it seems to be conflating 2 opinions.

I'm not sure I really understand what the author is trying to say. Is it that OSS encourages a culture of being exploited and that GitHub is inadvertently pushing that culture? Or is it that recruiters don't know how to assess the code they see and this is somehow GitHub's fault? Or is it that working on code on your spare time is really a bad thing? Or maybe it's that only white men create GitHub accounts.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#14

Post by spindritf »

> the demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed toward white men than the software industry is, which is saying something

What?

> You just get what other people think is useful. Aside from which, GitHub displays a lot of useless stats about how many followers you have, and some completely psychologically manipulative stats about how often you commit and how many days it is since you had a day off.

You get social proof, some measure of conscientiousness, and a crowd-sourced filter. All on one page. That sounds great. I don't see the problem.

Companies want to hire influential workers. It's relevant. So is putting in the work.

And products which people find useful are vastly superior to those that the author finds well engineered. I'm guessing many company owners will share that view.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#15

Post by jballanc »

seivan wrote: post #2

"OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say. But I do find it funny that they don't think that Github should be used as a resumé but their "conferencing", tweets, books about diversifying and podcasts should do. Talkers or Makers? I write OSS on my free time because I feel like other alternatives might not be good enough. I spend a couple of hours in the morning, we…

The article does not say that conference talks, tweets, books, etc. should be used for hiring decisions and only GitHub should not. It says (right there at the end), that hiring is hard and any shortcut to try and get around that fact is wrong. It just so happens that "don't send us your resume, tell us your GitHub username" just happens to be the shortcut of the moment.

Also, I'd challenge you to find where the article says or even implies that you shouldn't be making stuff because you FEEL like it. Quite the opposite, in fact. You should be making stuff because you feel like it and not because you have some expectation of getting a better offer or being able to show off your GitHub profile at your next interview.

As for the white, male bias...not sure what to tell you. It's real. The statistics don't lie. I'm glad that you have had success as a non-white member of the LGBT community, but as the saying goes: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#16

Post by seivan »

jballanc wrote: post #15
seivan wrote: post #2

"OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say. But I do find it funny that they don't think that Github should be used as a resumé but their "conferencing", tweets, books about diversifying and podcasts should do. Talkers or Makers? I write OSS on my free time because I feel like other alternatives might not be good enough. I spend a couple of hours in the morning, we…

The article does not say that conference talks, tweets, books, etc. should be used for hiring decisions and only GitHub should not. It says (right there at the end), that hiring is hard and any shortcut to try and get around that fact is wrong. It just so happens that "don't send us your resume, tell us your GitHub username" just happens to be the shortcut of the moment. Also, I'd challenge you to find where the arti…

> The article does not say that conference talks, tweets, books, etc. should be used for hiring decisions and only GitHub should not. It says (right there at the end), that hiring is hard and any shortcut to try and get around that fact is wrong. It just so happens that "don't send us your resume, tell us your GitHub username" just happens to be the shortcut of the moment.

Actually, Ashe has that on the Hire Me Page.

>As for the white, male bias...not sure what to tell you. It's real. The statistics don't lie. I'm glad that you have had success as a non-white member of the LGBT community, but as the saying goes: the plural of anecdote is not data.

I understand this is a fact, but how this can be used against Github as a resumé or against OSS on your free time, I have a hard time seeing that. It comes off as incredibly stupid.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#18

Post by kybernetikos »

marknutter wrote: post #9

Unless you have your CV on github..

Yes, all the complaints about how you can't tell a story with your github profile seems to completely ignore gh-pages, a phenomenal service that does let you tell a story.

Maybe your github profile isn't a good portfolio by default, but it's an excellent service for creating your portfolio. On top of that, even a poor github profile provides more signal than most CVs I've read.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#19

Post by jballanc »

Beatniks.

That's what we'll get.

The Beats were a genuine movement of talented, hard working literary types. They were hip. They were cool. They were who everyone wanted to be, so people started emulating their dress, their mannerisms, their speach.

But they were not driven by the same passion. Their motivation was different.

Ginsberg said of the Beatniks: "If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash man."

If we let companies continue to use GitHub as a hiring tool, the OSS community will gradually become overrun by people attempting to achieve the same success as the OSS pioneers by mimicking their actions...but lacking their same motivation.

It's hard for me to say this. I like GitHub. I like Open Source. I am proud of what little I have managed to contribute to that community, and I think it is to my advantage if a company considers my GitHub profile when making a hiring decision. That said...I'd rather give up that advantage in exchange for keeping GitHub as an open community to share source, instead of a cauldron for the latest start up founders to pluck their next engineering hire from.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#20

Post by cheshire137 »

I disagree with this article completely. I'm a woman and a software developer and I think my Github is very valuable as a portfolio to me. Before I used Github, if I wanted some of my code to get shown off, I would make a blog post about it and call out specific chunks while linking to a ZIP of the whole thing. If a potential employer wanted to see samples of my code, they'd have to find my blog and dig through its archives. Now, they just find my Github. The author acts as though when an employer asks for someone's Github, it's going to be the main or only component to determine whether to hire or not. In interviews where I've been the interviewer, we've used it as a filter to determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own, if they contribute to open source projects, what their coding style is like, what languages they gravitate to writing in, and just as a general personality guideline. It's cool to see the kind of stuff a person codes in their personal account, whether it's joke repos that give a glimpse at the person's personality and sense of humor, or actual serious projects.
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