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Why GitHub is not your CV

blog.jcoglan.com

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Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#101

Post by mattgreenrocks »

jballanc wrote: post #19

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 coun…

What's the difference of motivation? Genuine interest in craft v. vain self-image cultivation?

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#102

Post by angersock »

kybernetikos wrote: post #35
jballanc wrote: post #19

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 coun…

This is always what happens, and it's usually a good thing. The people ahead of the curve have to be more motivated, but if we get more people sharing, more eyes to find and fix bugs, more people from other walks of life that understand a bit more of the hacker mentality, more acceptance of sharing code as a normal part of life, then the world is a better place. Yes, it's a shame that not everyone who plays the piano…

To play the other side of this...

It's not a good thing. Submitting proper bug reports is hard, and contributing to an existing project without making more work for others can be hard as well.

The best software does the most with the least amount of code while still being easy to read--and when a library or app gets there, it's time to stop.

The problem with a hypothetical swarm of people trying to pad their Githubs (the same way premeds pad their CVs, for example) is that they'll flood otherwise stable projects with garbage, or start rewrites for no other reason than they think they can do it better. A lot of good projects are going to get fucked up this way.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#104

Post by [deleted] »

hvidgaard wrote: post #31
cheshire137 wrote: post #20

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 a…

You either missed the point, or do not think it's a problem. > determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own Which he is arguing that you are not a bad developer for doing other things outside of work. The vast majority of people need to not code to regenerate. I can use myself as anecdotal evidence: I'm the goto guy when it's particular difficult to solve a bug, when it's a new framework, or when the te…

[deleted]

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#105

Post by adeaver »

fecak wrote: post #96
adeaver wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except in a live coding exercise most people are trying to be efficient or 'to it right' and paying attention to what they are doing and how. I realize this is anecdotal, but 95% of the public code in my git repo is stuff I did as fun. I didn't care about being right, or care about memory issues or being thread safe or anything other than 'I wonder if...' In that instance, and I suspect a lot of other people public w…

Sure, but if you were aware that your public git repos would be up for discussion in an interview, you might go back and switch some things up, no? At least a handful of times, I know that the repo that would be discussed was referenced before the interview as an agenda item - "we'll talk about PROJECT A from your GitHub account".

Odds are no, I won't do anything to the code. Why? Because for one, it would likely take a bit of time to 'make it decent' and secondly, by the time I've been informed that Project X will be talked about the interviewer has already looked at it.

If I change it at that point then I'm either being disingenuous or taking away the aspect he wanted to talk about.

All that said, if I put my github url on the resume then it's fair game to _talk about_. My point is (same as the articles) using it as a filter is generally a bad idea.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#106

Post by kmike84 »

themoonbus wrote: post #66
spindritf wrote: post #14

> 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 da…

It's a system which disproportionately rewards the lucky few whose employers allow them to either open source their work, or contribute to open source projects... or the people who spend their free time coding. I know plenty of folk who are damn good at their job but like to spend their free time on other, unrelated hobbies. I'm actually lucky enough to fall into the former category, but I feel that if you only hire…

Choosing a company to work for is not beyond one's control. It is possible to specifically look for a job that allows contributing to open-source in some way, or, in other words, to blacklist those who explicitly forbids that. I've done this in both two cases I was on a job market and still enjoy this decision.

Maybe I see the world through rose-colored glasses, but I don't see why sane employer would like to forbid contributing to open-source project if e.g. this project is used for work and has some bug. And there are always bugs or inconveniences if you use something heavily. For some industries it is even hard for a developer not to be on Github, because a lot of software she uses is on github, and in a lot of cases the best way to fix the issue she's working on is to contribute to open-source project that caused this issue, instead of e.g. working around it by some hack.

I agree that discarding people without respectable github presence is bad (unless you're looking for a very specific kind of people, e.g. for marketing purposes). But I can see how not being on Github at all (even with minimal presence) could be a bad sign in some cases. Of course, industries are very different and this shouldn't be a general rule.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#107

Post by aestra »

icecreampain wrote: post #57

> The demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed toward white men than the software industry is What the fuck am I reading? Is this asshole author trying to inject racism into something that is inherently race-, age-, gender-, wealth- and location-agnostic? Github doesn't care who you are, what you code or in what language you code it. And yet here we are with a dumbfuck author who, for the s…

You missed the point. Nobody is projecting white guilt into anything. The author linked to another article that presents some evidence as to why women might be less inclined to contribute to OSS, and have less code that was written outside of the workplace to display to potential employers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740089

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#108

Post by driverdan »

aestra wrote: post #87
fexl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are females with CS degrees less likely to have Github pages than males with CS degrees? Is it because of the testosterone which tends to make males show off more than females? If not that, then what?

Did you read the linked article on the subject? http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-th... Here's some key points from it if it is tl;dr Marginalized people in tech - women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others - have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity. Women are far more likely to be a primary caregiv…

The cited stats are from the general population, not specifically women with CS degrees. I'm curious to see if the same stats hold up in this smaller population.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#109

Post by mcphilip »

pa5tabear wrote: post #89
mcphilip wrote: post #60

I've been able to get through my career without LinkedIn or GitHub accounts as proof of my skills. I've pored my time and energy into the jobs I hold and hadn't gotten inspired to start contributing to OSS until just this week[1], so I have no publicly available proof of my skills. However, I can give in depth descriptions of interesting algorithms and data structures I developed and deployed related to: 1) Motion de…

Where can I learn more about #1? Sounds very interesting.

Glad you're interested! I just started on it and need a couple days to hit the poc milestone and then write up a guide for it. Shoot me an email to the address listed in my profile and I'll ping you when it's ready later this weekend.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#110

Post by zodiac »

The article is mixing two conceptually distinct points: that using github instead of CVs produces false negatives, and that it produces false positives.

It produces false negatives because lots of people who are good coders and who deserve to be hired don't have impressive github accounts for various legitimate reasons. I completely agree with this point.

However, to employers, false negatives are not that big of a problem. In some sense it's morally unfair that I exclude so many people who "deserve" the job, but if in the end I land a satisfactory candidate, I'm happy.

So to employers, the real question is, does github produce false positives? If my screening practice (I think we all agree that githubs and resumes should be used mainly as a screening step) is to ask for githubs instead of CVs, do I let better candidates through? If you read the article carefully, there is very little evidence presented for this; the author mostly argues that using github produces false negatives or weak signals.

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