111–120 of 135 posts
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are you implying the only worthwhile fine art is the 0.1th percentile?
There's a lot of art out there.
Artists practically invented the 'race to the bottom' effect.
The Internet and digital media came late to the party, magnified the effect, then widened the number of domains impacted
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> 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.…
> 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. I really don't think anyone is saying not to do OSS on your free time. That there is a greater lack of diversity in OSS than in software engineering as a profession suggests that whatever it is that keeps minorities out of software engi…
It kind of reads like a no-child-left-behind or no-child-gets-ahead (can't remember which) proponent piece. We all have busy lives and saying its a race/gender etc. issue is way off the mark. I wish that whole section was left out as it just confuses the pretty simple point I think she was trying to make that open source engagement should not be an authoritative filter.
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This. While I understand that many people enjoy writing code and do so for fun, there are a large number of fantastic engineers that don't (myself included). Just as I wouldn't give someone preference for a robust profile, I'm not going to penalize someone for lack thereof. There is only so much time in the day and if they can do ten hours worth of work in eight hours and choose to spend their off time with their fam…
If you are working with the same technology stack we work and are not finding bugs or implementing new features you are not playing in the same league. We don't contribute to FOSS because we are hobbyists or good Samaritans, we do it because we need the features or fixes. We do it because in the long term it is cheaper and more efficient than maintaining a fork or developing a closed source component.
This doesn't mean that the people working in non-web industries "are not playing in the same league" with respect to skill, it just means that they don't have a huge public representation of the work they do.
> 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…
I've seen it lots on GitHub, and the problem seems to be growing. The guy that parachutes into a project -- one with money-impacting code already deployed on 1000's of real world systems used by ordinary people -- submits a pull request where he's modified every single file in the project, making only superficial changes to formatting and whitespace, and probably the result of an automated tool, and most importantly DOES NOT THOROUGHLY TEST IT beforehand... yet, from GitHub's perspective he's now (a) an accepted code contributor, (b) modified lots of files -- prolific! -- and (c) has a high count of lines added/removed -- IMPACTFUL! -- and (d) very very busy beaver "working" on lots of projects. "Gosh, we want him!"
But does he/she understand threading, leaks, races, parallelization, good architecture, good documentation, automation, reproducability, security, scalability, strategy, pacing, production support, risk mitigation, algorithmic complexity, tradeoffs, market priorities, DRY, YAGNI, edge cases, BATNAs, etc etc? Well... er... maybe not so much. But his/her eyes just light right up when you mention you have a foosball table and a keg in your cubicle-or-overturned-door "office"!
> 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…
If you think the issue is about what Github "cares" about, you missed the point entirely. The point is that those who have the free time and opportunity to contribute to OSS projects are more likely to be of some means. Given the economic realities of this country, those with some means are statistically speaking far more likely to be white males than anything else (which is confirmed by the data). The conversation t…
Is that a concern when hiring? Isn't the biggest concern false-positives? Hiring bad people is the worse hiring mistake. The argument around github seems to be that while the true positive rate is very high, there is also a high false negative rate (rejecting qualified people because they aren't on github). From a hiring perspective (purely arguing economics), that is an acceptable trade-off. Your upside is limited by a smaller pool of applicants (that are still qualified), but your downside is greatly smaller.
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That it's probably not a good measure of skill in any sense worth measuring, unless you think that 98.5% of the programmers worth hiring are men. I don't see how those two points are related. A measure can be good or bad independent of who you choose to measure by it. Github(not necessarily just having an account but actually looking at what they have done) is a good measure of skill because it allows you to see the…
> A good hiring filter filters for skill but doesn't filter for other attributes like race and gender. It's a trade-off. You want to see as many people meeting your criteria as you can, but don't want false positives. A github profile might have many false negatives (because of the white man skew), but that's a price a company might be willing to pay, if they get enough applicants anyway.
> 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…
The problem is you only get what you measure. Then you rank only/disproportionately by those narrow measurements. It leads to "gaming" of a system. To min-maxing. (To use an old RPG term.) See Congress and Wall Street for powerful examples of how "gamed" systems end up hurting the rest of us in tangible ways. I've seen it lots on GitHub, and the problem seems to be growing. The guy that parachutes into a project -- o…
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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…
>you're disregarding a large number of people for something beyond their control What you spend your free time on is not beyond your control (at least when you're a software dev and presumably paid enough to actually have free time). And you might decide to spend it on other, unrelated hobbies. That's cool, but you should be aware that unless you can present that hobby as interesting, unless you can sell it as someth…
...or you know, don't have family obligations.
I do agree to some extent with what you're saying, but as others have stated, it should be one of many factors taken into consideration, and it depends on the culture the company is trying to foster.
I personally have looked at github profiles of people I'm interviewing, if they chose to share it with me.
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?
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> 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. I really don't think anyone is saying not to do OSS on your free time. That there is a greater lack of diversity in OSS than in software engineering as a profession suggests that whatever it is that keeps minorities out of software engi…
It doesn't sit well with me that Ashe is trivializing the time commitment with 'oh they're just white dudes', when it's usually more a case of 'they love what they do and they make time for it'. If writing open source gives you the competitive edge in the market then that's great no-one should feel guilty about edging others out of higher profile work because they represent their skills better at recruitment. The dri…
Or, to take it to an extreme, why is Silicon Valley in California and not Botswana? Do you believe that the people of Botswana are inherently less intelligent? less motivated? less capable?
Or is it their environment which is working against them? Jared Diamond has probably one of the most interesting takes on how these sorts of inequities can arise on a regional level (Germs, Guns, and Steel: http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/03...), but is it such a stretch to imagine that the same sorts of inequities don't exist at smaller scales as well?