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Why GitHub is not your CV

blog.jcoglan.com

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Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#121

Post by hyperpape »

stonemetal wrote: post #88
hyperpape wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it say? 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.

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…

I took it as implicit that a measure of skill is something that should work for most people. If you just mean it can be an indicator of skill (that is, something that tells you positively that some people have skill, but doesn't tell you anything about most people) we have no disagreement, we just were using words differently.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#122

Post by steveklabnik »

nathan_long wrote: post #98

Can you name any job qualification which does not put some groups at a disadvantage? I want to be fair, but "do you have work you can show me?" is about as close to ideal as I can think of.

It's not that: it's that without acknowledging the bias, the 'meritocracy' philosophy suggests that those who do OSS are the best at what they do, which is not necessarily true.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#124

Post by jasonlotito »

kybernetikos wrote: post #53
jasonlotito wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, all the complaints about how you can't tell a story with your github profile seems to completely ignore gh-pages Yeah... that's not what they mean, and you know it.

Not really. Plenty of people have a site like http://kybernetikos.github.io/ which just tells a story about some of the projects they've got on github. I just threw that together quickly a while back and haven't updated it, but github whould make a fantastic site for a portfolio.

> Not really.

Apparently not.

When people are referring to using Github as your CV, they aren't talking about Github pages. They are talking about the repositories and the code. Github pages are another thing entirely, and not what is being discussed here.

> but github [pages] whould make a fantastic site for a portfolio.

No one would argue that github pages would make for an easy to use hosting provider for a portfolio site. No one is suggesting that.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#125

Post by WalterSear »

mkramlich wrote: post #111
WalterSear wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of art out there.

And almost all of it can be enjoyed for free, without its creators ever seeing a penny. 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

They also invented the 'sea of mediocrity' effect.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#126

Post by Nutella4 »

fecak wrote: post #80
hvidgaard wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When you say 'Screening based on a GitHub account', I think it's important to differentiate whether we are screening out those that don't have activity or moving those that do to the front of the line. There is a difference, and I think that difference is somewhat key to the author's article.

There is no difference unless you frequently hire the people you've put at the back of the line because of their lack of GitHub presence.

"I hired the other guy because I screened out the non-GitHubbers" and "I hired the other guy because I gave preference to active GitHubbers" -- I don't see the distinction.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#127

Post by tokenrove »

The argument that only the well-to-do contribute to OSS is bullshit, although I haven't looked at the data. Perhaps on a global scale, but within the gamut of rich and poor in North America, my own anecdata on the matter is just the opposite.

Github-as-the-new-resume is galling for plenty of other reasons.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#128

Post by zem »

seivan wrote: post #23

If you have time to peddling your diversify book, write angry tweets, go to conferences and do podcasts. You have time to write code. That is, if you're a software engineer (the people who use Github mainly)

what makes you think coglan and dryden are speaking on behalf of themselves, and not on behalf of all the people who don't have the time and luxury to write code, and are being unfairly and systemically penalised for it?

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#129

Post by csixty4 »

aestra wrote: post #90
bengillies wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say. OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward people who are either paid to do it at their current job, or who have few enough prior commitments in the rest of their life to be able to afford to do it outside of work. I'm not sure whether it biases towards white men or not, but I'm pretty sure it biases to…

As a condition of my employment, I had to sign a contract with my former employer that basically said since I was a software engineer with them, they owned all the software I wrote, even if I wrote it outside of my work hours. This obviously prevented me from working on any OSS. Also please read my above comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740089 The article links to another article about why it favors whi…

> As a condition of my employment, I had to sign a contract with my former employer that basically said since I was a software engineer with them, they owned all the software I wrote, even if I wrote it outside of my work hours.

I had an employer spring an intellectual property agreement just like that on me. I'd been working there for six months already, and had to threaten to walk out unless they specifically put in an exception for open source work in mine.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#130

Post by nathan_long »

steveklabnik wrote: post #122
nathan_long wrote: post #98

Can you name any job qualification which does not put some groups at a disadvantage? I want to be fair, but "do you have work you can show me?" is about as close to ideal as I can think of.

It's not that: it's that without acknowledging the bias, the 'meritocracy' philosophy suggests that those who do OSS are the best at what they do, which is not necessarily true.

No, but they are those most easily demonstrably good at what they do.

I mean, if you had a Ruby job opening and you got applications from Aaron Patterson and 20 other people, would it be unfair to put Patterson's application at the top?

There might be another applicant as good, but 1) you have to look harder and 2) you can't really tell until after you've hired them.

Picking a sure thing over a gamble is pretty understandable.

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