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Why GitHub is not your CV

blog.jcoglan.com

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Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#41

Post by cnkeller »

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…

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 family, friends, or hobbies, good for them. Knowing how to decompress and enjoy both work and life is just as valuable to me as crafting solutions to engineering problems.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#42

Post by jasonlotito »

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…

> I would never pass the bar at a startup that's looking for the typical startup stereotype developer.

I'm not seeing a problem with this. Not because you are a bad developer, but that you don't match the type of person they want to hire at that time.

> I'm 100% certain that I make more business sense to hire than all of your average workoholic startup developer, but I would never be considered.

What's your experience as a "startup developer" that you feel justified in making that claim?

> In short there is soooo much that you need to consider when hiring.

Of course. But I don't see Github being the only thing to consider, nor do I see it as being something that should be ignored. It's a piece of the puzzle.

You're a programmer. A good one at that. But have you ever stopped to consider they need someone more than that for where they are at? Someone who can be more than a programmer?

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#43

Post by hyperpape »

kybernetikos wrote: post #38
hyperpape wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point (imho) isn't that literally nothing on github can be a good hiring indicator. It's that people are treating github as if, by itself, it is an adequate way to assess candidates and decide who to interview. Maybe if you make a page like you're suggesting, then you can link to that page, but then github is more or less just a host.

Well, I can certainly accept that it's possible to overweight github as a hiring indicator, however that's not been my experience from either side of the interview, so I strongly suspect that if there's an optimum amount of attention to pay to services like github, most recruitment programs are on the 'too little' side rather than the 'too much'.

Yeah, while I agree with a lot in the article, I also agree with your generalization. Most companies are still looking for the boring "CS degree + 2 years experience, HR doesn't know what github is".

But there are also a lot of "hot" companies, of the sort that are talked about a lot on HN, that are pushing github as the end all be all.

The real point isn't about what the average company is doing, it's about which attitudes are sensible.

(Bias: I got my first job as a developer based on a combination of a non-technical friend's contacts and my github repos looking acceptable. I was three years out of grad school in the humanities at the time).

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#44

Post by theorique »

jballanc wrote: post #36
theorique wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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". The thing is, something can be both a filter against 'underrepresented groups' AND a valid criterion for hiring. Requiring a CS degree probably biases in favor of white and asian mal…

The point is, the lack of diversity in the Open Source community is greater than the lack of diversity in CS education programs. You'd be less likely to hire a black female if you said "send us your GitHub profile" than if you said "show me your CS degree".

Makes sense.

Many different factors need to be used as part of a full portfolio. Look at their resume, their github (if any), their formal education and self education, their work projects, and so forth.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#45

Post by jasonlotito »

kybernetikos wrote: post #18
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.

> 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.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#46

Post by king_jester »

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…

> 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.

This is covered by the OP, but if you are using Github as a part of your hiring decision, you are going to be putting at a disadvantage many different kinds of people who do not or cannot contribute to open source or personal projects. The OP argues that Github is not necessarily a useful indicator of the things you mentioned and if Github becomes a very influencing factor for many companies hiring decisions, then it becomes de facto required and means you must work more as a programmer than you already do. This extra work is more able to be done with those that have free time and more personal resources (e.g. income), so some types of people are probably being excluded from your hiring process, leading to more a of a developer monoculture.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#47

Post by pjmlp »

thenerdfiles wrote: post #30
thenerdfiles wrote: post #24

Your Website is where your CV goes. Whether it (your CV link, internally — extracts data from github? — or externally) points to your github profile or not is your decision. Why is this still being discussed ? Websites, people. Websites.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say (just to see what happens to this industry): On all these "job posting" sites, [Your Website] should be a Required Field for Web Developers. Period. Show me that you take the time to register a domain, configure a host, log in to that Linux box, and build the Web. A more pertinant question is: Why would you hire a Web Developer who has no place on the Web? It has to be Your Domain, Yo…

NDAs

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#48

Post by king_jester »

seivan wrote: post #16
jballanc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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.

The OP is arguing that if a company values or gives extra weight to candidates with OSS and/or Github contributions, they are by definition skewing their candidate selections towards white men. The main criticism is that the desire for easier metrics to make higher decisions has built in bias problems that will exclude whole groups of people.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#49

Post by mihaifm »

> That is, GitHub picks your most popular repos and puts those at the top. You have no say about what you consider important, or worthwhile, or interesting, or well-engineered, or valuable

Well said. This is also valid for stackoverflow, where your "top" questions are often silly ones that everyone can understand, while the ones you consider valuable are buried in anonymity. Some sort of showcase feature would be nice, in both cases.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#50

Post by scardine »

Any resumé screening and interviewing process boils down to only 3 essential questions:

- How well can you do this work? - Will you blend in (can you endure our work environment)? - Is it easy to work with you (you are not a dick, are you)?

So get over it, everything you do online IS more real than your resumé. Why? Because we are an online company and your online reputation is more important than a single document traditionally written in a corporate mumbo-jumbo style where the author tend to exaggerate his accomplishments.

When I ask for your github profile, I'm not asking for free work - FOSS is not about free work. I want to see your pull requests. Why? Because from time to time we do pull requests, and do it not because we are good Samaritans but out of sheer greed.

We use an open source technology stack. We push it's boundaries, we find bugs, we fix bugs. We find components lacking, we implement the desired feature and contribute back. We port code from other languages or create it from scratch and open source because it is cheaper than maintaining a closed source library. Is it free work? No, it is cooperation, and it makes sense economically.

Do you have a patch accepted in a high profile FOSS project? This means:

- You are doing serious work based on FOSS stacks - You have some communication skills - You have coding skills, can write tests and documentation - You can fix bugs and implement new features

I want to see the issues you open: are they well documented, with reproducible test cases?

I want to see your stack overflow profile: do you write good questions and good answers? Because a good question is 90% of a good answer, and good answers is what our customers demand.

Do you write really odd blog posts or troll around in online forums? Sorry, I guess you will not fit our work environment.

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