61–70 of 135 posts
That said, my own presence on Github is pretty anemic, so maybe that's another form of bias!
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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…
This is what we are looking for in your github profile. If you don't have it, may be you are fit for the work, but clearly you are not playing the same game yet.
Ashe Dryden's original post has merit, I'm not contesting that. James' post however, is wrong on so many levels. It's worth noting that James is a UK based developer. Most of his points may be completely valid in the US but they are completely at odds with the UK climate. I've worked with an inordinate amount of tech companies in the UK and consulted with many more and I've yet to come across any that hire based prim…
'I know that it's rare to find a true indication of someones ability from just their github contributions but for example, it can help me discern whether a ruby candidate adheres to ruby best practices or not.' The problem with this is that you can't really make a logical decision when the code (on Github/bitbucket) is removed from its context. Maybe none of the code follows best practice, but there is a compelling r…
You are absolutely right. I can honestly only ever think of one circumstance where I dismissed someone based exclusively on what I saw in their github repo. I felt guilty so I phoned them a week later to discuss my thoughts and it turns out my suspicions were correct but that was categorically an edge case.
Forgive my naiveté, but why is this a topic of debate now? Did something radically change? Weren't you all doing this before Github existed?
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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
> 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'm actually lucky enough to fall into the former category, but I feel that if you only hire people with a respectable presence on github, you're disregarding a large number of people for something beyond their control that doesn't accurately reflect their ability.
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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".
I would advise the author not to worry about this. I recently went through a job change, and to enhance my chances, I spruced up my Github profile, and put a link to it at the top of my resume. It's not the most active profile, but all the work there are wholly self-initiated projects, all of which tackle some interesting, often original problem. One of the projects randomly ended up with a few stars without me posti…
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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…
The nice thing about programming: You don't have to perform in the 99.9 percentile (like Picasso) to make something people want.
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.…