Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why GitHub is not your CV

blog.jcoglan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 135 posts

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#91

Post by woah »

king_jester wrote: post #46
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 putti…

Or there's increased pressure on people to generalize solutions so that they can release them on their own as github projects, benefitting everybody.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#92

Post by adeaver »

fecak wrote: post #78
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…

Recruiter here. I've seen GitHub used in interviews where the interviewer may look at the code before the interview, and then bring up the repo during the interview to discuss it. This is usually to challenge why certain decisions were made, what could have been done differently, etc. It isn't much different than how a conversation would go after a live coding exercise to review the work, with the exception that the…

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 where they aren't contributing to something using the repo code as a talking point is counter-productive.

Why did I do it that way? Because I wanted to see what would happen.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#93

Post by Anderkent »

cnkeller wrote: post #41
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…

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…

> 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).

Sure, but there aren't many people who hate coding but still do it (in significant amounts) in their free time. so having a github profile is still a positive signal towards being a good coder (assuming, of course, that practice causes improvement).

It would be wasteful for a company to ignore this information.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#94

Post by Anderkent »

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…

>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 something that helps you grow, you are making yourself look less good that someone doing the same kind of work, and then doing OSS in their free time.

A company is not going to disregard you for not having a respectable github presence if no other candidates have a github presence either. But if there's a clear disparity, why should they take an extra risk by hiring you, rather than hire the person that can show them their actual contributions?

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#95

Post by Anderkent »

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…

> 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.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#96

Post by fecak »

adeaver wrote: post #92
fecak wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiter here. I've seen GitHub used in interviews where the interviewer may look at the code before the interview, and then bring up the repo during the interview to discuss it. This is usually to challenge why certain decisions were made, what could have been done differently, etc. It isn't much different than how a conversation would go after a live coding exercise to review the work, with the exception that the…

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".

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#97

Post by aestra »

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…

No.

I will not put my real name online in a public forum. Especially not linked with my CV that has a lot of personal information on it. I am afraid of harassment and stalkers, and I really want to control the amount of personal information that gets out there. I don't have a LinkedIn for that reason. I know a lot of that can be found if someone is digging hard enough, but I am extremely uncomfortable with just anyone finding my CV with a Google search. I am really uncomfortable with my work history being public information. In theory I could make that information password protected I guess.

Does it limit me? Probably.

My ideal, if you search for my name in a search engine and NOTHING comes back.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#99

Post by Millennium »

GitHub isn't a CV: it's a portfolio. That can be incredibly valuable in the hiring process, if it is used properly, but it is not the be-all and end-all of hiring. The article is right as far as this goes.

I cannot say that I agree with much of the rest of the article, and I agree with even less of the article on which it is based. But summarily rejecting non-GitHub candidates really is a bad idea.

Re: Why GitHub is not your CV

#100

Post by elarkin »

adeaver wrote: post #92
fecak wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiter here. I've seen GitHub used in interviews where the interviewer may look at the code before the interview, and then bring up the repo during the interview to discuss it. This is usually to challenge why certain decisions were made, what could have been done differently, etc. It isn't much different than how a conversation would go after a live coding exercise to review the work, with the exception that the…

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…

I occasionally do interviews for my company, and I use Github in the manner that fecak describes.

Before the interview, I will check out your stuff and make sure I have compilers/interpreters for your favorite languages (as best I can identify them). Then I will do a combination of live coding, and talking about repositories that might have caught my eye.

In this kind of situation "Why did I do it that way? Because I wanted to see what would happen" Is a great answer. It leads into a discussion about what happened, and whether or not you would do it again (without waiting half an hour for you to work through a problem of my devising). I could not care less whether the code was good or bad if you can show that you analyzed the experience and learned from it.

Part of writing good code is having written bad code in the past. I get that. I'm a programmer myself.

Now, we do not use Github as a filter (as the article discourages). If you put your Github in your resume, I will use it to make the interview itself a more valuable experience for both of us. If you chose not to put your Github on your resume, then you will get the generic interview, and I might not have your text editor/IDE ready to go.

Post reply on HN