30 ms·

On the flip side? As somebody who has plenty of open source projects--the set of employers who actually looks at them is within epsilon of zero. I have not once

On the flip side? As somebody who has plenty of open source projects--the set of employers who actually looks at them is within epsilon of zero. I have not once, not once gotten a meaningful question from anything I have posted on Github in any interview or client meeting even after suggesting up-front that it's worth taking a look. And I used to interview on a monthly basis just to keep in practice! No--instead you get dance-like-a-monkey "coding tests" (unpaid, of course) that are nonportable from employer to employer. Employers don't care. Employers say they care, but it's signaling. If I didn't write code on my own because I like it, it would be a serious negative to do so on the off chance that you run into the black-swan employer who takes the question seriously.

bad_user 9y ago
I don't share your experience and my guess is that you're not advertising your projects enough. If you have projects that you're proud of — mention them on your website, on your Twitter's bio, on your LinkedIn profile, mention them everywhere. Even better, once per year go to a conference and talk about those projects in front of an audience, such that you can then have videos on YouTube too. We like building things and there's absolutely no shame in marketing ourselves or in talking about the things we've built.
- eropple 9y ago
  I think maybe there's a miscommunication here. Of course I've had conversations about my projects. Of course I've discussed them at length and in public spaces. Prospective employers have never asked. And, yes, it's clearly highlighted on my resume and my LinkedIn profile, with an entire section of my resume calling out interesting and high-quality projects. Employers do not care. Other people? Sure. Employers? No.
  - GoToRO 9y ago
    There are also employers that downplay your achievements just to have a reason to offer you less money. The decision to hire you was already made and they advanced to salary negotiation but without telling you. You just have to know your real market value, how good are you compared to others.
    - eropple 9y ago
      Well, yeah. That's why, now, I run my own little consultancy. ;)
      - GoToRO 9y ago
        Thanks for mentioning this. I just finished a desktop app. They wanted to pay X but when the little app was done another colaborating company found out so I made 2.5 * X in total. Now the first company came back and they want another app for 4.5 * X. Is this how it all starts? :)
        eropple 9y ago
        Pretty much. Making the coefficients go up to the point where you can hire other people is the name of the game.
        GoToRO 9y ago
        Thanks!
- minimaxir 9y ago
  I have put my GitHub + GitHub projects on my resume as individual items with clickable links, but very few employers (mostly nontechnical recruiters) acknowledged them.
dualogy 9y ago
> As somebody who has plenty of open source projects--the set of employers who actually looks at them is within epsilon of zero. I have not once, not once gotten a meaningful question from anything I have posted on Github I guess that isn't the idea here. I think the idea is for them to grab a dev from the next cubicle/floor, point them to the repo, ask "can he code?", and the dev says "sure looks like code to me, yeah." "Showing up" is 90% of every move. Sure, the guy who copy-pasted something together could get the job that more talented dude who was too timid to share their stuff would be much more suitable for, but such are the trade-offs here.
- eropple 9y ago
  In my experience, that doesn't happen. And I go on a lot of interviews; it's an activity that helps with a set of skills that I always need to keep sharp. And, along those lines, I get a lot of offers! But it has never-not-once been related to my Github profile. In my experience, it is employers signaling how cool they are before they ask you to do their multi-hour coding test for no money.
  - hobofan 9y ago
    > before they ask you to do their multi-hour coding test for no money Where do all of you keep finding those companies? Is that an SV thing, or am I just not applying to "prestigious" enough companies? I've been on my fair share of interviews and haven't had that happen once, along with no whiteboard interviews. I can echo your experience about Github projects playing a small role apart from signaling though. Once, an interviewer mentioned one of the Github projects I worked on and we exchanged 2-3 sentences about it, but I don't think it had a significant impact on the result of the interview.
    - eropple 9y ago
      It's pretty much a standard interview practice in Boston. As a rule, I don't and have never consented to them because I find them exploitative.
    - literallycancer 9y ago
weberc2 9y ago
Just to add my data point, my company does look at side projects as part of the hiring process.
crdoconnor 9y ago
I noticed this as well. The interviewer has checked the "codes in his spare time" checkbox" and I've guilt tripped them into skipping the dance like a monkey test once or twice by pointing them at my github but that's about it. I'd be super impressed if a prospective employer looked and made some sort of salient comment, but it's never happened and probably won't.
- pault 9y ago
  As much as I hate it, the problem with taking the github profile as evidence of proficiency is that it's easy to plagiarize, and the applicant has a significant financial incentive to do so. Obviously plagiarizing code samples would be a terrible career strategy, but that doesn't protect you as an employer if you get the one in a thousand con artist who can collect six months' salary before people start to ask difficult questions.
notzorbo3 9y ago
> Employers don't care. The wrong empoyers don't care. The right ones do. My github portfolio is a means for me to determine if a potential employer is suitable for me, not the other way around. It's not a test for me to pass, it's a test for a potential employer to pass. If a recruiter brings up things listed on my LinkedIn page, I know they're not suitable for me. If they bring up things on my github, I'm reasonably positive I want to talk to them. One company's CEO asked me a whole bunch of questions about one of my projects. Not as an interview, but as a peer. He had a genuine interest in my side projects. If he'd asked me to come work for him, I would have said yes in an instance.
- watwut 9y ago
  You list things on linked in just so you can blame potential employers for looking at it? I dont even have linked in account and still find it ridiculous to hold it against them if they dare to look there.
  - hobofan 9y ago
    It's not that they "dare to look there", it's that they _only_ look there and don't care enough to look even a tiny bit further.
  - warcher 9y ago
    “How much time is the interviewer willing to invest” is a super legit question to be asking. It tells you a lot about how many shits they give about you in particular and is a good proxy for the quality of the team in general.
- ifhd 9y ago
  Thats a pretty arbitrary line. Why wouldn't they want to ask about hte projects you poured thousands of hours of paid time into?
- kemitche 9y ago
  I don't expect my surgeon to do surgery in his spare time. Nor my plumber, dentist, gardener, or any other professional. I look at their past work history and reviews from customers and/or coworkers. I will never understand the belief that side projects are in any way necessary. I'd much rather have a well rounded individual who isn't moonlighting on other things but rather can bring his clear focused mind to the office.
city41 9y ago
I disagree, my side projects have led to many employment opportunities, including my current one. I also get recruiters contacting me and mentioning my side projects. I often suspect their system just found my projects and dumped them into the email, but other times the email is clearly from a human who has read my blog and/or investigated my projects.
- kakwa_ 9y ago
  I've a bunch of personal projects on github. They are not that successful, a few dozens stars generally for the most serious ones. And also, there are not especially trendy (no fancy react app or js library, but stuff in python (lib, web ui), C, a puppet module, some shell scripts and little bit of perl). With that, in 5 years, I was contacted only by 2 or 3 recruiters/contacts that emailed me because of my projects. For two of them, it was more a general look at which languages I used in my projects ("hey, this guy knows Python and Bash, he may be good for an SRE position"). The last one actually came across one of my project which is a little bit domain specific (an RFC 3161 timestamp server), not sure if it would have ended in a recruitment offer however. I get more offers through my crappy linkedin profile.
Consultant32452 9y ago
No--instead you get dance-like-a-monkey "coding tests" (unpaid, of course) that are nonportable from employer to employer. Anecdote time! I had a potential employer ask me to do the tutorial for their framework before the interview. I submitted a pull request to fix errors in their documentation during the interview. I got the offer but didn't wind up taking it. I don't do those types of things anymore because it's more beneficial to them than it is to me. I could see the value in doing it if I was a junior dev trying to get my foot in the door though.
- canadiancreed 9y ago
  I had something similar where they had a test app online, but the test environment was broken to the point of it being non usable. Emailed them as to what was broken including error messages. Got an email cancelling my interview twenty minutes later.
  - jonhermansen 9y ago
    Hopefully they weren’t trying to hire you for a QA position...
    - canadiancreed 9y ago
      From my brief interaction, I';d be amazed if they were aware of the concept of QA
freshhawk 9y ago
Interesting. Hasn't been my experience. I've hired and been hired based largely on github code many times.
jogjayr 9y ago
This. Not once has a potential employer ever said to me: "Based on your Github, you can obviously fizzbuzz with the best of them, and know a for-loop from an if-statement. Let's skip the phone screen/homework assignment and get you onsite directly."
- foo101 9y ago
  Time for anecdotes. Twice in my career, an employer has looked at my GitHub and asked specific questions about certain projects, what motivated me to write the project, why did I not use a popular big data technology to write the project, etc.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    But, did that interest lead directly to a job offer? My guess would be no, knowing the industry and given no other information about your situation.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  That's only because most recruiters are non-technical. They lack the ability to gauge your ability.
- stevekemp 9y ago
  There was a time, last year, when I'd regularly receive email-SPAM from recruiters talking about one of my C++ projects. (Console based mail-client with Lua scripting.) Later I moved that project to a github-organization, as it didn't need to be tied solely to me, and I wanted to allow others to commit, etc. I'm not sure if the SPAM-mails went away because recruiters stopped scanning github for profiles, or because there was no obvious link between that particular project and my personal email.
- exodust 9y ago
  Speaking of FizzBuzz, I had never heard of the fizzbuzz test until recently in interview. In 15 years of frontend work I've never needed to find if a number is divisible by another number, so I forgot about the modulus operator '%', and stumbled on that question. Apparently not knowing about that made me unqualified for the job, above all other evidence of my frontend work and achievements. It takes less than 10 seconds to find the solution, but in interviews we are expected to have the entire JS reference guide in memory.
vacri 9y ago
One company I work for rejected a candidate based on Github - he'd cloned some repos and stamped his name on it, and claimed they were his. The hiring tech smelled something fishy, and the candidate said that he worked with these various other repos on the backend. Hiring tech reached out to the owners of several repos, and none of them had heard of the candidate before. Github was used in this hiring process to reveal a fraud - a different 'success' story to others commenting here, but it definitely birthed 'a meaningful question' or two.
- joshribakoff 9y ago
  Likewise I've deleted resumes because they claimed to have coded a website when it's clear they simply installed out of the box software. They didn't explicitly lie and say they coded it from scratch, but I felt like they were implying that Another time I rejected due to side work was a candidate claimed to have written the "worlds fastest framework". Even if it was fast it's possible there's something out there faster, so it showed lack of touch with reality, ego, and lack of self awareness. Note I gave the candidate the chance to substantiate their claims and was met with profanity
  - meesterdude 9y ago
    > so it showed lack of touch with reality, ego, and lack of self awareness. feel like they'll fit right in with any number of startups out there! But good for you on calling them on it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
ioddly 9y ago
I imagine it varies. I have gotten some good mileage out of my github projects in interviews that have resulted from the HN whoishiring thread; I'm sure if I went in for an interview at some line-of-business software shop here in Houston this would only result in a blank stare.
warcher 9y ago
I am technical and we will sit down and go line by line, haha. And I know where alllllllll the fun code is hiding, not just the boilerplate. I get real deep in there. I’m sure my methods probably weed out some folks who don’t or can’t drop trou, but I never expected to catch every single fish in the ocean.
apple4ever 9y ago
You must be applying to the wrong companies then. I just got done doing interviews, and I looked at what the second round candidates had available on GitHub and their personal site, and the one who got the job had about 5 projects that were impressive. Good employers care. I care. Its not signaling. Its important.
- 0xfeba 9y ago
 Best company I worked at looked at my personal site and Github, albeit briefly, ahead of time and didn't ask much if anything about it (IIRC). They asked more peer-level questions. Pretty casual. As my first job out of college they didn't expect much from me but later told me the other devs were impressed. Best group of devs I've ever worked with. All of them were pretty smart, wrote nice code, comments, knew how to use version control, and configuration management. They wrote their own JS framework that interfaced with a Java backend. I would later realize (in retrospect) this code was really well written and maintained. Worst company I worked (work) for (but pays well) had me answer a few questions on a whiteboard. One of which was 'not even wrong' (the answer was: "HTML5 gave us the tag to replace "). They were desperate for bodies after a bunch of people left. They also partake in the usual H1B/contractor games and wonder why they have shit code. Meh, my project is going well. If they have me work on their main .NET monstrosity though, I'll quit. Haha, jokes on them.
 - contras1970 9y ago
 > the answer was: "HTML5 gave us the tag to replace " i bet the question was: "what has HTML5 done for us?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
 - 0xfeba 9y ago
 Yes, it was. And then she followed up more specifically with, "what we can use instead of the tag?" I said, "CSS, but it doesn't have much to do with HTML5's features."
- 9y ago
trevor-e 9y ago
FWIW, I'll look at a candidate's Github account whenever they list it on their resume. That doesn't mean I'll bring it up during the interview unless there was something particularly interesting to talk about. It's pretty useful for screening candidates, especially looking at code written <1 year ago. I do keep in mind that code written in free time might not have the same standards as production code, but often there are some red flags that carry over.
- candiodari 9y ago
 You realize that github dates can easily be falsified, right ? Besides, you are only using this as a negative ? So you'll actually hire people who don't put in extra effort over people who put slightly substandard free time code online ? That seems like a losing strategy. I've always found that willingness to put in effort vastly outperforms ability. Not to an infinite extent, but quite a bit.
 - trevor-e 9y ago
 >You realize that github dates can easily be falsified, right ? Yea, but why would someone bother in this case? >Besides, you are only using this as a negative ? So you'll actually hire people who don't put in extra effort over people who put slightly substandard free time code online ? That seems like a losing strategy. That's not what I said at all. It's potentially a positive or a negative, just like anything else on a resume. I've seen plenty of Github profiles that have files with 2000 lines of spaghetti code and no structure or testability. Just like I've seen profiles with neat projects and excellent code. >I've always found that willingness to put in effort vastly outperforms ability. Not to an infinite extent, but quite a bit. I agree with this in general too.
 - mi100hael 9y ago
 > You realize that github dates can easily be falsified, right ? If someone knows that much git, I'd hire them regardless. I'm so sick of untangling other peoples failed merges or trying to explain what the "not a fast-forward" issue means when their push fails.
ultrasaurus 9y ago
Hiring manager here who reads Github profiles -- it just occurred to me that I've almost never actually mentioned it to the interviewee. It's flavoured the conversation for sure (except for the bootcamp grads who all have identical Githubs) but I tend to talk more about your process than the actual code.
- jeffwilcox 9y ago
  When I've had time to prepare, I've taken the time to review candidates' GitHub repositories, and it has surely helped to really understand what "open source experience" means vs "coding camp attendee". It's fun to ask about a particular class or set of files and ask the candidate to teach me something about the project. It shows we care, and also helps me tease apart a candidate's communication abilities.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  As a software engineer who does technical interviews, I also regularly review GitHub contributions if mentioned on the resume. It's not a deal killer if someone doesn't have these things...but if you're up against another candidate who does (and their work is good)...then the other candidate is likely getting the job.
  - nanodano 9y ago
    What % of candidates have side projects to show you? When I did interviews, I saw probably less than 10% have any side projects to show.
    - pc86 9y ago
      I work in consulting, almost entirely for federal and state government. Here that number is low single digits.
      - nanodano 9y ago
        This is what I think most people fail to understand. It's not a _requirement_. The vast majority of people DON'T have side projects. Companies can't afford to simply auto-reject everyone who doesn't have side projects. The point is that if you do have any, it can help make you stand out dramatically.
Macha 9y ago
So when I was interviewing as a intern and junior developer, I had _most_ places that actually interviewed me look at my side projects I'd listed on my CV. The one interview I've done at an intermediate level (at a company that reached out to me) also did.
voidmain 9y ago
I disagree with you, and grandparent, and the article :-) I've hired plenty of great engineers who didn't have side projects on github. I have never specifically been looking for people that don't have a life outside the field, and unlike GP I have found that there are other ways to evaluate people that can identify great engineers with very few mistakes. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't see your high quality or impressive open source code as a huge plus. Quantity doesn't matter -- if anything if you're super prolific I might wonder if you have much energy for your day job -- but I'm not going to pass up a chance to see what kind of work you do. And because quantity doesn't matter, I think that writing a little bit of code "for your resume" (every once in a while, to reflect your continuing development as an engineer) is a pretty reasonable investment even if you don't happen to want to spend your whole life outside work programming. It's not required, but it might get you a really great position some day, even if like the OP you're up front about having a life outside of software engineering.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
karmelapple 9y ago
Another hiring manager here who reads GitHub profiles and loves to have a candidate walk me through what challenges they experienced, design decisions they had to make, etc. One question I have for the grandparent post: what would a meaningful question be? Is the description I mention above seem like a meaningful way to discuss the work you took the time to share with me?
justboxing 9y ago
> instead you get dance-like-a-monkey "coding tests" (unpaid, of course) that are nonportable from employer to employer. This - the non-portable aspect - is what irks me the most. Especially for enterprise developers. Since most of the software we develop is under NDA, we cannot put any of it online to showcase our skills. I've had to do 3 different take-home "coding exercises" over the last 10 days. 1 was for a Hedge Fund, another for a Real Estate company and a 3rd for an Accounting SaaS company. I'm in the process of publishing these coding exercise solutions after polishing it up a bit more onto my github profile. Still, I feel like this will also be a waste, because like OP says, most companies have their own specific "Coding tests" and wouldn't take an already coded solution to accept skills and experience of the candidate.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  That's because they want to gauge you against other candidates and the only way to do that fairly is with a standardized test.
  - freedomben 9y ago
    I see the point, but some of these tests can take several hours or longer to complete. I think they shoot themselvess in the foot a bit because many of the really good devs won't waste their time with that. My evidence is all purely anecdotal, however.
    - aminorex 9y ago
      If all you've got is a foot-gun, everything looks like a foot.
- freedomben 9y ago
  This is becoming a real problem IMHO. Asking me to do 3 to 4 hours of work on a "test" just to get to a real interview is a big ask. I do it because I have to; but as my time has gotten more valuable I've started just politely refusing and thanking the recruiter for reaching out. I have a ton of stuff on github that I'd much rather talk about.
wybiral 9y ago
I've been taken aback during interviews and client conversations when they brought up details about projects I'd posted on my off time. There are people who look at that stuff.
jackgolding 9y ago
I agree with this, the whole need for a portfolio for a back-office role is bizarre to me - no one who has asked for my github has asked me about them, they are much more interested in me talking through my work related projects.
aaronbrethorst 9y ago
That's too bad. This is my favorite interview question to ask.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
indigochill 9y ago
Anecdotally, as someone who has been involved in hiring and (sort of) cares about side projects, it's not actually the technical implementation I care about, that's true. It's about the applicant signalling "I care about this stuff". But it's far from the only indicator and shouldn't be given too much weight. I'd gladly hire someone who had no side projects but passed our technical test/interview and soft skills interview. As for why I don't take Github profiles too seriously, we had plenty of applicants who did have projects on their Github profiles who tripped all over themselves on our simple coding test. Maybe we would have found out something similar by digging into their commit history, but that would be an even greater time investment than the hiring process already was.
- SandwichTeeth 9y ago
  I think that coding tests and challenges apply a sort of artificial pressure and requirement to have things memorized that aren't there in the real world. I think it would be a mistake to discount a candidate who has good code on their github when they had time to sit, think through problems without being under a magnifying glass, but trips up during a technical interview challenge/puzzle/whiteboard or whatever. Maybe in those candidates you could actually walk through their projects with them and try to determine if they have a deep understanding of what they wrote. To me, that seems a better indicator of how they would perform on a team with real problems, rather than having to puke up a pseudocode merge-sort from memory.
pawelkomarnicki 9y ago
There was one, (literally: ONE) time I check out somebody's GitHub profile when making a hiring decision. It was a clusterfuck of forks, and source repos were a total mess, no documentation, nothing. In such case I would rather NOT see a GitHub link like that, really. He didn't get a job.
- Double_a_92 9y ago
  It would be nice if GitHub offered a grouping function for "random" forks. Sometimes you just fork something out of interest or to fix some small bug and they mess up your profile...
cooervo 9y ago
same here, have github full of projects. Nobody ever mentions them.
oelmekki 9y ago
Code is for tech reviewers (CTO or inside developers). Most often, they will look at your repos, but they are not the ones you will chat with. It's still useful to have material for non tech people, though. That's why, additionally to my github profile, I maintain an angelList profile on which I document the why's and how's of my projects from a non developer perspective. But of course, the single most important thing you can do in an interview with a non tech guy is to show them you understand their business, what they're trying to achieve, and that you find it exciting (provided it's true, obviously). From having been on the hiring side, I've learned that the worst thing to say is : "yeah, actually it doesn't really matter what we will do, I'm mostly interested in coding".

bad_user 9y ago

I don't share your experience and my guess is that you're not advertising your projects enough. If you have projects that you're proud of — mention them on your website, on your Twitter's bio, on your LinkedIn profile, mention them everywhere. Even better, once per year go to a conference and talk about those projects in front of an audience, such that you can then have videos on YouTube too. We like building things and there's absolutely no shame in marketing ourselves or in talking about the things we've built.

eropple 9y ago
I think maybe there's a miscommunication here. Of course I've had conversations about my projects. Of course I've discussed them at length and in public spaces. Prospective employers have never asked. And, yes, it's clearly highlighted on my resume and my LinkedIn profile, with an entire section of my resume calling out interesting and high-quality projects. Employers do not care. Other people? Sure. Employers? No.
- GoToRO 9y ago
  There are also employers that downplay your achievements just to have a reason to offer you less money. The decision to hire you was already made and they advanced to salary negotiation but without telling you. You just have to know your real market value, how good are you compared to others.
  - eropple 9y ago
    Well, yeah. That's why, now, I run my own little consultancy. ;)
    - GoToRO 9y ago
      Thanks for mentioning this. I just finished a desktop app. They wanted to pay X but when the little app was done another colaborating company found out so I made 2.5 * X in total. Now the first company came back and they want another app for 4.5 * X. Is this how it all starts? :)
      - eropple 9y ago
        Pretty much. Making the coefficients go up to the point where you can hire other people is the name of the game.
        GoToRO 9y ago
        Thanks!
minimaxir 9y ago
I have put my GitHub + GitHub projects on my resume as individual items with clickable links, but very few employers (mostly nontechnical recruiters) acknowledged them.

dualogy 9y ago

> As somebody who has plenty of open source projects--the set of employers who actually looks at them is within epsilon of zero. I have not once, not once gotten a meaningful question from anything I have posted on Github I guess that isn't the idea here. I think the idea is for them to grab a dev from the next cubicle/floor, point them to the repo, ask "can he code?", and the dev says "sure looks like code to me, yeah." "Showing up" is 90% of every move. Sure, the guy who copy-pasted something together could get the job that more talented dude who was too timid to share their stuff would be much more suitable for, but such are the trade-offs here.

eropple 9y ago
In my experience, that doesn't happen. And I go on a lot of interviews; it's an activity that helps with a set of skills that I always need to keep sharp. And, along those lines, I get a lot of offers! But it has never-not-once been related to my Github profile. In my experience, it is employers signaling how cool they are before they ask you to do their multi-hour coding test for no money.
- hobofan 9y ago
  > before they ask you to do their multi-hour coding test for no money Where do all of you keep finding those companies? Is that an SV thing, or am I just not applying to "prestigious" enough companies? I've been on my fair share of interviews and haven't had that happen once, along with no whiteboard interviews. I can echo your experience about Github projects playing a small role apart from signaling though. Once, an interviewer mentioned one of the Github projects I worked on and we exchanged 2-3 sentences about it, but I don't think it had a significant impact on the result of the interview.
  - eropple 9y ago
    It's pretty much a standard interview practice in Boston. As a rule, I don't and have never consented to them because I find them exploitative.
  - literallycancer 9y ago

weberc2 9y ago

Just to add my data point, my company does look at side projects as part of the hiring process.

crdoconnor 9y ago

I noticed this as well. The interviewer has checked the "codes in his spare time" checkbox" and I've guilt tripped them into skipping the dance like a monkey test once or twice by pointing them at my github but that's about it. I'd be super impressed if a prospective employer looked and made some sort of salient comment, but it's never happened and probably won't.

pault 9y ago
As much as I hate it, the problem with taking the github profile as evidence of proficiency is that it's easy to plagiarize, and the applicant has a significant financial incentive to do so. Obviously plagiarizing code samples would be a terrible career strategy, but that doesn't protect you as an employer if you get the one in a thousand con artist who can collect six months' salary before people start to ask difficult questions.

notzorbo3 9y ago

> Employers don't care. The wrong empoyers don't care. The right ones do. My github portfolio is a means for me to determine if a potential employer is suitable for me, not the other way around. It's not a test for me to pass, it's a test for a potential employer to pass. If a recruiter brings up things listed on my LinkedIn page, I know they're not suitable for me. If they bring up things on my github, I'm reasonably positive I want to talk to them. One company's CEO asked me a whole bunch of questions about one of my projects. Not as an interview, but as a peer. He had a genuine interest in my side projects. If he'd asked me to come work for him, I would have said yes in an instance.

watwut 9y ago
You list things on linked in just so you can blame potential employers for looking at it? I dont even have linked in account and still find it ridiculous to hold it against them if they dare to look there.
- hobofan 9y ago
  It's not that they "dare to look there", it's that they _only_ look there and don't care enough to look even a tiny bit further.
- warcher 9y ago
  “How much time is the interviewer willing to invest” is a super legit question to be asking. It tells you a lot about how many shits they give about you in particular and is a good proxy for the quality of the team in general.
ifhd 9y ago
Thats a pretty arbitrary line. Why wouldn't they want to ask about hte projects you poured thousands of hours of paid time into?
kemitche 9y ago
I don't expect my surgeon to do surgery in his spare time. Nor my plumber, dentist, gardener, or any other professional. I look at their past work history and reviews from customers and/or coworkers. I will never understand the belief that side projects are in any way necessary. I'd much rather have a well rounded individual who isn't moonlighting on other things but rather can bring his clear focused mind to the office.

city41 9y ago

I disagree, my side projects have led to many employment opportunities, including my current one. I also get recruiters contacting me and mentioning my side projects. I often suspect their system just found my projects and dumped them into the email, but other times the email is clearly from a human who has read my blog and/or investigated my projects.

kakwa_ 9y ago
I've a bunch of personal projects on github. They are not that successful, a few dozens stars generally for the most serious ones. And also, there are not especially trendy (no fancy react app or js library, but stuff in python (lib, web ui), C, a puppet module, some shell scripts and little bit of perl). With that, in 5 years, I was contacted only by 2 or 3 recruiters/contacts that emailed me because of my projects. For two of them, it was more a general look at which languages I used in my projects ("hey, this guy knows Python and Bash, he may be good for an SRE position"). The last one actually came across one of my project which is a little bit domain specific (an RFC 3161 timestamp server), not sure if it would have ended in a recruitment offer however. I get more offers through my crappy linkedin profile.

Consultant32452 9y ago

No--instead you get dance-like-a-monkey "coding tests" (unpaid, of course) that are nonportable from employer to employer. Anecdote time! I had a potential employer ask me to do the tutorial for their framework before the interview. I submitted a pull request to fix errors in their documentation during the interview. I got the offer but didn't wind up taking it. I don't do those types of things anymore because it's more beneficial to them than it is to me. I could see the value in doing it if I was a junior dev trying to get my foot in the door though.

canadiancreed 9y ago
I had something similar where they had a test app online, but the test environment was broken to the point of it being non usable. Emailed them as to what was broken including error messages. Got an email cancelling my interview twenty minutes later.
- jonhermansen 9y ago
  Hopefully they weren’t trying to hire you for a QA position...
  - canadiancreed 9y ago
    From my brief interaction, I';d be amazed if they were aware of the concept of QA

freshhawk 9y ago

Interesting. Hasn't been my experience. I've hired and been hired based largely on github code many times.

jogjayr 9y ago

This. Not once has a potential employer ever said to me: "Based on your Github, you can obviously fizzbuzz with the best of them, and know a for-loop from an if-statement. Let's skip the phone screen/homework assignment and get you onsite directly."

foo101 9y ago
Time for anecdotes. Twice in my career, an employer has looked at my GitHub and asked specific questions about certain projects, what motivated me to write the project, why did I not use a popular big data technology to write the project, etc.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  But, did that interest lead directly to a job offer? My guess would be no, knowing the industry and given no other information about your situation.
chrisco255 9y ago
That's only because most recruiters are non-technical. They lack the ability to gauge your ability.
stevekemp 9y ago
There was a time, last year, when I'd regularly receive email-SPAM from recruiters talking about one of my C++ projects. (Console based mail-client with Lua scripting.) Later I moved that project to a github-organization, as it didn't need to be tied solely to me, and I wanted to allow others to commit, etc. I'm not sure if the SPAM-mails went away because recruiters stopped scanning github for profiles, or because there was no obvious link between that particular project and my personal email.
exodust 9y ago
Speaking of FizzBuzz, I had never heard of the fizzbuzz test until recently in interview. In 15 years of frontend work I've never needed to find if a number is divisible by another number, so I forgot about the modulus operator '%', and stumbled on that question. Apparently not knowing about that made me unqualified for the job, above all other evidence of my frontend work and achievements. It takes less than 10 seconds to find the solution, but in interviews we are expected to have the entire JS reference guide in memory.

vacri 9y ago

One company I work for rejected a candidate based on Github - he'd cloned some repos and stamped his name on it, and claimed they were his. The hiring tech smelled something fishy, and the candidate said that he worked with these various other repos on the backend. Hiring tech reached out to the owners of several repos, and none of them had heard of the candidate before. Github was used in this hiring process to reveal a fraud - a different 'success' story to others commenting here, but it definitely birthed 'a meaningful question' or two.

joshribakoff 9y ago
Likewise I've deleted resumes because they claimed to have coded a website when it's clear they simply installed out of the box software. They didn't explicitly lie and say they coded it from scratch, but I felt like they were implying that Another time I rejected due to side work was a candidate claimed to have written the "worlds fastest framework". Even if it was fast it's possible there's something out there faster, so it showed lack of touch with reality, ego, and lack of self awareness. Note I gave the candidate the chance to substantiate their claims and was met with profanity
- meesterdude 9y ago
  > so it showed lack of touch with reality, ego, and lack of self awareness. feel like they'll fit right in with any number of startups out there! But good for you on calling them on it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

ioddly 9y ago

I imagine it varies. I have gotten some good mileage out of my github projects in interviews that have resulted from the HN whoishiring thread; I'm sure if I went in for an interview at some line-of-business software shop here in Houston this would only result in a blank stare.

warcher 9y ago

I am technical and we will sit down and go line by line, haha. And I know where alllllllll the fun code is hiding, not just the boilerplate. I get real deep in there. I’m sure my methods probably weed out some folks who don’t or can’t drop trou, but I never expected to catch every single fish in the ocean.

apple4ever 9y ago

You must be applying to the wrong companies then. I just got done doing interviews, and I looked at what the second round candidates had available on GitHub and their personal site, and the one who got the job had about 5 projects that were impressive. Good employers care. I care. Its not signaling. Its important.

0xfeba 9y ago
Best company I worked at looked at my personal site and Github, albeit briefly, ahead of time and didn't ask much if anything about it (IIRC). They asked more peer-level questions. Pretty casual. As my first job out of college they didn't expect much from me but later told me the other devs were impressed. Best group of devs I've ever worked with. All of them were pretty smart, wrote nice code, comments, knew how to use version control, and configuration management. They wrote their own JS framework that interfaced with a Java backend. I would later realize (in retrospect) this code was really well written and maintained. Worst company I worked (work) for (but pays well) had me answer a few questions on a whiteboard. One of which was 'not even wrong' (the answer was: "HTML5 gave us the tag to replace "). They were desperate for bodies after a bunch of people left. They also partake in the usual H1B/contractor games and wonder why they have shit code. Meh, my project is going well. If they have me work on their main .NET monstrosity though, I'll quit. Haha, jokes on them.
- contras1970 9y ago
 > the answer was: "HTML5 gave us the tag to replace " i bet the question was: "what has HTML5 done for us?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
 - 0xfeba 9y ago
 Yes, it was. And then she followed up more specifically with, "what we can use instead of the tag?" I said, "CSS, but it doesn't have much to do with HTML5's features."
9y ago

trevor-e 9y ago

FWIW, I'll look at a candidate's Github account whenever they list it on their resume. That doesn't mean I'll bring it up during the interview unless there was something particularly interesting to talk about. It's pretty useful for screening candidates, especially looking at code written <1 year ago. I do keep in mind that code written in free time might not have the same standards as production code, but often there are some red flags that carry over.

candiodari 9y ago
You realize that github dates can easily be falsified, right ? Besides, you are only using this as a negative ? So you'll actually hire people who don't put in extra effort over people who put slightly substandard free time code online ? That seems like a losing strategy. I've always found that willingness to put in effort vastly outperforms ability. Not to an infinite extent, but quite a bit.
- trevor-e 9y ago
  >You realize that github dates can easily be falsified, right ? Yea, but why would someone bother in this case? >Besides, you are only using this as a negative ? So you'll actually hire people who don't put in extra effort over people who put slightly substandard free time code online ? That seems like a losing strategy. That's not what I said at all. It's potentially a positive or a negative, just like anything else on a resume. I've seen plenty of Github profiles that have files with 2000 lines of spaghetti code and no structure or testability. Just like I've seen profiles with neat projects and excellent code. >I've always found that willingness to put in effort vastly outperforms ability. Not to an infinite extent, but quite a bit. I agree with this in general too.
- mi100hael 9y ago
  > You realize that github dates can easily be falsified, right ? If someone knows that much git, I'd hire them regardless. I'm so sick of untangling other peoples failed merges or trying to explain what the "not a fast-forward" issue means when their push fails.

ultrasaurus 9y ago

Hiring manager here who reads Github profiles -- it just occurred to me that I've almost never actually mentioned it to the interviewee. It's flavoured the conversation for sure (except for the bootcamp grads who all have identical Githubs) but I tend to talk more about your process than the actual code.

jeffwilcox 9y ago
When I've had time to prepare, I've taken the time to review candidates' GitHub repositories, and it has surely helped to really understand what "open source experience" means vs "coding camp attendee". It's fun to ask about a particular class or set of files and ask the candidate to teach me something about the project. It shows we care, and also helps me tease apart a candidate's communication abilities.
chrisco255 9y ago
As a software engineer who does technical interviews, I also regularly review GitHub contributions if mentioned on the resume. It's not a deal killer if someone doesn't have these things...but if you're up against another candidate who does (and their work is good)...then the other candidate is likely getting the job.
- nanodano 9y ago
  What % of candidates have side projects to show you? When I did interviews, I saw probably less than 10% have any side projects to show.
  - pc86 9y ago
    I work in consulting, almost entirely for federal and state government. Here that number is low single digits.
    - nanodano 9y ago
      This is what I think most people fail to understand. It's not a _requirement_. The vast majority of people DON'T have side projects. Companies can't afford to simply auto-reject everyone who doesn't have side projects. The point is that if you do have any, it can help make you stand out dramatically.

Macha 9y ago

So when I was interviewing as a intern and junior developer, I had _most_ places that actually interviewed me look at my side projects I'd listed on my CV. The one interview I've done at an intermediate level (at a company that reached out to me) also did.

voidmain 9y ago

I disagree with you, and grandparent, and the article :-) I've hired plenty of great engineers who didn't have side projects on github. I have never specifically been looking for people that don't have a life outside the field, and unlike GP I have found that there are other ways to evaluate people that can identify great engineers with very few mistakes. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't see your high quality or impressive open source code as a huge plus. Quantity doesn't matter -- if anything if you're super prolific I might wonder if you have much energy for your day job -- but I'm not going to pass up a chance to see what kind of work you do. And because quantity doesn't matter, I think that writing a little bit of code "for your resume" (every once in a while, to reflect your continuing development as an engineer) is a pretty reasonable investment even if you don't happen to want to spend your whole life outside work programming. It's not required, but it might get you a really great position some day, even if like the OP you're up front about having a life outside of software engineering.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

karmelapple 9y ago

Another hiring manager here who reads GitHub profiles and loves to have a candidate walk me through what challenges they experienced, design decisions they had to make, etc. One question I have for the grandparent post: what would a meaningful question be? Is the description I mention above seem like a meaningful way to discuss the work you took the time to share with me?

justboxing 9y ago

> instead you get dance-like-a-monkey "coding tests" (unpaid, of course) that are nonportable from employer to employer. This - the non-portable aspect - is what irks me the most. Especially for enterprise developers. Since most of the software we develop is under NDA, we cannot put any of it online to showcase our skills. I've had to do 3 different take-home "coding exercises" over the last 10 days. 1 was for a Hedge Fund, another for a Real Estate company and a 3rd for an Accounting SaaS company. I'm in the process of publishing these coding exercise solutions after polishing it up a bit more onto my github profile. Still, I feel like this will also be a waste, because like OP says, most companies have their own specific "Coding tests" and wouldn't take an already coded solution to accept skills and experience of the candidate.

chrisco255 9y ago
That's because they want to gauge you against other candidates and the only way to do that fairly is with a standardized test.
- freedomben 9y ago
  I see the point, but some of these tests can take several hours or longer to complete. I think they shoot themselvess in the foot a bit because many of the really good devs won't waste their time with that. My evidence is all purely anecdotal, however.
  - aminorex 9y ago
    If all you've got is a foot-gun, everything looks like a foot.
freedomben 9y ago
This is becoming a real problem IMHO. Asking me to do 3 to 4 hours of work on a "test" just to get to a real interview is a big ask. I do it because I have to; but as my time has gotten more valuable I've started just politely refusing and thanking the recruiter for reaching out. I have a ton of stuff on github that I'd much rather talk about.

wybiral 9y ago

I've been taken aback during interviews and client conversations when they brought up details about projects I'd posted on my off time. There are people who look at that stuff.

jackgolding 9y ago

I agree with this, the whole need for a portfolio for a back-office role is bizarre to me - no one who has asked for my github has asked me about them, they are much more interested in me talking through my work related projects.

aaronbrethorst 9y ago

That's too bad. This is my favorite interview question to ask.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

indigochill 9y ago

Anecdotally, as someone who has been involved in hiring and (sort of) cares about side projects, it's not actually the technical implementation I care about, that's true. It's about the applicant signalling "I care about this stuff". But it's far from the only indicator and shouldn't be given too much weight. I'd gladly hire someone who had no side projects but passed our technical test/interview and soft skills interview. As for why I don't take Github profiles too seriously, we had plenty of applicants who did have projects on their Github profiles who tripped all over themselves on our simple coding test. Maybe we would have found out something similar by digging into their commit history, but that would be an even greater time investment than the hiring process already was.

SandwichTeeth 9y ago
I think that coding tests and challenges apply a sort of artificial pressure and requirement to have things memorized that aren't there in the real world. I think it would be a mistake to discount a candidate who has good code on their github when they had time to sit, think through problems without being under a magnifying glass, but trips up during a technical interview challenge/puzzle/whiteboard or whatever. Maybe in those candidates you could actually walk through their projects with them and try to determine if they have a deep understanding of what they wrote. To me, that seems a better indicator of how they would perform on a team with real problems, rather than having to puke up a pseudocode merge-sort from memory.

pawelkomarnicki 9y ago

There was one, (literally: ONE) time I check out somebody's GitHub profile when making a hiring decision. It was a clusterfuck of forks, and source repos were a total mess, no documentation, nothing. In such case I would rather NOT see a GitHub link like that, really. He didn't get a job.

Double_a_92 9y ago
It would be nice if GitHub offered a grouping function for "random" forks. Sometimes you just fork something out of interest or to fix some small bug and they mess up your profile...

cooervo 9y ago

same here, have github full of projects. Nobody ever mentions them.

oelmekki 9y ago

Code is for tech reviewers (CTO or inside developers). Most often, they will look at your repos, but they are not the ones you will chat with. It's still useful to have material for non tech people, though. That's why, additionally to my github profile, I maintain an angelList profile on which I document the why's and how's of my projects from a non developer perspective. But of course, the single most important thing you can do in an interview with a non tech guy is to show them you understand their business, what they're trying to achieve, and that you find it exciting (provided it's true, obviously). From having been on the hiring side, I've learned that the worst thing to say is : "yeah, actually it doesn't really matter what we will do, I'm mostly interested in coding".