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As a recruiter I can answer this! I do not speak for all recruiters. As a recruiter who is also a programmer, my approach may be nonstandard. * I want to see

As a recruiter I can answer this! I do not speak for all recruiters. As a recruiter who is also a programmer, my approach may be nonstandard. * I want to see thoughtful README files. If the README is whatever was generated default by the framework and not edited at all, that's a huge groan and turn off and you lose tons of strength (credibility) as a candidate. * I want to see your code looking pretty. Consistent indentation, run through a linter, good comments, and so forth. Would I be able to contribute to and maintain this code? That's pretty much it. The most important thing that companies want to see is employment history, either at brand name companies or somewhere where you've already been doing the job they're hiring for.

Aeolun 8y ago
I really don’t see why these things are relevant at all. It’s a personal Github profile. Why would anyone add thoughtful readme’s or a clean coding style if they’re the only contributor? I mean, those things are great of course, but not sure if I’d expect it on Github.
- david-s 8y ago
  Some use GitHub as a portfolio, it seems. Mine is/was mostly a dumping ground of half finished ideas in my college days.
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  My GitHub/GitLab profiles are full of hacky, ugly games written at game jams in 48 hours, often just by me or me plus some artist, with just one end-goal: to be able to present it at the end of the event. A README file is the last thing needed there :P
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    I 100% disagree. Even just saying that it was hacked together gives some context for 1) Why the code looks so unconventional 2) What you do in your spare time.
    - akerl_ 8y ago
      Context for whom? My target audience for my personal projects is myself. Any company that assumes their recruiting org is the target audience for my personal projects is setting themselves up for disappointment.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        Sure, but we're in a discussion of what recruiters look for. If you only code something for yourself, that's fine, but if you want it to be taken well when job-hunting, you should make it at least minimally presentable (i.e., a recruiter can tell what they're even looking at).
      - TheRealPomax 8y ago
        in which case you wouldn't have put your github profile on your resume, so there is no issue. That's not what this question was about, thought.
      - chillacy 8y ago
        Tell us in the readme if you make it public. You gotta think, who is reading this? That goes beyond documentation to code itself and any communication you do.
        godelski 8y ago
        Repositories are public for a lot of reasons, a lot of which are not "I want to show this off to a potential employer". Let me give some good reasons, that's not an exhaustive list. - It is the default. - Free private repos are new and no one is going back and making things private. - If you are working with someone it is many times easier to make it public. - You want to share code with someone, public is easier than making them a collaborator. Honestly I don't think a lot of people, if any, are reading the stuff I have on GitHub.
        seba_dos1 8y ago
        I put my things public on GPL out of principle, because there are some people playing those games, so I want to provide all necessary freedoms to them - even if nobody is actually interested in exercising those freedoms, because well, those are shitty jam games.
- ModernMech 8y ago
  Ostensibly, you put your code on Github for others to read, use, and maybe even contribute to. If you have a project that you didn't care enough to write cleanly, or even document in the most bare minimum of ways (a helpful README to contextualize the code) then why are you even putting it online? It's just going to reflect poorly upon you. If all your Github repos are as described above, people are going to (rightly) assume that's how you treat all of your projects, even those you are paid for.
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    That’s quite an assumption to make about intentions. Repository hosting is also a way to back up your code or make sure it’s available on multiple devices. Until very recently, you couldn’t do that and keep your code private on github without paying. So (unless they want to also maintain a bitbucket account) people dump stuff there for reasons other than explicitly wanting to share it with the world or show it off.
    - ModernMech 8y ago
      > Until very recently, you couldn’t do that and keep your code private on github without paying. Ok, but now you can. > people dump stuff there for reasons other than explicitly wanting to share it with the world or show it off. Maybe, but that doesn't change the fact you are sharing it with the world and you are showing it off, and if you put a bunch of sloppy inscrutable code on your GitHub, people are going to assume you tend to write sloppy inscrutable code, especially if you don't contextualize it with a Readme. That's just the reality of it. The real big assumption here is thinking people aren't going to judge you by how you present your work online.
      - Aeolun 8y ago
        > That's just the reality of it. Given that I don’t, and am in a position to hire people tells me this isn’t as hard and fast as you present it.
        8y ago
- BjoernKW 8y ago
  If you use your GitHub profile as part of your personal brand / marketing then these things absolutely are relevant. As a developer in a professional context you'll hardly ever work alone or be the sole contributor. Even if you use a GitHub profile just as your personal code repository code still is communication, even if it's just with your future self. Therefore communication skills are crucial. A well-thought-out README file and consistent, readable code help others to understand your work. These aspects often are more important than what the code accomplishes. Working, even efficient, but unmaintainable code is a risk. Ultimately, code is a precise specification of what the software at hand is supposed to do. If that specification is hard to understand it'll be much less useful.
  - RussianCow 8y ago
    > If you use your GitHub profile as part of your personal brand / marketing then these things absolutely are relevant. The problem is when others assume this on your behalf. I would take a lack of proper readme as a signal that the repo isn't intended for viewing and judgement by others, not as a signal that the candidate has poor communication skills. If the repo is for a library that the author has published and is marketing for production use, then sure, but I'd wager that does not represent the vast majority of repos on GitHub, and to assume otherwise is foolish in my opinion.
  - peruvian 8y ago
    I use to think this way then I started working in the real world with developers who coded and documented work code cleanly but had messy GitHub profiles especially because until recently private repos were not free. A lot of people don't care about perfectly formatted READMEs, commit comments, etc. if they're just hacking on the weekend on something small... and that's fine. Nowadays unless you pushed your profile and repos hard in the resume or interview process, I couldn't care less if the rest of the interview went fine. Worst case scenario they're "forced" to write good documentation as part of the job - not everything we do at work is natural or fun for us.
- stevekemp 8y ago
  The assumption is that if you have a personal github project then you're doing it because it interests you, you're passionate about it, and you're not doing it just for money. If a developer writes sloppy code when they're doing it for passion, then that doesn't show them at their best. Of course we all have repositories, tools, or code, that was just thrown together to solve an immediate project but in general I'd expect something that is a labour of love - not a project for work - to be something that they'd put more effort into.
- systematical 8y ago
  I write verbose readme files with examples of how to use my libraries because it's what I expect of other engineers. I do the same for private repos.
- your-nanny 8y ago
  if you are linking to it in your resume than you are showcasing it. if you are showcasing it and it's a scrapheap, folks straight not going to be impressed. I think the obvious thing to do is create a showcase profile and a scrappy scratchpad profile. keep the former clean and polished
- closeparen 8y ago
  Personal projects can give signal about someone's interests, level of investment, sense of adventure, etc. They're also often an explicit relief valve from "dotting the Is and crossing the Ts" at work, so not a great way to assess professional/production code quality. If I see a tower of inscrutable Haskell on someone's Github, that is a great thing: both that they have the urge to do it, and the good sense to scratch that itch away from the company's codebase.
- k__ 8y ago
  Yes, sounds like BS to me. But on the other hand I'm no employee and don't know the "virtues" employers look for, haha.
- hacym 8y ago
  You're right -- if they don't feel like they need to have clean, maintainable code on their own personal work, why would they feel like they need to do it at work? That's a red flag.
Waterluvian 8y ago
Everything you say makes sense on the surface. But it scares me a little bit. Do you ignore all my half-done prototypes and junky hacks and experiments?
- Frost1x 8y ago
  Or your proprietary work you don't own IP to. Ironically, some look to GitHub to somehow correlate with employment history. Many employed are too busy sinking development time in source that's never releasable. Some companies may contribute to certain OSS projects publically but a lot of their core business code base is protected.
  - Benjammer 8y ago
    This is what I never understood. Say that I choose to spend my spare time in propriety code instead of open source or personal hobby code. It seems like some recruiters are making a tradeoff in indicating metrics here. They are saying that a good GitHub profile correlates so strongly with a good recruit, that it's worth a false positive of someone who spends too much time working on side projects and doesn't get as much done at work, and also this seems to be saying that people who spend spare time innovating proprietary code aren't worth finding and should be lumped into the weak coder pile by default. Is this a plausible deniability thing? ("How could I have known that guy would be a dud? I mean, look at his GH!"). This can't possibly correlate as well as people claim to success on the job... There just seem to me to be too many other complicating factors for this specifically to be any kind of decent metric.
Novashi 8y ago
>that's a huge groan and turn off and you lose tons of strength (credibility) as a candidate. Toxic and off putting. You put too much weight on relatively minor things. It’s preventing you from fairly considering the rest of the candidate. You could be the one to teach them to do READMEs well.
- beardedwizard 8y ago
  Wow. This comment is deep. People who call themselves managers, read that last sentence 20x. This is what we need to do, can you?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - chillacy 8y ago
    Most big companies no longer believe in training but selecting. This is popularized in “strengths based” training sold by a handful of consultants.
- zepolen 8y ago
  So choose between: 1. A developer who doesn't respect himself first and foremost to write a README/maintainable code so that his future self and others can have an easier time. 2. A developer who cares about communicating his work to himself/others and making the environment easier for everyone to work for the future. Right.
  - chickenfries 8y ago
    I cannot stand this kind of developer armchair psychology.
  - beardedwizard 8y ago
    Are developers only male? Your biases are really showing in these comments.
avip 8y ago
Let me politely call BS on that. There is no possible correlation between the "code quality" of my random github repos, which I usually start to learn/test/share something, and my general ability to write clean documented code. If a project evolves to have users, things shift.
iandanforth 8y ago
I know people are being down on this comment, but it's important to know that people do this, which might help people get jobs. Google is known to can applications if there are typos in either the resume or cover letter. Supposedly there is a statistical correlation that backs this. While this seems arbitrary and absurd it is important to know it's a thing so you can at least work around it.
- projektir 8y ago
  I disagree. Bending over backwards to strange expectations and requirements is a race to the bottom.
grepthisab 8y ago
This is awful, no offense. You're a recruiter, do you mind if I ask if you were previously a professional software engineer? GitHub is often, very often, for small personal projects where you don't spend a lot of time going through TDD or making sure the readme is up to date. Often mine are smaller projects I built to accomplish a specific goal (hello python script that clicks the "okay I'm still watching" button on all the required learning videos I've had to watch at work). It's impressive when someone has a substantial project or contributed to open source, but GitHub shouldn't be a negative signal.
gherlein 8y ago
That's lame, sorry. As a long-time hiring manager I do value a good readme if the project is meant for others to consume, otherwise if it's a scratch pad for learning who cares? And I could care less about how pretty their code is. I'm more interested to see if they are PASSIONATE about tech. While it's true that some folks don't have time outside of work my experience is that really good Engineers still play around a bit. They fork stuff. They try it. They may submit a PR that fixes something. They have some experimental repos where they put stuff when learning a new language. And yes, the rare one will have a fork of a project where they regularly contribute. I don't think you are looking for the things I look for in a candidate at all.
jordache 8y ago
Haha dude expects personal projects to go through a linter... You code?

Aeolun 8y ago

I really don’t see why these things are relevant at all. It’s a personal Github profile. Why would anyone add thoughtful readme’s or a clean coding style if they’re the only contributor? I mean, those things are great of course, but not sure if I’d expect it on Github.

david-s 8y ago
Some use GitHub as a portfolio, it seems. Mine is/was mostly a dumping ground of half finished ideas in my college days.
seba_dos1 8y ago
My GitHub/GitLab profiles are full of hacky, ugly games written at game jams in 48 hours, often just by me or me plus some artist, with just one end-goal: to be able to present it at the end of the event. A README file is the last thing needed there :P
- solarkraft 8y ago
  I 100% disagree. Even just saying that it was hacked together gives some context for 1) Why the code looks so unconventional 2) What you do in your spare time.
  - akerl_ 8y ago
    Context for whom? My target audience for my personal projects is myself. Any company that assumes their recruiting org is the target audience for my personal projects is setting themselves up for disappointment.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
      Sure, but we're in a discussion of what recruiters look for. If you only code something for yourself, that's fine, but if you want it to be taken well when job-hunting, you should make it at least minimally presentable (i.e., a recruiter can tell what they're even looking at).
    - TheRealPomax 8y ago
      in which case you wouldn't have put your github profile on your resume, so there is no issue. That's not what this question was about, thought.
    - chillacy 8y ago
      Tell us in the readme if you make it public. You gotta think, who is reading this? That goes beyond documentation to code itself and any communication you do.
      - godelski 8y ago
        Repositories are public for a lot of reasons, a lot of which are not "I want to show this off to a potential employer". Let me give some good reasons, that's not an exhaustive list. - It is the default. - Free private repos are new and no one is going back and making things private. - If you are working with someone it is many times easier to make it public. - You want to share code with someone, public is easier than making them a collaborator. Honestly I don't think a lot of people, if any, are reading the stuff I have on GitHub.
        seba_dos1 8y ago
        I put my things public on GPL out of principle, because there are some people playing those games, so I want to provide all necessary freedoms to them - even if nobody is actually interested in exercising those freedoms, because well, those are shitty jam games.
ModernMech 8y ago
Ostensibly, you put your code on Github for others to read, use, and maybe even contribute to. If you have a project that you didn't care enough to write cleanly, or even document in the most bare minimum of ways (a helpful README to contextualize the code) then why are you even putting it online? It's just going to reflect poorly upon you. If all your Github repos are as described above, people are going to (rightly) assume that's how you treat all of your projects, even those you are paid for.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  That’s quite an assumption to make about intentions. Repository hosting is also a way to back up your code or make sure it’s available on multiple devices. Until very recently, you couldn’t do that and keep your code private on github without paying. So (unless they want to also maintain a bitbucket account) people dump stuff there for reasons other than explicitly wanting to share it with the world or show it off.
  - ModernMech 8y ago
    > Until very recently, you couldn’t do that and keep your code private on github without paying. Ok, but now you can. > people dump stuff there for reasons other than explicitly wanting to share it with the world or show it off. Maybe, but that doesn't change the fact you are sharing it with the world and you are showing it off, and if you put a bunch of sloppy inscrutable code on your GitHub, people are going to assume you tend to write sloppy inscrutable code, especially if you don't contextualize it with a Readme. That's just the reality of it. The real big assumption here is thinking people aren't going to judge you by how you present your work online.
    - Aeolun 8y ago
      > That's just the reality of it. Given that I don’t, and am in a position to hire people tells me this isn’t as hard and fast as you present it.
      - 8y ago
BjoernKW 8y ago
If you use your GitHub profile as part of your personal brand / marketing then these things absolutely are relevant. As a developer in a professional context you'll hardly ever work alone or be the sole contributor. Even if you use a GitHub profile just as your personal code repository code still is communication, even if it's just with your future self. Therefore communication skills are crucial. A well-thought-out README file and consistent, readable code help others to understand your work. These aspects often are more important than what the code accomplishes. Working, even efficient, but unmaintainable code is a risk. Ultimately, code is a precise specification of what the software at hand is supposed to do. If that specification is hard to understand it'll be much less useful.
- RussianCow 8y ago
  > If you use your GitHub profile as part of your personal brand / marketing then these things absolutely are relevant. The problem is when others assume this on your behalf. I would take a lack of proper readme as a signal that the repo isn't intended for viewing and judgement by others, not as a signal that the candidate has poor communication skills. If the repo is for a library that the author has published and is marketing for production use, then sure, but I'd wager that does not represent the vast majority of repos on GitHub, and to assume otherwise is foolish in my opinion.
- peruvian 8y ago
  I use to think this way then I started working in the real world with developers who coded and documented work code cleanly but had messy GitHub profiles especially because until recently private repos were not free. A lot of people don't care about perfectly formatted READMEs, commit comments, etc. if they're just hacking on the weekend on something small... and that's fine. Nowadays unless you pushed your profile and repos hard in the resume or interview process, I couldn't care less if the rest of the interview went fine. Worst case scenario they're "forced" to write good documentation as part of the job - not everything we do at work is natural or fun for us.
stevekemp 8y ago
The assumption is that if you have a personal github project then you're doing it because it interests you, you're passionate about it, and you're not doing it just for money. If a developer writes sloppy code when they're doing it for passion, then that doesn't show them at their best. Of course we all have repositories, tools, or code, that was just thrown together to solve an immediate project but in general I'd expect something that is a labour of love - not a project for work - to be something that they'd put more effort into.
systematical 8y ago
I write verbose readme files with examples of how to use my libraries because it's what I expect of other engineers. I do the same for private repos.
your-nanny 8y ago
if you are linking to it in your resume than you are showcasing it. if you are showcasing it and it's a scrapheap, folks straight not going to be impressed. I think the obvious thing to do is create a showcase profile and a scrappy scratchpad profile. keep the former clean and polished
closeparen 8y ago
Personal projects can give signal about someone's interests, level of investment, sense of adventure, etc. They're also often an explicit relief valve from "dotting the Is and crossing the Ts" at work, so not a great way to assess professional/production code quality. If I see a tower of inscrutable Haskell on someone's Github, that is a great thing: both that they have the urge to do it, and the good sense to scratch that itch away from the company's codebase.
k__ 8y ago
Yes, sounds like BS to me. But on the other hand I'm no employee and don't know the "virtues" employers look for, haha.
hacym 8y ago
You're right -- if they don't feel like they need to have clean, maintainable code on their own personal work, why would they feel like they need to do it at work? That's a red flag.

Waterluvian 8y ago

Everything you say makes sense on the surface. But it scares me a little bit. Do you ignore all my half-done prototypes and junky hacks and experiments?

Frost1x 8y ago
Or your proprietary work you don't own IP to. Ironically, some look to GitHub to somehow correlate with employment history. Many employed are too busy sinking development time in source that's never releasable. Some companies may contribute to certain OSS projects publically but a lot of their core business code base is protected.
- Benjammer 8y ago
  This is what I never understood. Say that I choose to spend my spare time in propriety code instead of open source or personal hobby code. It seems like some recruiters are making a tradeoff in indicating metrics here. They are saying that a good GitHub profile correlates so strongly with a good recruit, that it's worth a false positive of someone who spends too much time working on side projects and doesn't get as much done at work, and also this seems to be saying that people who spend spare time innovating proprietary code aren't worth finding and should be lumped into the weak coder pile by default. Is this a plausible deniability thing? ("How could I have known that guy would be a dud? I mean, look at his GH!"). This can't possibly correlate as well as people claim to success on the job... There just seem to me to be too many other complicating factors for this specifically to be any kind of decent metric.

Novashi 8y ago

>that's a huge groan and turn off and you lose tons of strength (credibility) as a candidate. Toxic and off putting. You put too much weight on relatively minor things. It’s preventing you from fairly considering the rest of the candidate. You could be the one to teach them to do READMEs well.

beardedwizard 8y ago
Wow. This comment is deep. People who call themselves managers, read that last sentence 20x. This is what we need to do, can you?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- chillacy 8y ago
  Most big companies no longer believe in training but selecting. This is popularized in “strengths based” training sold by a handful of consultants.
zepolen 8y ago
So choose between: 1. A developer who doesn't respect himself first and foremost to write a README/maintainable code so that his future self and others can have an easier time. 2. A developer who cares about communicating his work to himself/others and making the environment easier for everyone to work for the future. Right.
- chickenfries 8y ago
  I cannot stand this kind of developer armchair psychology.
- beardedwizard 8y ago
  Are developers only male? Your biases are really showing in these comments.

avip 8y ago

Let me politely call BS on that. There is no possible correlation between the "code quality" of my random github repos, which I usually start to learn/test/share something, and my general ability to write clean documented code. If a project evolves to have users, things shift.

iandanforth 8y ago

I know people are being down on this comment, but it's important to know that people do this, which might help people get jobs. Google is known to can applications if there are typos in either the resume or cover letter. Supposedly there is a statistical correlation that backs this. While this seems arbitrary and absurd it is important to know it's a thing so you can at least work around it.

projektir 8y ago
I disagree. Bending over backwards to strange expectations and requirements is a race to the bottom.

grepthisab 8y ago

This is awful, no offense. You're a recruiter, do you mind if I ask if you were previously a professional software engineer? GitHub is often, very often, for small personal projects where you don't spend a lot of time going through TDD or making sure the readme is up to date. Often mine are smaller projects I built to accomplish a specific goal (hello python script that clicks the "okay I'm still watching" button on all the required learning videos I've had to watch at work). It's impressive when someone has a substantial project or contributed to open source, but GitHub shouldn't be a negative signal.

gherlein 8y ago

That's lame, sorry. As a long-time hiring manager I do value a good readme if the project is meant for others to consume, otherwise if it's a scratch pad for learning who cares? And I could care less about how pretty their code is. I'm more interested to see if they are PASSIONATE about tech. While it's true that some folks don't have time outside of work my experience is that really good Engineers still play around a bit. They fork stuff. They try it. They may submit a PR that fixes something. They have some experimental repos where they put stuff when learning a new language. And yes, the rare one will have a fork of a project where they regularly contribute. I don't think you are looking for the things I look for in a candidate at all.

jordache 8y ago

Haha dude expects personal projects to go through a linter... You code?