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One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. They want to see open-source contributions or

• jsonne 7y ago
  >One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. This unfortunately isn't just a trend on programming. I've run into the worrying trend of marketing roles or contracts requiring live walk throughs of running ad accounts of current clients so people can vett you...uh what? As if NDAs don't exist or you just plain don't feel comfortable sharing client data and marketing secrets you're suddenly unhireable.
  • namibj 7y ago
    I could see a company trying this with a calibrated amount of effort, and congratulating you on not giving up client secrets, treating it as a positive thing. If you'd have given them client secrets, they'd boot you (potentially right then and there).
• malvosenior 7y ago
  As someone who uses Github and OSS contribution as a strong hiring signal, I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. People who do a lot of personal projects tend to be very good developers, especially when you can see a demonstrated ability to ship. This is also helpful for people who haven't worked at big name companies or don't have degrees from elite universities. I'd happily hire someone with no experience and no degree if I can see multiple impressive projects they've built for themselves (I've done this, and it's worked out very well). Yes, it works against people who don't like to code in their personal time, but it also removes a bunch of filters and in my experience works better than anything else for finding good candidates.
  • plughs 7y ago
    People who do a lot of personal projects also tend to be young with minimal outside responsibilities. It is no secret that they are appealing hires - someone who's willing to spend long hours on personal projects is probably also willing to spend long hours on work projects. That's what makes it discrimination.
    • malvosenior 7y ago
      I've never asked my employees to work long hours. That's basic management. I also let them continue working on personal projects whenever possible (getting the rest of the company to agree...).
      • plughs 7y ago
        Few managers ask their employees to work long hours. That doesn't mean they don't expect them to work long hours. "let them continue working on personal projects". How considerate of you to allow them to decide if they want to work long hours on their time or the company's.
    • natalyarostova 7y ago
      Life is about trade-offs. If you want to spend more time outside of work on things like friends and family, that's great. In fact, it's probably optimal. But to then say it's discrimination when someone who has made the choice to instead only focus on their technical skill, at the exclusion of friends and family, is better than you, is a little silly.
      • throwawaymath 7y ago
        To be more charitable to the commenter's point, that's not what's being asserted as discriminatory. They're making the claim that it's implicitly discriminatory to penalize people who don't spend time on programming outside of work, because that reasonably penalizes people who are older (i.e. more likely to have a family). They are not making the claim that choosing to hire someone better than someone else is discriminatory.
• mprovost 7y ago
  Absolutely - clothes send a social signal that you're a part of the right group. In London you can not get hired in the City for wearing brown shoes. Not because black is the right colour, but because everyone from the social class that they want to hire from knows about the unwritten rule to only wear black shoes. The same goes in SV for Patagonia vests and Allbirds.
  • notdang 7y ago
    What about Patagonia vests?
    • pwm 7y ago
      https://www.instagram.com/midtownuniform/ https://www.instagram.com/midtownuniform/
• myth_drannon 7y ago
  Welcome to Quebec,Canada - law 21. If you are wearing a hijab you can't be hired as a teacher, judge, policewomen or any other public facing job.
• mcguire 7y ago
  Re: public code, don't get me wrong, I'm sympathetic, but honestly there are very few ways to separate a good programmer from a good bullshitter. The alternative is interview coding tests; suggest that and see how much love you get. (And some don't even know they're bullshitting. They honestly think that being marginally associated with a project means they did the work.) As for suits? Yeah, those are the same people who freak out at the idea of wearing a suit to an interview.
  • plughs 7y ago
    I do get that, and I'll be more sympathetic to hiring managers who want to see open-source code than I have been in other comments. ( Active job hunting tends to make one grumpy. Take home programming assignments are a current sore spot for me. ) It's a recent job posting that said "Requirement: OSS contributions" that seemed over the top. Maybe it's no less troubling than "Requirement: SQL expertise" - after all, we're all 'discriminated' against to some degree by not having experience in everything a future employer might want. With the SQL requirement, however, there's an obvious drag on a project if they bring in a new hire who has no SQL knowledge. If a team working on OSS hires someone with no OSS experience - is that going to mean they can't contribute right away?
    • ghaff 7y ago
      I suppose the argument could be that someone with experience making OSS contributions has experience in how open source projects operate, how contributions are made, just basically how things work. But, TBH, projects vary so much anyway that I'm not sure how much that experience adds that couldn't be picked up fairly quickly with some mentoring.
  • bojo 7y ago
    > The alternative is interview coding tests I've all but given up considering finding a new job at this point because even with a solid github project in the target company's language of choice which goes above and beyond their "homework" and/or pair programming interview, they still ask you to do their ridiculous coding test. Too old for this shit.
  • 7y ago
• hyperpape 7y ago
  You may enjoy a tweet of Dan's, where he says his open source code has been completely irrelevant in most of his interviews: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/806222862663053312 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/806222862663053312. Lest you think he's just a superstar who doesn't care about interviews, he says he's quite bad at them https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1058029337923014656 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1058029337923014656
  • scottlamb 7y ago
    From later in that second twitter thread: > I was at a party tonight and someone asked me what my favorite book was. Couldn't answer. They relaxed the constraint and asked about "a good book". Couldn't answer. They relaxed the constraint again and asked me about "any book, good or bad". Couldn't answer. From his blog, Dan is obviously a great engineer. I'd love to say as an interviewer I'd recognize this and say "strong hire". But I have no idea how to interview someone who gets this nervous. I've written "don't hire" in such cases before.
    • raxxorrax 7y ago
      Don't know the party, but it would be a weak question in an interview in my opinion.
      • pc86 7y ago
        I think it's possible you're missing the point. If you have such crippling social anxiety that you cannot name literally any book, whether you've read it or not, and you can't even make one up, the odds of you performing well at an interview are extremely small.
        • perl4ever 7y ago
          I'm reasonably confident in at least half the interviews I do, and I might blank if I was asked about books, because somewhere in my 30s, I essentially stopped reading them. If you reminded me of something I'd read, I could talk about it, but nothing comes to mind any more because I'm no longer buying or reading books on a day-to-day basis. Also, assuming one or more came to mind, maybe I'm paralyzed in an interview because I'm thinking about what the ones I can think of imply, whether they give away my age, or whatever. It would be easy to talk about a book if I was warned ahead of time. I'm not sure I even know where my copy is, but if I chose one book that I've read that more people should know about, it would be: "You Don't Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization" (Elliott D. Sclar) But in an interview on the spot, I absolutely wouldn't have come up with that.
• loftyai 7y ago
  I never understood the bias on work attire from both sides. It's silly to judge people's abilities based on what they like to wear period. The whole point of casual dressing in Tech was that it made some people perform better, because it took them less time to get dressed in the morning, and they were physically more comfortable at work. But people are different, some people might genuinely code better or perform better if they wear a suit. The point is to let people wear whatever they're comfortable with, so they can perform at their personal best, within reason of course. We wouldn't want crazy people to show up to work in underwear or naked haha.
  • brahmwg 7y ago
    On the topic of work attire, one interesting argument/explanation in favor of professional (read: suit) clothing is for the compartmentalization; like Peter Parker becoming spiderman, you only do work in that set of clothing. When the suit is on, you're in work mode. When the suit is removed, you're in non-work mode. This way you don't associate work with your casual clothes. I thought it was an interesting point in favor of a specific set of work clothing.
    • loftyai 7y ago
      This is a pretty interesting point of view. I had always thought that it's just something that was passed down as tradition since it seemed that back in the days, men always wore suits, even when they're not at work.
    • perl4ever 7y ago
      I like the look of ties, accumulate colorful ones, but I hate wearing them. So I prefer to wear a suit and tie to an interview, and then never again. It's a costume, for particular occasions. And if you (as a man) don't wear a suit and tie to an interview, you have the problem women complain about - there's too large a spectrum of possibilities for clothing that someone might judge you for unfairly. But I also like work clothing that isn't expressive; it just has to be comfortable.
  • Kalium 7y ago
    Like a lot of things, it started as comfort and quickly became a vehicle for social signaling of group membership, status, and conformity.
• dcolkitt 7y ago
  > One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. As someone coming from the hiring side, I don't understand how these companies are finding enough candidates that they can afford to put up all these arbitrary requirements. Right now in the US, software engineers are one of (if not the the most) in-demand position in one of (if not the most) tightest labor markets in economic history. To find engineers we've had to scrape the bottom of the barrel, throw piles of money at recruiters, and literally beg candidates just to come it to talk to us. Are these companies requiring things like 1000 Github stars or a resume with experience exactly matching twelve different super-hot tech stacks actually finding people? Because if so, it boggles my mind?
  • grimjack00 7y ago
    > As someone coming from the hiring side, I don't understand how these companies are finding enough candidates that they can afford to put up all these arbitrary requirements. Well, they're not; that's one reason why there are so many stories of "not enough qualified developers". If I give in to my conspiratorial side, I'd say having these arbitrary requirements is entirely intentional, so a company can either: a. not have to hire anyone at all b. lobby for H1B or c. resort to offshoring, outsourcing, etc.
  • busterarm 7y ago
    Where you are, what tech stack you use, how senior you're trying to hare and how known your company is will have a large impact on this. I've been on the hiring side in many organizations and have had hiring pools as little as 0 and as high as thousands.
  • perl4ever 7y ago
    One possibility would be you're not trendy enough to get the trendy candidates. There might be an alternative approach that is more suited to non-trendy businesses. What you can do is write an ad that is trawling for anyone who is at all useful as a problem solver without tech requirements. Then you look at the best of who that brings in, and maybe you find people that others are overlooking and will work for less, with a better attitude than someone who might be tricked into thinking you're trendy and then leave. Edit: Something I think is key whenever you're trying to select the best of something from a large population, is not to decide up front what the important criteria are. First, figure out how many you need in your pool to evaluate in more detail, and then construct your criteria to get that size pool. At that point, you select the top 10% or 1% or 5 or whatever, for the next level. And then, if you end up with something other than you expected, consider that may not be a flaw in the process, but a sign that you need to adapt to the output and utilize it opportunistically. You can't just say "these 5 things seem like reasonable requirements" and commit to that because multiple filters can exponentially reduce the results.
• Filligree 7y ago
  If she interviews with me, she absolutely will. Appearance? Who cares.
• tzs 7y ago
  A lot of public code not related to their job being produced by the employees of a company suggests that the work there is not interesting enough and challenging enough and deep enough to keep them occupied.
• ddevault 7y ago
  I'll be honest: if you have one person who spends 8 hours a day practicing a talent, and another who spends 10 or 12 hours a day practicing their talent, which is going to be better at that skill? Having lots of open source code to read demonstrates in public the prospect's talent for writing code, has examples of their collaboration with others, etc, but also simply means they spend more time writing code and getting good at it, on a broader variety of projects, with a greater diversity of collaborators. Yes, it's unfair, and if we're just arguing on a sense of lofty idealism, I agree that you shouldn't have to sacrifice your off-hours. But the truth of it is, people who don't code in their spare time aren't as good at it, and people who do are not only more skilled, but are easier to evaluate.
  • kvb 7y ago
    But writing code is only a small part of a software engineer's job (at least that's true everywhere I've worked), so selecting people who have opted to dedicate their lives to only that portion might be a worse idea than hiring better-rounded candidates, when it comes to building real software systems that need to be liked by users.
  • organsnyder 7y ago
    Time invested isn't linear with improved talent. We all have our own thresholds, but we all get diminishing returns after working/practicing so many hours in a day. It also depends on the quality of time as well as the quantity. I'm a musician, and it's a fairly common trope to talk about practice in terms of efficiency, such as identifying "directed practice" and similar terms. I've experienced it myself: if I'm mindlessly playing the same passage over and over again, I won't improve nearly as quickly as if I stop and analyze why I'm making the mistake rather than just trying to force myself past it.
  • simsla 7y ago
    My company disallows me from doing open source (without an incredibly rigorous review process that makes it honestly not worth the hassle). Nice plus? Sure. Near-mandatory? Fuck no.
    • 7y ago
• nate 7y ago
  I'm totally in agreement that that would be discriminatory. And no doubt hiring managers are sadly looking for quantity and crazy amounts of open source wizardry. But I have a slightly alternative take that might be helpful for folks struggling with this problem of "Job interviews want open source, and I just can't contribute." I've been on both sides of this table quite a bit as an employee and as someone who hires a lot for like 20 years. As an employer, what I like to look for when I ask for a GitHub profile is not that I'm seeing an insane prolific coder who will only spend time at work and on my business or "bleeds code". What I'm looking for is a signal that this person has the wherewithal to communicate code to a larger audience. Can they make their PR readable to someone else? Can they ship a project no matter how small that would make sense to an outsider? Can they teach other devs? Can they find things to abstract that someone else would find useful? As for time, can I show you a couple projects of mine: https://github.com/n8/bust_rails_etags https://github.com/n8/bust_rails_etags and https://github.com/n8/nectarine https://github.com/n8/nectarine Remove the boilerplate and they are both ~30 lines of code. https://github.com/n8/bust_rails_etags/blob/master/lib/bust_rails_etags.rb https://github.com/n8/bust_rails_etags/blob/master/lib/bust_... and https://github.com/n8/nectarine/blob/master/lib/nectarine.rb https://github.com/n8/nectarine/blob/master/lib/nectarine.rb Neither are very popular or show off any code wizardry. These things aren't impressive in the least. You might even argue they are dumb and useless. Fine! But both projects have been great conversation pieces when I'm talking to folks trying to hire me. I'm showing (at least trying to show) those same things I'm looking for as a boss: I look for things to abstract, I take the time to communicate with clarity, I teach other devs, etc. And as for an organization who says: "Absolutely NO public code of yours on Github or you're fired." First, who are these orgs? There should be a shitlist of companies who wipe out their employees Github profiles. But... this seems to be a lot more rare of a case, and I've worked in a lot of places. Yes, there's plenty worried about their IP being leaked, but there's plenty of code to write that teaches a concept that isn't near a company's IP. But if you're really worried about upsetting a boss, I would take a crack at talking to someone (a boss, hr person, etc.) who has the authority to take a peak at putting out a project or two like I describe. Since these aren't mind blowing things, but tiny little utilities or ways of showing off a non-proprietary concept, it's very likely you'll be met with yesses. Even that talk of convincing your boss to "YES" about publishing something sounds like a great story to share with a future employer ;) So I agree, there are folks using open source poorly as a signal, but for those out there with the complaint that "My organization won't let me. Or I don't have time to contribute the amazing things I know I can contribute.", the hurdle isn't as big as you think. A lot of us employers aren't looking for amazing, gigantic, magic contributions to the world. Just a couple handfuls of code to show how you think and communicate with others.
• mdip 7y ago
  > If I had my way this would be considered employment discrimination and grounds for a lawsuit. I took issue with the tie stuff, myself, in another comment. It's unlikely to be discriminatory, except in the case -- as you mentioned -- of things that fall into the practice of religion. It's funny, though, how different sectors view the "tie in an interview". I know of many jobs where failing to show up in a tie to an interview will end the interview before it starts. I think software development is leaning in the other direction. And it's all a bit silly to a lot of us from the sounds of it. Standards exist for a reason -- if the tie-less interviewer showed up in a swimsuit with no shirt, I'd imagine he'd do worse than the guy wearing a tie. As I mentioned in a previous comment, the issue is that someone is passing judgement on you as a candidate based on information that is unreliable to draw a conclusion from. My answer is to provide that information "My dad was a business owner and beat into my head that 'you wear a tie to an interview', plus I have far too many Jerry Garcia ties for how infrequently I get opportunities for wearing it" (I've even jokingly thanked an interviewer for the opportunity to dust off one of my favorite ties). If that doesn't satisfy my interviewer, I don't want the job. I can't manage a situation where "the rules for success" are so arbitrary/subjective that my choice to wear a very loud tie to an interview was enough to eliminate me from the selection process. Part of it is probably the Garcia ties, thinking about it. They're very stylish, but bold, so while I can wear one to a really formal event and get compliments, the mention of a tie with a loose relation to The Grateful Dead communicates that I'm not much of a tie-kind-of-guy.
  • meddlepal 7y ago
    Jerry Garcia ties usually are great and I like an excuse to wear a tie myself. But yes more and more interviewers seem to either expect business casual or dress-code is communicated in run-up correspondence to the interview.
  • perl4ever 7y ago
    I don't particularly like to wear a suit and would never want to wear one day-to-day. But I feel vaguely threatened by people who penalize you for wearing one, because it seems like a Schelling point, which is a useful and comfortable thing. It's one less problem that you have to solve to get hired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
• eikenberry 7y ago
  Requiring a software portfolio makes sense if you think of programming as an art form. Just about every professional artist has a portfolio of some sort and the current status quo for a portfolio in software is open source projects or code in a public repo (usually github).