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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 project

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.
    - boring_twenties 7y ago
      Why is it discriminatory? All else equal, isn't it clearly better to hire someone with no responsibilities outside of work, than someone who has to be out of the office at 5pm every day to deal with their kids?
      - ghaff 7y ago
        >isn't it clearly better to hire someone with no responsibilities outside of work Umm. No? I see nothing "clearly better" about someone just because they don't have any responsibilities.
        boring_twenties 7y ago
        Really. You don't see anything better about hiring someone for whom the job will be their #1 priority, and someone else for whom it will be #2 or even lower? I find that difficult to believe.
        riversflow 7y ago
        How do you know here that their job will be priority #1? Traditionally, men with families are considered more reliable because having a family demands stability. If I’m a dude who gets sucked into code, who’s to say I won’t get sucked into some other code than what I’m getting paid for.
- pc86 7y ago
  Calling this discrimination is offensive to people who are actually discriminated against.
MS90 7y ago
It's just frustrating because not everyone wants to spend 24/7 working at a computer, some of us have other hobbies and prefer to keep a good work/life balance. I already get paid to code 8 hours a day, the last thing I want to do is go home and do it for free. Would an architect get denied employment because they didn't have a "pet project" skyscraper in their backyard to show off?
- malvosenior 7y ago
  It's not about denying you employment. It's about hiring someone who can ship software. If someone has publicly shipped software and you can see that, they make for a good candidate. It seems reasonable to me that people who really love writing software and do it a lot would get jobs and be successful in the industry. I wouldn't judge them on their work/life balance, some people really do enjoy programming that much.
  - LargeWu 7y ago
    If you can't glean that devs with 15+ years of experience on their resume know how to ship software, then maybe the real problem is your ability to evaluate talent.
    - malvosenior 7y ago
      I've hired tons of developers with 15+ years of experience! A lot of them have amazing OSS contributions. Some don't but all can talk in depth about projects they've delivered. Hiring based on open source contribution isn't the only signal one can look at, it's just a very strong one (the strongest in my experience). I'll add that not all developers with 15+ years of experience can ship software. Many have let their skills deteriorate or never pushed themselves to learn new things. It's yet another reason a strong personal portfolio is a good signal.
    - xedrac 7y ago
      I am one of those with 15+ years of experience and have shipped many different projects. I've also interviewed many people with impressive resumes only to realize that resumes don't translate to performance. The ability to ship quality software has more to do with personality than it does resumes. I see nothing wrong with counting open source contributions as a big plus. I wouldn't use the lack of it as a hard filter though.
fzeroracer 7y ago
Please please please P L E A S E keep in mind that a lot of developers literally cannot work on many projects in their free time because the company they work for owns everything they do on and off company time. Even contributing to open source efforts can become an issue because you're expected to ask for permission first and it can become a sticky legal issue of ownership. Companies expect and want people to work on personal projects but then don't give ownership of said projects to the developer.
- mcguire 7y ago
  In 25 years of signing employment agreements, I've never seen one that said, "the company ... owns everything they do on and off company time." Yes, if you're working on a Foo and you write a Foo on your own time, you'll have an issue. Do you have any specific lawsuits in mind?
  - robohoe 7y ago
    It doesn't even have to be lawsuits - I've seen cease and desist letters be sent in the past. Not everyone has the financial resources to hire on lawyers to go through with a lawsuit.
    - mcguire 7y ago
      Well, the thing is, you can get a cease and desist for just about anything, whether there's justification for it or not. Anyone can do anything to you, if you can't or won't call them on it. That's why I wanted to see legal precedents. If the Nginx thing were happening in the US, I know which side I'd put my bets on. And I'd really like it, one way or another, because we wouldn't need to have this conversation.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    That's illegal in California, but in Canada you will see things like that come up, even to the extent of saying the company owns anything you think of while employed there.
  - 7y ago
patja 7y ago
If it works for you then great, but you are really limiting the pipeline of candidates. I'll bet there are 100 great candidates out there who don't even have Github accounts for every one you are seeing.
- mcguire 7y ago
  For every one of them, there are 100 people in the pipeline who can tell you in great detail how brilliant the last project they worked on is but can't write a lick of code.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    And if you couldn’t figure that out doesn’t that say a lot about your interviewing process.
    - mcguire 7y ago
      Honestly, he was brilliant. I was looking forward to working with him. Right up to the point where we handed him a laptop and asked him to write some code. "I know you're looking for language X, but I'm really more comfortable with Y." Me (who has written my share of Y): "Sure, that'll be fine. Y should be installed." He proceeded to take 30 minutes to not produce anything resembling X or Y. It was agonizing.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        That’s acceptable. Sit me down to an IDE to write some code and/or stand me in front of a whiteboard to draw out some architecture - like people do in the real world. But don’t ask me to code on a whiteboard. That’s not a real world scenario.
eggsnbacon1 7y ago
This is a stupid signal. Many/most developers are prohibited from working on open source projects by their employers. In any state besides California and Illinois you will be forced to sign an IP assignment agreement to work for any medium/large companies. Open source projects will not let you contribute under such an agreement, and anything you do on your own is owned by your employer.
- leetrout 7y ago
  I paid an attorney to review my contract and NDA... “ anything you do on your own is owned by your employer.” If you use their equipment or their office or their phones. But doing a software project at home on the weekend on your own computer is not going to be owned by the employer in the states I’ve lived and worked in (VA, GA, TN, NC). Do you have a source for a state where this has happened?
  - fzeroracer 7y ago
    Can you afford an attorney to defend yourself in court if a company decided to push the issue? As I will keep saying it does not matter if companies follow up on their threat or not. It still has a chilling effect on people doing side projects which is the intended behavior. And a lot of people can't afford a legal battle even if they had a high chance of winning.
    - ACow_Adonis 7y ago
      Have you considered doing it anonymously or not informing anyone of the projects you're working on? Just like you can't necessarily afford to engage in the legal system, the legal system can't be engaged if they don't have a signal that there's anything there to engage with. And in interviews you can still use the experience and talk about your contributions without releasing the product/ identity to your current employer, and your current company is incredibly unlikely to come chasing after you years later on things with no obvious connection to your real name.
      - 7y ago
marcosdumay 7y ago
Almost all of those procedures are perfectly ok as long as everybody is not doing the same ones. The problem appears if every well paying job requires your to have a public portfolio. The good news is that all of those procedures are more effective the less companies are using them. So unless you the entire field has a very centralized hiring market (as in 80% of the good jobs are in FAANG), there are good odds it things don't ever get bad.
- ghaff 7y ago
  That comes awfully close to saying it's OK to discriminate against $GROUP so long as everyone doesn't do it.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    Requiring a public portfolio is the same as racism now?
    - ghaff 7y ago
      The comment I was responding to was "Almost all of those procedures are perfectly ok as long as everybody is not doing the same ones. The problem appears if every well paying job requires your to have a public portfolio." IOW, a fair reading is that the parent acknowledges that the practice excludes people who aren't in a position to have a public portfolio. (For whatever reason: IP rules, family obligations, lack of interest in programming as a hobby.) And that would be a problem if everyone did it. But everyone doesn't so it's OK as long as just some of us do it.
flamtap 7y ago
I really see both sides of this. It’s hard to get around the fact that OSS and GH activity really, truly, is a good hiring signal. It’s certainly one of many, and it’s not (nor should it be) the be-all, end-all hiring signal. There are wizardly devs who stick to a strict 40 hour week. There are equally astounding devs who live, breath, and dream code all day every day. We’d all be lucky to work with both. I don’t see a way around the fact that a public resume is just an enormously strong and quantifiable signal for hiring managers.
- ghaff 7y ago
  On the one hand, it's hard to deny that a requirement (or strong preference) like this will often discriminate against some fairly large groups. And it feels cringe-y for that reason. But it's also hard to deny the value of a portfolio that's directly relevant to the job being hired for. And, if I'm being honest... I do a lot of writing as part of my job. If I'm hiring someone for a role like mine, you can be sure that I want to see some writing that they've done. If they don't have anything they can share? (Which seems a little off. But maybe it was all internal company communication stuff.) Well, they're going to have to write something because I'm not going to just take them at their word that they write well.
  - ryandrake 7y ago
    Also keep in mind that while X could be a good hiring signal, that doesn’t mean that “lack of X” is necessarily a bad hiring signal. I’d be ok with using public projects / GitHub as a boost to get someone into the hiring funnel, but I’d never use “no GitHub profile” as a reason to filter a candidate out.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> People who do a lot of personal projects tend to be very good developers How much OSS work do you do?
- malvosenior 7y ago
  A fair amount, I'm also not young and find time to make it happen. I love building things and I couldn't really imagine not working on my own projects.
scarface74 7y ago
I didn’t graduate from an elite college. I graduated from a no name college over 20 years ago. Software engineering jobs are a dime a dozen. I’ve also only worked for a company that anyone has ever heard of for a couple of years. If someone hinted that they wouldn’t hire me because when I left work, I shut down my computer and didn’t think about software development until the next day, that would be a hard pass. I would move on to any of the dozen of companies that are looking for experienced software developers - and I’m not on the west coast.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  You're right there are a bunch of software development jobs out there! Certainly enough that any skilled developer can find one. That being said, for me as a manager, I like to hire people who demonstrate the ability to repeatedly ship products. It helps if they've owned that product from conception, through delivery all the way to support. That's a skill that is in great demand and I've never been disappointed when hiring someone with a great project portfolio on Github.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    It doesn’t say anything about how well you can “ship” a product because you posted it to Github. “shipping a product” involves knowing what trade offs to make, deadlines, working with QA, deployment strategies, documentation, not breaking preexisting code, etc., dealing with security and regulatory audits, etc. Nothing about posting a pet project on Github gives a signal about shipping a product in the real world.
    - malvosenior 7y ago
      Sure it does. Are they solving a problem they were able to define? What does the shipping history for their project look like? Did they make interesting design choices and tradeoffs. Shipping any software is an accomplishment and does a lot more to demonstrate your skills than leetcode interviews.
Aeolun 7y ago
I really enjoy hiring people that have been full-stack engineers, or the only engineer, at small businesses. They almost without exception know how to develop a reasonable application. People that have only ever worked for a large corporation seems to know only how to deal with their own little bit of the stack.

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.
  - boring_twenties 7y ago
    Why is it discriminatory? All else equal, isn't it clearly better to hire someone with no responsibilities outside of work, than someone who has to be out of the office at 5pm every day to deal with their kids?
    - ghaff 7y ago
      >isn't it clearly better to hire someone with no responsibilities outside of work Umm. No? I see nothing "clearly better" about someone just because they don't have any responsibilities.
      - boring_twenties 7y ago
        Really. You don't see anything better about hiring someone for whom the job will be their #1 priority, and someone else for whom it will be #2 or even lower? I find that difficult to believe.
        riversflow 7y ago
        How do you know here that their job will be priority #1? Traditionally, men with families are considered more reliable because having a family demands stability. If I’m a dude who gets sucked into code, who’s to say I won’t get sucked into some other code than what I’m getting paid for.
pc86 7y ago
Calling this discrimination is offensive to people who are actually discriminated against.

MS90 7y ago

It's just frustrating because not everyone wants to spend 24/7 working at a computer, some of us have other hobbies and prefer to keep a good work/life balance. I already get paid to code 8 hours a day, the last thing I want to do is go home and do it for free. Would an architect get denied employment because they didn't have a "pet project" skyscraper in their backyard to show off?

malvosenior 7y ago
It's not about denying you employment. It's about hiring someone who can ship software. If someone has publicly shipped software and you can see that, they make for a good candidate. It seems reasonable to me that people who really love writing software and do it a lot would get jobs and be successful in the industry. I wouldn't judge them on their work/life balance, some people really do enjoy programming that much.
- LargeWu 7y ago
  If you can't glean that devs with 15+ years of experience on their resume know how to ship software, then maybe the real problem is your ability to evaluate talent.
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    I've hired tons of developers with 15+ years of experience! A lot of them have amazing OSS contributions. Some don't but all can talk in depth about projects they've delivered. Hiring based on open source contribution isn't the only signal one can look at, it's just a very strong one (the strongest in my experience). I'll add that not all developers with 15+ years of experience can ship software. Many have let their skills deteriorate or never pushed themselves to learn new things. It's yet another reason a strong personal portfolio is a good signal.
  - xedrac 7y ago
    I am one of those with 15+ years of experience and have shipped many different projects. I've also interviewed many people with impressive resumes only to realize that resumes don't translate to performance. The ability to ship quality software has more to do with personality than it does resumes. I see nothing wrong with counting open source contributions as a big plus. I wouldn't use the lack of it as a hard filter though.

fzeroracer 7y ago

Please please please P L E A S E keep in mind that a lot of developers literally cannot work on many projects in their free time because the company they work for owns everything they do on and off company time. Even contributing to open source efforts can become an issue because you're expected to ask for permission first and it can become a sticky legal issue of ownership. Companies expect and want people to work on personal projects but then don't give ownership of said projects to the developer.

mcguire 7y ago
In 25 years of signing employment agreements, I've never seen one that said, "the company ... owns everything they do on and off company time." Yes, if you're working on a Foo and you write a Foo on your own time, you'll have an issue. Do you have any specific lawsuits in mind?
- robohoe 7y ago
  It doesn't even have to be lawsuits - I've seen cease and desist letters be sent in the past. Not everyone has the financial resources to hire on lawyers to go through with a lawsuit.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    Well, the thing is, you can get a cease and desist for just about anything, whether there's justification for it or not. Anyone can do anything to you, if you can't or won't call them on it. That's why I wanted to see legal precedents. If the Nginx thing were happening in the US, I know which side I'd put my bets on. And I'd really like it, one way or another, because we wouldn't need to have this conversation.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  That's illegal in California, but in Canada you will see things like that come up, even to the extent of saying the company owns anything you think of while employed there.
- 7y ago

patja 7y ago

If it works for you then great, but you are really limiting the pipeline of candidates. I'll bet there are 100 great candidates out there who don't even have Github accounts for every one you are seeing.

mcguire 7y ago
For every one of them, there are 100 people in the pipeline who can tell you in great detail how brilliant the last project they worked on is but can't write a lick of code.
- scarface74 7y ago
  And if you couldn’t figure that out doesn’t that say a lot about your interviewing process.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    Honestly, he was brilliant. I was looking forward to working with him. Right up to the point where we handed him a laptop and asked him to write some code. "I know you're looking for language X, but I'm really more comfortable with Y." Me (who has written my share of Y): "Sure, that'll be fine. Y should be installed." He proceeded to take 30 minutes to not produce anything resembling X or Y. It was agonizing.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      That’s acceptable. Sit me down to an IDE to write some code and/or stand me in front of a whiteboard to draw out some architecture - like people do in the real world. But don’t ask me to code on a whiteboard. That’s not a real world scenario.

eggsnbacon1 7y ago

This is a stupid signal. Many/most developers are prohibited from working on open source projects by their employers. In any state besides California and Illinois you will be forced to sign an IP assignment agreement to work for any medium/large companies. Open source projects will not let you contribute under such an agreement, and anything you do on your own is owned by your employer.

leetrout 7y ago
I paid an attorney to review my contract and NDA... “ anything you do on your own is owned by your employer.” If you use their equipment or their office or their phones. But doing a software project at home on the weekend on your own computer is not going to be owned by the employer in the states I’ve lived and worked in (VA, GA, TN, NC). Do you have a source for a state where this has happened?
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  Can you afford an attorney to defend yourself in court if a company decided to push the issue? As I will keep saying it does not matter if companies follow up on their threat or not. It still has a chilling effect on people doing side projects which is the intended behavior. And a lot of people can't afford a legal battle even if they had a high chance of winning.
  - ACow_Adonis 7y ago
    Have you considered doing it anonymously or not informing anyone of the projects you're working on? Just like you can't necessarily afford to engage in the legal system, the legal system can't be engaged if they don't have a signal that there's anything there to engage with. And in interviews you can still use the experience and talk about your contributions without releasing the product/ identity to your current employer, and your current company is incredibly unlikely to come chasing after you years later on things with no obvious connection to your real name.
    - 7y ago

marcosdumay 7y ago

Almost all of those procedures are perfectly ok as long as everybody is not doing the same ones. The problem appears if every well paying job requires your to have a public portfolio. The good news is that all of those procedures are more effective the less companies are using them. So unless you the entire field has a very centralized hiring market (as in 80% of the good jobs are in FAANG), there are good odds it things don't ever get bad.

ghaff 7y ago
That comes awfully close to saying it's OK to discriminate against $GROUP so long as everyone doesn't do it.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Requiring a public portfolio is the same as racism now?
  - ghaff 7y ago
    The comment I was responding to was "Almost all of those procedures are perfectly ok as long as everybody is not doing the same ones. The problem appears if every well paying job requires your to have a public portfolio." IOW, a fair reading is that the parent acknowledges that the practice excludes people who aren't in a position to have a public portfolio. (For whatever reason: IP rules, family obligations, lack of interest in programming as a hobby.) And that would be a problem if everyone did it. But everyone doesn't so it's OK as long as just some of us do it.

flamtap 7y ago

I really see both sides of this. It’s hard to get around the fact that OSS and GH activity really, truly, is a good hiring signal. It’s certainly one of many, and it’s not (nor should it be) the be-all, end-all hiring signal. There are wizardly devs who stick to a strict 40 hour week. There are equally astounding devs who live, breath, and dream code all day every day. We’d all be lucky to work with both. I don’t see a way around the fact that a public resume is just an enormously strong and quantifiable signal for hiring managers.

ghaff 7y ago
On the one hand, it's hard to deny that a requirement (or strong preference) like this will often discriminate against some fairly large groups. And it feels cringe-y for that reason. But it's also hard to deny the value of a portfolio that's directly relevant to the job being hired for. And, if I'm being honest... I do a lot of writing as part of my job. If I'm hiring someone for a role like mine, you can be sure that I want to see some writing that they've done. If they don't have anything they can share? (Which seems a little off. But maybe it was all internal company communication stuff.) Well, they're going to have to write something because I'm not going to just take them at their word that they write well.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  Also keep in mind that while X could be a good hiring signal, that doesn’t mean that “lack of X” is necessarily a bad hiring signal. I’d be ok with using public projects / GitHub as a boost to get someone into the hiring funnel, but I’d never use “no GitHub profile” as a reason to filter a candidate out.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> People who do a lot of personal projects tend to be very good developers How much OSS work do you do?

malvosenior 7y ago
A fair amount, I'm also not young and find time to make it happen. I love building things and I couldn't really imagine not working on my own projects.

scarface74 7y ago

I didn’t graduate from an elite college. I graduated from a no name college over 20 years ago. Software engineering jobs are a dime a dozen. I’ve also only worked for a company that anyone has ever heard of for a couple of years. If someone hinted that they wouldn’t hire me because when I left work, I shut down my computer and didn’t think about software development until the next day, that would be a hard pass. I would move on to any of the dozen of companies that are looking for experienced software developers - and I’m not on the west coast.

malvosenior 7y ago
You're right there are a bunch of software development jobs out there! Certainly enough that any skilled developer can find one. That being said, for me as a manager, I like to hire people who demonstrate the ability to repeatedly ship products. It helps if they've owned that product from conception, through delivery all the way to support. That's a skill that is in great demand and I've never been disappointed when hiring someone with a great project portfolio on Github.
- scarface74 7y ago
  It doesn’t say anything about how well you can “ship” a product because you posted it to Github. “shipping a product” involves knowing what trade offs to make, deadlines, working with QA, deployment strategies, documentation, not breaking preexisting code, etc., dealing with security and regulatory audits, etc. Nothing about posting a pet project on Github gives a signal about shipping a product in the real world.
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    Sure it does. Are they solving a problem they were able to define? What does the shipping history for their project look like? Did they make interesting design choices and tradeoffs. Shipping any software is an accomplishment and does a lot more to demonstrate your skills than leetcode interviews.

Aeolun 7y ago

I really enjoy hiring people that have been full-stack engineers, or the only engineer, at small businesses. They almost without exception know how to develop a reasonable application. People that have only ever worked for a large corporation seems to know only how to deal with their own little bit of the stack.