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Is it true you still need an "open source coding resume" by mid-career stage? I can understand using that to give you an advantage for entry-level roles, but by

Is it true you still need an "open source coding resume" by mid-career stage? I can understand using that to give you an advantage for entry-level roles, but by "mid-career" shouldn't your experience and achievements in past roles speak for itself? Or do companies still want to see engineers spending their spare time doing unpaid coding? By mid-career, many people have families to support, that they also would like to spend time with in their down time. Surely this is considered during the hiring process? I don't think I would want to work somewhere that expects a married with kids mid-level engineer to spend their weekends and nights contributing to open source, just to land their next job.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> By mid-career, many people have families to support, that they also would like to spend time with in their down time. I have never hired anyone, but anecdotally from a team lead dev who has hired a couple dozen people, that is the exact kind of thing they want to avoid. If someone was a "star" working 90 hours a week in the past but now wants to work 40, they stop being the kind of "star" some companies want.
- kleiba 6y ago
  It's worth noting that the opposite point of view is also true: in that case, they are not the company the "ex-star" would want to work for, either.
- SystemOut 6y ago
  As someone who has been in a team lead role and hiring for many years I can't imagine a more toxic viewpoint to team building.
- x0x0 6y ago
  You can find whatever type of company you want. I find the complaining of most engineers incoherent. Until March or so, more than at any point in time, being a competent software engineer opened doors at thousands of companies. I expect we'll be back there within two years tops. When you are looking for a job, ask the person you're talking to what expectations are. Ask the hiring manager how he or she defines success for the role. Ask every employee you speak to how much they work. You'll get your answer. Pick your employer accordingly. ps -- at my 40-ish person startup, eng rarely work more than 45h/week. And we have plenty of parents. We do however make comparatively boring software sold to enterprises, and have trouble hiring in part because of that (imo).
- smt88 6y ago
  That team lead (and companies with similar thinking) need to learn that obsessive/workaholic devs are not more productive. If coding consumes your paid and free time, you're generally not cranking out new CRUD features requested by the marketing team. You're doing pet projects, learning new languages, or getting lost in bikeshedding, like writing a new JS framework because you think the current list sucks. That means your workaholic employee is burning out on things that don't help your company, and their actual paid work is probably a distraction from what they really want to be doing. By contrast, someone experienced with a family and/or hobbies working 40h will often do their work well and have ways to detox from work problems before getting started again the next morning. A lot of that is my anecdata, but hiring people who want work/life balance is working so well that those are the only devs I have (14 at the moment).
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    I'm somewhat amused at this rejuvenation of the age-old belief that folks who have this as a hobby are somehow maladjusted and burning out. Fascinating. I think it was this early belief in the 90s and then the dotcom boom had the superstars and then the next wave had the next superstars and it shifted. Now it's shifted back. Wonder what shifted it. Well, to my people out there, do not fret: there are still places to work where you work with other obsessives, there are still people who look for that in each other, and after 20 years of messing with computers I can tell you it is still joyful. You can do what you love and make a lot of money doing it. And in these places no one will judge you for loving the thing you work on so much you do it for fun as well.
    - smt88 6y ago
      You've missed my point entirely, which is perhaps a communication failure on my part. I believe there are obsessive coders who will have lots of money/fun. Some will be valuable to their employers. No company should only look for these coders, which is the policy I was originally trying to refute. It's much, much easier to find productive 40 hr coders than productive 80 hr coders. The ones coding for 80 hrs are often perfectionists, or they believe they're immune to burnout. You yourself seem to believe that loving something enough means you can avoid burnout. You can't. Burnout is part of our physiology. If you lose even small amounts of sleep for long periods of time, your performance falls off a cliff. What's worse is that you don't know you're not at your best. Look at pro gamers. They love games enough to play them all day, every day, but they still suffer at the end of a long session.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Stars work 90 hours a week? Are they being paid hourly? Would you pay them hourly if they requested it and would you still think they were stars if you were?
karatestomp 6y ago
> Is it true you still need an "open source coding resume" by mid-career stage? Who knows? Every company wants something different and most of them seem reluctant to provide that information up front, inexplicably. Maybe lead with “we expect to go over some of your code with you” or “we’ll be doing 2 hours of whiteboarding, but nothing above leetcode easy” or whatever. Every interview (outside certain major companies which are quite up-front about what they want) is a mystery until they spring it on you. Wish they’d fucking settle on one thing. Let’s all do open-source (would mean everyone would have to stop forbidding it, of course) or even all do leetcode. The guessing game interviews and scattershot prep requirements are draining and a waste of everyone’s time.
- wolco 6y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head. The various random things that can be thrown at you is incredible. Add that to different personality requirements. Most want extroverts during the interview process but introverted after hired.
  - smt88 6y ago
    You can be a good communicator and an introvert and nail a job interview. The hurdle for introverts is usually that they feel anxiety (some of which is normal for a job interview!) and may not come across as well as they would in a more comfortable setting.
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      Extroverts feel anxiety too. A job interview is a situation with an inherent power asymmetry, which is no more comforting to extroverts.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    > The various random things that can be thrown at you is incredible. From another perspective, that's a pretty apt description of a whole class of programming jobs. Maybe it's an accidental/unintended test for a thing that really matters...
twblalock 6y ago
In my experience that expectation is not normal, except at startups -- and a lot of startups don't care either. Most of the people I've interviewed and seen hired had not made any open-source contributions, and if they had side projects they didn't mention them.
organicfigs 6y ago
You definitely don't need an "open source coding resume" at mid-career since you don't need it in an early career job hunt. You just need to LeetCode sigh
- whycombagator 6y ago
  Pretty much. In mid-career you will probably need system design as well for the >L4 roles
  - ddlutz 6y ago
    I had a system design interview for my L4 interview @ Google, it seems pretty typical to.
    - bitL 6y ago
      Some time ago a senior recruiter at Google suggested to me that they would have waived some interviews if I had a famous open-source project on my resume.
      - wolco 6y ago
        Famous open source project > 10000+ likes.
        p410n3 6y ago
        I'll just open source my bot that gives my project 10k likes and call it a day
        durnygbur 6y ago
        GitHub likes seem like such a volatile currency for competency entities.
      - hoorayimhelping 6y ago
        Makes me think of this: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
If your resume is a "yes" at first read, your GitHub projects won't matter. Likewise, if your resume experience is a "no", they're not going to visit GitHub to change their minds. Where it starts to matter is if your resume is a "maybe" on first read. If they're not quite sure if your experience is what they're looking for, they might make an effort to probe around your GitHub profile for extra information. Having even a few good commits easily accessible on GitHub can be enough to tip the scales to "yes" and move candidates on to the next stage in the interview. > I don't think I would want to work somewhere that expects a married with kids mid-level engineer to spend their weekends and nights contributing to open source, just to land their next job. It's a mistake to think that's it's mandatory. I've never met a real-world hiring manager who thinks that GitHub profiles are a requirement for good candidates. Likewise, it's a mistake when people delay their job search or applications to build up a portfolio of side projects first. Realistically, most companies are never going to check your GitHub profile in the first place.
- seer 6y ago
  A lot of the time you’re not reviewed in isolation. There is a stack of resumes and 5 of them are a yes, but there’s a budget for 2. Or you have roughly the same experience but demand a bit more money. In all of those cases having a real provable thing they can anchor their decision on is a big win. Anything in a resume can be suspect. Every time you describe something awesome you did at a previous job, there is “another side” - for example you built this microservice that scales this problematic thing and everyone was happy, but after you left there is not enough docs and now people are struggling to maintain it. Or you were great at code review and everyone really appreciated your input, but it turns out they were shy and didn’t tell it to your face, but complained about you behind your back. Anyway open source work is a very clear way for someone evaluating you to have a concrete data point. It might not be accurate, but the interviewer will often perceive it as such. The old “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” kind of mentality. But its more than that. People usually make it as a ”will this achieve my goals” kind of thing. You don’t do open source _just_ so you’ll get an additional interview. You do OS because you’re helping the global human understanding, you’re becoming a better, more helpful and knowledgeable dev, and because it’s your passion. And if you are those things, it’s a great sign for the interviewer that you can be a good fit for almost any dev position.
bitL 6y ago
Not only open source coding resume, but also Leetcode-hard proficiency for entry-level jobs (not joking; ofc this is waived if you know the right people). Welcome to the insanity of contemporary tech industry! BTW, almost nobody clicks on links in your CV.
- cmarschner 6y ago
  I have clicked on github links in resumes many times, and I have yet to get impressed. Most of the time you‘d find empty repositories, some forks that were never touched, and other garbage, and hardly any activity. If you can‘t clean up your profile when submitting an application, just remove that link.
  - bitL 6y ago
    Stuff you can find in my resume are links like my own self-driving car, humanoid robot, music studio, links to software that was #1 on HN etc. Yet still almost nobody clicks on them :D Recruiters/HR/interviewers seem to be quite lazy and what is on the paper must be sufficient to convince them to give you a shot or make you likable enough.
    - ebalit 6y ago
      I don't know about recruiters but I am interested! Would you mind sharing those links here?
Igelau 6y ago
> do companies still want to see engineers spending their spare time doing unpaid coding? This is a festering rot in the core of the dev hiring process. Too many applications have a required field for your side projects before you've even gotten past the first page. The fact that this is being pushed by someone and enabled by some portion of devs is dangerous.
downvoteme1 6y ago
I think the going consensus is that your github etc does not matter if you can leetcode. However the equation might have changed drastically in the last 8 weeks as now there are number of laid off people searching while most companies have put hiring on hold.
renewiltord 6y ago
I skipped our whiteboarding exercise with a candidate based on reading an original GitHub project of his. I didn't notice him because of the project, I wouldn't have ignored him without the project but the repo gave me enough info to know he was capable. If he hadn't already done that, then we'd just have to go through some demonstration of programming ability. It's been a few months and I'm ready to call this a win.
nilkn 6y ago
As a hiring manager it’s just an additional piece of information that can add to or enhance the resume in some cases. It’s not something that candidates should stress about or worry about in my opinion, and it’s hardly required. Most candidates have nothing of interest or true significance. But in some cases we’ve certainly become more interested in a candidate because we were impressed with something on their GitHub profile.
davedx 6y ago
I've done a fair bit of technical screening of candidates at various levels. In my experience, unless you have a big open source project that people actually recognise, it's not worth mentioning. All the companies I helped interview candidates for were much more interested in 1) Experience 2) Proven programming ability, almost always measured with tests Companies all in the Netherlands in the last ~8 years, from smaller to international.
wastedhours 6y ago
Isn't most of it about having something public you can talk about and show your contributions for? It's not a filter in and of itself, but almost all of your other experience will be proprietary and closed, and you can at best talk in generalities about problems you've solved. You can't evidence half of it. Open source projects allow someone who's umming and ahhing to have something concrete to see whether or not you're selling them donuts. Certainly isn't a requirement though.
onion2k 6y ago
Tangentially related point - I've had several recruiters contact me through my Github profile (I have my location on there). While I don't know if really it makes a difference having a link to it on your resume, it can be a source of opportunities.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> By mid-career, many people have families to support, that they also would like to spend time with in their down time. I have never hired anyone, but anecdotally from a team lead dev who has hired a couple dozen people, that is the exact kind of thing they want to avoid. If someone was a "star" working 90 hours a week in the past but now wants to work 40, they stop being the kind of "star" some companies want.

kleiba 6y ago
It's worth noting that the opposite point of view is also true: in that case, they are not the company the "ex-star" would want to work for, either.
SystemOut 6y ago
As someone who has been in a team lead role and hiring for many years I can't imagine a more toxic viewpoint to team building.
x0x0 6y ago
You can find whatever type of company you want. I find the complaining of most engineers incoherent. Until March or so, more than at any point in time, being a competent software engineer opened doors at thousands of companies. I expect we'll be back there within two years tops. When you are looking for a job, ask the person you're talking to what expectations are. Ask the hiring manager how he or she defines success for the role. Ask every employee you speak to how much they work. You'll get your answer. Pick your employer accordingly. ps -- at my 40-ish person startup, eng rarely work more than 45h/week. And we have plenty of parents. We do however make comparatively boring software sold to enterprises, and have trouble hiring in part because of that (imo).
smt88 6y ago
That team lead (and companies with similar thinking) need to learn that obsessive/workaholic devs are not more productive. If coding consumes your paid and free time, you're generally not cranking out new CRUD features requested by the marketing team. You're doing pet projects, learning new languages, or getting lost in bikeshedding, like writing a new JS framework because you think the current list sucks. That means your workaholic employee is burning out on things that don't help your company, and their actual paid work is probably a distraction from what they really want to be doing. By contrast, someone experienced with a family and/or hobbies working 40h will often do their work well and have ways to detox from work problems before getting started again the next morning. A lot of that is my anecdata, but hiring people who want work/life balance is working so well that those are the only devs I have (14 at the moment).
- renewiltord 6y ago
  I'm somewhat amused at this rejuvenation of the age-old belief that folks who have this as a hobby are somehow maladjusted and burning out. Fascinating. I think it was this early belief in the 90s and then the dotcom boom had the superstars and then the next wave had the next superstars and it shifted. Now it's shifted back. Wonder what shifted it. Well, to my people out there, do not fret: there are still places to work where you work with other obsessives, there are still people who look for that in each other, and after 20 years of messing with computers I can tell you it is still joyful. You can do what you love and make a lot of money doing it. And in these places no one will judge you for loving the thing you work on so much you do it for fun as well.
  - smt88 6y ago
    You've missed my point entirely, which is perhaps a communication failure on my part. I believe there are obsessive coders who will have lots of money/fun. Some will be valuable to their employers. No company should only look for these coders, which is the policy I was originally trying to refute. It's much, much easier to find productive 40 hr coders than productive 80 hr coders. The ones coding for 80 hrs are often perfectionists, or they believe they're immune to burnout. You yourself seem to believe that loving something enough means you can avoid burnout. You can't. Burnout is part of our physiology. If you lose even small amounts of sleep for long periods of time, your performance falls off a cliff. What's worse is that you don't know you're not at your best. Look at pro gamers. They love games enough to play them all day, every day, but they still suffer at the end of a long session.
rorykoehler 6y ago
Stars work 90 hours a week? Are they being paid hourly? Would you pay them hourly if they requested it and would you still think they were stars if you were?

karatestomp 6y ago

> Is it true you still need an "open source coding resume" by mid-career stage? Who knows? Every company wants something different and most of them seem reluctant to provide that information up front, inexplicably. Maybe lead with “we expect to go over some of your code with you” or “we’ll be doing 2 hours of whiteboarding, but nothing above leetcode easy” or whatever. Every interview (outside certain major companies which are quite up-front about what they want) is a mystery until they spring it on you. Wish they’d fucking settle on one thing. Let’s all do open-source (would mean everyone would have to stop forbidding it, of course) or even all do leetcode. The guessing game interviews and scattershot prep requirements are draining and a waste of everyone’s time.

wolco 6y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head. The various random things that can be thrown at you is incredible. Add that to different personality requirements. Most want extroverts during the interview process but introverted after hired.
- smt88 6y ago
  You can be a good communicator and an introvert and nail a job interview. The hurdle for introverts is usually that they feel anxiety (some of which is normal for a job interview!) and may not come across as well as they would in a more comfortable setting.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Extroverts feel anxiety too. A job interview is a situation with an inherent power asymmetry, which is no more comforting to extroverts.
- bigiain 6y ago
  > The various random things that can be thrown at you is incredible. From another perspective, that's a pretty apt description of a whole class of programming jobs. Maybe it's an accidental/unintended test for a thing that really matters...

twblalock 6y ago

In my experience that expectation is not normal, except at startups -- and a lot of startups don't care either. Most of the people I've interviewed and seen hired had not made any open-source contributions, and if they had side projects they didn't mention them.

organicfigs 6y ago

You definitely don't need an "open source coding resume" at mid-career since you don't need it in an early career job hunt. You just need to LeetCode sigh

whycombagator 6y ago
Pretty much. In mid-career you will probably need system design as well for the >L4 roles
- ddlutz 6y ago
  I had a system design interview for my L4 interview @ Google, it seems pretty typical to.
  - bitL 6y ago
    Some time ago a senior recruiter at Google suggested to me that they would have waived some interviews if I had a famous open-source project on my resume.
    - wolco 6y ago
      Famous open source project > 10000+ likes.
      - p410n3 6y ago
        I'll just open source my bot that gives my project 10k likes and call it a day
      - durnygbur 6y ago
        GitHub likes seem like such a volatile currency for competency entities.
    - hoorayimhelping 6y ago
      Makes me think of this: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

If your resume is a "yes" at first read, your GitHub projects won't matter. Likewise, if your resume experience is a "no", they're not going to visit GitHub to change their minds. Where it starts to matter is if your resume is a "maybe" on first read. If they're not quite sure if your experience is what they're looking for, they might make an effort to probe around your GitHub profile for extra information. Having even a few good commits easily accessible on GitHub can be enough to tip the scales to "yes" and move candidates on to the next stage in the interview. > I don't think I would want to work somewhere that expects a married with kids mid-level engineer to spend their weekends and nights contributing to open source, just to land their next job. It's a mistake to think that's it's mandatory. I've never met a real-world hiring manager who thinks that GitHub profiles are a requirement for good candidates. Likewise, it's a mistake when people delay their job search or applications to build up a portfolio of side projects first. Realistically, most companies are never going to check your GitHub profile in the first place.

seer 6y ago
A lot of the time you’re not reviewed in isolation. There is a stack of resumes and 5 of them are a yes, but there’s a budget for 2. Or you have roughly the same experience but demand a bit more money. In all of those cases having a real provable thing they can anchor their decision on is a big win. Anything in a resume can be suspect. Every time you describe something awesome you did at a previous job, there is “another side” - for example you built this microservice that scales this problematic thing and everyone was happy, but after you left there is not enough docs and now people are struggling to maintain it. Or you were great at code review and everyone really appreciated your input, but it turns out they were shy and didn’t tell it to your face, but complained about you behind your back. Anyway open source work is a very clear way for someone evaluating you to have a concrete data point. It might not be accurate, but the interviewer will often perceive it as such. The old “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” kind of mentality. But its more than that. People usually make it as a ”will this achieve my goals” kind of thing. You don’t do open source _just_ so you’ll get an additional interview. You do OS because you’re helping the global human understanding, you’re becoming a better, more helpful and knowledgeable dev, and because it’s your passion. And if you are those things, it’s a great sign for the interviewer that you can be a good fit for almost any dev position.

bitL 6y ago

Not only open source coding resume, but also Leetcode-hard proficiency for entry-level jobs (not joking; ofc this is waived if you know the right people). Welcome to the insanity of contemporary tech industry! BTW, almost nobody clicks on links in your CV.

cmarschner 6y ago
I have clicked on github links in resumes many times, and I have yet to get impressed. Most of the time you‘d find empty repositories, some forks that were never touched, and other garbage, and hardly any activity. If you can‘t clean up your profile when submitting an application, just remove that link.
- bitL 6y ago
  Stuff you can find in my resume are links like my own self-driving car, humanoid robot, music studio, links to software that was #1 on HN etc. Yet still almost nobody clicks on them :D Recruiters/HR/interviewers seem to be quite lazy and what is on the paper must be sufficient to convince them to give you a shot or make you likable enough.
  - ebalit 6y ago
    I don't know about recruiters but I am interested! Would you mind sharing those links here?

Igelau 6y ago

> do companies still want to see engineers spending their spare time doing unpaid coding? This is a festering rot in the core of the dev hiring process. Too many applications have a required field for your side projects before you've even gotten past the first page. The fact that this is being pushed by someone and enabled by some portion of devs is dangerous.

downvoteme1 6y ago

I think the going consensus is that your github etc does not matter if you can leetcode. However the equation might have changed drastically in the last 8 weeks as now there are number of laid off people searching while most companies have put hiring on hold.

renewiltord 6y ago

I skipped our whiteboarding exercise with a candidate based on reading an original GitHub project of his. I didn't notice him because of the project, I wouldn't have ignored him without the project but the repo gave me enough info to know he was capable. If he hadn't already done that, then we'd just have to go through some demonstration of programming ability. It's been a few months and I'm ready to call this a win.

nilkn 6y ago

As a hiring manager it’s just an additional piece of information that can add to or enhance the resume in some cases. It’s not something that candidates should stress about or worry about in my opinion, and it’s hardly required. Most candidates have nothing of interest or true significance. But in some cases we’ve certainly become more interested in a candidate because we were impressed with something on their GitHub profile.

davedx 6y ago

I've done a fair bit of technical screening of candidates at various levels. In my experience, unless you have a big open source project that people actually recognise, it's not worth mentioning. All the companies I helped interview candidates for were much more interested in 1) Experience 2) Proven programming ability, almost always measured with tests Companies all in the Netherlands in the last ~8 years, from smaller to international.

wastedhours 6y ago

Isn't most of it about having something public you can talk about and show your contributions for? It's not a filter in and of itself, but almost all of your other experience will be proprietary and closed, and you can at best talk in generalities about problems you've solved. You can't evidence half of it. Open source projects allow someone who's umming and ahhing to have something concrete to see whether or not you're selling them donuts. Certainly isn't a requirement though.

onion2k 6y ago

Tangentially related point - I've had several recruiters contact me through my Github profile (I have my location on there). While I don't know if really it makes a difference having a link to it on your resume, it can be a source of opportunities.