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GitHub Won’t Help You with Hiring

119 points by user5994461 6y ago

ivars 6y ago
Maybe I missed the forest for the trees, but it sounds like OP is almost discouraging people from contributing to their GitHub profiles? If you are a well know or experienced dev with a long resume of working for closed-source companies, then, yes, you don't need a GitHub profile. For younger people or developers switching domains, GitHub contributions and personal projects might be the only way of showing their worth to future employers.
- II2II 6y ago
  > Maybe I missed the forest for the trees, but it sounds like OP is almost discouraging people from contributing to their GitHub profiles? It wouldn't surprise me. There is a lot of content online that appears to be created for the sole purpose of finding work or as part of school/university projects. A lot of that is of limited value, which diminishes the signal:noise. But I think the main point of the article is that it is unlikely to be used in the hiring process. People either don't see if as being of value or realize that it can be gamed.
- croes 6y ago
  It seems nobody cares about Github contributions so you actually don't show anything if nobody watches.
lovetocode 6y ago
Thank you! I have been complaining about this forever. 99% of software I write is closed source! It seems like we get punished for this when in reality it’s the company’s policy not to publicly expose proprietary information.
dewey 6y ago
Of course if you already have a job in tech and 3 other companies on the resume it doesn't matter so much. For people straight out of university their side projects are interesting to recruiters though as there's not that many other references you have. This is even more true for people not coming through the normal CS pipeline, working on their own projects and shipping something is a good way to show that you know what you are doing. Especially when so many people coming out of CS studies don't even know how to code.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  That is so bizarre to me, in Portugal pure CS theory without any kind of project deliverables is a math degree specialisation, what one would do the last two years of a 5 year degree in maths. Spending 5 years in any kind of engineering degree without being evaluated just doesn't happen, unless one would be cheating on their project assignments.
  - dewey 6y ago
    > Spending 5 years in any kind of engineering degree without being evaluated just doesn't happen Passing programming assignments or university projects is very different to actually knowing how to code or think about solutions on your own I think.
    - SJC_Hacker 6y ago
      Main difference would be the time pressure. Our coding assignments could be done generally at our own pace, though of course there were deadlines. Also the "tricky algorithm" and "off the top of your head" aspects generally weren't there - of course way back when, there wasn't a whole lot of code public so you couldn't just copy off the internet. though of course some cheated and copied each other's work. Perhaps universities should start acting like more like what the companies are testing for nowadays, in order to prepare their students better. Timed coding quizzes every week, automatically validated like HackerRank, Leetcode, etc.. It wouldn't even have to be these tricky algorithms - maybe just a something like implement quicksort, etc. (without using the API calls) in like 30 minutes.
  - hansvm 6y ago
    It's not too hard to get passable marks in a subject you don't understand well and then forget most it. Suppose a given class has a 40/60 applied/theory split. Our hypothetical student is average in some sense and gets 75% on the theory. Now if they get at least 37.5% on the applied portion they barely pass the class. There are minimum GPA considerations, and you might need at least a C in some classes rather than a D to continue, but it's pretty common to spread the hardest classes out so that you only have one super hard class to focus on each semester, and easier courses and generals will help pad out the Ds on your transcript to maintain a passing GPA. Throw in a retake or two for a couple screw-ups, and you still graduate in 4 years with a whisper of a shadow of an ability to program. Filtering for high GPAs and whatnot can help (or it might exclude people who had family emergencies or other complicating factors and still know their shit), but in the worst case that's just a measure of the amount of time and dedication spent per course. You also probably need to set a pretty high threshold -- you can bomb all your algorithms, data structures, and applied programming courses and still have a 3.5+ GPA if you do well enough elsewhere.
jon-wood 6y ago
When interviewing someone I will try to track down their GitHub profile, and having some decent code on their is probably going to make me more inclined to hire you since it gives me a data point on how you work. However for all the reasons listed in this article I’m just going to disregard the lack of a profile or a profile with limited content, I’m trying to hire a professional software developer to do work here, and whether or not your hobby is running a large open source project doesn’t really influence how good you are at your day job.
- OmarShehata 6y ago
  Do you actually scroll through and asses the code quality though? The only thing I can tell at a glance is "they bothered to clean this up and document it" which is one useful sign. The more useful signal for me is GitHub as a portfolio piece, if they got some concrete relevant work done that I can ask them about in the interview but I don't need to see the source code for that.
  - jon-wood 6y ago
    I give it a quick skim, unless it’s something that interests me on a deeper level than “this is just some code”. It’s essentially a somewhat deeper fizzbuzz test, if someone has half decent code which shows baseline knowledge I’ll skip doing a screening test.
- stevekemp 6y ago
  I had an interesting interview a few months back, the interviewers said "Please pick a smallish repository and walk us through the design and implementation". I talked for nearly an hour about one of my projects, first of all the broad design, then various interesting aspects of the implementation. (Most projects have lots of "dull"/"boring" code, but I certainly highlighted the areas I had the most fun/pleasure/difficulty implementing.) Was a nice interview, although it was only possible because I've posted a whole bunch of projects online. I know other people keep their stuff private, or don't even write code in their spare times.
  - 6y ago
vbernat 6y ago
GitHub also record contributions in form of issues and pull requests. Not contributing to projects you are using for your work looks like a bad signal for me.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  Not everyone uses open source for their work. Even if they do how likely is it they’d have anything to contribute? Can you mark down most developers who use Java or Spring because they haven’t found a bug in them to report?
  - ivanche 6y ago
    If they do, I'd say it should be very likely the moment they start using anything smaller than Java/Spring for anything serious. I opened issues and/or PRs for about a dozen libraries and frameworks, and that's probably 50% of what I could open if I had more willingness.
lukeholder 6y ago
This article is from 2018. You can now make your private contributions a data-point on your public profile[1] without giving away private information [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/publicizing-or-hiding-your-private-contributions-on-your-profile https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-yo...
- theamk 6y ago
  That doesn't help much. Our org, for example, runs private github instance. Only few things end up in github.com, and this is mostly boring stuff like patches to existing projects.
- ziml77 6y ago
  How many businesses even store their internal code on GitHub's public service? Everywhere I've worked has used self-hosted solutions.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    Every customer I worked with stores their code either on github or bitbucket. The only one who doesn't let me use my self hosted git repository (I mean the copy on a server of mine.) They also have a copy they can pull from there. All of them are medium / small sized.
- stevesimmons 6y ago
  This doesn't work if the private repo belongs to your former company... Once a company removes your access rights to their private repo, your historic commit record there disappears from your own commit timeline.
ubercow13 6y ago
My activity graph is almost solid green just due to commits to my private dotfiles repository, so yeah it’s not that useful. On the other hand even if no one looks at my profile, the projects on there allow me to put extra keywords on my CV which could help with resume screening if nothing else.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  Ooh, that's a good point.
- p00f 6y ago
  > My activity graph is almost solid green just due to commits to my private dotfiles repository Same here lol
breezest 6y ago
By showing that almost no recruiter check the GitHub repos cannot tell if such contributions make a candidate stand out. If someone has tangible contributions through GitHub, they probably write that down in the resume. The interviewers may check their claims either during interview or on GitHub before/after the interview. The problem is that if a candidate performs moderately well in the interview (e.g. coding interview), while he/she has made many contributions through GitHub, should the interviewer recommend the candidate? My belief is that most interviewers will not take the risk or take the responsibility for a potentially wrong hire.
codesections 6y ago
> The vast majority of software being produced is closed source software I found this claim surprising. I would have guessed that the narrow majority of software produced these days is open source, but I don't have a citation for that. Do others agree with the article's "vast majority" claim?
- asutekku 6y ago
  A minority of software is open source. It’s the bubble of Github and HN that makes open source to be more prevalent than it actually is.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > A minority of software is open source. How do we know this to be true? Has anyone checked?
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Value point of one. Coding since mid-80's, never worked for a company that would allow me to publish work related code, with exception of my time spent in research institutions. I bet this applies to the large majority of developers out there, but I am extrapolating.
    - mh7 6y ago
      Look at all the software running on your computer right now, how much of it is open source? (Including OS, drivers, ssd/efi/cpu/misc controllers firmware). Email every website you visit and ask to get the source code. Go and check all gadgets in your house which contains a microcontroller or cpu, how many of those can you get the source code for? Ask your car manufacturer for the source code of all its systems. Go out in your city, look at all computerized utilities (screens, payment systems, traffic lights, elevators, power plants, public transport, the list goes on..) Does it really need to be checked? Seems blatantly obvious to me that most software is proprietary.
      - 6y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Actually, GH doesn't just show open-source contributions. It will also show private repos, if you set that (I think it's on by default). Some folks use this to "game" their activity logs. I've heard of people writing scripts to draw pictures in the activity log. I haven't actually seen it, though. That's mostly because I haven't bothered to look. I encountered one activity graph that was insane. It had about 15,000 commits per year. I work 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and have about 3,000. I know of folks with 5-6K, that I believe are legit. Then I clicked on one of the squares, and saw that it had about 600 commits in one day, in a private repo, along about a 24-hour cycle. The person obviously had written a script, that checks stuff into a "dump" repo, automatically. So, the lesson is, caveat emptor. The activity log is an outstanding way to view someone's working style and velocity. Since I do pretty much everything in open-source, you can run number-crunchers on my ID, and see what I do, when. GH has an API. I suspect there's some interesting stuff out there (someone posted a pretty cool CLI tool in HN, a while ago, that showed graphs of the time of day most people did checkins). Back when I was a hiring manager, I would have killed for the kind of info the GH activity log can give. Totally knocks "Draw Spunky" tests into a cocked hat.
- tazjin 6y ago
  > The person obviously had written a script, that checks stuff into a "dump" repo, automatically. Or they had automation committing things into a private repository for some purpose (e.g. machine states). It doesn't have to be an attempt at "tricking" anyone.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    Good point. I didn't think it was a deliberate trick, as it wouldn't have been that extreme, if the person wanted to misrepresent themselves. It just made their GH profile worthless, for me. I do think that tools like GH are important for helping to introduce ourselves to others. As with any tool, it is up to us to use it properly. For me, I am not actually looking for work, but I get tired of not being taken seriously, so I make a point of ensuring that my work is made available for anyone that wants to see it. My motto is "Don't just take my word for it. See for yourself." I am grateful for tools like GH, that allow me to do this. The Stack Overflow Story is another one.
belval 6y ago
I think I agree with "Followers on GitHub Show Popularity Not Talent" to some small scale, but that example is idiotic, who is going to submit a fictional character's GitHub profile as their own. Most of the time when there is +50 people following someone it means that at the very least they have one significant repository, published article or somewhat known through other means (blogs are one).
- croes 6y ago
  He doesn't say that someone submitted a fictional characters profile as his own. He says github popularity is a useless metric because even fictional characters have a higher popularity as nearly all github users.
  - belval 6y ago
    So the reasoning is, due to having outliers that don't actually exist with multiple thousands followers, the metric won't help for hiring? Someone with followers still indicates that at the very least some people are interested in that person's projects.
    - MrPowers 6y ago
      Yea, the author performed an argument by selective observation in the followers section. Choosing a GitHub user from a famous TV show to prove his point makes the line of argumentation particularly fallacious. I'd need to crunch the numbers, but would suspect that number of followers is highly correlated with GitHub stars, PyPi / NPM downloads, etc.
      - croes 6y ago
        As soon as these metrics lead to job success as soon we get fake followers and stars, like on twitter, instagram, etc.
    - croes 6y ago
      It just indicates that his account has followers. A couple of friends or some fake accounts and everbody cam have followers. The pure existence of followers says nothing just like everywhere else.
jmnicolas 6y ago
Fwiw I was interviewed at the beginning of the year because a recruiter found a 5yo stackoverflow post that I completely forgot about (I probably have something like 3 posts on SO).
bregma 6y ago
First thing I do when a resume crosses my desk (as a hiring manager) is check their GitHub (or GitLab) profile, if they supply one. It is an important weapon in our arsenal for helping determine which hire from a shortlist gets called in for interviews. Just having an empty profile is better than no profile, but one with repos of your work is best and worth extra points. It has made the difference in our hiring decisions. Unfortunately for me, I came from a world where everything had to be open source, but moved to a closed source world where everything I produce, even in my private time, belongs to The Company. IP lawyers have to check the bowl before I flush. I am paranoid that my public commit log being empty will affect my chances of getting a job in the FLOSS realm once again.
- stennie 6y ago
  If you are going to use public commit profiles as part of your screening process and hiring decisions, I would encourage you to ask candidates what aspects of their public activity are relevant. For example, ask for a few specific highlights and why the candidate thinks those are interesting. Hobby projects and open source contributions are evidence of patterns of collaboration and commits, but may not be indicative of one's typical (or best) work. There are also many reasons why a great software engineer may not have a public activity profile. The majority of my public commits are scratching itches on open source projects, and are very opportunistic depending on other life and work commitments at the time. Code may not always be pristine, but I can probably rationalise why I took a certain approach (following existing code style, hacking for my own use, actually aiming for quality and performance, ...). As a hiring manager, I'm also OK if candidates want to do something with their personal time that doesn't involve committing to public repos :).
- pokeball1 6y ago
  > [...] but moved to a closed source world where everything I produce, even in my private time, belongs to The Company. [...] So you can't even commit something own, when in private, because company you work for can sue you, just because?
  - sethammons 6y ago
Kiro 6y ago
Year should be added to the title since this is really outdated.
amadeuspagel 6y ago
To argue that GitHub won't help you with hiring doesn't just require showing that it's not perfect, it requires that other methods of assessing people (Interviews? Degrees?) absolutely dominate it. But the arguments made against github would work against any such method. Yes there are impressive people without an impressive github page, there are also impressive people who fail interviews, don't have degrees, etc. > Not only are GitHub profiles not that helpful for hiring developers, it also seems like they aren't that much help for developers that are looking for work. Why try to dissuade people from something they aren't doing anyway?
wendyshu 6y ago
I don't get it. Obviously assessing candidates by only looking at their GitHub is a bad idea. But if a candidate does have a good GitHub, that's useful information.
ohnoesjmr 6y ago
I can tell from experience that this is not true. Sure, a lot of great people do not contribute to open source, yet I do (maintain a sizeable popular project), and nearly half of the interviews spend a good time discussing the work I do in opensource.
danielrpa 6y ago
I've been a hiring manager for 10+ years and I've used the candidate's code on GitHub for helping pre-interview screening decisions numerous times. Good code on GitHub is a good sign, of course I can change my mind after actually interviewing the candidate. This phrase from the article over simplifies this and is frankly childish: "People still seem to think that you can figure out how talented a developer is merely by looking at their open source contributions" Duh. It says that some people "still" think that you can do that by "merely" looking at their OSS contributions. But maybe, just maybe, others can use it "merely" as a data point.
mqus 6y ago
I agree with the article that the quantitative metrics(contribution statistics, followers, stars, LOC, etc) are not really good vor evaluating someone. But its still good for checking 1. The type of code one writes and in what languages, maybe documentation and 2. The interactions with other people in form of PRs and issues. I guess that most recruiters don't have the time to look at that but it definitely could be valuable.
maerF0x0 6y ago
Lets face it, recruiters do a terrible job of screening. They dont understand the job, so how could they ever detect the tells of in group / out group? Plus, you can generate activity for your profile. It's a game of cat and mouse. https://hackernoon.com/how-to-hack-github-kind-of-12b08a46d02e https://hackernoon.com/how-to-hack-github-kind-of-12b08a46d0...
- deleted 6y ago
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- johnnyfaehell 6y ago
  Honestly, I think the biggest problem is our own expectations. The way IT recruitment is just now, is not substainable and makes little sense. * There are more developer jobs than developers * We're constantly afraid of developers who can't code * We decide to test every developer often with non-real-world scenarios and weird things they'll never do in their job and if they did do, you would be very concerned. * Not only do we test them for things things they won't be doing, we also expect them to spend hours and sometimes days doing these tests. * We reject people for weird random reasons. They don't understand one concept correctly, so clearly they can't do the job ever. * We then hire recruiters, who realise how screwed out recruiting is and that it's often potluck. And realise this is a basic funnel, so they go and search out anyone who has a rough chance of doing being able job. * We then blame the recruiters because people don't meet our weird standards. For real, most companies need to realise they are not FAANG. They do not have an endless source of people wanting to work for them because of the reputation. Many of these companies that are acting like they can expect people to jump through hoop and hoop, have employee churn rates of 6-12 months and are competing with many other companies in their local area for the same talent. We continually act like like doing this job always requires the best. From what I see at most companies, you need one or two people who can archectect your system and explain the designs to people and after that you just need people who can follow the designs. We can say "But everyone should be able to do archectecture designs", if you want to spend your days discuss design plans and the benefits of this and that fair enough. But that's not what a company needs, a company needs people to write code they don't need 8 out of 10 to be designing code, they need 8 out of 10 to be "boilerplate" code so to speak. And if someone is able to take a code design and implement it without making it more complex then they're good enough for the job. Google is famous for making people jump through hoops and then have them do basic tasks, because doing basic tasks is what is important. That's just my rant of the week on IT recruitment.
crb002 6y ago
It could if you were smart about it. See the scripts at: https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat You could identify high quality devs that are suddenly funemployed with a burst of github activity - and reach out to them in a non-sleazy manner.
kristopolous 6y ago
Their code and whether they are not crazy are basically the only things i care about. Everything else is a less accurate proxy measurement. Unsupervised, self-motivated, goal-oriented adulting ... that's what I need Doesn't matter what company, these basic requirements don't seem to change.
simonkafan 6y ago
Why do we have to make everything so forcefully career driven? Just enjoy writing code and showing it to the world if you want - no strings attached. Github helps in this case.
- smt88 6y ago
  > Why do we have to make everything so forcefully career driven? Because a lot of us have to code for a living, and employers often ask to see GitHub projects. None of us are choosing this. It's just one of the many shitty trends in the world of software HR.
- dentemple 6y ago
  As the article points out, it's because recruiters have started to ask for links to Github profiles. Hence the topic. Having a Github profile is "being forcefully career-driven" because it's now a potential gate put in place to work at increasingly more companies.
tpkahlon 6y ago
I fell into this cycle where I posted my projects on GitHub. I was constantly chasing the green tick every single day. All my projects were representation of bad code. At the end, I learnt that successful developers usually pay mere attention to Github and more attention to problem solving and consistent learning. These days, I use Github as a reference to concepts I learn. When a day come where I can consider myself a master on a language, I’ll take on an open source project to solve a real world problem with the knowledge gained.
jameslk 6y ago
> While he has written a ton of code at his work in the last year, he hasn't posted anything that can be viewed publicly: he has no public commits, he hasn't created any repositories of his own and he has an insignificant number of followers. Despite all that he's still the best developer I've ever had the pleasure of working with. This is more a problem for the developer, not the company. The company may have a smaller pool of candidates by evaluating based on GitHub profiles, but they will have more data to use in their evaluation. If they don't have the resources to pay for the premium of being selective, they may evaluate candidates from a wider pool (those without GitHub profiles/history). The candidates without GitHub profiles will receive the attention from those companies not willing to pay a premium for their services. This can be generalized in other ways beyond GitHub. GitHub, in this sense, serves as a marketing tool, similar to LinkedIn, a personal site, a blog, a resume, etc. Provided it's a free marketing tool, the developer has little to lose by investing their time into marketing theirself and a lot to gain by receiving more demand.
- bleah1000 6y ago
  Have you ever been able to look at someone's code and immediately figure out whether it's good or not? I think it can be easy to see if it's really bad, but sometimes it can be hard to tell if it's okay code, or really good code. The problem is that you might have extra information to make a hiring decision, but it requires orders of magnitude more time to evaluate. For example, if the whole project is done by a single person do you evaluate their design and code? What if it was just a one-off project that they didn't care about so it has copy-paste code in a few places. Is that bad? If you ask candidates to point out examples of good code, then is that really meaningful? What if a mediocre programmer can find a few places where they wrote some strong code. What if that code was made good through a strong review process? I think the problem is that it's too difficult to determine if open source contributions are actually representative of the way someone will code in a job.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    I don't think the most useful info you can get from someone's Github involves the sort of deep analysis you're attacking in your comment. Nobody is deep diving your code like this, btw. Looking at someone's code projects can tell you some things like how they might write a README, if there is one. It might present a concrete project they built that you can discuss in an interview; what was the hardest part of this project? It can tell you where they are roughly on the scale of "barely started programming" and "clearly are experienced" (an experienced developer can glean this very quickly from someone else's code—even what they choose to paste from Stack Overflow—it isn't as hard as you think). Reading the code line by line looking for "strong code" is something that beginners think employers will be doing, but they don't. Just like developers don't evaluate libraries like this, they do a more topical, holistic page-through. Of course it isn't going to tell you exactly how someone will perform on the job. That's not the goal post (the absence of Github usually means you have nothing to look at at all). It just has a few useful signals like looking at a chair that a carpenter has built. It seems like you are suggesting that the chair a carpenter built in his own time couldn't possibly give you any reliable signal about how the carpenter works, because what if the carpenter was in a rush? Well, let me point out that a rushed veteran and a rushed beginner will cut completely different corners. Kind of like how a skilled artist with only 10 seconds to draw something can still express a great deal of their expertise merely by how they attacked the problem.
aaronbrethorst 6y ago
I don't see why everything has to be bucketed into 'good' vs. 'bad'. A well-populated GitHub profile can be a positive signal to me. It makes it easier for me to see how a prospective candidate works and thinks, and provides me with a more useful and instructive set of questions to ask during an interview. It is also possible that I will discover that the candidate is not sufficiently experienced to meet the requirements of the position that they are applying for, but at least this way I don't have to try to ferret out these answers or waste their time. An unpopulated GitHub profile is a neutral signal for me, and means that I need to spend more time trying to tease out the answers that are simply given to me with a well-populated profile.
- soneca 6y ago
  In a competitive scenario, like multiple people applying to only one open position, a “neutral” signal versus a positive signal is effectively a negative signal.
  - aaronbrethorst 6y ago
    When it comes to hiring highly qualified engineers, I would love to have the problem you are describing.
  - bena 6y ago
    No. It's not. It's a neutral signal. It can't tell you anything either way. Even the github profile isn't a strong positive signal, it's a weak signal. But that's ok. That's really what we're looking for: a lot of weak positive signals. So that person had a github profile. Everything else could either be a neutral or negative signal. Compare that with someone without a github, but has every other positive signal you could ask for. I'd take non-github person over github person every single time.
- tdeck 6y ago
  > It makes it easier for me to see how a prospective candidate works and thinks Be careful making even these assumptions. My GitHub is a subset of my side projects combined with some old work stuff that was reprioritized. Many of my repos lack tests because they're for such a small number of users it's more efficient just to test manually and handle issues personally. That doesn't mean I don't write tests in my professional life. Similarly, many projects may be older and my habits have evolved since then.
mtnGoat 6y ago
I laugh at that as an job application requirement and move on. Anyone thinking a look at a GitHub profile will prove skill, is sadly mistaken and not sometime if want to work with. Considering most code is property of employers, nothing to see.
zwayhowder 6y ago
I made the mistake of thinking an active github account was a good proxy for "Is this person interested in tech enough to work here?". I was called out on it at a conference (fortunately for me at a bar and not when I was on stage), by someone who pointed out that many people just don't have time to work on side projects and push them to Github. Maybe they work 8 hours a day on a bank or government project that is all private and then they spend the rest of the day acting as a care giver to a relative, studying, or volunteering in a women's refuge. All noble activities that I would consider positives for a candidate, but I'd never know if I just checked "Do you go home and cut code out of hours?". I mistook my own privilege of free time as a universal truth and I'm glad I was called out on it early on and able to change my (interviewing/screening) ways. I wonder what else I need someone to call me out on...
- ethanbond 6y ago
  Not to mention this signal is easily gamed. I know many people who light up their Github activity graph with one line commits to READMEs or codestyle changes somewhere.
  - nullsense 6y ago
    Someone made a product called GitHub Gardener that does this for you.
    - Balgair 6y ago
      https://www.gitgardener.com/ https://www.gitgardener.com/ $10/mo isn't bad for a 'professional' service. Basic manicures are ~$20 and last 7-10 days; they are common with in-person sales and marketing jobs.
    - juped 6y ago
      lol, clever. I just put up a pre- and post- dated repository with commits dated from 1970 to 2038, which should keep me set until Github dies.
      - 6y ago
nullsense 6y ago
>Most GitHub Projects Aren't Impressive So make an impressive one. My team lead would sometimes ask me to help evaluate potential candidates and sometimes we looked at GitHub profiles if one was supplied. No problem if not, but if so then it's a data point. The claim above from the article is true. Mostly nothing is actually impressive and if you're not careful it's easy to have something count against you. It's actually a bit of a trap. As a result of that I decided to make all 50 public repos I had private and instead just work on a single public repo of decent depth/quality. What I wound up doing is create a small web app in a domain I would never be interested in trying to turn it into a commercial product, then I use it as not a single project, but a series of inter-related projects that build on each other. Mostly it's a playground for me to learn new things and explore ideas. So I first did an API. Then once I had an API I took the opportunity to learn a new front end tech and made a front end with it. Now I'm working my way through learning IaC with it. After that I'm gonna use it to learn serverless. Each additional project with it makes it more valuable to me. More valuable in the sense that each project completed increases my motivation to do the next one because it becomes a more fully fleshed out piece of software and feels more "worth it". I haven't switched employers since I started it about a year ago, but I think it'll definitely help with positioning. As it is it helps me with my career anyways as I have a semi-realistic environment in which to try things out to evaluate their pros and cons.
jariel 6y ago
No doubt 'activity' is a worthless metric. But someone who created and maintained a good repo, that's actually used by other people (doesn't have to be many), where the code is relatively clean and actually works ... this says quite a lot actually. Of course the major caveat is that this doesn't mean that someone who does not have this is 'not good'. Finally, if someone has made any number of contributions and they are objectively 'not good' - this is also a negative signal. So 'if there is a github profile' and the code/usage can actually be looked at, it might be useful criteria it just needs to be contextualized.
cmckn 6y ago
I asked ~50 candidates for some code I could look at, and not one had anything public to show me. I think being active on GitHub and having personal projects is a great sign, but it's so uncommon that you can't really knock people for lacking it. I personally use GitHub, but don't have anything of substance public. My previous employer actively fought against us contributing to open source (even though the company operated 100% on OSS). I still did so anyway, for tiny fixes that irked me.
- dilyevsky 6y ago
  I was on the panel for 300+ candidates and only 2 had any substantial gh presence - one had a bunch of prototypes that he specifically created to show off during interviews (“let me show you how i implement deque in a new language over two weeks”) and the other one was legit and worked for OSS company.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
andrewstuart 6y ago
Let's be clear - it's OK to write shit code. There are many many contexts in which writing shit code is perfectly valid. Indeed there are times when writing shit code is almost a requirement. You're experimenting, you're researching, you're learning, you're having fun, you're in the initial build stages of something, you're under time constraints. And lots of code should not have tests, or be works of art, or be bug free, or be commented, or be comprehensible to less experienced developers. It's a problem that Github is used for assessing programming skills at all because those assessments ALWAYS look for consistent perfect code as a high arts with full code coverage etc etc. Public code also has time context - maybe you wrote that four years ago when you were new at some technology or skill - what exactly does that mean to the assessor who is seeking perfection? I don't want to direct anyone to my code as an assessment because it's always misread by the assessor. Even worse I find myself rethinking posting code online because I think "but what if I get assessed on this will it hurt my career"? I think that analysis of people's public/Github code is a hiring antipattern and the fallback of those unskilled in assessing candidates.
bdcravens 6y ago
I've taken to maintaining a singular "portfolio" repo that contains bits of a code with pointless code (like standard framework boilerplate files) omitted, with a README in each folder for context and explanation.
perlgeek 6y ago
I've been using Github long enough that I have my first name (not a terribly uncommon name) as a username. I have no idea what it even means to follow somebody on github. Why? I use github to host my code, to collaborate with others. I use issues, sometimes wiki, pull requests (obviously) and so on. But it's not a social platform for me. I don't want it to be a social platform. I guess following means I get some kind of notification when they do something? I'm drowning in gh notifications already, and switched off most. So I'd discard followers on github as any kind of metric right from the start.
1DRACOSEA8 6y ago
I think you’re putting GH on a pedestal, a software engineer is the sum of all parts not divided by contributions or some other ephemeral journeyman metric. It will have 0 impact if you want It, it will hace above 5 impact ..if you try, maybe it takes off. Entirely irrelevant to the skill set of writing adequate, readable, and logical code; the most important centroids that comprise the volume of being that the encapsulates the very essence or meta of an engineer
ablekh 6y ago
While the author makes some valid points, I disagree with the general stance of the post (and, more broadly, quite dislike most generalizations like that). Obviously, no decent hiring manager in their right mind will base their decision purely on someone's GitHub profile. At the same time, relevant profiles with enough information could be a very useful signal and data point. In other words, I think that using GitHub profiles to augment other available information is a worthwhile element of the overall hiring strategy for [software] engineering teams.
ffggvv 6y ago
having worked at multiple of most peoples "dream companies", i can tell you very few of the engineers i met had every contributed to open source, and no one cared. and furthermore the company wouldnt let employees contribute, as it created copyright issues
miguelmota 6y ago
I somewhat disagree with the article only because as a co-founder and also as early engineer in previous startups I've worn the interviewer hat a lot and candidates with solid github portfolio projects demonstrated to be better suited for the role than those that didn't have projects to demonstrate their skills. I agree that there are a ton of 10x engineers that don't do any public open source stuff but at the same time you'd know they're good just by having a conversation with them or reading posts they've written. One of my previous employers has also expressed that they were impressed by my github projects and I feel like that gave me leverage over other candidates. It really depends on the employer and I think the larger the company the less they care about your open source projects or how good your portfolio since there's a lot of churn and they can afford it unlike early stage startups where they do a little more diligence on early hires.
higerordermap 6y ago
This 100%. Especially the 'most projects are uninteresting' part. I see a lot of enthusiastic students writing yet another Tensorflow something of 2 files and uploading it to GitHub. That does not mean these projects are interesting. It is hard to get great project ideas. On the other hand it is quite easy to slap together yet another python data visualization 'project'. Another thing is, plagiarism. Some people create repository out of cloned files. (if forked, it will be shown as forked on GitHub).
Jdjdjdjjdhebe 6y ago
HN comments here probably more valuable to the world than any HN story I can remember
SergeAx 6y ago
While the article is technically correct, it is completely wrong on its message. I can't use GitHub profile as a negative factor, but totally can as a positive one. So, active GitHub profile literally helps with hiring like in "requires less effort from both candidate and company sides".
samtuke 6y ago
Non-representative counter example: we produce only Open Source products, and I review the public code contributions of all technical staff during pre-interview assessment. If you're hiring Open Source developers then past Open Source contributions to other projects are useful and important.

119 points by user5994461 6y ago

Maybe I missed the forest for the trees, but it sounds like OP is almost discouraging people from contributing to their GitHub profiles? If you are a well know or experienced dev with a long resume of working for closed-source companies, then, yes, you don't need a GitHub profile. For younger people or developers switching domains, GitHub contributions and personal projects might be the only way of showing their worth to future employers.

II2II 6y ago
> Maybe I missed the forest for the trees, but it sounds like OP is almost discouraging people from contributing to their GitHub profiles? It wouldn't surprise me. There is a lot of content online that appears to be created for the sole purpose of finding work or as part of school/university projects. A lot of that is of limited value, which diminishes the signal:noise. But I think the main point of the article is that it is unlikely to be used in the hiring process. People either don't see if as being of value or realize that it can be gamed.
croes 6y ago
It seems nobody cares about Github contributions so you actually don't show anything if nobody watches.

lovetocode 6y ago

Thank you! I have been complaining about this forever. 99% of software I write is closed source! It seems like we get punished for this when in reality it’s the company’s policy not to publicly expose proprietary information.

dewey 6y ago

Of course if you already have a job in tech and 3 other companies on the resume it doesn't matter so much. For people straight out of university their side projects are interesting to recruiters though as there's not that many other references you have. This is even more true for people not coming through the normal CS pipeline, working on their own projects and shipping something is a good way to show that you know what you are doing. Especially when so many people coming out of CS studies don't even know how to code.

pjmlp 6y ago
That is so bizarre to me, in Portugal pure CS theory without any kind of project deliverables is a math degree specialisation, what one would do the last two years of a 5 year degree in maths. Spending 5 years in any kind of engineering degree without being evaluated just doesn't happen, unless one would be cheating on their project assignments.
- dewey 6y ago
  > Spending 5 years in any kind of engineering degree without being evaluated just doesn't happen Passing programming assignments or university projects is very different to actually knowing how to code or think about solutions on your own I think.
  - SJC_Hacker 6y ago
    Main difference would be the time pressure. Our coding assignments could be done generally at our own pace, though of course there were deadlines. Also the "tricky algorithm" and "off the top of your head" aspects generally weren't there - of course way back when, there wasn't a whole lot of code public so you couldn't just copy off the internet. though of course some cheated and copied each other's work. Perhaps universities should start acting like more like what the companies are testing for nowadays, in order to prepare their students better. Timed coding quizzes every week, automatically validated like HackerRank, Leetcode, etc.. It wouldn't even have to be these tricky algorithms - maybe just a something like implement quicksort, etc. (without using the API calls) in like 30 minutes.
- hansvm 6y ago
  It's not too hard to get passable marks in a subject you don't understand well and then forget most it. Suppose a given class has a 40/60 applied/theory split. Our hypothetical student is average in some sense and gets 75% on the theory. Now if they get at least 37.5% on the applied portion they barely pass the class. There are minimum GPA considerations, and you might need at least a C in some classes rather than a D to continue, but it's pretty common to spread the hardest classes out so that you only have one super hard class to focus on each semester, and easier courses and generals will help pad out the Ds on your transcript to maintain a passing GPA. Throw in a retake or two for a couple screw-ups, and you still graduate in 4 years with a whisper of a shadow of an ability to program. Filtering for high GPAs and whatnot can help (or it might exclude people who had family emergencies or other complicating factors and still know their shit), but in the worst case that's just a measure of the amount of time and dedication spent per course. You also probably need to set a pretty high threshold -- you can bomb all your algorithms, data structures, and applied programming courses and still have a 3.5+ GPA if you do well enough elsewhere.

jon-wood 6y ago

When interviewing someone I will try to track down their GitHub profile, and having some decent code on their is probably going to make me more inclined to hire you since it gives me a data point on how you work. However for all the reasons listed in this article I’m just going to disregard the lack of a profile or a profile with limited content, I’m trying to hire a professional software developer to do work here, and whether or not your hobby is running a large open source project doesn’t really influence how good you are at your day job.

OmarShehata 6y ago
Do you actually scroll through and asses the code quality though? The only thing I can tell at a glance is "they bothered to clean this up and document it" which is one useful sign. The more useful signal for me is GitHub as a portfolio piece, if they got some concrete relevant work done that I can ask them about in the interview but I don't need to see the source code for that.
- jon-wood 6y ago
  I give it a quick skim, unless it’s something that interests me on a deeper level than “this is just some code”. It’s essentially a somewhat deeper fizzbuzz test, if someone has half decent code which shows baseline knowledge I’ll skip doing a screening test.
stevekemp 6y ago
I had an interesting interview a few months back, the interviewers said "Please pick a smallish repository and walk us through the design and implementation". I talked for nearly an hour about one of my projects, first of all the broad design, then various interesting aspects of the implementation. (Most projects have lots of "dull"/"boring" code, but I certainly highlighted the areas I had the most fun/pleasure/difficulty implementing.) Was a nice interview, although it was only possible because I've posted a whole bunch of projects online. I know other people keep their stuff private, or don't even write code in their spare times.
- 6y ago

vbernat 6y ago

GitHub also record contributions in form of issues and pull requests. Not contributing to projects you are using for your work looks like a bad signal for me.

ubercow13 6y ago
Not everyone uses open source for their work. Even if they do how likely is it they’d have anything to contribute? Can you mark down most developers who use Java or Spring because they haven’t found a bug in them to report?
- ivanche 6y ago
  If they do, I'd say it should be very likely the moment they start using anything smaller than Java/Spring for anything serious. I opened issues and/or PRs for about a dozen libraries and frameworks, and that's probably 50% of what I could open if I had more willingness.

lukeholder 6y ago

This article is from 2018. You can now make your private contributions a data-point on your public profile[1] without giving away private information [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/publicizing-or-hiding-your-private-contributions-on-your-profile https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-yo...

theamk 6y ago
That doesn't help much. Our org, for example, runs private github instance. Only few things end up in github.com, and this is mostly boring stuff like patches to existing projects.
ziml77 6y ago
How many businesses even store their internal code on GitHub's public service? Everywhere I've worked has used self-hosted solutions.
- pmontra 6y ago
  Every customer I worked with stores their code either on github or bitbucket. The only one who doesn't let me use my self hosted git repository (I mean the copy on a server of mine.) They also have a copy they can pull from there. All of them are medium / small sized.
stevesimmons 6y ago
This doesn't work if the private repo belongs to your former company... Once a company removes your access rights to their private repo, your historic commit record there disappears from your own commit timeline.

ubercow13 6y ago

My activity graph is almost solid green just due to commits to my private dotfiles repository, so yeah it’s not that useful. On the other hand even if no one looks at my profile, the projects on there allow me to put extra keywords on my CV which could help with resume screening if nothing else.

jedimastert 6y ago
Ooh, that's a good point.
p00f 6y ago
> My activity graph is almost solid green just due to commits to my private dotfiles repository Same here lol

breezest 6y ago

By showing that almost no recruiter check the GitHub repos cannot tell if such contributions make a candidate stand out. If someone has tangible contributions through GitHub, they probably write that down in the resume. The interviewers may check their claims either during interview or on GitHub before/after the interview. The problem is that if a candidate performs moderately well in the interview (e.g. coding interview), while he/she has made many contributions through GitHub, should the interviewer recommend the candidate? My belief is that most interviewers will not take the risk or take the responsibility for a potentially wrong hire.

codesections 6y ago

> The vast majority of software being produced is closed source software I found this claim surprising. I would have guessed that the narrow majority of software produced these days is open source, but I don't have a citation for that. Do others agree with the article's "vast majority" claim?

asutekku 6y ago
A minority of software is open source. It’s the bubble of Github and HN that makes open source to be more prevalent than it actually is.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > A minority of software is open source. How do we know this to be true? Has anyone checked?
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Value point of one. Coding since mid-80's, never worked for a company that would allow me to publish work related code, with exception of my time spent in research institutions. I bet this applies to the large majority of developers out there, but I am extrapolating.
  - mh7 6y ago
    Look at all the software running on your computer right now, how much of it is open source? (Including OS, drivers, ssd/efi/cpu/misc controllers firmware). Email every website you visit and ask to get the source code. Go and check all gadgets in your house which contains a microcontroller or cpu, how many of those can you get the source code for? Ask your car manufacturer for the source code of all its systems. Go out in your city, look at all computerized utilities (screens, payment systems, traffic lights, elevators, power plants, public transport, the list goes on..) Does it really need to be checked? Seems blatantly obvious to me that most software is proprietary.
    - 6y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Actually, GH doesn't just show open-source contributions. It will also show private repos, if you set that (I think it's on by default). Some folks use this to "game" their activity logs. I've heard of people writing scripts to draw pictures in the activity log. I haven't actually seen it, though. That's mostly because I haven't bothered to look. I encountered one activity graph that was insane. It had about 15,000 commits per year. I work 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and have about 3,000. I know of folks with 5-6K, that I believe are legit. Then I clicked on one of the squares, and saw that it had about 600 commits in one day, in a private repo, along about a 24-hour cycle. The person obviously had written a script, that checks stuff into a "dump" repo, automatically. So, the lesson is, caveat emptor. The activity log is an outstanding way to view someone's working style and velocity. Since I do pretty much everything in open-source, you can run number-crunchers on my ID, and see what I do, when. GH has an API. I suspect there's some interesting stuff out there (someone posted a pretty cool CLI tool in HN, a while ago, that showed graphs of the time of day most people did checkins). Back when I was a hiring manager, I would have killed for the kind of info the GH activity log can give. Totally knocks "Draw Spunky" tests into a cocked hat.

tazjin 6y ago
> The person obviously had written a script, that checks stuff into a "dump" repo, automatically. Or they had automation committing things into a private repository for some purpose (e.g. machine states). It doesn't have to be an attempt at "tricking" anyone.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Good point. I didn't think it was a deliberate trick, as it wouldn't have been that extreme, if the person wanted to misrepresent themselves. It just made their GH profile worthless, for me. I do think that tools like GH are important for helping to introduce ourselves to others. As with any tool, it is up to us to use it properly. For me, I am not actually looking for work, but I get tired of not being taken seriously, so I make a point of ensuring that my work is made available for anyone that wants to see it. My motto is "Don't just take my word for it. See for yourself." I am grateful for tools like GH, that allow me to do this. The Stack Overflow Story is another one.

belval 6y ago

I think I agree with "Followers on GitHub Show Popularity Not Talent" to some small scale, but that example is idiotic, who is going to submit a fictional character's GitHub profile as their own. Most of the time when there is +50 people following someone it means that at the very least they have one significant repository, published article or somewhat known through other means (blogs are one).

croes 6y ago
He doesn't say that someone submitted a fictional characters profile as his own. He says github popularity is a useless metric because even fictional characters have a higher popularity as nearly all github users.
- belval 6y ago
  So the reasoning is, due to having outliers that don't actually exist with multiple thousands followers, the metric won't help for hiring? Someone with followers still indicates that at the very least some people are interested in that person's projects.
  - MrPowers 6y ago
    Yea, the author performed an argument by selective observation in the followers section. Choosing a GitHub user from a famous TV show to prove his point makes the line of argumentation particularly fallacious. I'd need to crunch the numbers, but would suspect that number of followers is highly correlated with GitHub stars, PyPi / NPM downloads, etc.
    - croes 6y ago
      As soon as these metrics lead to job success as soon we get fake followers and stars, like on twitter, instagram, etc.
  - croes 6y ago
    It just indicates that his account has followers. A couple of friends or some fake accounts and everbody cam have followers. The pure existence of followers says nothing just like everywhere else.

jmnicolas 6y ago

Fwiw I was interviewed at the beginning of the year because a recruiter found a 5yo stackoverflow post that I completely forgot about (I probably have something like 3 posts on SO).

bregma 6y ago

First thing I do when a resume crosses my desk (as a hiring manager) is check their GitHub (or GitLab) profile, if they supply one. It is an important weapon in our arsenal for helping determine which hire from a shortlist gets called in for interviews. Just having an empty profile is better than no profile, but one with repos of your work is best and worth extra points. It has made the difference in our hiring decisions. Unfortunately for me, I came from a world where everything had to be open source, but moved to a closed source world where everything I produce, even in my private time, belongs to The Company. IP lawyers have to check the bowl before I flush. I am paranoid that my public commit log being empty will affect my chances of getting a job in the FLOSS realm once again.

stennie 6y ago
If you are going to use public commit profiles as part of your screening process and hiring decisions, I would encourage you to ask candidates what aspects of their public activity are relevant. For example, ask for a few specific highlights and why the candidate thinks those are interesting. Hobby projects and open source contributions are evidence of patterns of collaboration and commits, but may not be indicative of one's typical (or best) work. There are also many reasons why a great software engineer may not have a public activity profile. The majority of my public commits are scratching itches on open source projects, and are very opportunistic depending on other life and work commitments at the time. Code may not always be pristine, but I can probably rationalise why I took a certain approach (following existing code style, hacking for my own use, actually aiming for quality and performance, ...). As a hiring manager, I'm also OK if candidates want to do something with their personal time that doesn't involve committing to public repos :).
pokeball1 6y ago
> [...] but moved to a closed source world where everything I produce, even in my private time, belongs to The Company. [...] So you can't even commit something own, when in private, because company you work for can sue you, just because?
- sethammons 6y ago

Kiro 6y ago

Year should be added to the title since this is really outdated.

amadeuspagel 6y ago

To argue that GitHub won't help you with hiring doesn't just require showing that it's not perfect, it requires that other methods of assessing people (Interviews? Degrees?) absolutely dominate it. But the arguments made against github would work against any such method. Yes there are impressive people without an impressive github page, there are also impressive people who fail interviews, don't have degrees, etc. > Not only are GitHub profiles not that helpful for hiring developers, it also seems like they aren't that much help for developers that are looking for work. Why try to dissuade people from something they aren't doing anyway?

wendyshu 6y ago

I don't get it. Obviously assessing candidates by only looking at their GitHub is a bad idea. But if a candidate does have a good GitHub, that's useful information.

ohnoesjmr 6y ago

I can tell from experience that this is not true. Sure, a lot of great people do not contribute to open source, yet I do (maintain a sizeable popular project), and nearly half of the interviews spend a good time discussing the work I do in opensource.

danielrpa 6y ago

I've been a hiring manager for 10+ years and I've used the candidate's code on GitHub for helping pre-interview screening decisions numerous times. Good code on GitHub is a good sign, of course I can change my mind after actually interviewing the candidate. This phrase from the article over simplifies this and is frankly childish: "People still seem to think that you can figure out how talented a developer is merely by looking at their open source contributions" Duh. It says that some people "still" think that you can do that by "merely" looking at their OSS contributions. But maybe, just maybe, others can use it "merely" as a data point.

mqus 6y ago

I agree with the article that the quantitative metrics(contribution statistics, followers, stars, LOC, etc) are not really good vor evaluating someone. But its still good for checking 1. The type of code one writes and in what languages, maybe documentation and 2. The interactions with other people in form of PRs and issues. I guess that most recruiters don't have the time to look at that but it definitely could be valuable.

maerF0x0 6y ago

Lets face it, recruiters do a terrible job of screening. They dont understand the job, so how could they ever detect the tells of in group / out group? Plus, you can generate activity for your profile. It's a game of cat and mouse. https://hackernoon.com/how-to-hack-github-kind-of-12b08a46d02e https://hackernoon.com/how-to-hack-github-kind-of-12b08a46d0...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
johnnyfaehell 6y ago
Honestly, I think the biggest problem is our own expectations. The way IT recruitment is just now, is not substainable and makes little sense. * There are more developer jobs than developers * We're constantly afraid of developers who can't code * We decide to test every developer often with non-real-world scenarios and weird things they'll never do in their job and if they did do, you would be very concerned. * Not only do we test them for things things they won't be doing, we also expect them to spend hours and sometimes days doing these tests. * We reject people for weird random reasons. They don't understand one concept correctly, so clearly they can't do the job ever. * We then hire recruiters, who realise how screwed out recruiting is and that it's often potluck. And realise this is a basic funnel, so they go and search out anyone who has a rough chance of doing being able job. * We then blame the recruiters because people don't meet our weird standards. For real, most companies need to realise they are not FAANG. They do not have an endless source of people wanting to work for them because of the reputation. Many of these companies that are acting like they can expect people to jump through hoop and hoop, have employee churn rates of 6-12 months and are competing with many other companies in their local area for the same talent. We continually act like like doing this job always requires the best. From what I see at most companies, you need one or two people who can archectect your system and explain the designs to people and after that you just need people who can follow the designs. We can say "But everyone should be able to do archectecture designs", if you want to spend your days discuss design plans and the benefits of this and that fair enough. But that's not what a company needs, a company needs people to write code they don't need 8 out of 10 to be designing code, they need 8 out of 10 to be "boilerplate" code so to speak. And if someone is able to take a code design and implement it without making it more complex then they're good enough for the job. Google is famous for making people jump through hoops and then have them do basic tasks, because doing basic tasks is what is important. That's just my rant of the week on IT recruitment.

crb002 6y ago

It could if you were smart about it. See the scripts at: https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat You could identify high quality devs that are suddenly funemployed with a burst of github activity - and reach out to them in a non-sleazy manner.

kristopolous 6y ago

Their code and whether they are not crazy are basically the only things i care about. Everything else is a less accurate proxy measurement. Unsupervised, self-motivated, goal-oriented adulting ... that's what I need Doesn't matter what company, these basic requirements don't seem to change.

simonkafan 6y ago

Why do we have to make everything so forcefully career driven? Just enjoy writing code and showing it to the world if you want - no strings attached. Github helps in this case.

smt88 6y ago
> Why do we have to make everything so forcefully career driven? Because a lot of us have to code for a living, and employers often ask to see GitHub projects. None of us are choosing this. It's just one of the many shitty trends in the world of software HR.
dentemple 6y ago
As the article points out, it's because recruiters have started to ask for links to Github profiles. Hence the topic. Having a Github profile is "being forcefully career-driven" because it's now a potential gate put in place to work at increasingly more companies.

tpkahlon 6y ago

I fell into this cycle where I posted my projects on GitHub. I was constantly chasing the green tick every single day. All my projects were representation of bad code. At the end, I learnt that successful developers usually pay mere attention to Github and more attention to problem solving and consistent learning. These days, I use Github as a reference to concepts I learn. When a day come where I can consider myself a master on a language, I’ll take on an open source project to solve a real world problem with the knowledge gained.

jameslk 6y ago

> While he has written a ton of code at his work in the last year, he hasn't posted anything that can be viewed publicly: he has no public commits, he hasn't created any repositories of his own and he has an insignificant number of followers. Despite all that he's still the best developer I've ever had the pleasure of working with. This is more a problem for the developer, not the company. The company may have a smaller pool of candidates by evaluating based on GitHub profiles, but they will have more data to use in their evaluation. If they don't have the resources to pay for the premium of being selective, they may evaluate candidates from a wider pool (those without GitHub profiles/history). The candidates without GitHub profiles will receive the attention from those companies not willing to pay a premium for their services. This can be generalized in other ways beyond GitHub. GitHub, in this sense, serves as a marketing tool, similar to LinkedIn, a personal site, a blog, a resume, etc. Provided it's a free marketing tool, the developer has little to lose by investing their time into marketing theirself and a lot to gain by receiving more demand.

bleah1000 6y ago
Have you ever been able to look at someone's code and immediately figure out whether it's good or not? I think it can be easy to see if it's really bad, but sometimes it can be hard to tell if it's okay code, or really good code. The problem is that you might have extra information to make a hiring decision, but it requires orders of magnitude more time to evaluate. For example, if the whole project is done by a single person do you evaluate their design and code? What if it was just a one-off project that they didn't care about so it has copy-paste code in a few places. Is that bad? If you ask candidates to point out examples of good code, then is that really meaningful? What if a mediocre programmer can find a few places where they wrote some strong code. What if that code was made good through a strong review process? I think the problem is that it's too difficult to determine if open source contributions are actually representative of the way someone will code in a job.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  I don't think the most useful info you can get from someone's Github involves the sort of deep analysis you're attacking in your comment. Nobody is deep diving your code like this, btw. Looking at someone's code projects can tell you some things like how they might write a README, if there is one. It might present a concrete project they built that you can discuss in an interview; what was the hardest part of this project? It can tell you where they are roughly on the scale of "barely started programming" and "clearly are experienced" (an experienced developer can glean this very quickly from someone else's code—even what they choose to paste from Stack Overflow—it isn't as hard as you think). Reading the code line by line looking for "strong code" is something that beginners think employers will be doing, but they don't. Just like developers don't evaluate libraries like this, they do a more topical, holistic page-through. Of course it isn't going to tell you exactly how someone will perform on the job. That's not the goal post (the absence of Github usually means you have nothing to look at at all). It just has a few useful signals like looking at a chair that a carpenter has built. It seems like you are suggesting that the chair a carpenter built in his own time couldn't possibly give you any reliable signal about how the carpenter works, because what if the carpenter was in a rush? Well, let me point out that a rushed veteran and a rushed beginner will cut completely different corners. Kind of like how a skilled artist with only 10 seconds to draw something can still express a great deal of their expertise merely by how they attacked the problem.

aaronbrethorst 6y ago

I don't see why everything has to be bucketed into 'good' vs. 'bad'. A well-populated GitHub profile can be a positive signal to me. It makes it easier for me to see how a prospective candidate works and thinks, and provides me with a more useful and instructive set of questions to ask during an interview. It is also possible that I will discover that the candidate is not sufficiently experienced to meet the requirements of the position that they are applying for, but at least this way I don't have to try to ferret out these answers or waste their time. An unpopulated GitHub profile is a neutral signal for me, and means that I need to spend more time trying to tease out the answers that are simply given to me with a well-populated profile.

soneca 6y ago
In a competitive scenario, like multiple people applying to only one open position, a “neutral” signal versus a positive signal is effectively a negative signal.
- aaronbrethorst 6y ago
  When it comes to hiring highly qualified engineers, I would love to have the problem you are describing.
- bena 6y ago
  No. It's not. It's a neutral signal. It can't tell you anything either way. Even the github profile isn't a strong positive signal, it's a weak signal. But that's ok. That's really what we're looking for: a lot of weak positive signals. So that person had a github profile. Everything else could either be a neutral or negative signal. Compare that with someone without a github, but has every other positive signal you could ask for. I'd take non-github person over github person every single time.
tdeck 6y ago
> It makes it easier for me to see how a prospective candidate works and thinks Be careful making even these assumptions. My GitHub is a subset of my side projects combined with some old work stuff that was reprioritized. Many of my repos lack tests because they're for such a small number of users it's more efficient just to test manually and handle issues personally. That doesn't mean I don't write tests in my professional life. Similarly, many projects may be older and my habits have evolved since then.

mtnGoat 6y ago

I laugh at that as an job application requirement and move on. Anyone thinking a look at a GitHub profile will prove skill, is sadly mistaken and not sometime if want to work with. Considering most code is property of employers, nothing to see.

zwayhowder 6y ago

I made the mistake of thinking an active github account was a good proxy for "Is this person interested in tech enough to work here?". I was called out on it at a conference (fortunately for me at a bar and not when I was on stage), by someone who pointed out that many people just don't have time to work on side projects and push them to Github. Maybe they work 8 hours a day on a bank or government project that is all private and then they spend the rest of the day acting as a care giver to a relative, studying, or volunteering in a women's refuge. All noble activities that I would consider positives for a candidate, but I'd never know if I just checked "Do you go home and cut code out of hours?". I mistook my own privilege of free time as a universal truth and I'm glad I was called out on it early on and able to change my (interviewing/screening) ways. I wonder what else I need someone to call me out on...

ethanbond 6y ago
Not to mention this signal is easily gamed. I know many people who light up their Github activity graph with one line commits to READMEs or codestyle changes somewhere.
- nullsense 6y ago
  Someone made a product called GitHub Gardener that does this for you.
  - Balgair 6y ago
    https://www.gitgardener.com/ https://www.gitgardener.com/ $10/mo isn't bad for a 'professional' service. Basic manicures are ~$20 and last 7-10 days; they are common with in-person sales and marketing jobs.
  - juped 6y ago
    lol, clever. I just put up a pre- and post- dated repository with commits dated from 1970 to 2038, which should keep me set until Github dies.
    - 6y ago

nullsense 6y ago

>Most GitHub Projects Aren't Impressive So make an impressive one. My team lead would sometimes ask me to help evaluate potential candidates and sometimes we looked at GitHub profiles if one was supplied. No problem if not, but if so then it's a data point. The claim above from the article is true. Mostly nothing is actually impressive and if you're not careful it's easy to have something count against you. It's actually a bit of a trap. As a result of that I decided to make all 50 public repos I had private and instead just work on a single public repo of decent depth/quality. What I wound up doing is create a small web app in a domain I would never be interested in trying to turn it into a commercial product, then I use it as not a single project, but a series of inter-related projects that build on each other. Mostly it's a playground for me to learn new things and explore ideas. So I first did an API. Then once I had an API I took the opportunity to learn a new front end tech and made a front end with it. Now I'm working my way through learning IaC with it. After that I'm gonna use it to learn serverless. Each additional project with it makes it more valuable to me. More valuable in the sense that each project completed increases my motivation to do the next one because it becomes a more fully fleshed out piece of software and feels more "worth it". I haven't switched employers since I started it about a year ago, but I think it'll definitely help with positioning. As it is it helps me with my career anyways as I have a semi-realistic environment in which to try things out to evaluate their pros and cons.

jariel 6y ago

No doubt 'activity' is a worthless metric. But someone who created and maintained a good repo, that's actually used by other people (doesn't have to be many), where the code is relatively clean and actually works ... this says quite a lot actually. Of course the major caveat is that this doesn't mean that someone who does not have this is 'not good'. Finally, if someone has made any number of contributions and they are objectively 'not good' - this is also a negative signal. So 'if there is a github profile' and the code/usage can actually be looked at, it might be useful criteria it just needs to be contextualized.

cmckn 6y ago

I asked ~50 candidates for some code I could look at, and not one had anything public to show me. I think being active on GitHub and having personal projects is a great sign, but it's so uncommon that you can't really knock people for lacking it. I personally use GitHub, but don't have anything of substance public. My previous employer actively fought against us contributing to open source (even though the company operated 100% on OSS). I still did so anyway, for tiny fixes that irked me.

dilyevsky 6y ago
I was on the panel for 300+ candidates and only 2 had any substantial gh presence - one had a bunch of prototypes that he specifically created to show off during interviews (“let me show you how i implement deque in a new language over two weeks”) and the other one was legit and worked for OSS company.
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andrewstuart 6y ago

Let's be clear - it's OK to write shit code. There are many many contexts in which writing shit code is perfectly valid. Indeed there are times when writing shit code is almost a requirement. You're experimenting, you're researching, you're learning, you're having fun, you're in the initial build stages of something, you're under time constraints. And lots of code should not have tests, or be works of art, or be bug free, or be commented, or be comprehensible to less experienced developers. It's a problem that Github is used for assessing programming skills at all because those assessments ALWAYS look for consistent perfect code as a high arts with full code coverage etc etc. Public code also has time context - maybe you wrote that four years ago when you were new at some technology or skill - what exactly does that mean to the assessor who is seeking perfection? I don't want to direct anyone to my code as an assessment because it's always misread by the assessor. Even worse I find myself rethinking posting code online because I think "but what if I get assessed on this will it hurt my career"? I think that analysis of people's public/Github code is a hiring antipattern and the fallback of those unskilled in assessing candidates.

bdcravens 6y ago

I've taken to maintaining a singular "portfolio" repo that contains bits of a code with pointless code (like standard framework boilerplate files) omitted, with a README in each folder for context and explanation.

perlgeek 6y ago

I've been using Github long enough that I have my first name (not a terribly uncommon name) as a username. I have no idea what it even means to follow somebody on github. Why? I use github to host my code, to collaborate with others. I use issues, sometimes wiki, pull requests (obviously) and so on. But it's not a social platform for me. I don't want it to be a social platform. I guess following means I get some kind of notification when they do something? I'm drowning in gh notifications already, and switched off most. So I'd discard followers on github as any kind of metric right from the start.

1DRACOSEA8 6y ago

I think you’re putting GH on a pedestal, a software engineer is the sum of all parts not divided by contributions or some other ephemeral journeyman metric. It will have 0 impact if you want It, it will hace above 5 impact ..if you try, maybe it takes off. Entirely irrelevant to the skill set of writing adequate, readable, and logical code; the most important centroids that comprise the volume of being that the encapsulates the very essence or meta of an engineer

ablekh 6y ago

While the author makes some valid points, I disagree with the general stance of the post (and, more broadly, quite dislike most generalizations like that). Obviously, no decent hiring manager in their right mind will base their decision purely on someone's GitHub profile. At the same time, relevant profiles with enough information could be a very useful signal and data point. In other words, I think that using GitHub profiles to augment other available information is a worthwhile element of the overall hiring strategy for [software] engineering teams.

ffggvv 6y ago

having worked at multiple of most peoples "dream companies", i can tell you very few of the engineers i met had every contributed to open source, and no one cared. and furthermore the company wouldnt let employees contribute, as it created copyright issues

miguelmota 6y ago

I somewhat disagree with the article only because as a co-founder and also as early engineer in previous startups I've worn the interviewer hat a lot and candidates with solid github portfolio projects demonstrated to be better suited for the role than those that didn't have projects to demonstrate their skills. I agree that there are a ton of 10x engineers that don't do any public open source stuff but at the same time you'd know they're good just by having a conversation with them or reading posts they've written. One of my previous employers has also expressed that they were impressed by my github projects and I feel like that gave me leverage over other candidates. It really depends on the employer and I think the larger the company the less they care about your open source projects or how good your portfolio since there's a lot of churn and they can afford it unlike early stage startups where they do a little more diligence on early hires.

higerordermap 6y ago

This 100%. Especially the 'most projects are uninteresting' part. I see a lot of enthusiastic students writing yet another Tensorflow something of 2 files and uploading it to GitHub. That does not mean these projects are interesting. It is hard to get great project ideas. On the other hand it is quite easy to slap together yet another python data visualization 'project'. Another thing is, plagiarism. Some people create repository out of cloned files. (if forked, it will be shown as forked on GitHub).

Jdjdjdjjdhebe 6y ago

HN comments here probably more valuable to the world than any HN story I can remember

SergeAx 6y ago

While the article is technically correct, it is completely wrong on its message. I can't use GitHub profile as a negative factor, but totally can as a positive one. So, active GitHub profile literally helps with hiring like in "requires less effort from both candidate and company sides".

samtuke 6y ago

Non-representative counter example: we produce only Open Source products, and I review the public code contributions of all technical staff during pre-interview assessment. If you're hiring Open Source developers then past Open Source contributions to other projects are useful and important.