14 ms·

The first thing I look for in a resume is a GitHub URL. If I can find that, I stop reading the resume and start reading code. Doing open source is not a be-all

The first thing I look for in a resume is a GitHub URL. If I can find that, I stop reading the resume and start reading code. Doing open source is not a be-all and end-all by any means, but it's a good starting point. After five minutes of reading through a candidate's code I have a good handle of their skill level and style, making the interview run much more smoothly. All this makes me want to do is delete my entire Github. I do not want a future employer judging me on the basis of the half-finished amateurish experiments I knock off on my free time as I'm learning a new language or messing around with a new framework or just screwing around in general because I'm bored. If all this person is evaluating me on is my Github, they'll think that I've never advanced beyond an amateur level despite my having over a decade of experience in the industry... all because I treat my open source work as a hobby rather than as a second job.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago
A good employer will not judge you based on your half-completed personal work. The point isn't to see perfectly executed programs, it's to get a sense for the kind of interests this person has. Seeing a couple half-finished Go projects is better than seeing nothing at all.
laurent123456 4y ago
If you don't have much to show on your GitHub profile, simply do not provide the URL. It's just one data points among others, but it's true that it's useful to see the candidate's coding skills in advance and the easiest for that is open source code (since anything else probably can't be shared).
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I've googled people's names + github if their GH wasn't provided, just out of curiosity.
- tsukikage 4y ago
  +1. Additionally, in general, I personally prefer to keep work and leisure separate. Things that I bring to the awareness of potential / future employers are selected and curated, and distinct from places where I keep the half-baked stuff I do for fun for my own consumption. It's certainly possible to get from my real name to my leisure activities and vice versa with a concerted effort, but the first page or two of a casual Google search won't do it.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > it's useful to see the candidate's coding skills in advance Yes, but only if it’s representative of their work. Good luck finding the one kind of sensible library I’ve written in the 100 forks and experiments.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    That's what pinned repositories are for. It's your opportunity to highlight the projects you're actually proud of. Any half-reasonable prospective employer will look at those first, and probably only those. And again, if you have nothing worth pinning, there's always the option to leave it off your resume.
isthisfree 4y ago
As an employer that does the same thing as the person who wrote the article; I do, of course, look at the seriousness of whatever is on that Github profile. I am usually easily able to tell if it is a half-baked project for some hobby-thing or active participation in e.g. a well known piece of open source software. Someone who does this, is likely also skilled enough to separate those things. I don't only look at the user's own repos but also at contributions/comments etc. to others. And just as the author, I too experience more often than not that people have NO idea how to set the level for own experience.
- TheaomBen 4y ago
  Could you list some things that are red/green flags when perusing someone's public code/projects? I'm preparing to publicly release a project with the intent of building it up to demonstrate my own experience level. I'm asking as someone with next to no prior public code despite developping back-end almost full time since I dropped out 10ish years ago. I guess I'm asking for external criteria for whether I'm impostor-syndroming!
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    Just a few things I usually notice when going through a potential hire's GitHub: 1) All projects have a bad commit history. Just one commit and that's it. Usually it's something for school with really basic stuff inside. Most might be IDE provided "generate code" boilerplate. Even a single commit beyond the GitHub provided initial commit example is enough. Multiple ones in a sane cycle is even better. Even if you just update some comments. 2) Does the project run? If I check out the project, is there a clear way to run it or does it rely on the compile & run commands being on the submitter's bash history? Add a make/magefile or run.sh or anything. 3) README. Does it exist? GitHub pushes you really hard to add one, if you're lacking even the default one, you clearly don't understand how GH works. 4) Bonus task: does the repo have integrations or GH Actions enabled? If the project automatically runs some tests or builds on commit, it's a big green flag for me. If I'm going to be paying you over 100€/hour, I don't want you spending your time doing stuff manually if it can be automated with 15 minutes of boilerplate work.
tym0 4y ago
This was also my reaction, the way I write code when I have a 20 minutes of free time after work is really different from the way I write code for production. The author is lying to themselves if they think that most people Github projects are any more representative of the work they'll do once hired than their resume is. I think looking at the Github of applicants is useful as a conversation starter however: "Oh I see you've built X with Y, what was interesting about that? What did you learn?"
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  I agree with the conversation starter part, but I think there's still something to be said for seeing how someone's code looks when they're writing it not-for-production. Like does that just mean overly long functions? Lazy symbol naming? Linter violations? Lack of tests? Those might all be reasonable through the "not prod" lens, but there's other pretty important stuff that can still bubble up, like the person reinventing the wheel where a well known library could have been used, or using obviously non-idiomatic structures like an indexed loop in Python. None of this should be a deal breaker, but if you're seeing stuff that's obviously like "I would be annoyed to be reviewing this code" then it's worth talking about.
  - whiddershins 4y ago
    What if I wanted to reinvent the wheel to increase my knowledge?
    - lbotos 4y ago
      Make a readme that says "This project is me exploring how to do Y so I can learn the ins and outs". Solved.
      - reificator 4y ago
        And what if I’m not tracking that in such detail or even thinking about viewing it like that because it’s a side project? My repos are hidden specifically because I do them for fun. I’d make them public if tinkering were an understood thing but its not. > If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. Better to have a clear separation between work and play.
dkdbejwi383 4y ago
If all a person has to evaluate me on is public Github contributions, it'll seem like I only work one day every 3 years or so. With all the other things I do with my life (sport, art, socialising), I very rarely have any time (or motivation) to program in my free-time. Having all of these "extra-curricular" activities is probably good for my mental health and makes me a better engineer than I would otherwise be if I spent all my time both at work and in my own time working on software.
idop 4y ago
Please don't delete your GitHub account because of this one person's article. I have interviewed over a hundred of developers over the years, and I have actually adopted the habit of _not_ looking at their GitHub profile because I find them to be very non-representative of the person's skills and abilities 9 times out of 10. The article isn't bad, by the way, and OP is making very true points, most prominently that resumes are mostly bullshit and shouldn't be relied upon by themselves, but that's what the interview process is for.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
> All this makes me want to do is delete my entire Github. I do not want a future employer judging me on the basis of the half-finished amateurish experiments I knock off on my free time as I'm learning a new language or messing around with a new framework or just screwing around in general because I'm bored. This is my Github too; part of me thinks I should finally arse myself, remove unused repos, and build a portfolio with some example projects of how I build software (hopefully allowing me to skip a technical interview assignment), and maybe build some libraries for various purposes. Doesn't have to be anything unique. I mean my CV is impressive (according to recruiters / employers), but it's a high level overview of projects I've been involved in, it doesn't really boil down to my individual achievements because projects are generally team efforts. I do believe this is the danger of judging someone by CV alone though; just because they were a part of a project, doesn't mean they were big contributors to it. I've seen plenty of people who do one small commit per week and call it a day. There's always the one team member who gets carried by the rest of the team, just like in school. (childish as it might be, I do believe managers should review individual team members' contributions and to let people go if they're only along for the ride.)
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  > This is my Github too This is a very common problem and I solved it in a very simple way: one account for playing, experimenting, testing and enjoying, and another for showing off. This is not fundamentally different to how people treat HN accounts.
  - Juliate 4y ago
    Why should some specific people (employers, recruiters in this case) should have a relevant authority as to pretense what a GitHub is supposed to be for. If someone's GitHub profile is a mess, mixing experiments, serious work, goofy stuff, etc. as a result of their multiple uses of it (it's a _tool_ per se), that's up to them and it's up to no one to say "well, that doesn't look very professional to me, does it? your worth doesn't look great here".
    - 4y ago
kwhitefoot 4y ago
In the Soul of a New Machine Tracy Kidder relates how toward the end of the development of the Nova that Data General started rejecting applicants who had anything computer related as a hobby or spare time interest. If memory serves, they believed on the basis of experience that people with a broader range of interests were better team players and more resilient to burn out.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  While this may be technically accurate, the rest of the descriptions on how they interviewed & hired was brutally narrow-minded and biased. You're missing the part where they basically didn't hire anyone with a life outside of computing because you were being hired for an all-consuming death march.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    No, I didn't miss that point. That was the reason they finally changed their opinion.
ekianjo 4y ago
Why include your Github URL then if you think its only awful code?
deepstack 4y ago
> If all this person is evaluating me on is my Github, they'll think that I've never advanced beyond an amateur level despite my having over a decade of experience in the industry... all because I treat my open source work as a hobby rather than as a second job. Thanks you for bringing that up. That is one of the reason I don't use GH. Other being the acquisition by MS.
beej71 4y ago
Private repos are great for those half-baked projects you don't want people to see.
- antholeole 4y ago
  I think this is forcing me to choose between two evils - do I want to look like I can only write half baked weekend projects, or do I want to look like I don’t write any code in my free time at all?
  - bodge5000 4y ago
    Fair point, for me its the latter. I cant put on my CV brief descriptions of side projects I'm working on, during an interview I can give more details on those, etc... Still not ideal because they'd probably want to see the code, but its the lesser of two evils for me
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lbotos 4y ago
You can do that or you could also put a readme on your GitHub that it's a place where you explore hobby projects and you are interested in "x, y, and z". When I go to a GitHub as a hiring manager, I try to get as much signal as I can. You are scared that I'll solely judge you on the code, but I'm looking for metadata. Is this person interested in or exploring problems/technologies that are related to the problems/technologies we are using here? Oh, They are exclusively doing music based coding? INTERESTING. Let's talk about that in the interview. Oh, They've contributed a bug report to an open source project, lemme see what that looks like. Nice, repro steps are clear. And yes, some hiring managers are gonna say "welp, this candidate isn't an open source ninja so we don't want them." But that's not all hiring managers. What is a big turn off for me personally is the "I'm gonna slap something on github to tick the box" group. I had someone submit a resume with a link to their website and a link to their github. The website was literally just a demo site, but they had changed all of the blog titles so it looked like real posts, but if you clicked through, it was all lorem ipsum. The GitHub was also just the code for this site. I'll take a graveyard of personal exploration everyday over a half-baked sham site. (Note: They could have just been playing around BUT TELL ME THAT! Because it sure looked like an attempt to look the part.)
- soneca 4y ago
  > ” And yes, some hiring managers are gonna say "welp, this candidate isn't an open source ninja so we don't want them." But that's not all hiring managers.” So probably is good risk management to not include your GitHub ever when applying.
  - bruce343434 4y ago
    This strikes me as unnecessarily bitter and cynical. Application is a two way street. Would you even want to work for a company like that?
    - slothtrop 4y ago
      A company doesn't necessarily begin and end with the person hiring.
starkd 4y ago
He's talking about the case where the applicant explicitly provides a github link in their resume or profile. In that case, they could have been expected to pin their favorite projects or remove the ones they don't want seen. Plus they are merely suggesting it be used as a jumping off point for conversation with the candidate.
coffeeblack 4y ago
I do not want a future employer judging me on the basis of the half-finished amateurish experiments I would not want to work at a company where the tech people are not aware that most repos are precisely that.
mrfusion 4y ago
Perhaps consider a personal account and a professional account. Only put your best work on the professional one.
- em-bee 4y ago
  unless they changed it githubs terms of service do not allow multiple accounts. you'd have to split them over multiple hosting services, which, depending on the project, may not always be practical or possible
arinlen 4y ago
> All this makes me want to do is delete my entire Github. I do not want a future employer judging me on the basis of the half-finished amateurish experiments I knock off on my free time as I'm learning a new language or messing around with a new framework or just screwing around in general because I'm bored. I don't understand your complaint. We have free code hosting platforms which support private projects, such as GitLab. You only showcase the projects you want to show, as a public profile is also your portfolio. It makes no sense to showcase half-assed projects you care nothing or feel ashamed to show, as no one forces you to make a git repo public. It's perfectly fine if you do not curate your portfolio, but you also get the same problem if you don't curate your CV. Personally, I received job offers based on my GitHub profile alone, as I happened to have a pet project which uses a particular tech stack used by a company. I know people who were automatically excluded from job applications as they claimed expertise on tech stacks they showcased in their GitHub profiles, and their pet projects included blatant eggregious problems which can only result from incompetence. Companies hire based on the skillset they can evaluate, and if you make it your point to showcase shoddy work then that's a problem you create for yourself.
- dottedmag 4y ago
  GitHub is not a portfolio website. It's a code sharing platform.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  Has GitHub introduced some “showcase” feature, because this is the first time I’ve heard that a normal public repository should be a treated as a showcase. Historically, public repos were just where you put code that didn’t need to be private, like hobby code and experiments, just as much as showcase work or supported open source projects. Has the culture changed so much that this way of using GitHub isn’t familiar to you? How do others here see it?
  - autarch 4y ago
    > Has GitHub introduced some “showcase” feature, ... Yes, you can pin repos to your profile. But you can also create a profile repo. See https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/customizing-your-profile/managing-your-profile-readme https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an... I wrote a blog post about this and the profile generator I made for myself - https://blog.urth.org/2022/03/28/yet-another-github-profile-generator/ https://blog.urth.org/2022/03/28/yet-another-github-profile-...
bgroat 4y ago
This. Whenever an employer wants to look at my GitHub I tell them, "Look, this is all going to be half finished tutorials... as soon as I'm halfway decent with a technology I go out and build something proprietary"
- pferde 4y ago
  Do people really put stuff like "half finished tutorials" and little exploratory non-projects up on the Internet? What for? That stuff normally does not need to leave your local harddisk. Maybe exceptionally, if you want to explicitly share it with someone you have been discussing it with. Maybe I'm getting old and no longer "with it", but to me, this is just like teenagers entering way too much personal info on social media just because there are empty text boxes available. I have a "code" dir with dozens of subdirectories where I keep all that stuff. Some of those are local git repos because I'm starting to do something actually non-trivial there, and yes, some of those eventually get the "git remote add ..." treatment, and get published on a public code forge somewhere.
  - bgroat 4y ago
    > Do people really put stuff like "half finished tutorials" and little exploratory non-projects up on the Internet? What for? If I want to track version control across multiple machines without rolling my own git server or bothering to mark the repo private? I don't think it's an old thing. I think it's a HN crowd not really understanding user experience thing
  - Hackbraten 4y ago
    I publish as much as I can, and deliberately so. Not so much for internet points but because: 1. It forces me to write a README. No matter how small the project, I afford it an introductory paragraph, installation instructions, usage instructions, and a license. Doing that all the time helps build good habits. If it hurts, I’m not doing it often enough. Doing it often enough helps overcome resistance one day when it actually counts. 2. I contribute something back. It’s not exactly curl, but who am I to judge whether my project will be too trivial to be useful for others? I prefer to leave that decision up to the visitor. 3. Future me is going to get a README for free a couple of years down the road, when the details are long forgotten. Example: this repository [1] is for a 50-line Bash script [2]. [1]: https://github.com/claui/aws-credential-1password https://github.com/claui/aws-credential-1password [2]: https://github.com/claui/aws-credential-1password/blob/main/aws-credential-1password https://github.com/claui/aws-credential-1password/blob/main/...
polishdude20 4y ago
Also, my public repos are all code I've done before I started working. My code has improved a lot since I've been coding every day for my job but it's all private.
lmarcos 4y ago
Agree. I do have a GitHub account, but I do not link it in my CV (nor I link my personal website). I like to write "toy" software that more often than not does not leave my laptop. In the rare occasions I believe the software I write could be of help to others, I do publish it. But man, I code in my free time for fun! I couldn't care less about following guidelines or the latest patterns or using docker, or whatever.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
I'm never going to work for a company whose hiring managers require me to post hobby projects on Github. Won't even entertain interviewing with them. I shouldn't have to spend thousands of hours a year working on shit outside of work to prove that I can do my job. If it's not obvious from the interview and whatever test I'm given, then we have nothing further to discuss. One of the reasons I don't suffer from burnout is that once I'm finished with my full time job and my consulting side-gig, I leave it alone. I might dabble in some new technology from time to time, but there's no reason to announce that to the world.
ensignavenger 4y ago
So don't put your github URL in your resume? If you don't want a potential employer to look at something and judge your ability based on it, it doesn't belong in your resume.
- tmp_anon_22 4y ago
  Lots of resume aggregators and ATS require or at least present a Github URL field whether you like it or not.
  - mdm12 4y ago
    In such cases, I stick with the tried-and-true 'N/A'. I still get offers, so it doesn't auto-delete my application!
renewiltord 4y ago
That's a strange thing to do, in my opinion. That makes me want to put my Github (which is half half-baked nonsense, including this stupid `hello.S` from when I was barely learning amd64) on the resume. I do anyway, but it is now a reason to double down. After all, if my hiring manager can't correctly evaluate which code is toy and which code is real (I have both on my Github), I don't trust his competence and I want to not talk to him so it is important that he filter me out. This way, my time is not wasted with incompetents.
pizza234 4y ago
> I do not want a future employer judging me on the basis of the half-finished amateurish experiments I knock off on my free time as I'm learning a new language or messing around with a new framework or just screwing around in general because I'm bored. In this case there's no need to publish this type of code; Github offers private repositories for free. If one is convinced that there is value for other people from half-baked experiments, it's definitely worth publishing them in the open (it's possible that they're valuable), but if there isn't, why doing it? I also notice that many people display private commits in their profile stats; this way, one can signal the amount of activity, if they want (within the limits of what's possible, as certainly commits don't necessarily correlate with intense activity).
ozim 4y ago
That is one person so I would not read too much into it. When I read CV and I see github link it is "nice to have" so I check it after I consider that person has enough work experience. I have only seen "meh" code on GH. If someone would have contributions to some real OSS project he would probably jump queue to front, but it is not like I would throw away application because person is trying just stuff out on GH. That said - I don't see value in putting my own trash projects on public GH profile. I can have it in local repository or in private repo if I want to synch it between computers or deploy to VPS.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

A good employer will not judge you based on your half-completed personal work. The point isn't to see perfectly executed programs, it's to get a sense for the kind of interests this person has. Seeing a couple half-finished Go projects is better than seeing nothing at all.

laurent123456 4y ago

If you don't have much to show on your GitHub profile, simply do not provide the URL. It's just one data points among others, but it's true that it's useful to see the candidate's coding skills in advance and the easiest for that is open source code (since anything else probably can't be shared).

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I've googled people's names + github if their GH wasn't provided, just out of curiosity.
tsukikage 4y ago
+1. Additionally, in general, I personally prefer to keep work and leisure separate. Things that I bring to the awareness of potential / future employers are selected and curated, and distinct from places where I keep the half-baked stuff I do for fun for my own consumption. It's certainly possible to get from my real name to my leisure activities and vice versa with a concerted effort, but the first page or two of a casual Google search won't do it.
Aeolun 4y ago
> it's useful to see the candidate's coding skills in advance Yes, but only if it’s representative of their work. Good luck finding the one kind of sensible library I’ve written in the 100 forks and experiments.
- lolinder 4y ago
  That's what pinned repositories are for. It's your opportunity to highlight the projects you're actually proud of. Any half-reasonable prospective employer will look at those first, and probably only those. And again, if you have nothing worth pinning, there's always the option to leave it off your resume.

isthisfree 4y ago

As an employer that does the same thing as the person who wrote the article; I do, of course, look at the seriousness of whatever is on that Github profile. I am usually easily able to tell if it is a half-baked project for some hobby-thing or active participation in e.g. a well known piece of open source software. Someone who does this, is likely also skilled enough to separate those things. I don't only look at the user's own repos but also at contributions/comments etc. to others. And just as the author, I too experience more often than not that people have NO idea how to set the level for own experience.

TheaomBen 4y ago
Could you list some things that are red/green flags when perusing someone's public code/projects? I'm preparing to publicly release a project with the intent of building it up to demonstrate my own experience level. I'm asking as someone with next to no prior public code despite developping back-end almost full time since I dropped out 10ish years ago. I guess I'm asking for external criteria for whether I'm impostor-syndroming!
- theshrike79 4y ago
  Just a few things I usually notice when going through a potential hire's GitHub: 1) All projects have a bad commit history. Just one commit and that's it. Usually it's something for school with really basic stuff inside. Most might be IDE provided "generate code" boilerplate. Even a single commit beyond the GitHub provided initial commit example is enough. Multiple ones in a sane cycle is even better. Even if you just update some comments. 2) Does the project run? If I check out the project, is there a clear way to run it or does it rely on the compile & run commands being on the submitter's bash history? Add a make/magefile or run.sh or anything. 3) README. Does it exist? GitHub pushes you really hard to add one, if you're lacking even the default one, you clearly don't understand how GH works. 4) Bonus task: does the repo have integrations or GH Actions enabled? If the project automatically runs some tests or builds on commit, it's a big green flag for me. If I'm going to be paying you over 100€/hour, I don't want you spending your time doing stuff manually if it can be automated with 15 minutes of boilerplate work.

tym0 4y ago

This was also my reaction, the way I write code when I have a 20 minutes of free time after work is really different from the way I write code for production. The author is lying to themselves if they think that most people Github projects are any more representative of the work they'll do once hired than their resume is. I think looking at the Github of applicants is useful as a conversation starter however: "Oh I see you've built X with Y, what was interesting about that? What did you learn?"

mikepurvis 4y ago
I agree with the conversation starter part, but I think there's still something to be said for seeing how someone's code looks when they're writing it not-for-production. Like does that just mean overly long functions? Lazy symbol naming? Linter violations? Lack of tests? Those might all be reasonable through the "not prod" lens, but there's other pretty important stuff that can still bubble up, like the person reinventing the wheel where a well known library could have been used, or using obviously non-idiomatic structures like an indexed loop in Python. None of this should be a deal breaker, but if you're seeing stuff that's obviously like "I would be annoyed to be reviewing this code" then it's worth talking about.
- whiddershins 4y ago
  What if I wanted to reinvent the wheel to increase my knowledge?
  - lbotos 4y ago
    Make a readme that says "This project is me exploring how to do Y so I can learn the ins and outs". Solved.
    - reificator 4y ago
      And what if I’m not tracking that in such detail or even thinking about viewing it like that because it’s a side project? My repos are hidden specifically because I do them for fun. I’d make them public if tinkering were an understood thing but its not. > If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. Better to have a clear separation between work and play.

dkdbejwi383 4y ago

If all a person has to evaluate me on is public Github contributions, it'll seem like I only work one day every 3 years or so. With all the other things I do with my life (sport, art, socialising), I very rarely have any time (or motivation) to program in my free-time. Having all of these "extra-curricular" activities is probably good for my mental health and makes me a better engineer than I would otherwise be if I spent all my time both at work and in my own time working on software.

idop 4y ago

Please don't delete your GitHub account because of this one person's article. I have interviewed over a hundred of developers over the years, and I have actually adopted the habit of _not_ looking at their GitHub profile because I find them to be very non-representative of the person's skills and abilities 9 times out of 10. The article isn't bad, by the way, and OP is making very true points, most prominently that resumes are mostly bullshit and shouldn't be relied upon by themselves, but that's what the interview process is for.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

> All this makes me want to do is delete my entire Github. I do not want a future employer judging me on the basis of the half-finished amateurish experiments I knock off on my free time as I'm learning a new language or messing around with a new framework or just screwing around in general because I'm bored. This is my Github too; part of me thinks I should finally arse myself, remove unused repos, and build a portfolio with some example projects of how I build software (hopefully allowing me to skip a technical interview assignment), and maybe build some libraries for various purposes. Doesn't have to be anything unique. I mean my CV is impressive (according to recruiters / employers), but it's a high level overview of projects I've been involved in, it doesn't really boil down to my individual achievements because projects are generally team efforts. I do believe this is the danger of judging someone by CV alone though; just because they were a part of a project, doesn't mean they were big contributors to it. I've seen plenty of people who do one small commit per week and call it a day. There's always the one team member who gets carried by the rest of the team, just like in school. (childish as it might be, I do believe managers should review individual team members' contributions and to let people go if they're only along for the ride.)

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
> This is my Github too This is a very common problem and I solved it in a very simple way: one account for playing, experimenting, testing and enjoying, and another for showing off. This is not fundamentally different to how people treat HN accounts.
- Juliate 4y ago
  Why should some specific people (employers, recruiters in this case) should have a relevant authority as to pretense what a GitHub is supposed to be for. If someone's GitHub profile is a mess, mixing experiments, serious work, goofy stuff, etc. as a result of their multiple uses of it (it's a _tool_ per se), that's up to them and it's up to no one to say "well, that doesn't look very professional to me, does it? your worth doesn't look great here".
  - 4y ago

kwhitefoot 4y ago

In the Soul of a New Machine Tracy Kidder relates how toward the end of the development of the Nova that Data General started rejecting applicants who had anything computer related as a hobby or spare time interest. If memory serves, they believed on the basis of experience that people with a broader range of interests were better team players and more resilient to burn out.

skeeter2020 4y ago
While this may be technically accurate, the rest of the descriptions on how they interviewed & hired was brutally narrow-minded and biased. You're missing the part where they basically didn't hire anyone with a life outside of computing because you were being hired for an all-consuming death march.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  No, I didn't miss that point. That was the reason they finally changed their opinion.

ekianjo 4y ago

Why include your Github URL then if you think its only awful code?

deepstack 4y ago

> If all this person is evaluating me on is my Github, they'll think that I've never advanced beyond an amateur level despite my having over a decade of experience in the industry... all because I treat my open source work as a hobby rather than as a second job. Thanks you for bringing that up. That is one of the reason I don't use GH. Other being the acquisition by MS.

beej71 4y ago

Private repos are great for those half-baked projects you don't want people to see.

antholeole 4y ago
I think this is forcing me to choose between two evils - do I want to look like I can only write half baked weekend projects, or do I want to look like I don’t write any code in my free time at all?
- bodge5000 4y ago
  Fair point, for me its the latter. I cant put on my CV brief descriptions of side projects I'm working on, during an interview I can give more details on those, etc... Still not ideal because they'd probably want to see the code, but its the lesser of two evils for me
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

lbotos 4y ago

You can do that or you could also put a readme on your GitHub that it's a place where you explore hobby projects and you are interested in "x, y, and z". When I go to a GitHub as a hiring manager, I try to get as much signal as I can. You are scared that I'll solely judge you on the code, but I'm looking for metadata. Is this person interested in or exploring problems/technologies that are related to the problems/technologies we are using here? Oh, They are exclusively doing music based coding? INTERESTING. Let's talk about that in the interview. Oh, They've contributed a bug report to an open source project, lemme see what that looks like. Nice, repro steps are clear. And yes, some hiring managers are gonna say "welp, this candidate isn't an open source ninja so we don't want them." But that's not all hiring managers. What is a big turn off for me personally is the "I'm gonna slap something on github to tick the box" group. I had someone submit a resume with a link to their website and a link to their github. The website was literally just a demo site, but they had changed all of the blog titles so it looked like real posts, but if you clicked through, it was all lorem ipsum. The GitHub was also just the code for this site. I'll take a graveyard of personal exploration everyday over a half-baked sham site. (Note: They could have just been playing around BUT TELL ME THAT! Because it sure looked like an attempt to look the part.)

soneca 4y ago
> ” And yes, some hiring managers are gonna say "welp, this candidate isn't an open source ninja so we don't want them." But that's not all hiring managers.” So probably is good risk management to not include your GitHub ever when applying.
- bruce343434 4y ago
  This strikes me as unnecessarily bitter and cynical. Application is a two way street. Would you even want to work for a company like that?
  - slothtrop 4y ago
    A company doesn't necessarily begin and end with the person hiring.

starkd 4y ago

He's talking about the case where the applicant explicitly provides a github link in their resume or profile. In that case, they could have been expected to pin their favorite projects or remove the ones they don't want seen. Plus they are merely suggesting it be used as a jumping off point for conversation with the candidate.

coffeeblack 4y ago

I do not want a future employer judging me on the basis of the half-finished amateurish experiments I would not want to work at a company where the tech people are not aware that most repos are precisely that.

mrfusion 4y ago

Perhaps consider a personal account and a professional account. Only put your best work on the professional one.

em-bee 4y ago
unless they changed it githubs terms of service do not allow multiple accounts. you'd have to split them over multiple hosting services, which, depending on the project, may not always be practical or possible

arinlen 4y ago

> All this makes me want to do is delete my entire Github. I do not want a future employer judging me on the basis of the half-finished amateurish experiments I knock off on my free time as I'm learning a new language or messing around with a new framework or just screwing around in general because I'm bored. I don't understand your complaint. We have free code hosting platforms which support private projects, such as GitLab. You only showcase the projects you want to show, as a public profile is also your portfolio. It makes no sense to showcase half-assed projects you care nothing or feel ashamed to show, as no one forces you to make a git repo public. It's perfectly fine if you do not curate your portfolio, but you also get the same problem if you don't curate your CV. Personally, I received job offers based on my GitHub profile alone, as I happened to have a pet project which uses a particular tech stack used by a company. I know people who were automatically excluded from job applications as they claimed expertise on tech stacks they showcased in their GitHub profiles, and their pet projects included blatant eggregious problems which can only result from incompetence. Companies hire based on the skillset they can evaluate, and if you make it your point to showcase shoddy work then that's a problem you create for yourself.

dottedmag 4y ago
GitHub is not a portfolio website. It's a code sharing platform.
swatcoder 4y ago
Has GitHub introduced some “showcase” feature, because this is the first time I’ve heard that a normal public repository should be a treated as a showcase. Historically, public repos were just where you put code that didn’t need to be private, like hobby code and experiments, just as much as showcase work or supported open source projects. Has the culture changed so much that this way of using GitHub isn’t familiar to you? How do others here see it?
- autarch 4y ago
  > Has GitHub introduced some “showcase” feature, ... Yes, you can pin repos to your profile. But you can also create a profile repo. See https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/customizing-your-profile/managing-your-profile-readme https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an... I wrote a blog post about this and the profile generator I made for myself - https://blog.urth.org/2022/03/28/yet-another-github-profile-generator/ https://blog.urth.org/2022/03/28/yet-another-github-profile-...

bgroat 4y ago

This. Whenever an employer wants to look at my GitHub I tell them, "Look, this is all going to be half finished tutorials... as soon as I'm halfway decent with a technology I go out and build something proprietary"

pferde 4y ago
Do people really put stuff like "half finished tutorials" and little exploratory non-projects up on the Internet? What for? That stuff normally does not need to leave your local harddisk. Maybe exceptionally, if you want to explicitly share it with someone you have been discussing it with. Maybe I'm getting old and no longer "with it", but to me, this is just like teenagers entering way too much personal info on social media just because there are empty text boxes available. I have a "code" dir with dozens of subdirectories where I keep all that stuff. Some of those are local git repos because I'm starting to do something actually non-trivial there, and yes, some of those eventually get the "git remote add ..." treatment, and get published on a public code forge somewhere.
- bgroat 4y ago
  > Do people really put stuff like "half finished tutorials" and little exploratory non-projects up on the Internet? What for? If I want to track version control across multiple machines without rolling my own git server or bothering to mark the repo private? I don't think it's an old thing. I think it's a HN crowd not really understanding user experience thing
- Hackbraten 4y ago
  I publish as much as I can, and deliberately so. Not so much for internet points but because: 1. It forces me to write a README. No matter how small the project, I afford it an introductory paragraph, installation instructions, usage instructions, and a license. Doing that all the time helps build good habits. If it hurts, I’m not doing it often enough. Doing it often enough helps overcome resistance one day when it actually counts. 2. I contribute something back. It’s not exactly curl, but who am I to judge whether my project will be too trivial to be useful for others? I prefer to leave that decision up to the visitor. 3. Future me is going to get a README for free a couple of years down the road, when the details are long forgotten. Example: this repository [1] is for a 50-line Bash script [2]. [1]: https://github.com/claui/aws-credential-1password https://github.com/claui/aws-credential-1password [2]: https://github.com/claui/aws-credential-1password/blob/main/aws-credential-1password https://github.com/claui/aws-credential-1password/blob/main/...

polishdude20 4y ago

Also, my public repos are all code I've done before I started working. My code has improved a lot since I've been coding every day for my job but it's all private.

lmarcos 4y ago

Agree. I do have a GitHub account, but I do not link it in my CV (nor I link my personal website). I like to write "toy" software that more often than not does not leave my laptop. In the rare occasions I believe the software I write could be of help to others, I do publish it. But man, I code in my free time for fun! I couldn't care less about following guidelines or the latest patterns or using docker, or whatever.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

I'm never going to work for a company whose hiring managers require me to post hobby projects on Github. Won't even entertain interviewing with them. I shouldn't have to spend thousands of hours a year working on shit outside of work to prove that I can do my job. If it's not obvious from the interview and whatever test I'm given, then we have nothing further to discuss. One of the reasons I don't suffer from burnout is that once I'm finished with my full time job and my consulting side-gig, I leave it alone. I might dabble in some new technology from time to time, but there's no reason to announce that to the world.

ensignavenger 4y ago

So don't put your github URL in your resume? If you don't want a potential employer to look at something and judge your ability based on it, it doesn't belong in your resume.

tmp_anon_22 4y ago
Lots of resume aggregators and ATS require or at least present a Github URL field whether you like it or not.
- mdm12 4y ago
  In such cases, I stick with the tried-and-true 'N/A'. I still get offers, so it doesn't auto-delete my application!

renewiltord 4y ago

That's a strange thing to do, in my opinion. That makes me want to put my Github (which is half half-baked nonsense, including this stupid `hello.S` from when I was barely learning amd64) on the resume. I do anyway, but it is now a reason to double down. After all, if my hiring manager can't correctly evaluate which code is toy and which code is real (I have both on my Github), I don't trust his competence and I want to not talk to him so it is important that he filter me out. This way, my time is not wasted with incompetents.

pizza234 4y ago

> I do not want a future employer judging me on the basis of the half-finished amateurish experiments I knock off on my free time as I'm learning a new language or messing around with a new framework or just screwing around in general because I'm bored. In this case there's no need to publish this type of code; Github offers private repositories for free. If one is convinced that there is value for other people from half-baked experiments, it's definitely worth publishing them in the open (it's possible that they're valuable), but if there isn't, why doing it? I also notice that many people display private commits in their profile stats; this way, one can signal the amount of activity, if they want (within the limits of what's possible, as certainly commits don't necessarily correlate with intense activity).

ozim 4y ago

That is one person so I would not read too much into it. When I read CV and I see github link it is "nice to have" so I check it after I consider that person has enough work experience. I have only seen "meh" code on GH. If someone would have contributions to some real OSS project he would probably jump queue to front, but it is not like I would throw away application because person is trying just stuff out on GH. That said - I don't see value in putting my own trash projects on public GH profile. I can have it in local repository or in private repo if I want to synch it between computers or deploy to VPS.