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> Why as a manager are you wasting your time and the candidate's time "discovering" if they can code when there's millions of developers who are actively workin

> Why as a manager are you wasting your time and the candidate's time "discovering" if they can code when there's millions of developers who are actively working in the open on OSS platforms like GitHub? The number of developers who have something recent and meaningful on GitHub is extremely small. I’ve interviewed and hired a lot of great developers. Very few of them had much of anything on GitHub. Often the most I could find were one-line patches to projects somewhere. If you limit your hiring to GitHub OSS superstars, you’re going to miss out on a massive number of excellent developers.

wootland 4y ago
The truth is that I've never had a problem sourcing candidates this way for the past decade+. There are tens of millions of developers on GitHub. You will find people who are very accomplished in the exact area you need, and it's easy to track them down by navigating through the projects. Extra bonus points for hiring the maintainers of libraries/software you're actually using.
- deleted 4y ago
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- olliej 4y ago
  You will also exclude every person who works at a job that doesn’t allow that, and people who aren’t coding on weekends. The latter likely disproportionately impacts people with children, so that’s great as well.
  - wootland 4y ago
    I also hire like this with referrals from current (and past) team members. This helps provide an on-ramp for people with less of a public persona. If someone I've worked with in the past says "you should hire X, I worked with them at my last co and they're an amazing developer", I'll hire X. X tends to be excellent and you have a great chance of landing them with a hot referral.
JohnFen 4y ago
This is true. I have no code on GitHub or the like, personally. Although I have plenty of code that I can provide to a company if they want to see it. Some have, most haven't. I don't think it's an issue that some companies want to use GitHub as a shortcut to vetting developers. It does limit the pool they're fishing in, but that's what all vetting processes do.

wootland 4y ago

The truth is that I've never had a problem sourcing candidates this way for the past decade+. There are tens of millions of developers on GitHub. You will find people who are very accomplished in the exact area you need, and it's easy to track them down by navigating through the projects. Extra bonus points for hiring the maintainers of libraries/software you're actually using.

deleted 4y ago
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olliej 4y ago
You will also exclude every person who works at a job that doesn’t allow that, and people who aren’t coding on weekends. The latter likely disproportionately impacts people with children, so that’s great as well.
- wootland 4y ago
  I also hire like this with referrals from current (and past) team members. This helps provide an on-ramp for people with less of a public persona. If someone I've worked with in the past says "you should hire X, I worked with them at my last co and they're an amazing developer", I'll hire X. X tends to be excellent and you have a great chance of landing them with a hot referral.

JohnFen 4y ago

This is true. I have no code on GitHub or the like, personally. Although I have plenty of code that I can provide to a company if they want to see it. Some have, most haven't. I don't think it's an issue that some companies want to use GitHub as a shortcut to vetting developers. It does limit the pool they're fishing in, but that's what all vetting processes do.