12 ms·

The GitHub hiring experience

130 points by Empro 14y ago

nthitz 14y ago
From their build/deployment process to their hiring experience, it's hard to think of a company more open than GitHub these days (not including all that open source code ;)!
iandanforth 14y ago
I find these cultural pieces fascinating. One point that I'd love to know about in more companies is around how hiring is prioritized. Coby calls hiring "one of the most critical activities we do as a company" whereas at Valve it is the most important thing you can be doing. Is this prioritization common (or key?) at exceptional workplaces?
tptacek 14y ago
Am I reading right that it's 4 days from first contact to hire? That is extraordinarily fast. I wonder how much of the work of screening candidates is done "for free" for Github tech hires, since most of the techs Github would want to hire are also users of the site.
- holman 14y ago
  It depends. Most employees are going to experience slower than four days- hiring can be difficult (not only because of trying to find the right person, but because arranging things in meatspace like phone interviews and flights and schedules can be time-consuming). It's something we want to improve, but then again, we don't want to improve it too much... hiring's something that does benefit from waiting and thinking about someone before bringing them on. Related: I got an email on something like a Monday, interviewed Wednesday, and got hired 45 minutes into the interview. We don't want to make that mistake again.
- dxbydt 14y ago
  Agree, 4 days is absolutely remarkable. But its much better to take a long time and do it right, than to fall in love with the candidate and screw everything up afterwards. I recently had an absolutely excruciating experience after a startup on HN made an offer literally 0 days after meeting with me. We met for a sandwich and 2 hours later I had an offer. Three days go by and the hotshot young founder has now found a new muse, we have a falling out for an absolutely contrived reason, and I'm out on the street with no job in a new state with no health insurance and having to break the rental lease. Thankfully the next weekend, once again I clicked on the "Ask HN: Who is hiring? " thread and landed a new job, but this company took 50 days and a ton of coding interviews. Better safe than sorry.
  - psykotic 14y ago
    That's a shitty situation. I'm glad you had a soft landing! What made you accept the offer on such short notice? I get that startups move faster than other companies, but if someone wanted to hire me right now or not at all, I'd take it as a serious warning sign. Most likely it means they're hard-ass negotiators who are manipulating you or that they're genuine but too focused on the short term--either way, a red flag. I got a tentative offer for my current job just as I was starting a one-year sabbatical backpacking trip through South-East Asia. They had something time sensitive they needed me for as soon as possible. Despite that, they were totally understanding, reassuring me that they still wanted to work with me whenever I was ready.
    - kabdib 14y ago
      "Right now or not at all" is a showstopper. So are unreasonable time limits on offers. "48 hours to decide" is an easy "No, thank you." If they're worried about not landing someone, having to extend multiple offers and possibly overshooting their hiring goals then they should be up-front about that. I would also worry about their hiring bar.
    - dxbydt 14y ago
      >what made you accept the offer on such a short notice? I was the first hire with good equity...so I guess I was just plain greedy and not thinking straight. Or maybe it was the boredom that comes from working at a safe job in a bank...I was plain ecstatic to get back into a startup.Mostly my greed and idiocy. Am never going to be so trusting again.
      - psykotic 14y ago
        Hey, it could have been worse. A friend of a friend had the rotten luck of getting hired at a company, moving across the country, and getting laid off within the first week due to the company shutting its doors, not once but on two separate occasions!
- lukatmyshu 14y ago
  I've gone from first contact to first day in 5 (monday -> monday). I think it's imperative that you work quickly when it comes to candidates. Do your due diligence and when a candidate is in the office give them your time and attention. I have found that if you do that, it's easy to make an offer after one day interview.
- mccr8 14y ago
  They aren't claiming that four days is typical, rather that one time it happened that quickly.
corwinstephen 14y ago
It's funny, as seemingly unrelated as it is, the one thing that comes to mind after reading about how GitHub sees value in flying people to San Francisco from around the globe despite the cost is that the essence of that practice is the same as what we Americans SHOULD be seeing in our education system: People willing to invest enormous sums of money up front with the intention of producing graduates who, in turn, will generate much larger sums of money for the economy. Too bad all American politicians are too short sighted to see it.
gbog 14y ago
I like github as a tool and use it daily, but am I the only one to think this hiring article is pure PR speak woven with some artificial coolness? To compare with other companies: Google communicates in a more traditional way with possible candidates so it is visibly PR speak and don't try to hide it. Facebook had a nice shot recently with a fake negative view. That was cool and did not smell the strong fragrance of PR speak. Github here has a middle ground I would love to love but...
- ionforce 14y ago
  What part of the article reads PR speak to you?
  - gbog 14y ago
    I don't know, it is more of a general perception, but if I have to excerpt some typical sentences I could find these: - "Valuable people deserve a bespoke hiring experience" - "Hiring good people is one of the most critical activities we do as a company" etc. Maybe it is not exactly raw PR speak, maybe it is just empty sentences ballooned with good will and "think positive" attitude, written there in the hope that potential candidate will read them and apply. What worries me is that it looks like genuine and sincere, but it is not. It's like artificial marple syrup stuffed in a natural marple syrup bottle. And if I have the choice I prefer natural syrup in natural syrup bottle and artificial syrup in artificial syrup bottle over what we have here.
    - sharkweek 14y ago
      Everywhere wants to sound like the best place to work, so it's pretty common to get some fluff in a post like this. But even on top of that, he's rightfully passionate about where he works because from what I hear, GitHub treats it's employees very well
    - holman 14y ago
      Man, that's pretty pessimistic. If you want the straight dope — or maple syrup, in your case — here it is: hiring good people is the most important thing we do, and we don't fuck around with that. We fly people in, get them to meet people, and show them how we work because we care about this process. More importantly, we want this relaxed atmosphere so we can see if someone actually would fit in with us. It's a big deal. We have a pretty wildly different culture than most companies, and we want our hiring process to reflect that. Why would you not spend time on this? Why would you not care? It's literally the most important part of your business.
ionforce 14y ago
I find articles like these disheartening only because it is impossible for all workplaces to be this way. What if you are at a mediocre job with mediocre teammates? How would you ever get to experience the joy that is working at a Google or a Facebook or a Valve or a GitHub. It's nice that this strategy works for them, but I wonder why everyone isn't doing it if it is so successful?
- gaelian 14y ago
  I suspect it is much harder to retrofit such a culture to an existing organisation than to have it that way from the outset. With Valve, GitHub et al we see organisations that are trying to encourage novelty and creativity in their workforce. Many organisations are more interested in repeatability in their workforce. By which I mean many of their workers are basically following a workflow of some sort that requires just enough human judgement so as they cannot yet be replaced by a robot. So I think you're right, not all organisations can work this way and some probably don't even want to. But I entertain myself sometimes wondering how they could. My personal favourite is thinking about how one might manage to get a government department to work like Valve/GitHub.
  - ionforce 14y ago
    Let's do it! Which department?
    - gaelian 14y ago
      I didn't think anyone would be that interested in my little hypothetical. :) Well, I may live in a different country to you, so any department I describe may not be familiar to you. But without getting too specific, my first starting observation is that the hiring practices of most public organisations are terrible. They're not stringent enough and they don't encourage self motivated workers. So that would be the first thing I'd want to try and fix. Self motivation within the workforce would seem to be one of - if not the most - important ingredients to get the Valve/GitHub style culture working. Size of the organisation also would seem to be important. I have seen it discussed here before as to just how large an organisation this kind of flat strucutre would scale out to. I obviously don't know the answer. But again I think it would largely come back to how well the hiring process is managed. And how such a essentially anarchistic department would interface with the rest of the government and/or the public would also be a interesting experiment.
throwaway231 14y ago
My own experience with their hiring process was sadly not as positive. After the initial screen (which was face-to-face with one of their engineers and which I thought went well), I got the runaround. All I really wanted to know was whether it was a "cultural fit" issue or a "skills aren't up to par" one. Mostly I'm just disappointed because it seems like an awesome place to work.
- genrand 14y ago
  Did you ask?
dsolomon 14y ago
This is what happens when you keep HR out of the hiring process.
chromejs10 14y ago
I love Github's hiring process and their software building process. More companies should implement similar things. Now obviously you can't expect all companies to shell out this kind of cash, but I've read so many blogposts of Githubbers that all say the same thing: we just want to work with awesome people and make great products. It doesn't seem like there are a lot of politics going on. One post I've read by Zach Holman showed that the interview process was more about working on a project that you cared about rather than rambling off tiny utility methods or impractical algorithms. Hire people who show enthusiasm (and of course talent) instead of those who have memorized interview questions from glassdoor.com
masterponomo 14y ago
Wow. I think back to when I first tried to go out as a contractor. A headhunter got me an interview with a local telecom. During the interview, the manager asked me if I was one of the people named in a recent ComputerWorld article about families with multiple generations in IT. I said I was. He said the whole staff of the telecom IT were curious as to why everyone in the article had given their salary, but I had not. I told him it was because I had merely filled out a questionnaire before I found out the reporter was going to write a nationwide article, and that I subsequently declined to reveal my salary to the world. The manager asked how that went down. I told him not very well--the reporter dunned me to find out my salary, sent me a disposable camera with instructions to send him a photo of myself for the article (I also declined that honor). I told the manager I was a private person and had not consented for my image and my salary to be plastered in a magazine. Then I tried to steer it back to IT, and mentioned that I had recently started using Linux (this was 1998, when that was a daring thing for a mainframer to have done). He said, "Oh, you're one of those Unix guys? We hate that sht!" So, no fab whiskey, no dogs, no hotel, not pool and air hockey--just a quiz about an article I had tried not to be in, and a curse for liking Linux. sigh
rodly 14y ago
Fantastic read. As a current CS student (Junior), I'm hoping a GitHub employee might let me know if there are internship opportunities for next Summer? I'd love to try some SlowMerge(TM) ... and work really hard of course.
hans 14y ago
So long as you're younger than 35 har har ...
- jbarnette 14y ago
  There are a fair amount of us > 35 folks at GitHub.
  - hans 14y ago
    ah good to hear, just joking love the Git! these articles usually remind me of exercise mags where a 20 something person brags about their abundance of health + energy level, oblivious to how hard it is to retain that after late 30s, ok i'm rambling ...
philthom 14y ago
Seems more of a blogvertisement for GitHub
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
srik 14y ago
I ate that article up like a starving raccoon. Working at github is sortof a personal fantasy.

130 points by Empro 14y ago

From their build/deployment process to their hiring experience, it's hard to think of a company more open than GitHub these days (not including all that open source code ;)!

iandanforth 14y ago

I find these cultural pieces fascinating. One point that I'd love to know about in more companies is around how hiring is prioritized. Coby calls hiring "one of the most critical activities we do as a company" whereas at Valve it is the most important thing you can be doing. Is this prioritization common (or key?) at exceptional workplaces?

tptacek 14y ago

Am I reading right that it's 4 days from first contact to hire? That is extraordinarily fast. I wonder how much of the work of screening candidates is done "for free" for Github tech hires, since most of the techs Github would want to hire are also users of the site.

holman 14y ago
It depends. Most employees are going to experience slower than four days- hiring can be difficult (not only because of trying to find the right person, but because arranging things in meatspace like phone interviews and flights and schedules can be time-consuming). It's something we want to improve, but then again, we don't want to improve it too much... hiring's something that does benefit from waiting and thinking about someone before bringing them on. Related: I got an email on something like a Monday, interviewed Wednesday, and got hired 45 minutes into the interview. We don't want to make that mistake again.
dxbydt 14y ago
Agree, 4 days is absolutely remarkable. But its much better to take a long time and do it right, than to fall in love with the candidate and screw everything up afterwards. I recently had an absolutely excruciating experience after a startup on HN made an offer literally 0 days after meeting with me. We met for a sandwich and 2 hours later I had an offer. Three days go by and the hotshot young founder has now found a new muse, we have a falling out for an absolutely contrived reason, and I'm out on the street with no job in a new state with no health insurance and having to break the rental lease. Thankfully the next weekend, once again I clicked on the "Ask HN: Who is hiring? " thread and landed a new job, but this company took 50 days and a ton of coding interviews. Better safe than sorry.
- psykotic 14y ago
  That's a shitty situation. I'm glad you had a soft landing! What made you accept the offer on such short notice? I get that startups move faster than other companies, but if someone wanted to hire me right now or not at all, I'd take it as a serious warning sign. Most likely it means they're hard-ass negotiators who are manipulating you or that they're genuine but too focused on the short term--either way, a red flag. I got a tentative offer for my current job just as I was starting a one-year sabbatical backpacking trip through South-East Asia. They had something time sensitive they needed me for as soon as possible. Despite that, they were totally understanding, reassuring me that they still wanted to work with me whenever I was ready.
  - kabdib 14y ago
    "Right now or not at all" is a showstopper. So are unreasonable time limits on offers. "48 hours to decide" is an easy "No, thank you." If they're worried about not landing someone, having to extend multiple offers and possibly overshooting their hiring goals then they should be up-front about that. I would also worry about their hiring bar.
  - dxbydt 14y ago
    >what made you accept the offer on such a short notice? I was the first hire with good equity...so I guess I was just plain greedy and not thinking straight. Or maybe it was the boredom that comes from working at a safe job in a bank...I was plain ecstatic to get back into a startup.Mostly my greed and idiocy. Am never going to be so trusting again.
    - psykotic 14y ago
      Hey, it could have been worse. A friend of a friend had the rotten luck of getting hired at a company, moving across the country, and getting laid off within the first week due to the company shutting its doors, not once but on two separate occasions!
lukatmyshu 14y ago
I've gone from first contact to first day in 5 (monday -> monday). I think it's imperative that you work quickly when it comes to candidates. Do your due diligence and when a candidate is in the office give them your time and attention. I have found that if you do that, it's easy to make an offer after one day interview.
mccr8 14y ago
They aren't claiming that four days is typical, rather that one time it happened that quickly.

corwinstephen 14y ago

It's funny, as seemingly unrelated as it is, the one thing that comes to mind after reading about how GitHub sees value in flying people to San Francisco from around the globe despite the cost is that the essence of that practice is the same as what we Americans SHOULD be seeing in our education system: People willing to invest enormous sums of money up front with the intention of producing graduates who, in turn, will generate much larger sums of money for the economy. Too bad all American politicians are too short sighted to see it.

gbog 14y ago

I like github as a tool and use it daily, but am I the only one to think this hiring article is pure PR speak woven with some artificial coolness? To compare with other companies: Google communicates in a more traditional way with possible candidates so it is visibly PR speak and don't try to hide it. Facebook had a nice shot recently with a fake negative view. That was cool and did not smell the strong fragrance of PR speak. Github here has a middle ground I would love to love but...

ionforce 14y ago
What part of the article reads PR speak to you?
- gbog 14y ago
  I don't know, it is more of a general perception, but if I have to excerpt some typical sentences I could find these: - "Valuable people deserve a bespoke hiring experience" - "Hiring good people is one of the most critical activities we do as a company" etc. Maybe it is not exactly raw PR speak, maybe it is just empty sentences ballooned with good will and "think positive" attitude, written there in the hope that potential candidate will read them and apply. What worries me is that it looks like genuine and sincere, but it is not. It's like artificial marple syrup stuffed in a natural marple syrup bottle. And if I have the choice I prefer natural syrup in natural syrup bottle and artificial syrup in artificial syrup bottle over what we have here.
  - sharkweek 14y ago
    Everywhere wants to sound like the best place to work, so it's pretty common to get some fluff in a post like this. But even on top of that, he's rightfully passionate about where he works because from what I hear, GitHub treats it's employees very well
  - holman 14y ago
    Man, that's pretty pessimistic. If you want the straight dope — or maple syrup, in your case — here it is: hiring good people is the most important thing we do, and we don't fuck around with that. We fly people in, get them to meet people, and show them how we work because we care about this process. More importantly, we want this relaxed atmosphere so we can see if someone actually would fit in with us. It's a big deal. We have a pretty wildly different culture than most companies, and we want our hiring process to reflect that. Why would you not spend time on this? Why would you not care? It's literally the most important part of your business.

ionforce 14y ago

I find articles like these disheartening only because it is impossible for all workplaces to be this way. What if you are at a mediocre job with mediocre teammates? How would you ever get to experience the joy that is working at a Google or a Facebook or a Valve or a GitHub. It's nice that this strategy works for them, but I wonder why everyone isn't doing it if it is so successful?

gaelian 14y ago
I suspect it is much harder to retrofit such a culture to an existing organisation than to have it that way from the outset. With Valve, GitHub et al we see organisations that are trying to encourage novelty and creativity in their workforce. Many organisations are more interested in repeatability in their workforce. By which I mean many of their workers are basically following a workflow of some sort that requires just enough human judgement so as they cannot yet be replaced by a robot. So I think you're right, not all organisations can work this way and some probably don't even want to. But I entertain myself sometimes wondering how they could. My personal favourite is thinking about how one might manage to get a government department to work like Valve/GitHub.
- ionforce 14y ago
  Let's do it! Which department?
  - gaelian 14y ago
    I didn't think anyone would be that interested in my little hypothetical. :) Well, I may live in a different country to you, so any department I describe may not be familiar to you. But without getting too specific, my first starting observation is that the hiring practices of most public organisations are terrible. They're not stringent enough and they don't encourage self motivated workers. So that would be the first thing I'd want to try and fix. Self motivation within the workforce would seem to be one of - if not the most - important ingredients to get the Valve/GitHub style culture working. Size of the organisation also would seem to be important. I have seen it discussed here before as to just how large an organisation this kind of flat strucutre would scale out to. I obviously don't know the answer. But again I think it would largely come back to how well the hiring process is managed. And how such a essentially anarchistic department would interface with the rest of the government and/or the public would also be a interesting experiment.

throwaway231 14y ago

My own experience with their hiring process was sadly not as positive. After the initial screen (which was face-to-face with one of their engineers and which I thought went well), I got the runaround. All I really wanted to know was whether it was a "cultural fit" issue or a "skills aren't up to par" one. Mostly I'm just disappointed because it seems like an awesome place to work.

genrand 14y ago
Did you ask?

dsolomon 14y ago

This is what happens when you keep HR out of the hiring process.

chromejs10 14y ago

I love Github's hiring process and their software building process. More companies should implement similar things. Now obviously you can't expect all companies to shell out this kind of cash, but I've read so many blogposts of Githubbers that all say the same thing: we just want to work with awesome people and make great products. It doesn't seem like there are a lot of politics going on. One post I've read by Zach Holman showed that the interview process was more about working on a project that you cared about rather than rambling off tiny utility methods or impractical algorithms. Hire people who show enthusiasm (and of course talent) instead of those who have memorized interview questions from glassdoor.com

masterponomo 14y ago

Wow. I think back to when I first tried to go out as a contractor. A headhunter got me an interview with a local telecom. During the interview, the manager asked me if I was one of the people named in a recent ComputerWorld article about families with multiple generations in IT. I said I was. He said the whole staff of the telecom IT were curious as to why everyone in the article had given their salary, but I had not. I told him it was because I had merely filled out a questionnaire before I found out the reporter was going to write a nationwide article, and that I subsequently declined to reveal my salary to the world. The manager asked how that went down. I told him not very well--the reporter dunned me to find out my salary, sent me a disposable camera with instructions to send him a photo of myself for the article (I also declined that honor). I told the manager I was a private person and had not consented for my image and my salary to be plastered in a magazine. Then I tried to steer it back to IT, and mentioned that I had recently started using Linux (this was 1998, when that was a daring thing for a mainframer to have done). He said, "Oh, you're one of those Unix guys? We hate that sht!" So, no fab whiskey, no dogs, no hotel, not pool and air hockey--just a quiz about an article I had tried not to be in, and a curse for liking Linux. sigh

rodly 14y ago

Fantastic read. As a current CS student (Junior), I'm hoping a GitHub employee might let me know if there are internship opportunities for next Summer? I'd love to try some SlowMerge(TM) ... and work really hard of course.

hans 14y ago

So long as you're younger than 35 har har ...

jbarnette 14y ago
There are a fair amount of us > 35 folks at GitHub.
- hans 14y ago
  ah good to hear, just joking love the Git! these articles usually remind me of exercise mags where a 20 something person brags about their abundance of health + energy level, oblivious to how hard it is to retain that after late 30s, ok i'm rambling ...

philthom 14y ago

Seems more of a blogvertisement for GitHub

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

srik 14y ago

I ate that article up like a starving raccoon. Working at github is sortof a personal fantasy.