6 ms·

Why GitHub is not your CV

107 points by nephics 13y ago

otikik 13y ago
I got my current job precisely because of what I have on Github. I was never asked for a CV. The people in that company were already using some of my OSS libraries before I arrived. Today someone told me to review someone else's CV. My last comment was: "This CV does not mention a github account. This either means that this person does not have it or that he doesn't think of it as relevant enough to be on his CV". It was not a deciding factor, but it was listed on the "cons".
peterwwillis 13y ago
Two different kinds of open source projects are relevant to a resume. Group projects, and individual projects. A hiring manager will want to see both. If you only have an individual project, it's still better than nothing, and there is no color/gender/economic barrier to just writing code for yourself and uploading it to GitHub. I had joined several group projects, and started one of my own, back when I was first getting into the job market. It helped a lot to tell any employer that you had been fiddling with this new-fangled "Linux" and "Apache" and "MySQL" stuff for years, versus the older Unix guys who had been using the same industry tech for 10 years. Really, open source was just like a new fad to older hiring types, and knowing something about it meant you had a different mindset. But now everybody uses GitHub and it means jack shit.
fecak 13y ago
Actually, GitHub is just a supplemental CV. A potentially positive indicator, that among many others (including a CV itself) will be part of the body of work to determine a candidate's qualifications. Those in hiring positions need to use various indicators of what would make someone a good hire. For most of history in the tech world, this simply meant a standard resume/CV, followed by a phone screen and then an interview where the candidate may be asked whatever questions are deemed relevant by the interviewer. Could be tests, exercises, etc - depends on who you were talking to. Fast forward to today, where we have more ways that a candidate may show 'indicators' of talent. What about participation in user groups and meetups? Anyone can go to these things, but people who choose to go to them may have a bit more curiosity or interest (and admittedly free time) than those that don't, and that curiosity often goes hand in hand with talent. Not always, but again it is one indicator. A healthy Stack Overflow reputation score might be another indicator. People who know nothing about programming probably won't be able to rake up major points there. What if someone wrote a book about a technology? Another indicator probably, and if the book became a best-seller that would be even a stronger indicator since others are judging the material as worthy of their money. As the author points out, all of these things take time, and many in the industry don't have that kind of free time. Understood. Experience working at a known entity with a high barrier to entry is another indicator. We know that if someone passed the grueling interview process at certain firms, chances are they will get past our process as well. Another positive indicator. There will also be some false positives. Candidates that belong to several meetups and have very active GitHubs may not be able to code. Someone who has never heard of GitHub (or say Node.js or Mongo or whatever may be current and newsworthy at the time) will probably be given a negative indicator Would you consider hiring someone who had never heard of these things? Perhaps not. Candidates without families that we might expect to have more free time may not choose to spend it at meetups and building GitHub repos either. I don't think we should immediately assume that they are less qualified than the ones that do, but I don't think any will assume they are more qualified. The author says "you can't judge code without talking to its author". Perhaps you can, but I don't think anybody is necessarily suggesting that you should. No one is hiring candidates based on their GitHub activity alone without interviews, just like no one is hiring anyone based on their CV alone without interviews. Can we just agree that all of these positive indicators are just indicators? As long as we don't use the absence of them as a negative indicator (as a measure of fairness to those who lack the time or desire), we are not doing anyone a disservice.
ak217 13y ago
This post is horribly misguided to the point of being malicious. Nobody is using Github as their only hiring filter. On the other hand, Github is just about the best generic indicator of useful contributions of a coder back to society: visible code that someone else found useful. If someone wants to provide whomever is interested with more custom evidence of their work, that's great, and there is a way to link to your homepage for that. But Github stats do not lie, and the constrained profile format is a feature, not a bug.
mkramlich 13y ago
I found it interesting that the OA OA concluded that it biased to white men. I concluded something a little different. I concluded it biases to: folks who most have the free time and the mindset and the kind of desperateness to be doing it. Or income-increasing ambition. (Like the kind that's strongest when you're unemployed or under-employed.) Therefore, it biases (again, only statistically) to young males around college or high school age. Most likely living in their parent's house, or in a dorm, or perhaps out in their own place but without a spouse, kids, sick family members, or any significant hobbies other than computers. And without a long established work history "out in the real world" and thus lots of fellow coworkers/clients/managers to help keep them fully employed out in that pesky meatspace. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing necessarily. Or that this pattern is universal and without exception. I'm just saying this is the pattern I see in the majority of cases. I didn't sense any inherent pro-white bias, or something pro-male. With avatar icons and code commits and pull requests the Internet truly doesn't know or care whether you're a dog. (Only whether you're a smart enough dog that can interact and deliver.) It was just pro-... a certain set of qualities. If a certain demographic is more likely to have those qualities, then, that demographic will be disproportionately present and active there on GitHub. It's not a conspiracy, just the physics and economics of it. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with it. But it's important to realize it's at play. And to neither blindly assume that anyone without a GitHub presence, or an active one, or large one, is somehow incompetent/unqualified at software engineering. Or that everybody active on GitHub is a young white male in their parent's basement. Instead, treat each person as an individual. And realize that the entire world hasn't fully converted over to your wonderful new "rule of thumb" about hiring. Yet. And perhaps never will. And that too is not necessarily a bad thing.
dragonwriter 13y ago
GitHub isn't a CV, but it serves as a portfolio or set of work samples. This has traditionally been important in hiring people for creative work, though prior to GitHub and similar sites there wasn't necessarily a single particularly good/common way for this to be done in the software development field.
seivan 13y ago
"OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say. But I do find it funny that they don't think that Github should be used as a resumé but their "conferencing", tweets, books about diversifying and podcasts should do. Talkers or Makers? I write OSS on my free time because I feel like other alternatives might not be good enough. I spend a couple of hours in the morning, weekends and etc. It's hard and time consuming. I can take two days if just figuring out what the selector should be called or argument names. Right now I am getting paid for OSS, but I even spend my free time on it because I'd like to make sure it comes out good. It's very slow and time consuming, and sometimes keeps me up at night, but I LIKE IT. And I like acknowledgment to it. These sorta articles invalidate what I make just because I FEEL like making them. Not sure what to feel about that. I have friends who make stuff to Go-lang because they want to learn the language and make stuff that doesn't exist. These articles invalidates their passion. And saying bullshit like LGBT or other genders are actively being excluded... well it makes me hard to take you seriously. I'm not white, and I am part of LGBT.
- alfiejohn_ 13y ago
  > These sorta articles invalidate what I make just because I FEEL like making them. Not sure what to feel about that. Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but I've learned something... stop caring what others are saying and doing. If you feel like making shit, then make it.
  - seivan 13y ago
    I generally don't give a shit. But I do get concerned when others do to crap that might affect me.
- CmonDev 13y ago
  ""OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say." I hope one day we will be able to distil the ultimate rule: "being smart and proactive is discriminatory".
- jballanc 13y ago
  The article does not say that conference talks, tweets, books, etc. should be used for hiring decisions and only GitHub should not. It says (right there at the end), that hiring is hard and any shortcut to try and get around that fact is wrong. It just so happens that "don't send us your resume, tell us your GitHub username" just happens to be the shortcut of the moment. Also, I'd challenge you to find where the article says or even implies that you shouldn't be making stuff because you FEEL like it. Quite the opposite, in fact. You should be making stuff because you feel like it and not because you have some expectation of getting a better offer or being able to show off your GitHub profile at your next interview. As for the white, male bias...not sure what to tell you. It's real. The statistics don't lie. I'm glad that you have had success as a non-white member of the LGBT community, but as the saying goes: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
Peroni 13y ago
Ashe Dryden's original post has merit, I'm not contesting that. James' post however, is wrong on so many levels. It's worth noting that James is a UK based developer. Most of his points may be completely valid in the US but they are completely at odds with the UK climate. I've worked with an inordinate amount of tech companies in the UK and consulted with many more and I've yet to come across any that hire based primarily on the merits of a candidates github repo. In fact, I'd argue his understanding of the request for a candidates github URL is completely wrong. One of my first requests when speaking to a potential candidate is for their github/bitbucket profile so I can see some actual code examples. I know that it's rare to find a true indication of someones ability from just their github contributions but for example, it can help me discern whether a ruby candidate adheres to ruby best practices or not. A small example of a minor indicator that someone might be a good fit for our company. A man with significantly more experience in the industry than me once put it better than I ever could: The more information I can get, the easier it becomes for me to make a decision, and to feel comfortable in it. And the best sort of information to give me is to show me what you can make, whether that's code for a backend position, or interesting design/UI for a front end position. It also gives us another thing to talk about during interview; and more opportunity to ask about design decisions and rationale. Some of the best people I've ever sourced didn't have any publicly accessible code but if they had, I would have found them a hell of a lot quicker.
- 001sky 13y ago
  I would have found them a hell of a lot quicker. There are two ways to read this: (1) as a marker; (2) as a filter. Would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the interplay. My guess is that there is some game theory on signalling at play on both sides here.
  - Peroni 13y ago
    It's genuinely very straightforward. If you don't have much of an online presence (github, twitter, blog, etc) then the only way I'm likely to find you is if a mutual contact tells me about you. Now, referrals are one of the best sources of excellent people and I'm not knocking that. If you're constantly tweeting/blogging good quality content about an area of technology that is relevant to my business then of course I'm going to take notice. That, however, doesn't necessarily make you a better candidate by default, it just means you were easier to find.
fyolnish 13y ago
"If you want to find out whether someone’s worth hiring as a software engineer, their code is of very limited value compared to talking to them, discussing design and architecture, previous engineering constraints they’ve faced, and what they’re like at solving problems" I have a hard time thinking of a better way to see how good someone is at all of those those thing than to look at code they've written in the past. Also, the title of the article is "Why GitHub is not your CV" yet all it talks about is how it can't replace an interview. Which I don't think many people advocate.
CmonDev 13y ago
Have two profiles - one for your projects portfolio, another - to contribute to OSS.
marknutter 13y ago
Unless you have your CV on github..
- kybernetikos 13y ago
  Yes, all the complaints about how you can't tell a story with your github profile seems to completely ignore gh-pages, a phenomenal service that does let you tell a story. Maybe your github profile isn't a good portfolio by default, but it's an excellent service for creating your portfolio. On top of that, even a poor github profile provides more signal than most CVs I've read.
  - hyperpape 13y ago
    The point (imho) isn't that literally nothing on github can be a good hiring indicator. It's that people are treating github as if, by itself, it is an adequate way to assess candidates and decide who to interview. Maybe if you make a page like you're suggesting, then you can link to that page, but then github is more or less just a host.
    - kybernetikos 13y ago
      Well, I can certainly accept that it's possible to overweight github as a hiring indicator, however that's not been my experience from either side of the interview, so I strongly suspect that if there's an optimum amount of attention to pay to services like github, most recruitment programs are on the 'too little' side rather than the 'too much'.
      - hyperpape 13y ago
        Yeah, while I agree with a lot in the article, I also agree with your generalization. Most companies are still looking for the boring "CS degree + 2 years experience, HR doesn't know what github is". But there are also a lot of "hot" companies, of the sort that are talked about a lot on HN, that are pushing github as the end all be all. The real point isn't about what the average company is doing, it's about which attitudes are sensible. (Bias: I got my first job as a developer based on a combination of a non-technical friend's contacts and my github repos looking acceptable. I was three years out of grad school in the humanities at the time).
atmosx 13y ago
First thing: The white/black men discrimination issue seems totally out of place, almost ridiculous! As for the main argument, I think it's flawed. Github (or any other online repo) is an important asset and Open Source contributions matters. Especially if you don't have prior job experience. It's a very good way to show that you can actually write code and you will be hands on from the first week, or day, or hour.
marrs 13y ago
I think this article needs to be split in two because it seems to be conflating 2 opinions. I'm not sure I really understand what the author is trying to say. Is it that OSS encourages a culture of being exploited and that GitHub is inadvertently pushing that culture? Or is it that recruiters don't know how to assess the code they see and this is somehow GitHub's fault? Or is it that working on code on your spare time is really a bad thing? Or maybe it's that only white men create GitHub accounts.
spindritf 13y ago
> the demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed toward white men than the software industry is, which is saying something What? > You just get what other people think is useful. Aside from which, GitHub displays a lot of useless stats about how many followers you have, and some completely psychologically manipulative stats about how often you commit and how many days it is since you had a day off. You get social proof, some measure of conscientiousness, and a crowd-sourced filter. All on one page. That sounds great. I don't see the problem. Companies want to hire influential workers. It's relevant. So is putting in the work. And products which people find useful are vastly superior to those that the author finds well engineered. I'm guessing many company owners will share that view.
- hyperpape 13y ago
  What does it say? That it's probably not a good measure of skill in any sense worth measuring, unless you think that 98.5% of the programmers worth hiring are men.
  - stonemetal 13y ago
    That it's probably not a good measure of skill in any sense worth measuring, unless you think that 98.5% of the programmers worth hiring are men. I don't see how those two points are related. A measure can be good or bad independent of who you choose to measure by it. Github(not necessarily just having an account but actually looking at what they have done) is a good measure of skill because it allows you to see the person's work output. You know exactly what they contributed to a project and what type of work they are interested in and are familiar with. Now just because it is a good measurement of skill doesn't mean that it is a good hiring filter. The two are similar but not the same thing. A good hiring filter filters for skill but doesn't filter for other attributes like race and gender. It is kind of like saying measuring how much weight a person can lift is a bad measure for determining a person's strength because we only measured white guys. It is a good measure of strength, just misapplied if you are trying to find the world's strongest person.
    - 13y ago
badman_ting 13y ago
Yeah, but tell that to pretty much everyone who is hiring devs nowadays. Everything is like, "Send us your Github link. Peace out." Uhhh, but I mostly commit to private repos…?
jballanc 13y ago
Beatniks. That's what we'll get. The Beats were a genuine movement of talented, hard working literary types. They were hip. They were cool. They were who everyone wanted to be, so people started emulating their dress, their mannerisms, their speach. But they were not driven by the same passion. Their motivation was different. Ginsberg said of the Beatniks: "If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash man." If we let companies continue to use GitHub as a hiring tool, the OSS community will gradually become overrun by people attempting to achieve the same success as the OSS pioneers by mimicking their actions...but lacking their same motivation. It's hard for me to say this. I like GitHub. I like Open Source. I am proud of what little I have managed to contribute to that community, and I think it is to my advantage if a company considers my GitHub profile when making a hiring decision. That said...I'd rather give up that advantage in exchange for keeping GitHub as an open community to share source, instead of a cauldron for the latest start up founders to pluck their next engineering hire from.
- kybernetikos 13y ago
  This is always what happens, and it's usually a good thing. The people ahead of the curve have to be more motivated, but if we get more people sharing, more eyes to find and fix bugs, more people from other walks of life that understand a bit more of the hacker mentality, more acceptance of sharing code as a normal part of life, then the world is a better place. Yes, it's a shame that not everyone who plays the piano has the dedication and vision of Rachmaninov, or that everyone who paints is Picasso, but I think the world is a better place for amateurs and dilettantes. Sure, we'd perhaps have better art if it were restricted to those who must, but we have a better society because those who are moderately interested can.
  - arve456 13y ago
    The nice thing about programming: You don't have to perform in the 99.9 percentile (like Picasso) to make something people want.
    - 13y ago
cheshire137 13y ago
I disagree with this article completely. I'm a woman and a software developer and I think my Github is very valuable as a portfolio to me. Before I used Github, if I wanted some of my code to get shown off, I would make a blog post about it and call out specific chunks while linking to a ZIP of the whole thing. If a potential employer wanted to see samples of my code, they'd have to find my blog and dig through its archives. Now, they just find my Github. The author acts as though when an employer asks for someone's Github, it's going to be the main or only component to determine whether to hire or not. In interviews where I've been the interviewer, we've used it as a filter to determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own, if they contribute to open source projects, what their coding style is like, what languages they gravitate to writing in, and just as a general personality guideline. It's cool to see the kind of stuff a person codes in their personal account, whether it's joke repos that give a glimpse at the person's personality and sense of humor, or actual serious projects.
- seivan 13y ago
  Github can be gender/race/age/orientation agnostic. It's just a portfolio of Code. Some people, who don't do that, but instead tweet, podcast, conferences dislike it.
- hvidgaard 13y ago
  You either missed the point, or do not think it's a problem. > determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own Which he is arguing that you are not a bad developer for doing other things outside of work. The vast majority of people need to not code to regenerate. I can use myself as anecdotal evidence: I'm the goto guy when it's particular difficult to solve a bug, when it's a new framework, or when the teams are unsure how to solve a problem. I love coding, I constantly get compliments for my code and solutions. I do rarely code outside of my work. I used to before I got a "real" job after my degree, but now I (almost) only code at work. I usually think about solutions and architectures outside of work though, and I write a lot of pseudo code on paper if I get an idea for an algorithm - but I do not make binaries or contribute to OOS or a public Github repository. I have a spouse, children, friends, and hobbies that simply doesn't get as much of my time as they deserve. I would never pass the bar at a startup that's looking for the typical startup stereotype developer. I'm 100% certain that I make more business sense to hire than all of your average workoholic startup developer, but I would never be considered. I have seen so many developers with great personality and glowing Github repo fail so miserably because they have poor work ethics and are unable to do "the boring stuff" that needs to be done in a business. I can make a sensible plan, estimates that aren't completely bonkers, and I can tell when we're no longer on track to meet the deadline the same week it starts to slip. If I make a promise I keep it, or let you know that I'm unable to. I can also work completely agile, and not some "agile-but" that is so prevalent in the industry. In short there is soooo much that you need to consider when hiring. Screening based on a Github account is excluding developers that would be just the guy/gal you're looking for.
agilebyte 13y ago
willing and able to work for free For me, GitHub is a gallery of my art, not work, so: Me working for free for an employer that tells me what to do does not lead from me working in my spare time doing what/how I want.
cubsink 13y ago
"She covers the reasons why using OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men, and the excuses we use to tell ourselves everything is A-OK." What...the..fuck? I never thought I would see something like this on the front page of hacker news. But obviously anything can happen.
seivan 13y ago
If you have time to peddling your diversify book, write angry tweets, go to conferences and do podcasts. You have time to write code. That is, if you're a software engineer (the people who use Github mainly)
- zem 13y ago
  what makes you think coglan and dryden are speaking on behalf of themselves, and not on behalf of all the people who don't have the time and luxury to write code, and are being unfairly and systemically penalised for it?
thenerdfiles 13y ago
Your Website is where your CV goes. Whether it (your CV link, internally — extracts data from github? — or externally) points to your github profile or not is your decision. Why is this still being discussed ? Websites, people. Websites.
- thenerdfiles 13y ago
  In fact, I'd go so far as to say (just to see what happens to this industry): On all these "job posting" sites, [Your Website] should be a Required Field for Web Developers. Period. Show me that you take the time to register a domain, configure a host, log in to that Linux box, and build the Web. A more pertinant question is: Why would you hire a Web Developer who has no place on the Web? It has to be Your Domain, Your Place on the Web. You. What genuine rebuttal is there against this? (There has to be a pretty Good Reason to hire a Web Developer who does not have a Website.) Forget the "online portfolio" debate; build the Web and actually be about that.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    NDAs
    - thenerdfiles 13y ago
      Did you just blame The Man?
  - aestra 13y ago
    No. I will not put my real name online in a public forum. Especially not linked with my CV that has a lot of personal information on it. I am afraid of harassment and stalkers, and I really want to control the amount of personal information that gets out there. I don't have a LinkedIn for that reason. I know a lot of that can be found if someone is digging hard enough, but I am extremely uncomfortable with just anyone finding my CV with a Google search. I am really uncomfortable with my work history being public information. In theory I could make that information password protected I guess. Does it limit me? Probably. My ideal, if you search for my name in a search engine and NOTHING comes back.
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throwawaykf 13y ago
I would advise the author not to worry about this. I recently went through a job change, and to enhance my chances, I spruced up my Github profile, and put a link to it at the top of my resume. It's not the most active profile, but all the work there are wholly self-initiated projects, all of which tackle some interesting, often original problem. One of the projects randomly ended up with a few stars without me posting that link anywhere. Having code out there would give me a little leg-up over the intense competition, right? Of the dozen or so tech phone screens, not one asked about it. Only one asked me to talk about a personal project, and it was abundantly clear he had not looked at the Github link. At least he asked. One phone screen was with a recruiter at a famous open source company, and even she had not looked at it. To be fair, it was a recruiter call and not a technical one, but I thought she'd at least acknowledged it. Most of the phone screens turned into onsite interviews, and again, nobody even mentioned Github. Well, it did come up in one interview, where the interviewer was doing a deep dive into IP networking details, and I told him in an offhand manner that, y'know, I had code out there that did exactly what he was asking... The companies I interviewed with ranged from a couple of startups to a bunch of US technology giants in a variety of fields, and many of them get discussed on here regularly. My advice is, don't put too much stock in your Github profile to help your job prospects. For whatever reasons, maybe the same as TFA's, practically nobody cares. Instead, invest in practicing the same old Google/Amazon/Facebook whiteboard-a-problem style that everybody and their grandmother uses, even if the work involved is nowhere near the kind of work (some people at) Google/Amazon/Facebook do.
- fexl 13y ago
  As a personal anecdote, one recruiter from a well-known organization did mention my Github page as an indication of drive and initiative, but it was by no means a deciding factor. Just another piece of evidence on top of a lot of other things.
bereft_orange 13y ago
OSS/GitHub is what let me crack into the industry without having a CS degree or particularly good contacts. I started learning to code a year or two ago, then started contributing to open source and now I have a pretty solid track record on interesting projects that's helped me get some interest and interviews. Not sure how I could have done that otherwise...
mihaifm 13y ago
> That is, GitHub picks your most popular repos and puts those at the top. You have no say about what you consider important, or worthwhile, or interesting, or well-engineered, or valuable Well said. This is also valid for stackoverflow, where your "top" questions are often silly ones that everyone can understand, while the ones you consider valuable are buried in anonymity. Some sort of showcase feature would be nice, in both cases.
scardine 13y ago
Any resumé screening and interviewing process boils down to only 3 essential questions: - How well can you do this work? - Will you blend in (can you endure our work environment)? - Is it easy to work with you (you are not a dick, are you)? So get over it, everything you do online IS more real than your resumé. Why? Because we are an online company and your online reputation is more important than a single document traditionally written in a corporate mumbo-jumbo style where the author tend to exaggerate his accomplishments. When I ask for your github profile, I'm not asking for free work - FOSS is not about free work. I want to see your pull requests. Why? Because from time to time we do pull requests, and do it not because we are good Samaritans but out of sheer greed. We use an open source technology stack. We push it's boundaries, we find bugs, we fix bugs. We find components lacking, we implement the desired feature and contribute back. We port code from other languages or create it from scratch and open source because it is cheaper than maintaining a closed source library. Is it free work? No, it is cooperation, and it makes sense economically. Do you have a patch accepted in a high profile FOSS project? This means: - You are doing serious work based on FOSS stacks - You have some communication skills - You have coding skills, can write tests and documentation - You can fix bugs and implement new features I want to see the issues you open: are they well documented, with reproducible test cases? I want to see your stack overflow profile: do you write good questions and good answers? Because a good question is 90% of a good answer, and good answers is what our customers demand. Do you write really odd blog posts or troll around in online forums? Sorry, I guess you will not fit our work environment.
nicholassmith 13y ago
GitHub is not your CV, but I think it should be on your CV. If you're an artist when you interview they usually want to see a portfolio of your work, GitHub is a pretty handy way to portfolio code for others to view. There's many good things about it, and reasonably few downsides to trade off against, but overall if you've got a GitHub I'd be more interested in seeing that than knowing what grades you got at school 15 years ago.
icecreampain 13y ago
> The demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed toward white men than the software industry is What the fuck am I reading? Is this asshole author trying to inject racism into something that is inherently race-, age-, gender-, wealth- and location-agnostic? Github doesn't care who you are, what you code or in what language you code it. And yet here we are with a dumbfuck author who, for the sake of clicks, just absolutely needs to shit on white men, that have been the bane of all tech-interested non-white men since the dawn of time. When I hire I ask for code samples first and the person's name last. Shit, I'd hire the person based purely on code, put up anywhere on the net, and an anonymous chat, conducted fucking anywhere, and only require their name and social security number when signing the contract. Shit I'm pissed off now. Some people just can't accept that technology is the ultimate equalizer and instead have to project their white guilt into everything.
- gopher1 13y ago
  If you think the issue is about what Github "cares" about, you missed the point entirely. The point is that those who have the free time and opportunity to contribute to OSS projects are more likely to be of some means. Given the economic realities of this country, those with some means are statistically speaking far more likely to be white males than anything else (which is confirmed by the data). The conversation that has been occurring recently is about how having a Github profile is now becoming a de-facto must-have because hiring managers are increasingly seeing it as a shortcut filter. It's great that you would hire someone based on code put up anywhere on the net, but that's not what people are commenting about. People are saying that Github should not become mandatory, for many reasons, among them because you're limiting your pool of candidates to those with some means.
  - scardine 13y ago
    This is a common misconception about the FOSS economy. It is not about donation, it is about cooperation and net efficiency, and a good share of open source maintainers and contributors are very well paid to do what they do - they are not hobbyists donating weekends to the cause.
  - 13y ago
cowsandmilk 13y ago
(a) if someone I am interviewing has no idea what github is, that's a negative sign. this is completely unrelated to whether the person has time to contribute to projects (b) many great engineers have small forks of other projects. This shows me that: (i) they know how to find and adopt open source projects into their workflow, which will save me money (ii) when there is a bug or something that does not fit how they want to use the project, they are able to make that 15-line change or fix. (iii) if their fork is merged back into the original project, that can indicate quality of patches, ability to work with a community, explain benefits to their changes, etc. Honestly, those skills are very valuable indicators and do not require someone to be giving up their nights and weekends to OSS.
- scardine 13y ago
  His theory is based in the premise that most GitHub (and FOSS) contributions are made by hobbyists in their free time. This is a common misconception of the FOSS economy. Open source is not about donation, it is about cooperation and cooperation makes economical sense for a lot of business. Yes, there are the free-riders, but they are the copycats, we are the ones setting the pace. Startups tend to be pushing the envelope, people from all genders from all over the world are being PAID to fix bugs and implement new features during the business hours, not over weekends. I do, I'm Brazilian and not white by north American standards, so this whole "github bias" thing is BS based on a naive assumption.
mcphilip 13y ago
I've been able to get through my career without LinkedIn or GitHub accounts as proof of my skills. I've pored my time and energy into the jobs I hold and hadn't gotten inspired to start contributing to OSS until just this week[1], so I have no publicly available proof of my skills. However, I can give in depth descriptions of interesting algorithms and data structures I developed and deployed related to: 1) Motion detection algorithms for security cameras in outdoor environments with a lot of ambient noise that needed to be ignored. 2) Medical informatics data model with a recommendation engine component for predicting which ICD/CPT/SNOMED code to use for optimal chance of insurance coverage. 3) R&D, implementation, and deployment of an EAV/CR [2] open schema based analytics platform using the neo4j graph database for persistence So far I've had the luxury of only using meatspace networking to find interesting jobs to work at, but I stress over suddenly finding myself unemployed in the future and having to face the modern interviewing process with social networking activity used as a screen. Can anyone describe how one's GitHub is used in an interview? Is a candidate with an interesting, non-trivial personal project on GitHub considered, or are candidates judged on their contribution to others' projects? [1]Started working on a neo4j data science project involving gathering, refining, and translating film, actor, and director data into a graph data model for efficiently answering deeply recursive queries. [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model#Representing_substructure:_EAV_with_classes_and_relationships_.28EAV.2FCR.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%...
- fecak 13y ago
  Recruiter here. I've seen GitHub used in interviews where the interviewer may look at the code before the interview, and then bring up the repo during the interview to discuss it. This is usually to challenge why certain decisions were made, what could have been done differently, etc. It isn't much different than how a conversation would go after a live coding exercise to review the work, with the exception that the candidate in the case of a prior GitHub work will have had the advantage to clean things up and perhaps has gone through several iterations already.
  - adeaver 13y ago
    Except in a live coding exercise most people are trying to be efficient or 'to it right' and paying attention to what they are doing and how. I realize this is anecdotal, but 95% of the public code in my git repo is stuff I did as fun. I didn't care about being right, or care about memory issues or being thread safe or anything other than 'I wonder if...' In that instance, and I suspect a lot of other people public where they aren't contributing to something using the repo code as a talking point is counter-productive. Why did I do it that way? Because I wanted to see what would happen.
kstop 13y ago
Also why, after flirting with the idea for one hiring cycle, I stopped asking people if they had Stack Overflow accounts. Yes, if they had one, it provided useful information about their interests and communication ability. But it has a demographic skew that could have led me to rejecting other candidates unfairly. That said, my own presence on Github is pretty anemic, so maybe that's another form of bias!
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
Github isn't necessarily a new concept nor is submitting links to code sample repositories as part of a programmer's 'portfolio' Forgive my naiveté, but why is this a topic of debate now? Did something radically change? Weren't you all doing this before Github existed?
nathan_long 13y ago
Can you name any job qualification which does not put some groups at a disadvantage? I want to be fair, but "do you have work you can show me?" is about as close to ideal as I can think of.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  It's not that: it's that without acknowledging the bias, the 'meritocracy' philosophy suggests that those who do OSS are the best at what they do, which is not necessarily true.
  - nathan_long 13y ago
    No, but they are those most easily demonstrably good at what they do. I mean, if you had a Ruby job opening and you got applications from Aaron Patterson and 20 other people, would it be unfair to put Patterson's application at the top? There might be another applicant as good, but 1) you have to look harder and 2) you can't really tell until after you've hired them. Picking a sure thing over a gamble is pretty understandable.
Millennium 13y ago
GitHub isn't a CV: it's a portfolio. That can be incredibly valuable in the hiring process, if it is used properly, but it is not the be-all and end-all of hiring. The article is right as far as this goes. I cannot say that I agree with much of the rest of the article, and I agree with even less of the article on which it is based. But summarily rejecting non-GitHub candidates really is a bad idea.
dreamdu5t 13y ago
Tell that to all the job offers in my inbox via github projects.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  That's irrelevant to the point of the article.
zodiac 13y ago
The article is mixing two conceptually distinct points: that using github instead of CVs produces false negatives, and that it produces false positives. It produces false negatives because lots of people who are good coders and who deserve to be hired don't have impressive github accounts for various legitimate reasons. I completely agree with this point. However, to employers, false negatives are not that big of a problem. In some sense it's morally unfair that I exclude so many people who "deserve" the job, but if in the end I land a satisfactory candidate, I'm happy. So to employers, the real question is, does github produce false positives? If my screening practice (I think we all agree that githubs and resumes should be used mainly as a screening step) is to ask for githubs instead of CVs, do I let better candidates through? If you read the article carefully, there is very little evidence presented for this; the author mostly argues that using github produces false negatives or weak signals.
tokenrove 13y ago
The argument that only the well-to-do contribute to OSS is bullshit, although I haven't looked at the data. Perhaps on a global scale, but within the gamut of rich and poor in North America, my own anecdata on the matter is just the opposite. Github-as-the-new-resume is galling for plenty of other reasons.

107 points by nephics 13y ago

I got my current job precisely because of what I have on Github. I was never asked for a CV. The people in that company were already using some of my OSS libraries before I arrived. Today someone told me to review someone else's CV. My last comment was: "This CV does not mention a github account. This either means that this person does not have it or that he doesn't think of it as relevant enough to be on his CV". It was not a deciding factor, but it was listed on the "cons".

peterwwillis 13y ago

Two different kinds of open source projects are relevant to a resume. Group projects, and individual projects. A hiring manager will want to see both. If you only have an individual project, it's still better than nothing, and there is no color/gender/economic barrier to just writing code for yourself and uploading it to GitHub. I had joined several group projects, and started one of my own, back when I was first getting into the job market. It helped a lot to tell any employer that you had been fiddling with this new-fangled "Linux" and "Apache" and "MySQL" stuff for years, versus the older Unix guys who had been using the same industry tech for 10 years. Really, open source was just like a new fad to older hiring types, and knowing something about it meant you had a different mindset. But now everybody uses GitHub and it means jack shit.

fecak 13y ago

Actually, GitHub is just a supplemental CV. A potentially positive indicator, that among many others (including a CV itself) will be part of the body of work to determine a candidate's qualifications. Those in hiring positions need to use various indicators of what would make someone a good hire. For most of history in the tech world, this simply meant a standard resume/CV, followed by a phone screen and then an interview where the candidate may be asked whatever questions are deemed relevant by the interviewer. Could be tests, exercises, etc - depends on who you were talking to. Fast forward to today, where we have more ways that a candidate may show 'indicators' of talent. What about participation in user groups and meetups? Anyone can go to these things, but people who choose to go to them may have a bit more curiosity or interest (and admittedly free time) than those that don't, and that curiosity often goes hand in hand with talent. Not always, but again it is one indicator. A healthy Stack Overflow reputation score might be another indicator. People who know nothing about programming probably won't be able to rake up major points there. What if someone wrote a book about a technology? Another indicator probably, and if the book became a best-seller that would be even a stronger indicator since others are judging the material as worthy of their money. As the author points out, all of these things take time, and many in the industry don't have that kind of free time. Understood. Experience working at a known entity with a high barrier to entry is another indicator. We know that if someone passed the grueling interview process at certain firms, chances are they will get past our process as well. Another positive indicator. There will also be some false positives. Candidates that belong to several meetups and have very active GitHubs may not be able to code. Someone who has never heard of GitHub (or say Node.js or Mongo or whatever may be current and newsworthy at the time) will probably be given a negative indicator Would you consider hiring someone who had never heard of these things? Perhaps not. Candidates without families that we might expect to have more free time may not choose to spend it at meetups and building GitHub repos either. I don't think we should immediately assume that they are less qualified than the ones that do, but I don't think any will assume they are more qualified. The author says "you can't judge code without talking to its author". Perhaps you can, but I don't think anybody is necessarily suggesting that you should. No one is hiring candidates based on their GitHub activity alone without interviews, just like no one is hiring anyone based on their CV alone without interviews. Can we just agree that all of these positive indicators are just indicators? As long as we don't use the absence of them as a negative indicator (as a measure of fairness to those who lack the time or desire), we are not doing anyone a disservice.

ak217 13y ago

This post is horribly misguided to the point of being malicious. Nobody is using Github as their only hiring filter. On the other hand, Github is just about the best generic indicator of useful contributions of a coder back to society: visible code that someone else found useful. If someone wants to provide whomever is interested with more custom evidence of their work, that's great, and there is a way to link to your homepage for that. But Github stats do not lie, and the constrained profile format is a feature, not a bug.

mkramlich 13y ago

I found it interesting that the OA OA concluded that it biased to white men. I concluded something a little different. I concluded it biases to: folks who most have the free time and the mindset and the kind of desperateness to be doing it. Or income-increasing ambition. (Like the kind that's strongest when you're unemployed or under-employed.) Therefore, it biases (again, only statistically) to young males around college or high school age. Most likely living in their parent's house, or in a dorm, or perhaps out in their own place but without a spouse, kids, sick family members, or any significant hobbies other than computers. And without a long established work history "out in the real world" and thus lots of fellow coworkers/clients/managers to help keep them fully employed out in that pesky meatspace. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing necessarily. Or that this pattern is universal and without exception. I'm just saying this is the pattern I see in the majority of cases. I didn't sense any inherent pro-white bias, or something pro-male. With avatar icons and code commits and pull requests the Internet truly doesn't know or care whether you're a dog. (Only whether you're a smart enough dog that can interact and deliver.) It was just pro-... a certain set of qualities. If a certain demographic is more likely to have those qualities, then, that demographic will be disproportionately present and active there on GitHub. It's not a conspiracy, just the physics and economics of it. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with it. But it's important to realize it's at play. And to neither blindly assume that anyone without a GitHub presence, or an active one, or large one, is somehow incompetent/unqualified at software engineering. Or that everybody active on GitHub is a young white male in their parent's basement. Instead, treat each person as an individual. And realize that the entire world hasn't fully converted over to your wonderful new "rule of thumb" about hiring. Yet. And perhaps never will. And that too is not necessarily a bad thing.

dragonwriter 13y ago

GitHub isn't a CV, but it serves as a portfolio or set of work samples. This has traditionally been important in hiring people for creative work, though prior to GitHub and similar sites there wasn't necessarily a single particularly good/common way for this to be done in the software development field.

seivan 13y ago

"OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say. But I do find it funny that they don't think that Github should be used as a resumé but their "conferencing", tweets, books about diversifying and podcasts should do. Talkers or Makers? I write OSS on my free time because I feel like other alternatives might not be good enough. I spend a couple of hours in the morning, weekends and etc. It's hard and time consuming. I can take two days if just figuring out what the selector should be called or argument names. Right now I am getting paid for OSS, but I even spend my free time on it because I'd like to make sure it comes out good. It's very slow and time consuming, and sometimes keeps me up at night, but I LIKE IT. And I like acknowledgment to it. These sorta articles invalidate what I make just because I FEEL like making them. Not sure what to feel about that. I have friends who make stuff to Go-lang because they want to learn the language and make stuff that doesn't exist. These articles invalidates their passion. And saying bullshit like LGBT or other genders are actively being excluded... well it makes me hard to take you seriously. I'm not white, and I am part of LGBT.

alfiejohn_ 13y ago
> These sorta articles invalidate what I make just because I FEEL like making them. Not sure what to feel about that. Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but I've learned something... stop caring what others are saying and doing. If you feel like making shit, then make it.
- seivan 13y ago
  I generally don't give a shit. But I do get concerned when others do to crap that might affect me.
CmonDev 13y ago
""OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say." I hope one day we will be able to distil the ultimate rule: "being smart and proactive is discriminatory".
jballanc 13y ago
The article does not say that conference talks, tweets, books, etc. should be used for hiring decisions and only GitHub should not. It says (right there at the end), that hiring is hard and any shortcut to try and get around that fact is wrong. It just so happens that "don't send us your resume, tell us your GitHub username" just happens to be the shortcut of the moment. Also, I'd challenge you to find where the article says or even implies that you shouldn't be making stuff because you FEEL like it. Quite the opposite, in fact. You should be making stuff because you feel like it and not because you have some expectation of getting a better offer or being able to show off your GitHub profile at your next interview. As for the white, male bias...not sure what to tell you. It's real. The statistics don't lie. I'm glad that you have had success as a non-white member of the LGBT community, but as the saying goes: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

Peroni 13y ago

Ashe Dryden's original post has merit, I'm not contesting that. James' post however, is wrong on so many levels. It's worth noting that James is a UK based developer. Most of his points may be completely valid in the US but they are completely at odds with the UK climate. I've worked with an inordinate amount of tech companies in the UK and consulted with many more and I've yet to come across any that hire based primarily on the merits of a candidates github repo. In fact, I'd argue his understanding of the request for a candidates github URL is completely wrong. One of my first requests when speaking to a potential candidate is for their github/bitbucket profile so I can see some actual code examples. I know that it's rare to find a true indication of someones ability from just their github contributions but for example, it can help me discern whether a ruby candidate adheres to ruby best practices or not. A small example of a minor indicator that someone might be a good fit for our company. A man with significantly more experience in the industry than me once put it better than I ever could: The more information I can get, the easier it becomes for me to make a decision, and to feel comfortable in it. And the best sort of information to give me is to show me what you can make, whether that's code for a backend position, or interesting design/UI for a front end position. It also gives us another thing to talk about during interview; and more opportunity to ask about design decisions and rationale. Some of the best people I've ever sourced didn't have any publicly accessible code but if they had, I would have found them a hell of a lot quicker.

001sky 13y ago
I would have found them a hell of a lot quicker. There are two ways to read this: (1) as a marker; (2) as a filter. Would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the interplay. My guess is that there is some game theory on signalling at play on both sides here.
- Peroni 13y ago
  It's genuinely very straightforward. If you don't have much of an online presence (github, twitter, blog, etc) then the only way I'm likely to find you is if a mutual contact tells me about you. Now, referrals are one of the best sources of excellent people and I'm not knocking that. If you're constantly tweeting/blogging good quality content about an area of technology that is relevant to my business then of course I'm going to take notice. That, however, doesn't necessarily make you a better candidate by default, it just means you were easier to find.

fyolnish 13y ago

"If you want to find out whether someone’s worth hiring as a software engineer, their code is of very limited value compared to talking to them, discussing design and architecture, previous engineering constraints they’ve faced, and what they’re like at solving problems" I have a hard time thinking of a better way to see how good someone is at all of those those thing than to look at code they've written in the past. Also, the title of the article is "Why GitHub is not your CV" yet all it talks about is how it can't replace an interview. Which I don't think many people advocate.

CmonDev 13y ago

Have two profiles - one for your projects portfolio, another - to contribute to OSS.

marknutter 13y ago

Unless you have your CV on github..

kybernetikos 13y ago
Yes, all the complaints about how you can't tell a story with your github profile seems to completely ignore gh-pages, a phenomenal service that does let you tell a story. Maybe your github profile isn't a good portfolio by default, but it's an excellent service for creating your portfolio. On top of that, even a poor github profile provides more signal than most CVs I've read.
- hyperpape 13y ago
  The point (imho) isn't that literally nothing on github can be a good hiring indicator. It's that people are treating github as if, by itself, it is an adequate way to assess candidates and decide who to interview. Maybe if you make a page like you're suggesting, then you can link to that page, but then github is more or less just a host.
  - kybernetikos 13y ago
    Well, I can certainly accept that it's possible to overweight github as a hiring indicator, however that's not been my experience from either side of the interview, so I strongly suspect that if there's an optimum amount of attention to pay to services like github, most recruitment programs are on the 'too little' side rather than the 'too much'.
    - hyperpape 13y ago
      Yeah, while I agree with a lot in the article, I also agree with your generalization. Most companies are still looking for the boring "CS degree + 2 years experience, HR doesn't know what github is". But there are also a lot of "hot" companies, of the sort that are talked about a lot on HN, that are pushing github as the end all be all. The real point isn't about what the average company is doing, it's about which attitudes are sensible. (Bias: I got my first job as a developer based on a combination of a non-technical friend's contacts and my github repos looking acceptable. I was three years out of grad school in the humanities at the time).

atmosx 13y ago

First thing: The white/black men discrimination issue seems totally out of place, almost ridiculous! As for the main argument, I think it's flawed. Github (or any other online repo) is an important asset and Open Source contributions matters. Especially if you don't have prior job experience. It's a very good way to show that you can actually write code and you will be hands on from the first week, or day, or hour.

marrs 13y ago

I think this article needs to be split in two because it seems to be conflating 2 opinions. I'm not sure I really understand what the author is trying to say. Is it that OSS encourages a culture of being exploited and that GitHub is inadvertently pushing that culture? Or is it that recruiters don't know how to assess the code they see and this is somehow GitHub's fault? Or is it that working on code on your spare time is really a bad thing? Or maybe it's that only white men create GitHub accounts.

spindritf 13y ago

> the demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed toward white men than the software industry is, which is saying something What? > You just get what other people think is useful. Aside from which, GitHub displays a lot of useless stats about how many followers you have, and some completely psychologically manipulative stats about how often you commit and how many days it is since you had a day off. You get social proof, some measure of conscientiousness, and a crowd-sourced filter. All on one page. That sounds great. I don't see the problem. Companies want to hire influential workers. It's relevant. So is putting in the work. And products which people find useful are vastly superior to those that the author finds well engineered. I'm guessing many company owners will share that view.

hyperpape 13y ago
What does it say? That it's probably not a good measure of skill in any sense worth measuring, unless you think that 98.5% of the programmers worth hiring are men.
- stonemetal 13y ago
  That it's probably not a good measure of skill in any sense worth measuring, unless you think that 98.5% of the programmers worth hiring are men. I don't see how those two points are related. A measure can be good or bad independent of who you choose to measure by it. Github(not necessarily just having an account but actually looking at what they have done) is a good measure of skill because it allows you to see the person's work output. You know exactly what they contributed to a project and what type of work they are interested in and are familiar with. Now just because it is a good measurement of skill doesn't mean that it is a good hiring filter. The two are similar but not the same thing. A good hiring filter filters for skill but doesn't filter for other attributes like race and gender. It is kind of like saying measuring how much weight a person can lift is a bad measure for determining a person's strength because we only measured white guys. It is a good measure of strength, just misapplied if you are trying to find the world's strongest person.
  - 13y ago

badman_ting 13y ago

Yeah, but tell that to pretty much everyone who is hiring devs nowadays. Everything is like, "Send us your Github link. Peace out." Uhhh, but I mostly commit to private repos…?

jballanc 13y ago

Beatniks. That's what we'll get. The Beats were a genuine movement of talented, hard working literary types. They were hip. They were cool. They were who everyone wanted to be, so people started emulating their dress, their mannerisms, their speach. But they were not driven by the same passion. Their motivation was different. Ginsberg said of the Beatniks: "If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash man." If we let companies continue to use GitHub as a hiring tool, the OSS community will gradually become overrun by people attempting to achieve the same success as the OSS pioneers by mimicking their actions...but lacking their same motivation. It's hard for me to say this. I like GitHub. I like Open Source. I am proud of what little I have managed to contribute to that community, and I think it is to my advantage if a company considers my GitHub profile when making a hiring decision. That said...I'd rather give up that advantage in exchange for keeping GitHub as an open community to share source, instead of a cauldron for the latest start up founders to pluck their next engineering hire from.

kybernetikos 13y ago
This is always what happens, and it's usually a good thing. The people ahead of the curve have to be more motivated, but if we get more people sharing, more eyes to find and fix bugs, more people from other walks of life that understand a bit more of the hacker mentality, more acceptance of sharing code as a normal part of life, then the world is a better place. Yes, it's a shame that not everyone who plays the piano has the dedication and vision of Rachmaninov, or that everyone who paints is Picasso, but I think the world is a better place for amateurs and dilettantes. Sure, we'd perhaps have better art if it were restricted to those who must, but we have a better society because those who are moderately interested can.
- arve456 13y ago
  The nice thing about programming: You don't have to perform in the 99.9 percentile (like Picasso) to make something people want.
  - 13y ago

cheshire137 13y ago

I disagree with this article completely. I'm a woman and a software developer and I think my Github is very valuable as a portfolio to me. Before I used Github, if I wanted some of my code to get shown off, I would make a blog post about it and call out specific chunks while linking to a ZIP of the whole thing. If a potential employer wanted to see samples of my code, they'd have to find my blog and dig through its archives. Now, they just find my Github. The author acts as though when an employer asks for someone's Github, it's going to be the main or only component to determine whether to hire or not. In interviews where I've been the interviewer, we've used it as a filter to determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own, if they contribute to open source projects, what their coding style is like, what languages they gravitate to writing in, and just as a general personality guideline. It's cool to see the kind of stuff a person codes in their personal account, whether it's joke repos that give a glimpse at the person's personality and sense of humor, or actual serious projects.

seivan 13y ago
Github can be gender/race/age/orientation agnostic. It's just a portfolio of Code. Some people, who don't do that, but instead tweet, podcast, conferences dislike it.
hvidgaard 13y ago
You either missed the point, or do not think it's a problem. > determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own Which he is arguing that you are not a bad developer for doing other things outside of work. The vast majority of people need to not code to regenerate. I can use myself as anecdotal evidence: I'm the goto guy when it's particular difficult to solve a bug, when it's a new framework, or when the teams are unsure how to solve a problem. I love coding, I constantly get compliments for my code and solutions. I do rarely code outside of my work. I used to before I got a "real" job after my degree, but now I (almost) only code at work. I usually think about solutions and architectures outside of work though, and I write a lot of pseudo code on paper if I get an idea for an algorithm - but I do not make binaries or contribute to OOS or a public Github repository. I have a spouse, children, friends, and hobbies that simply doesn't get as much of my time as they deserve. I would never pass the bar at a startup that's looking for the typical startup stereotype developer. I'm 100% certain that I make more business sense to hire than all of your average workoholic startup developer, but I would never be considered. I have seen so many developers with great personality and glowing Github repo fail so miserably because they have poor work ethics and are unable to do "the boring stuff" that needs to be done in a business. I can make a sensible plan, estimates that aren't completely bonkers, and I can tell when we're no longer on track to meet the deadline the same week it starts to slip. If I make a promise I keep it, or let you know that I'm unable to. I can also work completely agile, and not some "agile-but" that is so prevalent in the industry. In short there is soooo much that you need to consider when hiring. Screening based on a Github account is excluding developers that would be just the guy/gal you're looking for.

agilebyte 13y ago

willing and able to work for free For me, GitHub is a gallery of my art, not work, so: Me working for free for an employer that tells me what to do does not lead from me working in my spare time doing what/how I want.

cubsink 13y ago

"She covers the reasons why using OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men, and the excuses we use to tell ourselves everything is A-OK." What...the..fuck? I never thought I would see something like this on the front page of hacker news. But obviously anything can happen.

seivan 13y ago

If you have time to peddling your diversify book, write angry tweets, go to conferences and do podcasts. You have time to write code. That is, if you're a software engineer (the people who use Github mainly)

zem 13y ago
what makes you think coglan and dryden are speaking on behalf of themselves, and not on behalf of all the people who don't have the time and luxury to write code, and are being unfairly and systemically penalised for it?

thenerdfiles 13y ago

Your Website is where your CV goes. Whether it (your CV link, internally — extracts data from github? — or externally) points to your github profile or not is your decision. Why is this still being discussed ? Websites, people. Websites.

thenerdfiles 13y ago
In fact, I'd go so far as to say (just to see what happens to this industry): On all these "job posting" sites, [Your Website] should be a Required Field for Web Developers. Period. Show me that you take the time to register a domain, configure a host, log in to that Linux box, and build the Web. A more pertinant question is: Why would you hire a Web Developer who has no place on the Web? It has to be Your Domain, Your Place on the Web. You. What genuine rebuttal is there against this? (There has to be a pretty Good Reason to hire a Web Developer who does not have a Website.) Forget the "online portfolio" debate; build the Web and actually be about that.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  NDAs
  - thenerdfiles 13y ago
    Did you just blame The Man?
- aestra 13y ago
  No. I will not put my real name online in a public forum. Especially not linked with my CV that has a lot of personal information on it. I am afraid of harassment and stalkers, and I really want to control the amount of personal information that gets out there. I don't have a LinkedIn for that reason. I know a lot of that can be found if someone is digging hard enough, but I am extremely uncomfortable with just anyone finding my CV with a Google search. I am really uncomfortable with my work history being public information. In theory I could make that information password protected I guess. Does it limit me? Probably. My ideal, if you search for my name in a search engine and NOTHING comes back.

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throwawaykf 13y ago

I would advise the author not to worry about this. I recently went through a job change, and to enhance my chances, I spruced up my Github profile, and put a link to it at the top of my resume. It's not the most active profile, but all the work there are wholly self-initiated projects, all of which tackle some interesting, often original problem. One of the projects randomly ended up with a few stars without me posting that link anywhere. Having code out there would give me a little leg-up over the intense competition, right? Of the dozen or so tech phone screens, not one asked about it. Only one asked me to talk about a personal project, and it was abundantly clear he had not looked at the Github link. At least he asked. One phone screen was with a recruiter at a famous open source company, and even she had not looked at it. To be fair, it was a recruiter call and not a technical one, but I thought she'd at least acknowledged it. Most of the phone screens turned into onsite interviews, and again, nobody even mentioned Github. Well, it did come up in one interview, where the interviewer was doing a deep dive into IP networking details, and I told him in an offhand manner that, y'know, I had code out there that did exactly what he was asking... The companies I interviewed with ranged from a couple of startups to a bunch of US technology giants in a variety of fields, and many of them get discussed on here regularly. My advice is, don't put too much stock in your Github profile to help your job prospects. For whatever reasons, maybe the same as TFA's, practically nobody cares. Instead, invest in practicing the same old Google/Amazon/Facebook whiteboard-a-problem style that everybody and their grandmother uses, even if the work involved is nowhere near the kind of work (some people at) Google/Amazon/Facebook do.

fexl 13y ago
As a personal anecdote, one recruiter from a well-known organization did mention my Github page as an indication of drive and initiative, but it was by no means a deciding factor. Just another piece of evidence on top of a lot of other things.

bereft_orange 13y ago

OSS/GitHub is what let me crack into the industry without having a CS degree or particularly good contacts. I started learning to code a year or two ago, then started contributing to open source and now I have a pretty solid track record on interesting projects that's helped me get some interest and interviews. Not sure how I could have done that otherwise...

mihaifm 13y ago

> That is, GitHub picks your most popular repos and puts those at the top. You have no say about what you consider important, or worthwhile, or interesting, or well-engineered, or valuable Well said. This is also valid for stackoverflow, where your "top" questions are often silly ones that everyone can understand, while the ones you consider valuable are buried in anonymity. Some sort of showcase feature would be nice, in both cases.

scardine 13y ago

Any resumé screening and interviewing process boils down to only 3 essential questions: - How well can you do this work? - Will you blend in (can you endure our work environment)? - Is it easy to work with you (you are not a dick, are you)? So get over it, everything you do online IS more real than your resumé. Why? Because we are an online company and your online reputation is more important than a single document traditionally written in a corporate mumbo-jumbo style where the author tend to exaggerate his accomplishments. When I ask for your github profile, I'm not asking for free work - FOSS is not about free work. I want to see your pull requests. Why? Because from time to time we do pull requests, and do it not because we are good Samaritans but out of sheer greed. We use an open source technology stack. We push it's boundaries, we find bugs, we fix bugs. We find components lacking, we implement the desired feature and contribute back. We port code from other languages or create it from scratch and open source because it is cheaper than maintaining a closed source library. Is it free work? No, it is cooperation, and it makes sense economically. Do you have a patch accepted in a high profile FOSS project? This means: - You are doing serious work based on FOSS stacks - You have some communication skills - You have coding skills, can write tests and documentation - You can fix bugs and implement new features I want to see the issues you open: are they well documented, with reproducible test cases? I want to see your stack overflow profile: do you write good questions and good answers? Because a good question is 90% of a good answer, and good answers is what our customers demand. Do you write really odd blog posts or troll around in online forums? Sorry, I guess you will not fit our work environment.

nicholassmith 13y ago

GitHub is not your CV, but I think it should be on your CV. If you're an artist when you interview they usually want to see a portfolio of your work, GitHub is a pretty handy way to portfolio code for others to view. There's many good things about it, and reasonably few downsides to trade off against, but overall if you've got a GitHub I'd be more interested in seeing that than knowing what grades you got at school 15 years ago.

icecreampain 13y ago

> The demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed toward white men than the software industry is What the fuck am I reading? Is this asshole author trying to inject racism into something that is inherently race-, age-, gender-, wealth- and location-agnostic? Github doesn't care who you are, what you code or in what language you code it. And yet here we are with a dumbfuck author who, for the sake of clicks, just absolutely needs to shit on white men, that have been the bane of all tech-interested non-white men since the dawn of time. When I hire I ask for code samples first and the person's name last. Shit, I'd hire the person based purely on code, put up anywhere on the net, and an anonymous chat, conducted fucking anywhere, and only require their name and social security number when signing the contract. Shit I'm pissed off now. Some people just can't accept that technology is the ultimate equalizer and instead have to project their white guilt into everything.

gopher1 13y ago
If you think the issue is about what Github "cares" about, you missed the point entirely. The point is that those who have the free time and opportunity to contribute to OSS projects are more likely to be of some means. Given the economic realities of this country, those with some means are statistically speaking far more likely to be white males than anything else (which is confirmed by the data). The conversation that has been occurring recently is about how having a Github profile is now becoming a de-facto must-have because hiring managers are increasingly seeing it as a shortcut filter. It's great that you would hire someone based on code put up anywhere on the net, but that's not what people are commenting about. People are saying that Github should not become mandatory, for many reasons, among them because you're limiting your pool of candidates to those with some means.
- scardine 13y ago
  This is a common misconception about the FOSS economy. It is not about donation, it is about cooperation and net efficiency, and a good share of open source maintainers and contributors are very well paid to do what they do - they are not hobbyists donating weekends to the cause.
- 13y ago

cowsandmilk 13y ago

(a) if someone I am interviewing has no idea what github is, that's a negative sign. this is completely unrelated to whether the person has time to contribute to projects (b) many great engineers have small forks of other projects. This shows me that: (i) they know how to find and adopt open source projects into their workflow, which will save me money (ii) when there is a bug or something that does not fit how they want to use the project, they are able to make that 15-line change or fix. (iii) if their fork is merged back into the original project, that can indicate quality of patches, ability to work with a community, explain benefits to their changes, etc. Honestly, those skills are very valuable indicators and do not require someone to be giving up their nights and weekends to OSS.

scardine 13y ago
His theory is based in the premise that most GitHub (and FOSS) contributions are made by hobbyists in their free time. This is a common misconception of the FOSS economy. Open source is not about donation, it is about cooperation and cooperation makes economical sense for a lot of business. Yes, there are the free-riders, but they are the copycats, we are the ones setting the pace. Startups tend to be pushing the envelope, people from all genders from all over the world are being PAID to fix bugs and implement new features during the business hours, not over weekends. I do, I'm Brazilian and not white by north American standards, so this whole "github bias" thing is BS based on a naive assumption.

mcphilip 13y ago

I've been able to get through my career without LinkedIn or GitHub accounts as proof of my skills. I've pored my time and energy into the jobs I hold and hadn't gotten inspired to start contributing to OSS until just this week[1], so I have no publicly available proof of my skills. However, I can give in depth descriptions of interesting algorithms and data structures I developed and deployed related to: 1) Motion detection algorithms for security cameras in outdoor environments with a lot of ambient noise that needed to be ignored. 2) Medical informatics data model with a recommendation engine component for predicting which ICD/CPT/SNOMED code to use for optimal chance of insurance coverage. 3) R&D, implementation, and deployment of an EAV/CR [2] open schema based analytics platform using the neo4j graph database for persistence So far I've had the luxury of only using meatspace networking to find interesting jobs to work at, but I stress over suddenly finding myself unemployed in the future and having to face the modern interviewing process with social networking activity used as a screen. Can anyone describe how one's GitHub is used in an interview? Is a candidate with an interesting, non-trivial personal project on GitHub considered, or are candidates judged on their contribution to others' projects? [1]Started working on a neo4j data science project involving gathering, refining, and translating film, actor, and director data into a graph data model for efficiently answering deeply recursive queries. [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model#Representing_substructure:_EAV_with_classes_and_relationships_.28EAV.2FCR.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%...

fecak 13y ago
Recruiter here. I've seen GitHub used in interviews where the interviewer may look at the code before the interview, and then bring up the repo during the interview to discuss it. This is usually to challenge why certain decisions were made, what could have been done differently, etc. It isn't much different than how a conversation would go after a live coding exercise to review the work, with the exception that the candidate in the case of a prior GitHub work will have had the advantage to clean things up and perhaps has gone through several iterations already.
- adeaver 13y ago
  Except in a live coding exercise most people are trying to be efficient or 'to it right' and paying attention to what they are doing and how. I realize this is anecdotal, but 95% of the public code in my git repo is stuff I did as fun. I didn't care about being right, or care about memory issues or being thread safe or anything other than 'I wonder if...' In that instance, and I suspect a lot of other people public where they aren't contributing to something using the repo code as a talking point is counter-productive. Why did I do it that way? Because I wanted to see what would happen.

kstop 13y ago

Also why, after flirting with the idea for one hiring cycle, I stopped asking people if they had Stack Overflow accounts. Yes, if they had one, it provided useful information about their interests and communication ability. But it has a demographic skew that could have led me to rejecting other candidates unfairly. That said, my own presence on Github is pretty anemic, so maybe that's another form of bias!

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

Github isn't necessarily a new concept nor is submitting links to code sample repositories as part of a programmer's 'portfolio' Forgive my naiveté, but why is this a topic of debate now? Did something radically change? Weren't you all doing this before Github existed?

nathan_long 13y ago

Can you name any job qualification which does not put some groups at a disadvantage? I want to be fair, but "do you have work you can show me?" is about as close to ideal as I can think of.

steveklabnik 13y ago
It's not that: it's that without acknowledging the bias, the 'meritocracy' philosophy suggests that those who do OSS are the best at what they do, which is not necessarily true.
- nathan_long 13y ago
  No, but they are those most easily demonstrably good at what they do. I mean, if you had a Ruby job opening and you got applications from Aaron Patterson and 20 other people, would it be unfair to put Patterson's application at the top? There might be another applicant as good, but 1) you have to look harder and 2) you can't really tell until after you've hired them. Picking a sure thing over a gamble is pretty understandable.

Millennium 13y ago

GitHub isn't a CV: it's a portfolio. That can be incredibly valuable in the hiring process, if it is used properly, but it is not the be-all and end-all of hiring. The article is right as far as this goes. I cannot say that I agree with much of the rest of the article, and I agree with even less of the article on which it is based. But summarily rejecting non-GitHub candidates really is a bad idea.

dreamdu5t 13y ago

Tell that to all the job offers in my inbox via github projects.

steveklabnik 13y ago
That's irrelevant to the point of the article.

zodiac 13y ago

The article is mixing two conceptually distinct points: that using github instead of CVs produces false negatives, and that it produces false positives. It produces false negatives because lots of people who are good coders and who deserve to be hired don't have impressive github accounts for various legitimate reasons. I completely agree with this point. However, to employers, false negatives are not that big of a problem. In some sense it's morally unfair that I exclude so many people who "deserve" the job, but if in the end I land a satisfactory candidate, I'm happy. So to employers, the real question is, does github produce false positives? If my screening practice (I think we all agree that githubs and resumes should be used mainly as a screening step) is to ask for githubs instead of CVs, do I let better candidates through? If you read the article carefully, there is very little evidence presented for this; the author mostly argues that using github produces false negatives or weak signals.

tokenrove 13y ago

The argument that only the well-to-do contribute to OSS is bullshit, although I haven't looked at the data. Perhaps on a global scale, but within the gamut of rich and poor in North America, my own anecdata on the matter is just the opposite. Github-as-the-new-resume is galling for plenty of other reasons.