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> As a software startup owner I really enjoy when people send us their résumés and they include their github account so we can see tangible work they have done.

• Cakez0r 13y ago
  You don't have to contribute to open source to have a github account. I use it to dump all my projects on (most of which are incomplete). I've made only one pull request to OSS (months ago) and it's still sitting in the request queue!
• ics 13y ago
  I've always had the impression that it's just an easier way of dealing with potential hires but by no means the only way. If the company you are applying to is an active contributor to OSS then it would probably be more important as a gauge of some workflow they'd like to see. Maybe I'm wrong though– I've never gone through that process myself.
• icelancer 13y ago
  >Do startups really look at github contributions as the ultimate measure of one's tech chops or are looking for people who go that extra bit and make time in their schedules for contributing back to the community? When I was hiring, yes. There is no easier and simpler way to evaluate someone before bringing them in for an interview than checking their verifiable OSS contributions. It's low friction. Doesn't mean we didn't consider others, but for obvious reasons people who actually could prove they had done work went to the head of the line. It's just how it is.
  • username223 13y ago
    "people who actually could prove they had done work went to the head of the line." You mean "people who proved they would work for free," right? FWIW, I'm not interested in working for your company, but of the code I wrote which has made it to Github, most has been uploaded by people other than me.
    • Blahah 13y ago
      OSS doesn't mean writing for free. A very large chunk of the code on Github was writing on paid time.
      • username223 13y ago
        It seems like mostly a place where people store config files, mirror code, and dump half-assed work in progress. But would "I wrote this code, and someone posted it on a website" really make someone better than "I wrote this code?"
        • pdpi 13y ago
          Not better, just easier to verify.
    • icelancer 13y ago
      No, I don't. I have written quite a bit of stuff that I was paid to write that made it to GitHub, FWIW.
    • pnathan 13y ago
      I don't work for free: my libre software work is under the GPL in one form or another. If it's a library, it's LGPL-derived; if it's product, it's AGPL3. Either I get money, or you get to publish your changes to my code so we all benefit. Pick one. =)
  • prawks 13y ago
    > people who actually could prove they had done work went to the head of the line Isn't that usually sorted out by the resume piece of the puzzle? By listing placed an applicant has actually worked? I know it's not your full hiring procedure you've outlined here, but I just see that kind of filtering as very naive. You'd have to make a huge number of assumptions to go from someone's OSS contributions to anything about their work ethic.
• Surio 13y ago
  >> I sometimes feel very insecure when I read statements like this. Relax. This is what happens here on HN often-times. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias >> However, I have (so far) never been able to manage contributing to open source projects in any significant way. Sometimes I have been too busy with work projects, sometimes it has been a busy life at grad school, sometimes family, I can take a safe bet that a lot of us here can confirm to this as well. So this is more prevalent than people care to admit/inform here. >> and I wish I were more like them. Not a bad wish, but if I were you, I wouldn't lose sleep over it. :) So, just keep doing what you are doing, and the opportunities (oh, there are plenty of those around. I can assure you) that arise around those things will come to you. Good luck!
  • pmiller2 13y ago
    A large part of the issue is that people who contribute to OSS talk about contributing to OSS, whereas people who don't contribute typically just don't mention it.
• 10098 13y ago
  Don't fall for that bullshit. Most of the best engineers I know don't have a github/bitbucket/sourceforge/you-name-it account, which doesn't prevent them from being awesome.
  • _pmf_ 13y ago
    > which doesn't prevent them from being awesome But how can they be awesome if they don't tell the Internet about it? It's unfathomable!
    • 10098 13y ago
      To be honest, there's a little bit of "I'm too old for this shit" attitude among them. They have have demanding jobs and families, and probably couldn't care less about what internet thinks. I also have to note that I've never met a person my age (early twenties) who I could call a great engineer. Promising - yes, talented - yes, but not great. You know, the type of people that you shut up and listen to when they talk. Guess those years of experience really count... P.S.: OK, I lied, I've actually seen some guys even younger than me that are absolutely brilliant, mostly those actively participating in programming contests (ACM/TopCoder, etc.), but I wouldn't exactly put them in charge of a team building a product, if you catch my drift...
      • prawks 13y ago
        There's for sure a difference in people I would call brilliant "hackers" and people I would call brilliant "architects". I think it's very difficult to be the latter without having constructed a handful of large systems, and those take significant time even if you do them back-to-back.
• logicallee 13y ago
  There's an entirely different reason for using github as a filter. But isn't one of the major reasons we look for a github portfolio, really as an ideological filter for finding cofounders? I wouldn't go so far as calling it communist, but contributing to open-source projects requires a dedication to the 'common good'. If it is communist, it is a great filter for people who would like to own the means of production (equity) rather than getting paid from surplus profits! (salary). I'm not great on communist ideology, but anyway startups are a mix, they're a bit socialist at a very early stage then mature. At any rate, if this is the correct way to view github, then the counterexample we're looking for isn't people who say "I'm a great engineer and I have no github" but - "I am highly interested in working for equity alone (in a pre-revenue context!) as a cofounder, building a project from scratch with no initial reward except a sense of ownership, and I have no github". That rings a lot more hollow than being a well-paid engineer with no github.
  • gutnor 13y ago
    The biggest contributor to open-source are companies like IBM. Calling IBM communist, is well weird. If you remove extremists of each movements, seeing value in common-good has nothing to do with communism or socialism or capitalism. The only filter you apply by looking at github is social. You select individual based on how involved they are in a community. If your company evolve in the same community that can be beneficial. If not, well it is only slightly a bit more relevant than looking at hiring a plumber based on how recognised he is in the car modding community.
    • burntsushi 13y ago
      I disagree. If you want to review a candidate's code, GitHub is one of many useful tools to do so. Having code on GitHub does not require one to participate in its social features. If GitHub lets you verify that someone is capable of writing code that you think is of high quality, is that not a useful tool to apply in a wide variety of circumstances?
      • gutnor 13y ago
• antirez 13y ago
  There are people who contribute to OSS and get traction in the open hacking community, but I know also a number of "stars" in the business/closed side of the code. People that are great but just focus on fixing business problems with their great code. These people also get acknowledged for their capabilities, just inside smaller circles, but those circles are very important business side so they are successful, have an easy time to find a new position when they want to change, and so forth. Long story short, try to be great, oss or not.
• evanspa 13y ago
  But what about personal projects? For me, the best way for learning new programming languages, libraries, techniques, etc, is to build something with that language. Naturally, I put this type of work into a public repo on Github and slap an OSS license on it. It's a great way to learn, but also to showcase your work to potential employers (or fellow hackers, etc).
  • danielweber 13y ago
    "Here is my very first project" seems like a horrible thing to show off to potential employers. My first projects in any language are full of hacks and "just-get-it-working" type stuff until I figure out the Right Way to do things. Putting up half-finished junk like that doesn't serve anybody's interest. At best it is ignored. At worst it is just pollution being dumped into the world in that any newbie seeing it would become actively dumber.
    • evanspa 13y ago
      Maybe, maybe-not. Couple things: some of my "personal projects" are more than just learning some new things. Often the project is for scratching an itch, and is a useful thing to me. That's the type of stuff that I will "polish." This forces me to not only learn the new language, but to write code idiomatically, write unit tests, etc. For "junk projects" that are solely to play around with some new thing, I think it's okay to make that clear in the README of the project and still put it in a public repo. If I'm an employer, I'm going to like the fact that you're actively learning new things; if it's a "play" project, made clear in the README, I wouldn't hold against you writing crappy code. Instead, I'll be more impressed that you're actually learning new things. Just my $.02.
    • LinXitoW 13y ago
      FizzBuzz is also extremely easy, yet somehow a lot of applicants seem to fail that. So, any running code would probably elevate you above people without any code.
• Kudos 13y ago
  The guy you're quoting hired me around the time he made this, and I have next to zero OSS chops. All of my free time that I put towards software selfishly goes into my side project, but it does mean I have some interesting stories to tell on problems I've solved.
• free652 13y ago
  Wouldn't be an active github user devote less time to the work's projects? Personally I know that after my 8-9 hours work day, I barely (no at all) have energy for a side project. How these people can spent almost full time working on the OSS project? (I know some of the developers' job is to work on OSS project, but what about others?)
  • T-hawk 13y ago
    For these sorts of folks, side project programming doesn't require or consume energy, it creates it. Some people relax by watching tv or reading the internet. Some people relax by coding features for an open source software project. Is there a correlation between the latter type and productivity in a day job? Employers who ask for a prolific github account would seem to think there is.
• robert_tweed 13y ago
  Let me give you my take as someone who has had to hire a lot of developers. Firstly, I'll say it depends a lot on the person doing the hiring. Different people will look for different things. For me though, any practical experience that you can show alongside your resume/CV is helpful for a few reasons: 1. If I see code of an excellent standard, I know I just need to use the interview to make sure you really did write it yourself, then if you're a good personality fit, you're hired. This makes my life a lot easier because it's very hard to tell if someone will be a good coder without seeing them code. Not everyone is willing to do a practical trial, and not all employers have time to organise these either. 2. It lets me see if any assessment you give of yourself agrees with reality. Some people understate their abilities, but most overestimate themselves greatly. If I know where you sit on this spectrum I have a better idea of what to expect in terms of mentoring requirements, how to approach the interview, etc., to figure out if you are competent and whether any poor judgement is a problem, or just typical egocentrism. 3. It gives me things to talk about in the interview. Like, "I saw you used X, why did you do that and not Y?" Usually it's when people can actually start talking about things like this that you can tell if they really understand what they are doing or not. So, I wouldn't be put off by the idea that you don't have a lot of open source contributions out in the wild for employers to look at, simply because it may not matter to everyone. However if you do, it's always of value and something you should highlight. In any case, don't underestimate the value of being able to show some work you have done. If your best work is closed source, try to get permission to show some of it to potential employers, while bearing in mind that they will be very busy and not hoping to wade through a ton of code figure out if you know what you're doing or not. It's an extra resource: if your skills look interesting, it allows them to see some evidence of what you've done, and poke around for interview talking points. Often just knowing the type of projects you worked on and having proof of your contribution is enough to tell if you are the real deal or not. So if you can't get access to sources, just indicate the projects, say what you did and try to get some evidence, like endorsements/references from colleagues. If you can't provide evidence, expect the interviewer to grill you on this: it will soon become apparent if you were exaggerating your contributions. The most important point is that if your CV/resume does not look good, they won't want to look at your code anyway. Don't shove it down their throats. Start off by selling yourself as concisely as possible, and use these kind of extra resources as evidence to back up what you say. What I like most about these Github resumes is not so much the fact I can see individual contributions, but that I can very quickly see a project history and % breakdown by language, which is what I'd expect to see on a paper resume, except here I know it's based on real data and not just something the candidate may have just made up. From data like this this I can tell within a few seconds if that person might be a good fit, and from there I may decide to go investigating further. Just remember that if you apply for say, a Ruby job and 90% of your open source contributions are Python, you probably want to tell the employer somewhere e.g., "I work with Ruby in my day job but most of my open source contributions are in Python". Only if the data is misleading though, like if as you said you have some open source contributions, but not enough to be representative. TLDR: Employers are busy. Within a few seconds, they want to know "does this person appear to have the skills I am looking for?". If that answer is yes then they may spend more time re-evaluating it, based on any evidence they can get. Source code is usually the best evidence a programmer's ability. Less up-front evidence means any interview will be a lot more hit-and-miss: interviews alone are not a good way to assess coding ability.