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Simple: at GitHub we hire "The Girl or Guy Who Wrote X," where X is an awesome project we all use or admire. A few suggestions: Change "we all" to "many peopl

by edw519 17y ago

Simple: at GitHub we hire "The Girl or Guy Who Wrote X," where X is an awesome project we all use or admire. A few suggestions: Change "we all" to "many people". Change "or admire" to "to make money" or "to get their jobs done". Suddenly you've opened this up to a much larger population of programmers who have done great work. Who says that the valuable work you've done has to be open source? If you say, "I've written the software that thousands of people use to process millions of orders," there are plenty of people who will want to hear more. Then you can tell them.

davidw 17y ago
There are obviously tons of good programmers that their particular "hiring practice" leaves out. However, perhaps those programmers would not be as good a fit at their company? They're talking not just about good coders, but about the culture of the company.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  Whether or not one's code is open source may have little or nothing to do with one's cultural preferences. But it has everything to do with one's employer's "culture".
jimbokun 17y ago
'Change "we all" to "many people".' I assumed that "we all" referred to people working at GitHub. I understand that there are a lot of programmers who have written excellent proprietary code. But it would make sense that GitHub would favor open source programmers, as open source programmers constitute the lion's share of their users.
technoweenie 17y ago
If you hear Chris tell his story, he'll mention he landed one of his early jobs because of a PHP YAML parser he wrote. It's not like X has to be world changing or anything.
frossie 17y ago
Suddenly you've opened this up to a much larger population of programmers who have done great work. I doubt the OP is in the position of not having a large enough pool of people to hire to his satisfaction using his criteria. This does not mean that there are no closed-source people that would be good to hire; but when you hire open-source developers whose work you know then you can do so with a higher degree of confidence, so if that works, why look elsewhere?

by edw519 17y ago

davidw 17y ago

There are obviously tons of good programmers that their particular "hiring practice" leaves out. However, perhaps those programmers would not be as good a fit at their company? They're talking not just about good coders, but about the culture of the company.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
Whether or not one's code is open source may have little or nothing to do with one's cultural preferences. But it has everything to do with one's employer's "culture".

jimbokun 17y ago

'Change "we all" to "many people".' I assumed that "we all" referred to people working at GitHub. I understand that there are a lot of programmers who have written excellent proprietary code. But it would make sense that GitHub would favor open source programmers, as open source programmers constitute the lion's share of their users.

technoweenie 17y ago

If you hear Chris tell his story, he'll mention he landed one of his early jobs because of a PHP YAML parser he wrote. It's not like X has to be world changing or anything.

frossie 17y ago

Suddenly you've opened this up to a much larger population of programmers who have done great work. I doubt the OP is in the position of not having a large enough pool of people to hire to his satisfaction using his criteria. This does not mean that there are no closed-source people that would be good to hire; but when you hire open-source developers whose work you know then you can do so with a higher degree of confidence, so if that works, why look elsewhere?