4 ms·
Obviously anyone really good won't actually do the tests because they'll be offered a job by somewhere that doesn't do them before they get around to yours thou
by estefan 11y ago
Obviously anyone really good won't actually do the tests because they'll be offered a job by somewhere that doesn't do them before they get around to yours though, sooo...
Personally I find the single best question is "what's your github username?". People who are on it and active are... well, actually I've only ever had one candidate who's actually been on github and she seemed OK. The majority of people I've seen haven't been much good (and have barely heard of github).
I agree about dodging a bullet. I think the OP did exactly the right thing.
- cldellow 11y agoWe'll definitely consider a GitHub account as well, but we don't want to exclude the universe of programmers who are Just Busy Doing Their Dayjob And Having a Life and don't have time to maintain a ton of open source forks.
- estefan 11y agoYeah there are definitely degrees of "active", but even one or two forks, or even submitting an issue to an active project demonstrate engagement that says a lot about someone.
- jharger 11y agoBut is the opposite true? If someone hasn't contributed to an open source project, does that say a lot about them?
- Buttons840 11y agoI have seen this first hand. Company A told me to complete a programming test, and only then they would talk to me further. Meanwhile, Company B gave me a solid job offer and I never got back to Company A. I don't feel too bad about ditching Company A, because they have contacted me through recruiters a few times. It's always the same story. I complete their programming challenge (which is really easy, because it's always the same), submit it, then never hear anything back, not even an acknowledgement that they received my solution.
- hdra 11y agoI'm curious, how does companies usually evaluate a github profile? and how important is that evaluation to the decision? I ask this because I find many of the software engineers I follow on Twitter who work at major tech companies (github, twitter, google, etc) have a pretty sparse github profile.
- estefan 11y agoI started asking it really so I could see examples of a candidate's code. Also seeing the projects they've contributed to would show that, for example, they genuinely were interested/engaged with whatever niche they were being interviewing for.
- jhildings 11y agoA problem with github could be that a lot of the code you write needs to be kept private for commercial reasons, and then I guess some kind of coding test would be better