Ask HN: Web project on GitHub helpful for finding a better job?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22375301

by kbrisso • 6 years ago

16 17 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I was thinking of posting a project to Github showcasing my skills. Do recruiters or potential hires look at these things? Has anyone done this and has it helped them? It would be more than a basic project. I was thing of using multiple technologies and deploying to Digital Ocean along with clear instructions. I have 20 years experience as a software engineer at the same job and want to move on. It has been a while since I looked for a job! Thanks!

totalperspectiv• 6 years ago

Yes. And No. I don't think recruiters look at github. Hiring managers might though, once your resume lands on their desk. So a project like this may not make you more discoverable, but it may make you more hireable once you've been discovered. Given that you have 20 years of experience though, it likely won't add a whole lot. And any questions that they ask you would likely be better answered by talking about real work experience rather than a toy project.

But it won't hurt :)

A thing that might be more productive would be to see what some of the core tech some jobs you are looking at use, and then re-implement that from scratch. You learn a lot, you can post that kind of stuff here and elsewhere and maybe be discoverable, and you can talk about it during an interview in a way that promotes you as an expert on something.

kbrisso• 6 years ago

Thanks for the reply - good idea about doing a small project that uses the companies API or demonstrates what they do.

stevekemp• 6 years ago

Recruiters sometimes look at github. I've certainly had random "I'm a recruiter and I've seen your github project X" spam in the past.

dyingkneepad3• 6 years ago

It can work in favor of but also against you :)

Where I work, once most of the candidates have been filtered out and there are only 1-5 remaining, managers get help from the senior engineers to assess the candidate's technical skills before interviewing. In my specific team we try to find code samples from github and contributions to open source communities (we love ohloh.net).

But we also do a "technical interview" with some fizzbuzz stuff. More than once we found candidates with good-looking open source patches but that couldn't implement fizzbuzz-like stuff on a whiteboard.

probinso2• 6 years ago

Agreed!

Whiteboarding is a skill and should be practiced prior to onsite interviews.

tcbasche3• 6 years ago

But we also do a "technical interview" with some fizzbuzz stuff

Why does anyone still think this is a good interview technique that provides any valuable metrics?

dyingkneepad3• 6 years ago

Because in the past we hired some programmers that were really good at BS-ing during interview and really crappy at programming.

So now we make sure we hire people who know what "a &= b" does in C and what a #define statement achieves.

codingdave• 6 years ago

Because there are still people who can look good on paper, and even talk their way through interviews, but can't actually code. You do not need the multiple-hour-whiteboard overkill that some places do, but you do need at least one coding gate to prove their resume is not a sham.

ccajas• 6 years ago

I look at FizzBuzz as a "assert" test before the thorough evaluation.

It should be logically impossible for an experienced developer to not pass a simple test like that. Those tests are not for metrics- they're just for prematurely weeding out corner cases.

duxup• 6 years ago

As a n00b just out of bootcamp I found it very handy in showing other technical folks that I can build something front to back that is ... competent enough given my experience at the time.

Considering the volume of similar bootcamp folks out there, I think it helped a great deal in that context.

Recruiters looked for fun more than anything else, but I don't think it made any impression on them / made any difference with recruiters.

BUT 20 years of experience, I'm not sure they'll care as much about something like a portfolio.

On the other hand it can't hurt and if you're going to do it for fun anyway, have at it ;)

probinso2• 6 years ago

I encourage people to put everything they can on a public host, then hyperlink the heck out of their resumes. You never know who will look, but for those who are interested its very nice.

With your existing experience, It is not required to have an online presence, but is nice.

Recruiters won't likely look, hiring managers may.

muzani• 6 years ago

There are many different types of recruiters. Some will, some won't. It does give you more dimensions as a person; someone with 20 years of experience and a project on GitHub is certainly more interesting thatn someone who has 20 years of experience.

That said, it's incredibly common for people to have a bunch of different things to showcase. You'll hear a lot of people who are "speaker, author, blogger, consultant" and still are just average skills with average salaries.

If you're going to do it anyway, go ahead and do it, but the return on investment is probably lower than just grinding Leetcode.

austincheney• 6 years ago

I ran a major code beautifier for about 10 years used by tens of thousands of developers. Having a major project like this didn’t turn me into a celebrity or win me any opportunities. I still needed a resume and had to wait for people to reach out to me as any other regular applicant.

It did, however, differentiate me at interview time. I could demonstrate an ability to solve hard problems with original solutions in a way others could not. I could demonstrate product management like an expert where other developers where not even a beginner. A massive project like this really allowed me to utterly destroy the competition when trying to get that job, but only as I talked through the value of that experience.

Having this sort of experience also created some major frictions, though. You might look like a rock star during the interview but there is a huge difference between what they want in theory versus practice. If you are coming into an organization that isn’t as obsessed with product quality or user fulfillment as you they won’t care how good you are or how good the product could be. This is especially true of your developer peers who have never contributed to open source. Instead they will care only for the popular mediocre way of doing things that you have learned hard to abandon in search of quality and performance. Any attempt to raise the bar, increase developer performance, or execution speed with be met with disdain and immediate hostility.

After going through frictions like those for years I have learned to settle. I still hate giant frameworks and the billions of packages developers with hide behind to avoid writing code or learning anything works, but have learned to accept that nobody cares until the business is ready to fire people. I just wish developers would at the very least give two shits about writing some basic documentation but even that feels like asking for too much.

At the very minimum at least learn to write good documentation.

xen0• 6 years ago

I am pretty sure that my Github profile had absolutely no effect on any of the hire/no-hire decisions I was subject to, or even on whether I was entered into a company's interview pipeline. A couple of work projects from my previous employer were hosted there and accessible from my profile, so my profile wasn't barren.

I highly suspect your ability to summarize your 20 years experience well in a 1 page document will matter a lot more. And you don't need a project to be on Github to be able to talk about it in interview.

Ask HN: Web project on GitHub helpful for finding a better job?

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