Ask HN: GitHub vs. self-hosted forges – What's your first impression?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46040569

by bitbasher • 8 months ago

3 6 8 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

When hiring or searching for open-source code, you often come across developers who host their projects exclusively on GitHub. Sometimes you may find individuals with a minimal social presence (no GitHub, LinkedIn, etc.) but who self-host their own forge, blog, or projects.

Does your impression of the person change at all? If so, how?

uberman2• 8 months ago

If we are talking about two otherwise unknown but equally impressive candidates and one said "here is my portfolio on github/gitlab/bitbucket" and the other said "here is my portfolio on some random domain" I would hire the first. I would not likely even visit the second candidate's portfolio.

bitbasher2• 8 months ago

Any specific rationale for it? Security concerns? Too much work to bother, etc?

ALittleSlow• 8 months ago

"some random domain"

Implies a fair amount of bias towards, "I'm just here for the job" integrity and self ownership/authorship is not my thing. Just the type of short term employee a manager would be looking for. Not a lot of risk or integrity for ether party, is kinda baked in to the culture. It's not just programming. Let's call them open source HOA's

uberman2• 8 months ago

I think there are several factors here. When I say "you" here, I don't necessarily mean you unless of course you are asking because you want to host your own.

First, why make it hard for me to review your code? You would almost certainly not have the review features that say Github has to browse code. You are probably asking me to pull your repo(s) and explore them in my IDE. I'm just not going to do that and a candidate should never really be in a situation where they are asking their interviewer to do work. Even work as trivial as looking up your email or phone number. That information should be included with every contact in my opinion. Asking them to fork the repos in your portfolio is way beyond that.

Secondly, not using standard tools like Bitbucket for example sends a message to me that you are a maverick and by extension unlikely to want to use my choice of repo, platform or tool chain. At this point in my life I have worked with enough brilliant jerks to have had my fill of "I wrote that feature in Elixir because I wanted to"

Finally, I would say that the novelty of being your own server admin has kind of worn off. Perhaps say 10 or 20 years ago there might have been a "cool factor" in being your own admin but for me at least that sheen has tarnished.

Ask HN: GitHub vs. self-hosted forges – What's your first impression?

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