Why GitHub is not your CV

http://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv/

by nephics • 13 years ago

107 129 13 years ago

blog.jcoglan.com

seivan6• 13 years ago

"OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say.

But I do find it funny that they don't think that Github should be used as a resumé but their "conferencing", tweets, books about diversifying and podcasts should do.

Talkers or Makers?

I write OSS on my free time because I feel like other alternatives might not be good enough. I spend a couple of hours in the morning, weekends and etc. It's hard and time consuming. I can take two days if just figuring out what the selector should be called or argument names.

Right now I am getting paid for OSS, but I even spend my free time on it because I'd like to make sure it comes out good.

It's very slow and time consuming, and sometimes keeps me up at night, but I LIKE IT. And I like acknowledgment to it.

These sorta articles invalidate what I make just because I FEEL like making them. Not sure what to feel about that.

I have friends who make stuff to Go-lang because they want to learn the language and make stuff that doesn't exist. These articles invalidates their passion.

And saying bullshit like LGBT or other genders are actively being excluded... well it makes me hard to take you seriously. I'm not white, and I am part of LGBT.

alfiejohn_• 13 years ago

These sorta articles invalidate what I make just because I FEEL like making them. Not sure what to feel about that.

Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but I've learned something... stop caring what others are saying and doing. If you feel like making shit, then make it.

seivan6• 13 years ago

I generally don't give a shit. But I do get concerned when others do to crap that might affect me.

CmonDev2• 13 years ago

""OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say."

I hope one day we will be able to distil the ultimate rule: "being smart and proactive is discriminatory".

jballanc6• 13 years ago

The article does not say that conference talks, tweets, books, etc. should be used for hiring decisions and only GitHub should not. It says (right there at the end), that hiring is hard and any shortcut to try and get around that fact is wrong. It just so happens that "don't send us your resume, tell us your GitHub username" just happens to be the shortcut of the moment.

Also, I'd challenge you to find where the article says or even implies that you shouldn't be making stuff because you FEEL like it. Quite the opposite, in fact. You should be making stuff because you feel like it and not because you have some expectation of getting a better offer or being able to show off your GitHub profile at your next interview.

As for the white, male bias...not sure what to tell you. It's real. The statistics don't lie. I'm glad that you have had success as a non-white member of the LGBT community, but as the saying goes: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

seivan6• 13 years ago

The article does not say that conference talks, tweets, books, etc. should be used for hiring decisions and only GitHub should not. It says (right there at the end), that hiring is hard and any shortcut to try and get around that fact is wrong. It just so happens that "don't send us your resume, tell us your GitHub username" just happens to be the shortcut of the moment.

Actually, Ashe has that on the Hire Me Page.

As for the white, male bias...not sure what to tell you. It's real. The statistics don't lie. I'm glad that you have had success as a non-white member of the LGBT community, but as the saying goes: the plural of anecdote is not data.

I understand this is a fact, but how this can be used against Github as a resumé or against OSS on your free time, I have a hard time seeing that. It comes off as incredibly stupid.

theorique2• 13 years ago

The thing is, something can be both a filter against 'underrepresented groups' AND a valid criterion for hiring.

Requiring a CS degree probably biases in favor of white and asian males and against black females. It is also a very valid filter for hiring programmers (pace the self-taught).

Not much can be done about this fact except for increasing the pipeline of underrepresented groups into CS degrees, recreational programming, OSS participation, and so forth.

bengillies• 13 years ago

"OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say.

OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward people who are either paid to do it at their current job, or who have few enough prior commitments in the rest of their life to be able to afford to do it outside of work.

I'm not sure whether it biases towards white men or not, but I'm pretty sure it biases towards younger people and against people who are in enterprisey companies (or who work on private contracts).

aestra4• 13 years ago

As a condition of my employment, I had to sign a contract with my former employer that basically said since I was a software engineer with them, they owned all the software I wrote, even if I wrote it outside of my work hours. This obviously prevented me from working on any OSS.

Also please read my above comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740089 The article links to another article about why it favors white men.

Peroni3• 13 years ago

Ashe Dryden's original post has merit, I'm not contesting that. James' post however, is wrong on so many levels.

It's worth noting that James is a UK based developer. Most of his points may be completely valid in the US but they are completely at odds with the UK climate. I've worked with an inordinate amount of tech companies in the UK and consulted with many more and I've yet to come across any that hire based primarily on the merits of a candidates github repo.

In fact, I'd argue his understanding of the request for a candidates github URL is completely wrong. One of my first requests when speaking to a potential candidate is for their github/bitbucket profile so I can see some actual code examples. I know that it's rare to find a true indication of someones ability from just their github contributions but for example, it can help me discern whether a ruby candidate adheres to ruby best practices or not. A small example of a minor indicator that someone might be a good fit for our company.

A man with significantly more experience in the industry than me once put it better than I ever could:

The more information I can get, the easier it becomes for me to make a decision, and to feel comfortable in it. And the best sort of information to give me is to show me what you can make, whether that's code for a backend position, or interesting design/UI for a front end position. It also gives us another thing to talk about during interview; and more opportunity to ask about design decisions and rationale.

Some of the best people I've ever sourced didn't have any publicly accessible code but if they had, I would have found them a hell of a lot quicker.

001sky• 13 years ago

I would have found them a hell of a lot quicker.

There are two ways to read this: (1) as a marker; (2) as a filter. Would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the interplay. My guess is that there is some game theory on signalling at play on both sides here.

Peroni3• 13 years ago

It's genuinely very straightforward. If you don't have much of an online presence (github, twitter, blog, etc) then the only way I'm likely to find you is if a mutual contact tells me about you. Now, referrals are one of the best sources of excellent people and I'm not knocking that.

If you're constantly tweeting/blogging good quality content about an area of technology that is relevant to my business then of course I'm going to take notice. That, however, doesn't necessarily make you a better candidate by default, it just means you were easier to find.

chadwickthebold• 13 years ago

'I know that it's rare to find a true indication of someones ability from just their github contributions but for example, it can help me discern whether a ruby candidate adheres to ruby best practices or not.'

The problem with this is that you can't really make a logical decision when the code (on Github/bitbucket) is removed from its context. Maybe none of the code follows best practice, but there is a compelling reason why this is so. If your decision on whether to pursue a candidate or not does not include a discussion with the candidate about their available code, you are missing an integral piece of the puzzle.

Peroni3• 13 years ago

If your decision on whether to pursue a candidate or not does not include a discussion with the candidate about their available code, you are missing an integral piece of the puzzle.

You are absolutely right. I can honestly only ever think of one circumstance where I dismissed someone based exclusively on what I saw in their github repo. I felt guilty so I phoned them a week later to discuss my thoughts and it turns out my suspicions were correct but that was categorically an edge case.

fyolnish• 13 years ago

"If you want to find out whether someone’s worth hiring as a software engineer, their code is of very limited value compared to talking to them, discussing design and architecture, previous engineering constraints they’ve faced, and what they’re like at solving problems"

I have a hard time thinking of a better way to see how good someone is at all of those those thing than to look at code they've written in the past.

Also, the title of the article is "Why GitHub is not your CV" yet all it talks about is how it can't replace an interview. Which I don't think many people advocate.

CmonDev2• 13 years ago

Have two profiles - one for your projects portfolio, another - to contribute to OSS.

marknutter• 13 years ago

Unless you have your CV on github..

kybernetikos5• 13 years ago

Yes, all the complaints about how you can't tell a story with your github profile seems to completely ignore gh-pages, a phenomenal service that does let you tell a story.

Maybe your github profile isn't a good portfolio by default, but it's an excellent service for creating your portfolio. On top of that, even a poor github profile provides more signal than most CVs I've read.

hyperpape4• 13 years ago

The point (imho) isn't that literally nothing on github can be a good hiring indicator. It's that people are treating github as if, by itself, it is an adequate way to assess candidates and decide who to interview. Maybe if you make a page like you're suggesting, then you can link to that page, but then github is more or less just a host.

jasonlotito4• 13 years ago

Yes, all the complaints about how you can't tell a story with your github profile seems to completely ignore gh-pages

Yeah... that's not what they mean, and you know it.

atmosx• 13 years ago

First thing: The white/black men discrimination issue seems totally out of place, almost ridiculous!

As for the main argument, I think it's flawed. Github (or any other online repo) is an important asset and Open Source contributions matters. Especially if you don't have prior job experience. It's a very good way to show that you can actually write code and you will be hands on from the first week, or day, or hour.

marrs• 13 years ago

I think this article needs to be split in two because it seems to be conflating 2 opinions.

I'm not sure I really understand what the author is trying to say. Is it that OSS encourages a culture of being exploited and that GitHub is inadvertently pushing that culture? Or is it that recruiters don't know how to assess the code they see and this is somehow GitHub's fault? Or is it that working on code on your spare time is really a bad thing? Or maybe it's that only white men create GitHub accounts.

spindritf• 13 years ago

the demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed toward white men than the software industry is, which is saying something

What?

You just get what other people think is useful. Aside from which, GitHub displays a lot of useless stats about how many followers you have, and some completely psychologically manipulative stats about how often you commit and how many days it is since you had a day off.

You get social proof, some measure of conscientiousness, and a crowd-sourced filter. All on one page. That sounds great. I don't see the problem.

Companies want to hire influential workers. It's relevant. So is putting in the work.

And products which people find useful are vastly superior to those that the author finds well engineered. I'm guessing many company owners will share that view.

hyperpape4• 13 years ago

What does it say? That it's probably not a good measure of skill in any sense worth measuring, unless you think that 98.5% of the programmers worth hiring are men.

stonemetal2• 13 years ago

That it's probably not a good measure of skill in any sense worth measuring, unless you think that 98.5% of the programmers worth hiring are men.

I don't see how those two points are related. A measure can be good or bad independent of who you choose to measure by it.

Github(not necessarily just having an account but actually looking at what they have done) is a good measure of skill because it allows you to see the person's work output. You know exactly what they contributed to a project and what type of work they are interested in and are familiar with.

Now just because it is a good measurement of skill doesn't mean that it is a good hiring filter. The two are similar but not the same thing. A good hiring filter filters for skill but doesn't filter for other attributes like race and gender. It is kind of like saying measuring how much weight a person can lift is a bad measure for determining a person's strength because we only measured white guys. It is a good measure of strength, just misapplied if you are trying to find the world's strongest person.

themoonbus2• 13 years ago

It's a system which disproportionately rewards the lucky few whose employers allow them to either open source their work, or contribute to open source projects... or the people who spend their free time coding. I know plenty of folk who are damn good at their job but like to spend their free time on other, unrelated hobbies.

I'm actually lucky enough to fall into the former category, but I feel that if you only hire people with a respectable presence on github, you're disregarding a large number of people for something beyond their control that doesn't accurately reflect their ability.

Anderkent3• 13 years ago

you're disregarding a large number of people for something beyond their control

What you spend your free time on is not beyond your control (at least when you're a software dev and presumably paid enough to actually have free time). And you might decide to spend it on other, unrelated hobbies. That's cool, but you should be aware that unless you can present that hobby as interesting, unless you can sell it as something that helps you grow, you are making yourself look less good that someone doing the same kind of work, and then doing OSS in their free time.

A company is not going to disregard you for not having a respectable github presence if no other candidates have a github presence either. But if there's a clear disparity, why should they take an extra risk by hiring you, rather than hire the person that can show them their actual contributions?

kmike84• 13 years ago

Choosing a company to work for is not beyond one's control. It is possible to specifically look for a job that allows contributing to open-source in some way, or, in other words, to blacklist those who explicitly forbids that. I've done this in both two cases I was on a job market and still enjoy this decision.

Maybe I see the world through rose-colored glasses, but I don't see why sane employer would like to forbid contributing to open-source project if e.g. this project is used for work and has some bug. And there are always bugs or inconveniences if you use something heavily. For some industries it is even hard for a developer not to be on Github, because a lot of software she uses is on github, and in a lot of cases the best way to fix the issue she's working on is to contribute to open-source project that caused this issue, instead of e.g. working around it by some hack.

I agree that discarding people without respectable github presence is bad (unless you're looking for a very specific kind of people, e.g. for marketing purposes). But I can see how not being on Github at all (even with minimal presence) could be a bad sign in some cases. Of course, industries are very different and this shouldn't be a general rule.

mkramlich3• 13 years ago

The problem is you only get what you measure. Then you rank only/disproportionately by those narrow measurements. It leads to "gaming" of a system. To min-maxing. (To use an old RPG term.) See Congress and Wall Street for powerful examples of how "gamed" systems end up hurting the rest of us in tangible ways.

I've seen it lots on GitHub, and the problem seems to be growing. The guy that parachutes into a project -- one with money-impacting code already deployed on 1000's of real world systems used by ordinary people -- submits a pull request where he's modified every single file in the project, making only superficial changes to formatting and whitespace, and probably the result of an automated tool, and most importantly DOES NOT THOROUGHLY TEST IT beforehand... yet, from GitHub's perspective he's now (a) an accepted code contributor, (b) modified lots of files -- prolific! -- and (c) has a high count of lines added/removed -- IMPACTFUL! -- and (d) very very busy beaver "working" on lots of projects. "Gosh, we want him!"

But does he/she understand threading, leaks, races, parallelization, good architecture, good documentation, automation, reproducability, security, scalability, strategy, pacing, production support, risk mitigation, algorithmic complexity, tradeoffs, market priorities, DRY, YAGNI, edge cases, BATNAs, etc etc? Well... er... maybe not so much. But his/her eyes just light right up when you mention you have a foosball table and a keg in your cubicle-or-overturned-door "office"!

bjourne• 13 years ago

Perhaps you could link to such an instance? If you have seen it many times that is, I haven't seen it even once.

badman_ting• 13 years ago

Yeah, but tell that to pretty much everyone who is hiring devs nowadays. Everything is like, "Send us your Github link. Peace out." Uhhh, but I mostly commit to private repos…?

jballanc6• 13 years ago

Beatniks.

That's what we'll get.

The Beats were a genuine movement of talented, hard working literary types. They were hip. They were cool. They were who everyone wanted to be, so people started emulating their dress, their mannerisms, their speach.

But they were not driven by the same passion. Their motivation was different.

Ginsberg said of the Beatniks: "If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash man."

If we let companies continue to use GitHub as a hiring tool, the OSS community will gradually become overrun by people attempting to achieve the same success as the OSS pioneers by mimicking their actions...but lacking their same motivation.

It's hard for me to say this. I like GitHub. I like Open Source. I am proud of what little I have managed to contribute to that community, and I think it is to my advantage if a company considers my GitHub profile when making a hiring decision. That said...I'd rather give up that advantage in exchange for keeping GitHub as an open community to share source, instead of a cauldron for the latest start up founders to pluck their next engineering hire from.

kybernetikos5• 13 years ago

This is always what happens, and it's usually a good thing.

The people ahead of the curve have to be more motivated, but if we get more people sharing, more eyes to find and fix bugs, more people from other walks of life that understand a bit more of the hacker mentality, more acceptance of sharing code as a normal part of life, then the world is a better place.

Yes, it's a shame that not everyone who plays the piano has the dedication and vision of Rachmaninov, or that everyone who paints is Picasso, but I think the world is a better place for amateurs and dilettantes. Sure, we'd perhaps have better art if it were restricted to those who must, but we have a better society because those who are moderately interested can.

arve456• 13 years ago

The nice thing about programming: You don't have to perform in the 99.9 percentile (like Picasso) to make something people want.

angersock• 13 years ago

To play the other side of this...

It's not a good thing. Submitting proper bug reports is hard, and contributing to an existing project without making more work for others can be hard as well.

The best software does the most with the least amount of code while still being easy to read--and when a library or app gets there, it's time to stop.

The problem with a hypothetical swarm of people trying to pad their Githubs (the same way premeds pad their CVs, for example) is that they'll flood otherwise stable projects with garbage, or start rewrites for no other reason than they think they can do it better. A lot of good projects are going to get fucked up this way.

mattgreenrocks• 13 years ago

What's the difference of motivation? Genuine interest in craft v. vain self-image cultivation?

jballanc6• 13 years ago

Right. If the people combing through GitHub profiles are not, themselves, technically proficient (i.e. recruiters) then we will find people being rewarded for quantity over quality. Taken to an extreme, this can lead to communities that become, in effect, echo chambers where developers are re-re-reinventing the wheel to pad out their GitHub profiles instead of endeavoring to create something interesting and new.

cheshire137• 13 years ago

I disagree with this article completely. I'm a woman and a software developer and I think my Github is very valuable as a portfolio to me. Before I used Github, if I wanted some of my code to get shown off, I would make a blog post about it and call out specific chunks while linking to a ZIP of the whole thing. If a potential employer wanted to see samples of my code, they'd have to find my blog and dig through its archives. Now, they just find my Github. The author acts as though when an employer asks for someone's Github, it's going to be the main or only component to determine whether to hire or not. In interviews where I've been the interviewer, we've used it as a filter to determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own, if they contribute to open source projects, what their coding style is like, what languages they gravitate to writing in, and just as a general personality guideline. It's cool to see the kind of stuff a person codes in their personal account, whether it's joke repos that give a glimpse at the person's personality and sense of humor, or actual serious projects.

seivan6• 13 years ago

Github can be gender/race/age/orientation agnostic. It's just a portfolio of Code. Some people, who don't do that, but instead tweet, podcast, conferences dislike it.

hvidgaard4• 13 years ago

You either missed the point, or do not think it's a problem.

determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own

Which he is arguing that you are not a bad developer for doing other things outside of work. The vast majority of people need to not code to regenerate.

I can use myself as anecdotal evidence: I'm the goto guy when it's particular difficult to solve a bug, when it's a new framework, or when the teams are unsure how to solve a problem. I love coding, I constantly get compliments for my code and solutions. I do rarely code outside of my work. I used to before I got a "real" job after my degree, but now I (almost) only code at work. I usually think about solutions and architectures outside of work though, and I write a lot of pseudo code on paper if I get an idea for an algorithm - but I do not make binaries or contribute to OOS or a public Github repository. I have a spouse, children, friends, and hobbies that simply doesn't get as much of my time as they deserve.

I would never pass the bar at a startup that's looking for the typical startup stereotype developer. I'm 100% certain that I make more business sense to hire than all of your average workoholic startup developer, but I would never be considered. I have seen so many developers with great personality and glowing Github repo fail so miserably because they have poor work ethics and are unable to do "the boring stuff" that needs to be done in a business.

I can make a sensible plan, estimates that aren't completely bonkers, and I can tell when we're no longer on track to meet the deadline the same week it starts to slip. If I make a promise I keep it, or let you know that I'm unable to. I can also work completely agile, and not some "agile-but" that is so prevalent in the industry. In short there is soooo much that you need to consider when hiring. Screening based on a Github account is excluding developers that would be just the guy/gal you're looking for.

cnkeller• 13 years ago

This.

While I understand that many people enjoy writing code and do so for fun, there are a large number of fantastic engineers that don't (myself included). Just as I wouldn't give someone preference for a robust profile, I'm not going to penalize someone for lack thereof. There is only so much time in the day and if they can do ten hours worth of work in eight hours and choose to spend their off time with their family, friends, or hobbies, good for them. Knowing how to decompress and enjoy both work and life is just as valuable to me as crafting solutions to engineering problems.

jasonlotito4• 13 years ago

I would never pass the bar at a startup that's looking for the typical startup stereotype developer.

I'm not seeing a problem with this. Not because you are a bad developer, but that you don't match the type of person they want to hire at that time.

I'm 100% certain that I make more business sense to hire than all of your average workoholic startup developer, but I would never be considered.

What's your experience as a "startup developer" that you feel justified in making that claim?

In short there is soooo much that you need to consider when hiring.

Of course. But I don't see Github being the only thing to consider, nor do I see it as being something that should be ignored. It's a piece of the puzzle.

You're a programmer. A good one at that. But have you ever stopped to consider they need someone more than that for where they are at? Someone who can be more than a programmer?

otikik2• 13 years ago

The vast majority of people need to not code to regenerate.

Citation needed. It seems to me that the majority of people don't.

fecak5• 13 years ago

When you say 'Screening based on a GitHub account', I think it's important to differentiate whether we are screening out those that don't have activity or moving those that do to the front of the line. There is a difference, and I think that difference is somewhat key to the author's article.

king_jester2• 13 years ago

In interviews where I've been the interviewer, we've used it as a filter to determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own, if they contribute to open source projects, what their coding style is like, what languages they gravitate to writing in, and just as a general personality guideline.

This is covered by the OP, but if you are using Github as a part of your hiring decision, you are going to be putting at a disadvantage many different kinds of people who do not or cannot contribute to open source or personal projects. The OP argues that Github is not necessarily a useful indicator of the things you mentioned and if Github becomes a very influencing factor for many companies hiring decisions, then it becomes de facto required and means you must work more as a programmer than you already do. This extra work is more able to be done with those that have free time and more personal resources (e.g. income), so some types of people are probably being excluded from your hiring process, leading to more a of a developer monoculture.

woah• 13 years ago

Or there's increased pressure on people to generalize solutions so that they can release them on their own as github projects, benefitting everybody.

agilebyte• 13 years ago

  willing and able to work for free

For me, GitHub is a gallery of my art, not work, so:

Me working for free for an employer that tells me what to do does not lead from me working in my spare time doing what/how I want.

seivan6• 13 years ago

If you have time to peddling your diversify book, write angry tweets, go to conferences and do podcasts. You have time to write code. That is, if you're a software engineer (the people who use Github mainly)

zem• 13 years ago

what makes you think coglan and dryden are speaking on behalf of themselves, and not on behalf of all the people who don't have the time and luxury to write code, and are being unfairly and systemically penalised for it?

thenerdfiles3• 13 years ago

Your Website is where your CV goes.

Whether it (your CV link, internally — extracts data from github? — or externally) points to your github profile or not is your decision.

Why is this still being discussed ?

Websites, people. Websites.

thenerdfiles3• 13 years ago

In fact, I'd go so far as to say (just to see what happens to this industry): On all these "job posting" sites, [Your Website] should be a Required Field for Web Developers. Period.

Show me that you take the time to register a domain, configure a host, log in to that Linux box, and build the Web.

A more pertinant question is: Why would you hire a Web Developer who has no place on the Web? It has to be Your Domain, Your Place on the Web. You. What genuine rebuttal is there against this? (There has to be a pretty Good Reason to hire a Web Developer who does not have a Website.)

Forget the "online portfolio" debate; build the Web and actually be about that.

pjmlp• 13 years ago

NDAs

aestra4• 13 years ago

No.

I will not put my real name online in a public forum. Especially not linked with my CV that has a lot of personal information on it. I am afraid of harassment and stalkers, and I really want to control the amount of personal information that gets out there. I don't have a LinkedIn for that reason. I know a lot of that can be found if someone is digging hard enough, but I am extremely uncomfortable with just anyone finding my CV with a Google search. I am really uncomfortable with my work history being public information. In theory I could make that information password protected I guess.

Does it limit me? Probably.

My ideal, if you search for my name in a search engine and NOTHING comes back.

throwawaykf• 13 years ago

I would advise the author not to worry about this.

I recently went through a job change, and to enhance my chances, I spruced up my Github profile, and put a link to it at the top of my resume. It's not the most active profile, but all the work there are wholly self-initiated projects, all of which tackle some interesting, often original problem. One of the projects randomly ended up with a few stars without me posting that link anywhere. Having code out there would give me a little leg-up over the intense competition, right?

Of the dozen or so tech phone screens, not one asked about it. Only one asked me to talk about a personal project, and it was abundantly clear he had not looked at the Github link.

At least he asked. One phone screen was with a recruiter at a famous open source company, and even she had not looked at it. To be fair, it was a recruiter call and not a technical one, but I thought she'd at least acknowledged it.

Most of the phone screens turned into onsite interviews, and again, nobody even mentioned Github. Well, it did come up in one interview, where the interviewer was doing a deep dive into IP networking details, and I told him in an offhand manner that, y'know, I had code out there that did exactly what he was asking...

The companies I interviewed with ranged from a couple of startups to a bunch of US technology giants in a variety of fields, and many of them get discussed on here regularly.

My advice is, don't put too much stock in your Github profile to help your job prospects. For whatever reasons, maybe the same as TFA's, practically nobody cares. Instead, invest in practicing the same old Google/Amazon/Facebook whiteboard-a-problem style that everybody and their grandmother uses, even if the work involved is nowhere near the kind of work (some people at) Google/Amazon/Facebook do.

fexl2• 13 years ago

As a personal anecdote, one recruiter from a well-known organization did mention my Github page as an indication of drive and initiative, but it was by no means a deciding factor. Just another piece of evidence on top of a lot of other things.

bereft_orange• 13 years ago

OSS/GitHub is what let me crack into the industry without having a CS degree or particularly good contacts. I started learning to code a year or two ago, then started contributing to open source and now I have a pretty solid track record on interesting projects that's helped me get some interest and interviews. Not sure how I could have done that otherwise...

mihaifm• 13 years ago

That is, GitHub picks your most popular repos and puts those at the top. You have no say about what you consider important, or worthwhile, or interesting, or well-engineered, or valuable

Well said. This is also valid for stackoverflow, where your "top" questions are often silly ones that everyone can understand, while the ones you consider valuable are buried in anonymity. Some sort of showcase feature would be nice, in both cases.

scardine5• 13 years ago

Any resumé screening and interviewing process boils down to only 3 essential questions:

- How well can you do this work? - Will you blend in (can you endure our work environment)? - Is it easy to work with you (you are not a dick, are you)?

So get over it, everything you do online IS more real than your resumé. Why? Because we are an online company and your online reputation is more important than a single document traditionally written in a corporate mumbo-jumbo style where the author tend to exaggerate his accomplishments.

When I ask for your github profile, I'm not asking for free work - FOSS is not about free work. I want to see your pull requests. Why? Because from time to time we do pull requests, and do it not because we are good Samaritans but out of sheer greed.

We use an open source technology stack. We push it's boundaries, we find bugs, we fix bugs. We find components lacking, we implement the desired feature and contribute back. We port code from other languages or create it from scratch and open source because it is cheaper than maintaining a closed source library. Is it free work? No, it is cooperation, and it makes sense economically.

Do you have a patch accepted in a high profile FOSS project? This means:

- You are doing serious work based on FOSS stacks - You have some communication skills - You have coding skills, can write tests and documentation - You can fix bugs and implement new features

I want to see the issues you open: are they well documented, with reproducible test cases?

I want to see your stack overflow profile: do you write good questions and good answers? Because a good question is 90% of a good answer, and good answers is what our customers demand.

Do you write really odd blog posts or troll around in online forums? Sorry, I guess you will not fit our work environment.

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

GitHub is not your CV, but I think it should be on your CV. If you're an artist when you interview they usually want to see a portfolio of your work, GitHub is a pretty handy way to portfolio code for others to view.

There's many good things about it, and reasonably few downsides to trade off against, but overall if you've got a GitHub I'd be more interested in seeing that than knowing what grades you got at school 15 years ago.

icecreampain• 13 years ago

The demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed toward white men than the software industry is

What the fuck am I reading? Is this asshole author trying to inject racism into something that is inherently race-, age-, gender-, wealth- and location-agnostic? Github doesn't care who you are, what you code or in what language you code it. And yet here we are with a dumbfuck author who, for the sake of clicks, just absolutely needs to shit on white men, that have been the bane of all tech-interested non-white men since the dawn of time.

When I hire I ask for code samples first and the person's name last. Shit, I'd hire the person based purely on code, put up anywhere on the net, and an anonymous chat, conducted fucking anywhere, and only require their name and social security number when signing the contract.

Shit I'm pissed off now. Some people just can't accept that technology is the ultimate equalizer and instead have to project their white guilt into everything.

gopher12• 13 years ago

If you think the issue is about what Github "cares" about, you missed the point entirely.

The point is that those who have the free time and opportunity to contribute to OSS projects are more likely to be of some means. Given the economic realities of this country, those with some means are statistically speaking far more likely to be white males than anything else (which is confirmed by the data).

The conversation that has been occurring recently is about how having a Github profile is now becoming a de-facto must-have because hiring managers are increasingly seeing it as a shortcut filter.

It's great that you would hire someone based on code put up anywhere on the net, but that's not what people are commenting about. People are saying that Github should not become mandatory, for many reasons, among them because you're limiting your pool of candidates to those with some means.

scardine5• 13 years ago

This is a common misconception about the FOSS economy.

It is not about donation, it is about cooperation and net efficiency, and a good share of open source maintainers and contributors are very well paid to do what they do - they are not hobbyists donating weekends to the cause.

darkarmani• 13 years ago

People are saying that Github should not become mandatory, for many reasons, among them because you're limiting your pool of candidates to those with some means.

Is that a concern when hiring? Isn't the biggest concern false-positives? Hiring bad people is the worse hiring mistake. The argument around github seems to be that while the true positive rate is very high, there is also a high false negative rate (rejecting qualified people because they aren't on github). From a hiring perspective (purely arguing economics), that is an acceptable trade-off. Your upside is limited by a smaller pool of applicants (that are still qualified), but your downside is greatly smaller.

aestra4• 13 years ago

You missed the point. Nobody is projecting white guilt into anything. The author linked to another article that presents some evidence as to why women might be less inclined to contribute to OSS, and have less code that was written outside of the workplace to display to potential employers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740089

cowsandmilk• 13 years ago

(a) if someone I am interviewing has no idea what github is, that's a negative sign. this is completely unrelated to whether the person has time to contribute to projects (b) many great engineers have small forks of other projects. This shows me that: (i) they know how to find and adopt open source projects into their workflow, which will save me money (ii) when there is a bug or something that does not fit how they want to use the project, they are able to make that 15-line change or fix. (iii) if their fork is merged back into the original project, that can indicate quality of patches, ability to work with a community, explain benefits to their changes, etc.

Honestly, those skills are very valuable indicators and do not require someone to be giving up their nights and weekends to OSS.

scardine5• 13 years ago

His theory is based in the premise that most GitHub (and FOSS) contributions are made by hobbyists in their free time. This is a common misconception of the FOSS economy.

Open source is not about donation, it is about cooperation and cooperation makes economical sense for a lot of business. Yes, there are the free-riders, but they are the copycats, we are the ones setting the pace.

Startups tend to be pushing the envelope, people from all genders from all over the world are being PAID to fix bugs and implement new features during the business hours, not over weekends. I do, I'm Brazilian and not white by north American standards, so this whole "github bias" thing is BS based on a naive assumption.

mcphilip2• 13 years ago

I've been able to get through my career without LinkedIn or GitHub accounts as proof of my skills. I've pored my time and energy into the jobs I hold and hadn't gotten inspired to start contributing to OSS until just this week[1], so I have no publicly available proof of my skills. However, I can give in depth descriptions of interesting algorithms and data structures I developed and deployed related to:

1) Motion detection algorithms for security cameras in outdoor environments with a lot of ambient noise that needed to be ignored.

2) Medical informatics data model with a recommendation engine component for predicting which ICD/CPT/SNOMED code to use for optimal chance of insurance coverage.

3) R&D, implementation, and deployment of an EAV/CR [2] open schema based analytics platform using the neo4j graph database for persistence

So far I've had the luxury of only using meatspace networking to find interesting jobs to work at, but I stress over suddenly finding myself unemployed in the future and having to face the modern interviewing process with social networking activity used as a screen.

Can anyone describe how one's GitHub is used in an interview? Is a candidate with an interesting, non-trivial personal project on GitHub considered, or are candidates judged on their contribution to others' projects?

[1]Started working on a neo4j data science project involving gathering, refining, and translating film, actor, and director data into a graph data model for efficiently answering deeply recursive queries.

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%...

fecak5• 13 years ago

Recruiter here. I've seen GitHub used in interviews where the interviewer may look at the code before the interview, and then bring up the repo during the interview to discuss it. This is usually to challenge why certain decisions were made, what could have been done differently, etc.

It isn't much different than how a conversation would go after a live coding exercise to review the work, with the exception that the candidate in the case of a prior GitHub work will have had the advantage to clean things up and perhaps has gone through several iterations already.

adeaver2• 13 years ago

Except in a live coding exercise most people are trying to be efficient or 'to it right' and paying attention to what they are doing and how.

I realize this is anecdotal, but 95% of the public code in my git repo is stuff I did as fun. I didn't care about being right, or care about memory issues or being thread safe or anything other than 'I wonder if...'

In that instance, and I suspect a lot of other people public where they aren't contributing to something using the repo code as a talking point is counter-productive.

Why did I do it that way? Because I wanted to see what would happen.

pa5tabear• 13 years ago

Where can I learn more about #1? Sounds very interesting.

mcphilip2• 13 years ago

Glad you're interested! I just started on it and need a couple days to hit the poc milestone and then write up a guide for it. Shoot me an email to the address listed in my profile and I'll ping you when it's ready later this weekend.

kstop• 13 years ago

Also why, after flirting with the idea for one hiring cycle, I stopped asking people if they had Stack Overflow accounts. Yes, if they had one, it provided useful information about their interests and communication ability. But it has a demographic skew that could have led me to rejecting other candidates unfairly.

That said, my own presence on Github is pretty anemic, so maybe that's another form of bias!

ChikkaChiChi• 13 years ago

Github isn't necessarily a new concept nor is submitting links to code sample repositories as part of a programmer's 'portfolio'

Forgive my naiveté, but why is this a topic of debate now? Did something radically change? Weren't you all doing this before Github existed?

otikik2• 13 years ago

I got my current job precisely because of what I have on Github. I was never asked for a CV. The people in that company were already using some of my OSS libraries before I arrived.

Today someone told me to review someone else's CV. My last comment was: "This CV does not mention a github account. This either means that this person does not have it or that he doesn't think of it as relevant enough to be on his CV". It was not a deciding factor, but it was listed on the "cons".

peterwwillis• 13 years ago

Two different kinds of open source projects are relevant to a resume. Group projects, and individual projects. A hiring manager will want to see both. If you only have an individual project, it's still better than nothing, and there is no color/gender/economic barrier to just writing code for yourself and uploading it to GitHub.

I had joined several group projects, and started one of my own, back when I was first getting into the job market. It helped a lot to tell any employer that you had been fiddling with this new-fangled "Linux" and "Apache" and "MySQL" stuff for years, versus the older Unix guys who had been using the same industry tech for 10 years. Really, open source was just like a new fad to older hiring types, and knowing something about it meant you had a different mindset.

But now everybody uses GitHub and it means jack shit.

fecak5• 13 years ago

Actually, GitHub is just a supplemental CV. A potentially positive indicator, that among many others (including a CV itself) will be part of the body of work to determine a candidate's qualifications.

Those in hiring positions need to use various indicators of what would make someone a good hire. For most of history in the tech world, this simply meant a standard resume/CV, followed by a phone screen and then an interview where the candidate may be asked whatever questions are deemed relevant by the interviewer. Could be tests, exercises, etc - depends on who you were talking to.

Fast forward to today, where we have more ways that a candidate may show 'indicators' of talent. What about participation in user groups and meetups? Anyone can go to these things, but people who choose to go to them may have a bit more curiosity or interest (and admittedly free time) than those that don't, and that curiosity often goes hand in hand with talent. Not always, but again it is one indicator.

A healthy Stack Overflow reputation score might be another indicator. People who know nothing about programming probably won't be able to rake up major points there.

What if someone wrote a book about a technology? Another indicator probably, and if the book became a best-seller that would be even a stronger indicator since others are judging the material as worthy of their money.

As the author points out, all of these things take time, and many in the industry don't have that kind of free time. Understood.

Experience working at a known entity with a high barrier to entry is another indicator. We know that if someone passed the grueling interview process at certain firms, chances are they will get past our process as well. Another positive indicator.

There will also be some false positives. Candidates that belong to several meetups and have very active GitHubs may not be able to code.

Someone who has never heard of GitHub (or say Node.js or Mongo or whatever may be current and newsworthy at the time) will probably be given a negative indicator Would you consider hiring someone who had never heard of these things? Perhaps not.

Candidates without families that we might expect to have more free time may not choose to spend it at meetups and building GitHub repos either. I don't think we should immediately assume that they are less qualified than the ones that do, but I don't think any will assume they are more qualified.

The author says "you can't judge code without talking to its author". Perhaps you can, but I don't think anybody is necessarily suggesting that you should. No one is hiring candidates based on their GitHub activity alone without interviews, just like no one is hiring anyone based on their CV alone without interviews.

Can we just agree that all of these positive indicators are just indicators? As long as we don't use the absence of them as a negative indicator (as a measure of fairness to those who lack the time or desire), we are not doing anyone a disservice.

ak217• 13 years ago

This post is horribly misguided to the point of being malicious.

Nobody is using Github as their only hiring filter.

On the other hand, Github is just about the best generic indicator of useful contributions of a coder back to society: visible code that someone else found useful. If someone wants to provide whomever is interested with more custom evidence of their work, that's great, and there is a way to link to your homepage for that. But Github stats do not lie, and the constrained profile format is a feature, not a bug.

mkramlich3• 13 years ago

I found it interesting that the OA OA concluded that it biased to white men. I concluded something a little different.

I concluded it biases to: folks who most have the free time and the mindset and the kind of desperateness to be doing it. Or income-increasing ambition. (Like the kind that's strongest when you're unemployed or under-employed.) Therefore, it biases (again, only statistically) to young males around college or high school age. Most likely living in their parent's house, or in a dorm, or perhaps out in their own place but without a spouse, kids, sick family members, or any significant hobbies other than computers. And without a long established work history "out in the real world" and thus lots of fellow coworkers/clients/managers to help keep them fully employed out in that pesky meatspace. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing necessarily. Or that this pattern is universal and without exception. I'm just saying this is the pattern I see in the majority of cases. I didn't sense any inherent pro-white bias, or something pro-male. With avatar icons and code commits and pull requests the Internet truly doesn't know or care whether you're a dog. (Only whether you're a smart enough dog that can interact and deliver.) It was just pro-... a certain set of qualities. If a certain demographic is more likely to have those qualities, then, that demographic will be disproportionately present and active there on GitHub. It's not a conspiracy, just the physics and economics of it.

And there's nothing necessarily wrong with it. But it's important to realize it's at play. And to neither blindly assume that anyone without a GitHub presence, or an active one, or large one, is somehow incompetent/unqualified at software engineering. Or that everybody active on GitHub is a young white male in their parent's basement. Instead, treat each person as an individual. And realize that the entire world hasn't fully converted over to your wonderful new "rule of thumb" about hiring. Yet. And perhaps never will. And that too is not necessarily a bad thing.

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

GitHub isn't a CV, but it serves as a portfolio or set of work samples.

This has traditionally been important in hiring people for creative work, though prior to GitHub and similar sites there wasn't necessarily a single particularly good/common way for this to be done in the software development field.

nathan_long2• 13 years ago

Can you name any job qualification which does not put some groups at a disadvantage?

I want to be fair, but "do you have work you can show me?" is about as close to ideal as I can think of.

steveklabnik2• 13 years ago

It's not that: it's that without acknowledging the bias, the 'meritocracy' philosophy suggests that those who do OSS are the best at what they do, which is not necessarily true.

nathan_long2• 13 years ago

No, but they are those most easily demonstrably good at what they do.

I mean, if you had a Ruby job opening and you got applications from Aaron Patterson and 20 other people, would it be unfair to put Patterson's application at the top?

There might be another applicant as good, but 1) you have to look harder and 2) you can't really tell until after you've hired them.

Picking a sure thing over a gamble is pretty understandable.

Millennium• 13 years ago

GitHub isn't a CV: it's a portfolio. That can be incredibly valuable in the hiring process, if it is used properly, but it is not the be-all and end-all of hiring. The article is right as far as this goes.

I cannot say that I agree with much of the rest of the article, and I agree with even less of the article on which it is based. But summarily rejecting non-GitHub candidates really is a bad idea.

dreamdu5t• 13 years ago

Tell that to all the job offers in my inbox via github projects.

steveklabnik2• 13 years ago

That's irrelevant to the point of the article.

zodiac• 13 years ago

The article is mixing two conceptually distinct points: that using github instead of CVs produces false negatives, and that it produces false positives.

It produces false negatives because lots of people who are good coders and who deserve to be hired don't have impressive github accounts for various legitimate reasons. I completely agree with this point.

However, to employers, false negatives are not that big of a problem. In some sense it's morally unfair that I exclude so many people who "deserve" the job, but if in the end I land a satisfactory candidate, I'm happy.

So to employers, the real question is, does github produce false positives? If my screening practice (I think we all agree that githubs and resumes should be used mainly as a screening step) is to ask for githubs instead of CVs, do I let better candidates through? If you read the article carefully, there is very little evidence presented for this; the author mostly argues that using github produces false negatives or weak signals.

tokenrove• 13 years ago

The argument that only the well-to-do contribute to OSS is bullshit, although I haven't looked at the data. Perhaps on a global scale, but within the gamut of rich and poor in North America, my own anecdata on the matter is just the opposite.

Github-as-the-new-resume is galling for plenty of other reasons.

Why GitHub is not your CV

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