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Comment by poorman | Hacker News Reader

Depends where you try to work. Most employers are only going to care about how sell yourself as a potential asset to their company. In the end, the only thing that matters is your ability to perform your job.

PS. I have a *friend who took 6 years to graduate with a BA in CS and now works for an awesome startup, that also employees some great programmers who never went to college.

PPS. If you're in CS create a GitHub account to act as your portfolio. Work on some projects in college; that way you have something to show the employer when they ask "So what have you done?".

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> PPS. If you're in CS create a GitHub account to act as your portfolio.

this is totally unnecessary.

no reasonable engineer that is asked to interview you will look at your github, or care if you have one.

Disagree. Especially with entry level positions, it's a real nice bonus for me when I'm reviewing applicants. It gives me something to look for when there's no work experience to try to craft what this person has worked on.

> no reasonable engineer that is asked to interview you will look at your github, or care if you have one.

yeah gonna have to disagree on this. I'm an engineer and work for a BigCo Enterprisey company and while it's not necessary, if you have a GH account, it makes my job easier when I interview you. Of course if you write terrible code, then the GH account probably is not the best thing to have. But other than that, I can't see a reason why not to have one. If you have one, I definitely look at it and I consider engineers who have one higher than those that don't. Doesn't mean that I won't rate you favorably if you really know what you're talking about, but it doesn't hurt.

> But other than that, I can't see a reason why not to have one.

you are assuming that

* they want to write code outside of working hours

* they will put the same level of attention into the code they write outside of work as they do the code they write at work

* they want the code they write outside of work to be open source

failing to do any or all of these things, or doing any or all of these things, should not affect a candidates impression on you.

Of course it should.

Do you really not see the difference between being able to look at someone's code and trying to guess what it might look like via lame whiteboard implementations of basic algorithms?

Well said "chillaxtian"!

I vastly prefer to see portfolio work, and when I assist in screening resumes, I always look at the people with portfolios first: they provide the most signal. How does your code look? How do you interact with others?

When I'm doing deeper interviews, I check the portfolio as well: what is the specialty and interest of the person? What are they up to? Do I want to work with this person?

At the end of the day, we're both human beings, and we have to get along at work. I don't want to be in a bad relationship. So I look at, and prefer resumes that give me the most information to this end.

Other people do it differently.

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