Ask HN: What to look for in a job candidate's GitHub profile | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What to look for in a job candidate's GitHub profile

9 pointsnoaclpo9 comments

What do you look for when evaluating a job candidate's Github profile? What do you value most? What warning signs do you watch out for? Do you skim their activity log or try to analyze commits in depth?

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It's quite hard to gather anything of importance. You have to remember that some of the best candidates work full time on their company's private repos. If they do have their own projects, they might be using a diff VCS. Either way, there are too many variables to make a github have any warning signs, but it's a good data source along with everything else to get a better idea of a candidates background.

* Do they have a github profile?

* Have a conversation about what is in it.

Don't expect a github profile to be professional class code. Sometimes it is just a playground.

So to me it is just one more data source to learn about a candidate.

Considering how easy it is to fake commits with Git, Mercurial, and maybe others I wouldn't trust must of the information provided in a GitHub profile. You might get a vague idea of the contributions to other projects and the preferences of the coder for coding standards, language, tooling, and silly things like that but don't expect anything serious, as other user commented: some of the best candidates work full time on their company's private repositories. I would also add the fact that some companies have clause in their contracts stating that all code written by the employee during his free time (aka. side projects) is to be owned by the company, I had this clause in my contracts and that is why my GitHub account only hosts experimental projects, nothing serious that I would want an employer to consider in order to offer a position in their company.

I was the original programmer at my startup. 7 years later I'm the chief architect. I've had very little time to contribute to open source projects. Any kind of creativity itch I have I can funnel into our product somehow. It would be very upsetting to me if someone got a bad vibe from my low activity on github.

You're approaching hiring from the wrong angle. You're looking at evidence and letting that decide what you hiring criteria should be, when what you should be doing is the exact opposite.

Start with writing a set of criteria for the role you want to hire and then measure the evidence against that. So for example if you criteria is "writes well commented code" you could use the candidate's code on github for evidence to support that (although a better approach would be to evaluate a work-sample test).

I'm not sure I get what all the cynicism is about. Github can be really helpful for figuring out where someone's strengths lie.

If they are really proud of what they've done, I would want to look at a few sample projects.

If they can explain clearly what their code does, I might even forego a code test. After all, if you aren't paying for the test, you're just wasting their time. There are lots of candidates who won't do an unpaid code test because the subject matter is usually really boring, and they would rather work on something meaningful.

I suppose anything can be faked, so I would be asking myself if their story matches what's on the Github profile. If it doesn't, then what you're seeing is probably fake. If it does, you can use it as a springboard to ask more questions.

If they have a project that they list on their resume that is also on their github, then take a quick look. Just enough to decide if you can ask them questions without getting their input first.

Also, if they list a bunch of languages, but they don't have examples in those languages, then have questions about that. (there aren't very many polyglot shops)

Remember, to become a rockstar cpp programmer https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar

I don't look at GitHub profiles unless a candidate specifically mentions something they are proud of. In that case, I scan the project they are proud of with the most charitable outlook I can.

Most of the best developers I know either have no GitHub profile or have profiles that are full of noodling that is not indicative of their output.

Honestly, it should only matter for New Grad positions. Why would it be relevant beyond the new grad position?

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