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Comment by throwawayosiu1 | Hacker News Reader

Very recently, a close friend was looking for a job (as a junior dev - focused on web). After applying and getting rejected, we decided to try a different approach - he basically gave up and decided to the following:

1) added buzz keywords in his resume

2) hosted an instance of gitlab and took various open source projects (stuff that was not popular, but had enough polish), modified them and uploaded them.

After a week, he was able to land multiple interviews. While he did get called out once, almost all engineers/non-tech hr didn't bother calling his bluff.

I am not suggesting that you should lie on your resume or steal open source projects, just that depending on one factor (like github, or resume, or white boards) is futile and that tech hiring in general is broken.

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> While he did get called out once, almost all engineers/non-tech hr didn't bother calling his bluff.

I see plenty of GitHub profiles that are filled with forked/starred projects from other people, and nothing of substance.

I don't bring it to the candidate because it is worthless and there are more interesting things to talk about. But that doesn't mean I didn't see it ;)

Actually I have never once in my life see a good github profile.

I don't like this notion of having a "good" GitHub profile. GitHub started off as an easy place for me to dump code, no matter how crappy. Dumb ideas, samples from learning, incomplete experiments, whatevs.

Then I noticed that I had started censoring my code krapola. I was sepf conscious about the code I was making visible, as I didn't want to be judged. Then I decided that lame. Now I shamelessly put garbage on GitHub, too.

Coding poorly & having fun trumps curating a collection fancy schmancy artisinal repos. And I've also learned that my good code often lives at work, and never makes it to GitHub.

I'm the same way. I removed a lot of old stuff from my early days because I was afraid I was going to be judged on it. Now I don't care. GitHub is my dumping ground for everything. I start a new project almost every time I want to learn a specific thing so I have lots of incomplete projects on there simply because I move on once I learned the goal task.

Unfortunately like most people all the clean and polished code lives in private work repos. All those things I learned from the unfinished repos is being used in work code. Oh well.

I wonder if it's worth maintaining two accounts. A professional-oriented curated one could be valuable in some job hunts.

I have a self-hosted Gogs instance for all the stuff that I want private (either because it's shit or because it's really personal information that I don't want to put on anyone else's computer, including GitHub's).

To explain to both of you:

Noone gives a f* about the code you have in your github. Noone will read it ever.

When I say a "good" profile. That means you put a link in your resume to ONE project you want to show. The landing page is a README with a paragraph to explain what is the app, a quick start, and a few screenshots.

If you've got a link to the website (or desktop installer) AND there are a few icons of external integrations in travis-ci/appveyor/unittestthing/packager then your repo is absolute perfection. =)

> I see plenty of GitHub profiles that are filled with forked/starred projects from other people, and nothing of substance.

Though I haven't interviewed candidates for a long time, I happen to be curious about somebody from time to time. The very first thing I do watching their GitHub profiles is to filter-out all the forks, only leaving "sources" (how GitHub calls them).

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