I'm not shocked that nobody looks at your GitHub. Reading other people's code takes time and energy that a lot of people aren't going to spend if they have a ton of candidates to sift through.
Get a relationship, however minimal, with an inside contact, who shows his boss your code or conference presentation or whatever, he calls you and schedules an interview, then HR is told to find two bodies off the street to interview to make the hiring decision look good.
Their code doesn't get read. I'm always kinda pissed when I'm brought in for that kind of interview and I figure out I'm just a placeholder. I've never said anything unpleasant but I have mostly politely walked out of interviews like that. Once its clear they just needed a checkbox and my showing up was the checkbox, theres no point in continuing. This is why sometimes you get callbacks for the craziest jobs you can imagine, like seriously, what in my carefully resume made you think I wanted to program FORTRAN exactly? You're hiring someone who's 90% of the time a graphics artist and all I know about photoshop is I'm familiar with the name? You need a .net programmer and what in my resume made you think that was me, let me know so I can burn it off the page with fire? Or there's a massive experience or salary mismatch, etc.
Every CodingHorror post and list of hiring tips demands a GitHub profile, with the implication that it had better contain useful, quality code. (And with a bit of a threat that you'd better not put any hacked-together, one-off project in there, even though everyone has some.)
That's good, I see the value of it, and I also understand why interviewers don't want to read it. But new devs have every right to be annoyed when the industry-standard wisdom says that you have to have a thing which is never used.
(The real answer is probably "New devs, get ready for the interview gamut. Experienced devs, call a contact and have a GitHub profile." But somehow that never comes up.)
I think it's just that they have a process built up over time like "interview process.doc" and the devs don't want to make any waves going off script
Bad hires inflict huge costs up front, in wasted interview opportunities and startup costs and lost training time and morale hits and a dozen other things. "Fire fast" is popular advice because it's better than firing slow, not because unsuccessful hires are a sustainable event.
A company, that advertised here on the last "Who's Hiring" sent me a code project.
Wasn't quite enough to be 'you're doing a sprint item for us', but merited decent effort:
- write a log monitoring console program that consumes an actively written to file
- parse out specific parts of the log and aggregate them every 15s, display summary data
- generate 'alert' notification when log messages/second (over the last two minutes rolling average) exceeds a threshold
- remove notification when fall back under this limit
- continue to generate stats while doing so
- develop some unit tests to demonstrate alert logic
This is, at least to me, _several_ hours of decent work. Certainly was nearly 500 lines of code.
Submitted.
"Thanks for this. We'll review."
Last I ever heard.
Thanks.
By all means, please do "out" this company. Preferably as a response their next "Who's Hiring?" posting.
You'll be doing not only your fellow developers a huge favor, but the guilty party as well. Being as they need to get their heads around the fact that it's not in their interest to keep pulling off bad behavior like this -- and if they need a good dose of public shaming for the message to sink in, then so be it.