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Comment by pkrumins | Hacker News Reader

Don't ask the candidates for silly resumes. Ask for their github repos and blogs. I mean who cares what your education, background, and previous job experience is? All of that is irrelevant. What matters is the code they have written. I want to see the code. The best developers will have thriving github repos and they'll be enthusiastic to write about what they are coding on their blogs. The perfect job application form has to have just two fields `Github URL: [.........]` and `Blog URL: [.........]`. Everything else is irrelevant. That's how I am going to hire.

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I generally agree that it matters more what you've actually done or created, not what you say on a resume.

But specifically when it comes to asking for the Github url (or the like): that assumes that the code they have worked on is open source. There are plenty of good hires out there that may not have participated in open source but still have plenty of code they've created. I think asking for a public repo is too heavily weighted towards open-source wonks.

I'm content asking the candidate to point me to something they've created. I work on webapps so presumably for the candidate that would be a public facing website. And then i study it. And then I grill them hard on the details of their implementation.

This is a good point but at the same point not many employers have this strategy so I suspect there is plenty of underemployment among people writing open source given the level of skill. The hiring strategy that pkrumins advocates seems pretty sensible for a business that is already deeply familiar with the open source world.

I don't really see much point in writing open source software - either I keep it to myself (isn't really good enough to release, or only designed to solve my problem) or I spend my time doing contract work.

In addition I find git to be fostering bad habbits (no default push of private branches), and github to be an abomination (stuff that relates to my code and source control should not be accessed in a 3th party website, but in the tool itself).

The point of releasing open source software for me is that I am contributing in my own small way to the state of human technological progress and to the massive canon of free software that I benefit from every day. Plus it's exhilarating to see other people become as excited about the code I've written as I was when I wrote it!

What pretentious nonsense. Most of the best programmers are working on commercial or government code that they aren't allowed to share, or sometimes even discuss.

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