Hacker News Reader

Comment by apple4ever | Hacker News Reader

You must be applying to the wrong companies then. I just got done doing interviews, and I looked at what the second round candidates had available on GitHub and their personal site, and the one who got the job had about 5 projects that were impressive.

Good employers care. I care. Its not signaling. Its important.

View on HN

>Good employers care. I care. Its not signaling. Its important.

It's not important. There are plenty of good companies who don't do these things that manage to pay developers $100k salaries. They may assess in other ways, but it's not the only signal.

It's only important to you. You choose what you want to see in candidates. You need buy-in from the candidates that your process is conducive to a good environment, good code, and good delivery. In turn, you cultivate a team who share something in common, and the team gets along well and makes good code.

It's people finding like-minded people -- the same social movements that are in every other profession. There's nothing wrong with it, but there's currently no prevailing right or wrong way to do it, otherwise that would be the technical interview.

Practically, development is still in demand. So if I get rejected, I can go apply some place else. That's why it's not important.

Maybe your pay is slightly above those other companies, but is a marginal pay increase really worth all of the extra effort? That's up to the developer. But the employers that don't use this criteria are not non-good employers.

For me, a marginal pay increase is only a differentiator when comparing two otherwise equally ranked opportunities. I once left a 300k job to take a 180k job on the basis of work content, cultural fit, and optionality. But, I make most of my money by holding XMR, so the difference in pay doesn't determine my quality of life - nor my ability to exercise charity - which is, practically, the same thing.

Best company I worked at looked at my personal site and Github, albeit briefly, ahead of time and didn't ask much if anything about it (IIRC). They asked more peer-level questions. Pretty casual. As my first job out of college they didn't expect much from me but later told me the other devs were impressed. Best group of devs I've ever worked with. All of them were pretty smart, wrote nice code, comments, knew how to use version control, and configuration management. They wrote their own JS framework that interfaced with a Java backend. I would later realize (in retrospect) this code was really well written and maintained.

Worst company I worked (work) for (but pays well) had me answer a few questions on a whiteboard. One of which was 'not even wrong' (the answer was: "HTML5 gave us the tag to replace ").

They were desperate for bodies after a bunch of people left. They also partake in the usual H1B/contractor games and wonder why they have shit code. Meh, my project is going well. If they have me work on their main .NET monstrosity though, I'll quit. Haha, jokes on them.

> the answer was: "HTML5 gave us the tag to replace "

i bet the question was: "what has HTML5 done for us?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ

Yes, it was. And then she followed up more specifically with, "what we can use instead of the tag?"

I said, "CSS, but it doesn't have much to do with HTML5's features."

It's not important. You're skipping out on a large pool of fantastic candidates who have families and hobbies outside of work. People who save their best programming effort for their job. Relying on GitHub / side projects as a barrier to entry is ridiculous to me.

But why is it important to you? Do you think the other candidates are couldn't, or didn't, produce similarly impressive code?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com