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Comment by peterhi | Hacker News Reader

Unless I have copious free time (and I don't) then I'm not going to browse 130 Github repositories and wouldn't known from Adam if they are forks or not (unless they were all created close together). Thus I cannot trust the metrics from them either

LinkedIn, blogs - not exactly reliable sources of information given they are what you are saying about yourself. We've had candidates list the number of Instagram likes they had as if it proved anything. Sold some t-shirts on Cafepress, wow you must be an incredible developer / entrepreneur then

I have seen some amazing code in a Github repository that the candidate couldn't explain to me. I suspect it was a joint project that someone else was a major contributor to

So yes I will want to verify / test your abilities

But personally I read a CV and then talk to the candidate. Worked well so far

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This is super interesting response.

Because today's research on code plagiarism is huge (this mean years spent in code re-engineering by really clever people), and I could argue you could use just one employee to develop a profile crawler and validation workflow, isn't so? I am saying you could automate the browsing and just discard Adam if he's below your threshold.

Thank you for your reply.

Would you say then an online persona doesn’t matter much? I think about this a bit as an undergraduate hoping to land a gig in a few years. I could care less about having a technical blog or a tailored Github/Gitlab account contributing to open source or having an LinkedIn account, I just want to build cool stuff and become a good programmer and not have to worry about showcasing that on the internet like a clown in a circus. But on the other hand, it seems like companies look for that kind of stuff or at least give you the upper hand for it.

LinkedIn is just an online CV for recruiters to find you by. The one you submit should be tailored to the job you are applying for

The CV that lands on my desk will determine if you get called for an interview. One or two sides of A4 is all you need. We only look at Github if the CV is interesting enough

If your CV says 'I have a CS degree' rather than 'I am a programmer' then I'm not going to look any further. I have employed excellent programmers this way. Only one of them had a Github account. None wrote blogs. Didn't even look at LinkedIn

Github can be interesting to see what languages you work in and what topics you found interesting when satisfying your own needs. But I will only look if the CV makes me think that it will be interesting

Github, LinkedIn and blog posts are merely supporting documents for your CV. If the CV sucks then it goes no further

An online persona is like client-side data validation. It's a nice to have, but it cannot be trusted. You should always have server-side validation anyway. That's what tests/assignments/interviews are for.

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