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Comment by monster_group | Hacker News Reader

General question - Do companies look at candidate's github? I have never had any company even care to ask what I have on github. Isn't it all about whiteboard coding interview? If I don't do well on coding interview, it doesn't matter what I have on github. At least that's been my experience. I am curious to know others' experience in this regard.

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I do, but only if you seemed like you mucked up part of the interview. I’ll go check Github, spend 2-3 minutes googling the source code to see if you copied/pasted or if it’s yours.

I’ve passed a few candidates who bombed technical interview via phone because Github showed they know what they’re doing & just had an off day.

Granted, I’m sure most do not do that but technical recruiting is so expensive so spending 5-10 mins on a candidate I already spent 30 mins with is a drop in the bucket if it gets me even 1-2 more hires who would’ve slipped through the cracks.

I have a similar practice. One of the best engineers I ever hired bombed the tech interview, and I went poking in his github. Found a project that seemed pretty neat and reached out the candidate with an email like:

"Hey, I realized we didn't get a chance the other day to go over something you wrote independent of the hiring pressure. Would you mind a call where we talk about $project?"

Since that candidate was much more comfortable talking about their own project, the interview went great. I learned a little rust, and we got a good engineer :)

Probably depends a lot on your location and size/value of the company you apply at.

In Europe, at the top big companies that pay good, GitHub profiles don't matter much. They get so many applications and hiring managers are so busy that they barely get enough time to read your resume thoroughly before the interview let alone have any time to look at your GitHub.

HR that makes the initial screening has no idea about code so candidate selection is mostly based on graduating from a prestigious University or work experience at other prestigious company so having a stellar GitHub profile won't do anything to get your foot in the door but it might sway the final decision in your favor later on in the process when managers have more time to decide.

For junior, particularly first job, candidates their GitHub (if they have one) is something I look at very closely.

They get points for knowing what a VCS is, points for creating an account, having anything on it, more if the stuff is any good, and they also get points for community activity like filing issues.

It really establishes whether the candidate has ever touched the technology and it shows initiative. There are other ways they can show this but GitHub is really easy. I find it generally more informative than whiteboards which I have rarely ever done.

For more senior candidates, I still look, still like to see at least a little activity (for instance, do you keep an eye on the repos of critical dependencies for your current project?), but generally there is less differentiation unless there is something truly impressive.

I haven't ever penalized a candidate for the low quantity or quality of what they put there. I think it would be stifling. For me I just collect the positives (unless there is anything truly alarming, which I've never encountered).

I have seen it being looked at out if interest when the candidate provides a link to their GitHub. The candidate would never even know.

The one thing seeing that happen taught me is to curate my public repos very carefully and leave the rest private.

Assume they are willing to click through to about 2 ~ 3 repos max and attempt to read the readme if there is one and find some samples of code if they can. That's how I've seen it play out.

To that end, if you have 30 repos and they just happen to click through to a React tutorial you did that contains barely any code and it's obviously not original the result is they just kinda wind up losing interest.

If, on the other hand, you have a reasonably well documented project with hundreds of commits against it that's original work it stands out.

I hear that companies do. I'm a hiring manager, and I may sometimes click if there's a link in the resume. With me, it can give you bonus points, but not really points against you. Since I believe that there's many developers who do awesome at work, stuff I'll never be able to see on GitHub either, so it'd not be fair. I consider myself a decent hire, yet my own GitHub is quite sparse. (Though, on the other hand, then why include it on your resume. If instead I have to google or duckduckgo for it, well, that's on me then.)

As someone who was involved with hiring for a small company (a dozen employees): I've looked at candidate's github accounts. It lets me have an idea of where they're at, what interests they have. If they're doing something weird like not properly handling passwords then I can bring that up & see if they take it personally or not

I always look at their github to see if it has interesting things.

I want to see how they write code and (hopefully) how they release software. That's either going to come from released code, a coding interview, or some kind of coding assignment. I'd much rather see their work on something they're passionate about and have had time to polish to their own satisfaction, so github is the best case scenario.

It's also nice to talk with them about their github projects during the interview. It puts them more at ease and on familiar ground so that we can really dig deep into their software development and design philosophies. The less pressured and anxious they feel, the better.

Ideally, I hope to find that they've arranged their profile page to show their best work first so that I don't have to go digging through it, but that's not something I'd hold against them; it just means that I might miss their best work.

I'm fairly prolific on gitlab/github and have both clearly marked on my resume, but I've never had an instance of my portfolio being an important factor in a job application process. Based on my personal experience I have never once found Github to be worth it in terms of career advancement, it's more for personal fulfilment and interest. My guess is that unless you are a leading star in your field it's pretty irrelevant. That said, when screening/interviewing candidates I've often looked at their Github if they have one and that's definitely been a deciding factor for me, but I can't say that's something I've encountered from others in the industry.

I definitely do, but only in preparing for the first interview. Your top bet through my front door is a tidy 1-2 page CV, fronted by a two paragraph intro that shows me your motivation and fit for the position, preferably in a very personal way.

I definitely have when interviewing candidates.

One curious guy had repos with seemingly auto generated daily commits. Just text files, no code. It may have been class notes I guess, but it looked suspicious I reccommended not hiring. Company hired him. He was awful and had to be let go after a few months.

I seem to get a lot of recruiters who use databases that scraped GitHub and find me.

When my company was a startup and we had very high hiring expectations we certainly looked for some high quality work on github.

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