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Comment by Thorentis | Hacker News Reader

Is it true you still need an "open source coding resume" by mid-career stage? I can understand using that to give you an advantage for entry-level roles, but by "mid-career" shouldn't your experience and achievements in past roles speak for itself? Or do companies still want to see engineers spending their spare time doing unpaid coding? By mid-career, many people have families to support, that they also would like to spend time with in their down time. Surely this is considered during the hiring process? I don't think I would want to work somewhere that expects a married with kids mid-level engineer to spend their weekends and nights contributing to open source, just to land their next job.

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If your resume is a "yes" at first read, your GitHub projects won't matter.

Likewise, if your resume experience is a "no", they're not going to visit GitHub to change their minds.

Where it starts to matter is if your resume is a "maybe" on first read. If they're not quite sure if your experience is what they're looking for, they might make an effort to probe around your GitHub profile for extra information. Having even a few good commits easily accessible on GitHub can be enough to tip the scales to "yes" and move candidates on to the next stage in the interview.

> I don't think I would want to work somewhere that expects a married with kids mid-level engineer to spend their weekends and nights contributing to open source, just to land their next job.

It's a mistake to think that's it's mandatory. I've never met a real-world hiring manager who thinks that GitHub profiles are a requirement for good candidates.

Likewise, it's a mistake when people delay their job search or applications to build up a portfolio of side projects first. Realistically, most companies are never going to check your GitHub profile in the first place.

A lot of the time you’re not reviewed in isolation. There is a stack of resumes and 5 of them are a yes, but there’s a budget for 2. Or you have roughly the same experience but demand a bit more money.

In all of those cases having a real provable thing they can anchor their decision on is a big win.

Anything in a resume can be suspect. Every time you describe something awesome you did at a previous job, there is “another side” - for example you built this microservice that scales this problematic thing and everyone was happy, but after you left there is not enough docs and now people are struggling to maintain it. Or you were great at code review and everyone really appreciated your input, but it turns out they were shy and didn’t tell it to your face, but complained about you behind your back.

Anyway open source work is a very clear way for someone evaluating you to have a concrete data point. It might not be accurate, but the interviewer will often perceive it as such. The old “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” kind of mentality.

But its more than that. People usually make it as a ”will this achieve my goals” kind of thing. You don’t do open source _just_ so you’ll get an additional interview. You do OS because you’re helping the global human understanding, you’re becoming a better, more helpful and knowledgeable dev, and because it’s your passion.

And if you are those things, it’s a great sign for the interviewer that you can be a good fit for almost any dev position.

This is not really my experience, having worked at a number of companies. Everyone's desperate to hire as many good engineers as they can find, there's rarely a week when two qualified candidates walk in the door. Maybe other job markets are worse, but IMO the real curse is that most resumes get only a cursory glance for buzzwords before a call is made.

> Realistically, most companies are never going to check your GitHub profile in the first place

This is, in my personal experience, a sad truth.

I've been seriously looking for work for the past 6 months (thank you, Covid-19, for your disruption) and I'm surprised by the number of times I've started a phone interview with questions like: "tell me about your skills" ... has the interviewer not looked at my CV with its link to GitHub and various live projects I've done?

Yes I know engineers and interviewers are busy people with real jobs and deadlines and stuff. But I've been on that side of the table too. I've conducted plenty of interviews, online and face-to-face. Not researching the candidate before you talk to them or meet them ... that's just discourteous (in my view). Even 15 mins spent checking out the links they've supplied can give the interviewer a feel for the candidate's potential strengths and weaknesses and help the interviewer personalise the "standard" questions to better fit the candidates experiences.

Interviewing is an unpleasant task for everyone. Making the experience even a little less unpleasant can help everyone make better hiring choices at the end of the day.

has the interviewer not looked at my CV with its link to GitHub and various live projects I've done?

No one ever looks at anyone’s Github, that’s the dirty little secret of hiring. A decade ago having a Github account was a weak-to-medium strength signal. Nowadays pretty much everyone has one and most are filled with junk (I’m sure yours isn’t but no one has the time to pore over it). You would be much better off saying “I contributed features X and Y to well-known Open Source product Z” where Z is something from the job spec.

Out of the 20 interviews I had only one person mentioned seeing my GitHub profile, but I’ve got a feeling they did so because they were naive enough to still care about the humane side of the process. It was a very pleasant interview by the way.

If it’s worth it for me to spend time on a phone screen, it’s worth it to re-read the resume and click on a github link. When I have, it’s mostly been junked—-forked repos with no changes or trivial college assignments.

To be fair, how the candidate responds to "tell me about your skills" during a verbal interview is often a lot more telling than the same information on the written CV.

I don't know about other candidates, but when I'm preparing for a phone interview I'll have spent time learning about the company and will have tailored the general questions I expect the interviewer to ask me to map closer to the job spec and the company ethos. It's nice when I mention skills I've used in various projects and the interviewer knows what those projects are because they've glanced through the links supplied in my CV/application.

As an interviewer, I'd hope the applicant has done similar work. If they haven't - or give me a stock response - I'd want to spend a couple of minutes probing their response with questions about how they used those skills in their portfolio work.

Asking about the skills they've developed while building their portfolio work as a first question generally (my personal view) helps break the ice, engage us both in the conversation and make for a happier rest-of-the-interview experience.

As an interviewer, I'd hope the applicant has done similar work

Especially in this market, unless you are, you’re not a special snowflake. You need them a lot more than they need you. Why would you expect them to put in any level of work pre interview?

My last two jobs where I was coming in because they needed my set of skills and I had three offers on the table and probably would have had at least one more of I had waited, yeah the company I worked for spent as much time selling me as I did them. They made sure that they moved fast and made an offer (less than two weeks from application to offer).

But, I’ve applied for my first role at a $BigTech. I started the process near the end of April. I had my first technical interview last week and the next rounds are probably not for two weeks. Who knows how long it will take them to make a decision. I would never have accepted that turn around at smaller companies. But $BigTech doesn’t need me to rescue a failing project or process like my last two companies.

It’s more telling you about how many interviews that candidate had done just before they picked up the call with you.

I've done more than a handful of interviews as an engineering manager trying to fill team positions. I can tell you the question is not looking to find out what you've done so much as to find out who you are.

When I'm trying to fill a req I will usually get hundreds or thousands of applications, which get winnowed down to a dozen or so by the HR department, or system, or something. All of those applications have resumes that looks reasonable, so I have to whittle the stack down further to 3 or 4 prime candidates. Usually, on paper, any one of those applications look like they could perform the tasks assigned.

What I need to find out in the interview is if the applicant would fit the team, not if they could perform the task. The way you answer, they way you interact, the way you look up or look down when you're trying to recall how you solved a particular problem (phone interviews are crap, we've had good video conferencing for a decade or more), these are things I base my judgement on. These are mostly intangibles and if you've gotten as far as an interview with the hiring manager but fail to get an offer, don't assume you're not good enough. The manager might know the team are a nursery of primadonna asshats that manage to produce above average but some normie not as far up the spectrum would just quit in a week if they were thrown into that pen. It's happened.

Believe me, if you put a github account on your CV I've checked it. Also, if you haven't added one, you CV goes to the bottom of the pile. Now, tell me about what you've done.

Do you think this confirms the adage that in-person interviews succeed when the interviewer is socially attracted to the candidate, as opposed to when the candidate is merely qualified?

I have no doubt, and it explains the rice-pudding consistency of the industry.

I try consciously not to let that influence my decisions, but I'm human. I notice most of the teams I've worked on look and talk a lot like me.

> "... the way you look up or look down when you're trying to recall how you solved a particular problem"

Are you talking about NLP here?

I have always looked a projects, portfolios, etc. No exceptions. If it's on the cover letter or CV, it's the first thing I go to -- even before I've properly read the other things. Not many people have interesting projects or have spent the time to curate a good portfolio. When they do, I tend to want to interview them regardless of their CV. I realise that I am in the minority (and I think that's crazy, but whatever).

If you have some good content, then make sure you don't waste it. Some hints here:

- If you have a main project that you have contributed to, make sure to point it out. Don't make me search for it amongst a hundred abandoned projects.

-If you are not the only (or even the main) contributor on a project at this point, make sure to point out what you did work on so I can find it.

- If you have some small experiments that you are proud of, point them out to me and tell me why you are proud of it. Personally, I love things like this. For less experienced people, if it's "I did a tutorial and modified it a bit.", tell me that. But you really have to explain why that's important to you. How did it change your outlook on things?

- If you have blog posts, show me, but point out one or two that you think are relevant for the position you are applying for. I'm impressed by a hundred blog posts, but I'm not going to read them all. I will read (um... skim... sorry) one or two, though.

- The more engaging the presentation of your projects, the more likely I am to spend time looking through it. The more time I spend looking through your projects, the more likely you are to get an interview (with cushy questions about your projects!) I'm stupid. I don't understand sunk cost fallacy :-) If you intrigue me and I spend time on you, I will secretly be hoping that you pass the interview.

Disclaimer: I'm a contractor now. I haven't done any serious interviewing for about 5 years.

> Is it true you still need an "open source coding resume" by mid-career stage?

Who knows? Every company wants something different and most of them seem reluctant to provide that information up front, inexplicably. Maybe lead with “we expect to go over some of your code with you” or “we’ll be doing 2 hours of whiteboarding, but nothing above leetcode easy” or whatever. Every interview (outside certain major companies which are quite up-front about what they want) is a mystery until they spring it on you. Wish they’d fucking settle on one thing. Let’s all do open-source (would mean everyone would have to stop forbidding it, of course) or even all do leetcode. The guessing game interviews and scattershot prep requirements are draining and a waste of everyone’s time.

I think you hit the nail on the head. The various random things that can be thrown at you is incredible.

Add that to different personality requirements. Most want extroverts during the interview process but introverted after hired.

You can be a good communicator and an introvert and nail a job interview.

The hurdle for introverts is usually that they feel anxiety (some of which is normal for a job interview!) and may not come across as well as they would in a more comfortable setting.

Extroverts feel anxiety too. A job interview is a situation with an inherent power asymmetry, which is no more comforting to extroverts.

> The various random things that can be thrown at you is incredible.

From another perspective, that's a pretty apt description of a whole class of programming jobs. Maybe it's an accidental/unintended test for a thing that really matters...

Real engineering problems are solved over weeks of research, however, not binary pass-fail pop-quiz format.

You definitely don't need an "open source coding resume" at mid-career since you don't need it in an early career job hunt. You just need to LeetCode sigh

Pretty much. In mid-career you will probably need system design as well for the >L4 roles

I had a system design interview for my L4 interview @ Google, it seems pretty typical to.

Some time ago a senior recruiter at Google suggested to me that they would have waived some interviews if I had a famous open-source project on my resume.

Famous open source project > 10000+ likes.

I'll just open source my bot that gives my project 10k likes and call it a day

GitHub likes seem like such a volatile currency for competency entities.

Makes me think of this: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

> By mid-career, many people have families to support, that they also would like to spend time with in their down time.

I have never hired anyone, but anecdotally from a team lead dev who has hired a couple dozen people, that is the exact kind of thing they want to avoid.

If someone was a "star" working 90 hours a week in the past but now wants to work 40, they stop being the kind of "star" some companies want.

It's worth noting that the opposite point of view is also true: in that case, they are not the company the "ex-star" would want to work for, either.

As someone who has been in a team lead role and hiring for many years I can't imagine a more toxic viewpoint to team building.

You can find whatever type of company you want.

I find the complaining of most engineers incoherent. Until March or so, more than at any point in time, being a competent software engineer opened doors at thousands of companies. I expect we'll be back there within two years tops.

When you are looking for a job, ask the person you're talking to what expectations are. Ask the hiring manager how he or she defines success for the role. Ask every employee you speak to how much they work. You'll get your answer. Pick your employer accordingly.

ps -- at my 40-ish person startup, eng rarely work more than 45h/week. And we have plenty of parents. We do however make comparatively boring software sold to enterprises, and have trouble hiring in part because of that (imo).

That team lead (and companies with similar thinking) need to learn that obsessive/workaholic devs are not more productive.

If coding consumes your paid and free time, you're generally not cranking out new CRUD features requested by the marketing team. You're doing pet projects, learning new languages, or getting lost in bikeshedding, like writing a new JS framework because you think the current list sucks.

That means your workaholic employee is burning out on things that don't help your company, and their actual paid work is probably a distraction from what they really want to be doing.

By contrast, someone experienced with a family and/or hobbies working 40h will often do their work well and have ways to detox from work problems before getting started again the next morning.

A lot of that is my anecdata, but hiring people who want work/life balance is working so well that those are the only devs I have (14 at the moment).

I'm somewhat amused at this rejuvenation of the age-old belief that folks who have this as a hobby are somehow maladjusted and burning out.

Fascinating. I think it was this early belief in the 90s and then the dotcom boom had the superstars and then the next wave had the next superstars and it shifted. Now it's shifted back. Wonder what shifted it.

Well, to my people out there, do not fret: there are still places to work where you work with other obsessives, there are still people who look for that in each other, and after 20 years of messing with computers I can tell you it is still joyful. You can do what you love and make a lot of money doing it. And in these places no one will judge you for loving the thing you work on so much you do it for fun as well.

You've missed my point entirely, which is perhaps a communication failure on my part.

I believe there are obsessive coders who will have lots of money/fun. Some will be valuable to their employers. No company should only look for these coders, which is the policy I was originally trying to refute.

It's much, much easier to find productive 40 hr coders than productive 80 hr coders. The ones coding for 80 hrs are often perfectionists, or they believe they're immune to burnout.

You yourself seem to believe that loving something enough means you can avoid burnout. You can't.

Burnout is part of our physiology. If you lose even small amounts of sleep for long periods of time, your performance falls off a cliff. What's worse is that you don't know you're not at your best.

Look at pro gamers. They love games enough to play them all day, every day, but they still suffer at the end of a long session.

Generalizations galore on both sides? There are probably as many 40hr Devs that just want to phone it in as there are effective ones. It's possible youve learned to weed out the former but they do exist. Similarly I'm probably one of those Workaholics, but I make an active effort not to waste time. However I do work with good effective 40hr devs and I try to make sure that we are all on the same velocity. The remaining time I spend on pet projects for sure, but I do hope they are not a waste of time for someone, be it my personal growth or my company.

90 hour a week means that the person is either not sleeping enough. Sleep deprivation means you cant be performant fully. Or the person did not had a single free day in weeks while working 12 hours a day. There are the people who do stupid decision just out of being tired.

Just about the only way I have seen people work this much and not be overly tired drag was when significant bulk of time was spent socializing and playing around. Otherwise said, it was not actually work, but it was clocked in as work.

And at this point, there is enough evidence that crunch is productive for few weeks and then productivity fails.

Not sure where these numbers come from. I come from acadrmia. The expectation (and for the most part, reality) for someone in track to become a successful tenured professor is to maintain 80 hr weeks for a couple of decades if not longer. My professors maintain this still, it's how they live now. They have kids, but they had them when they're in their 40s after getting tenure. And they are not working below optimal intellectual abilities.

You would be surprised at what your mind can do if you want it to. I made the jump to tech from academia because while I was ready to do that insane work ethic I wasn't convinced that academia as it is today was worth it.

Turns out I can't just switch off this style of working though, and hence I end up working harder than I should. I'm not wasting my time though.

What I have observed though is when engineers who are in their twenties just Naturally go into an insane work ethic without mentoring on focus and time management typically waste their time. But it is possible to be 2-3x more efficient by increasing the hours you put in as long as you are smart about it. Many of the smartest people in the world do. Of course this should be a personal choice. 90 hours is a bit much though. 80 is probably the sustainable maximum for any normal human.

> 80 is probably the sustainable maximum for any normal human.

Not according to research. I know that academia features long hours. I never heard of academia as an example of efficiency through. Game industry is another hours high occupation (and the studies about crunch are from there).

Also, having kids after 40 is not exactly advisable for women. You are getting into risk category health vise.

People who work 80 hours a week and have children simply have spouse who does all childcare related work and career sacrifice (if they had career).

This was a couple lab, both professors were intense, but yes once they had a kid the husband started working from home more. But that didn't mean he worked fewer hours. We would typically take turns being on phone with him till 10 pm every day.

I'm not advocating it to anyone who hates this. I just want to say that I didn't mind it, I liked it as long as I was working on exciting things, and so did my professors and most other professors that I knew for that matter. My professors didn't have burnout or mental breakdowns, I didnt. Some of my labmates did though, and they quit.

I do not condone how my professors did things, they were abusive for sure. But that was fairly independent of the work ethic if you ask me. Most biology labs that went on to produce Nobel laureates or path breaking vaccines are similar.

Also please go revisit your literature on women having kids after 40. It's not nearly as bad as you might think it is.

> And they are not working below optimal intellectual abilities.

How would you know?

It's possible they could have been more efficient, but given what seemed to be their upper ceiling of intellectual abilities they seemed to be quite close to it. Conjecture of course.

> Similarly I'm probably one of those Workaholics

I was too, from the age of 16 to about 26. Burnout doesn't always happen quickly.

In my case, I was able to work 80-100 hrs/wk for months at a time. Eventually I realized that my one-dimensional life wasn't getting any more work done.

Your brain needs to recharge, which can mean sleep, daydreaming, paying attention to the drone of exercise, socializing, watching TV, or any number of things.

I replied above, but I think there are some distinctions - 80 is probably the barely acceptable sustainable max you can work in a week. More importantly it's not just working longer hours, extra hours need different mental management of that time to be effective, and I got those lessons from my professors during my PhD. Probably why I haven't burned out till now.

Stars work 90 hours a week? Are they being paid hourly? Would you pay them hourly if they requested it and would you still think they were stars if you were?

In my experience that expectation is not normal, except at startups -- and a lot of startups don't care either.

Most of the people I've interviewed and seen hired had not made any open-source contributions, and if they had side projects they didn't mention them.

I skipped our whiteboarding exercise with a candidate based on reading an original GitHub project of his.

I didn't notice him because of the project, I wouldn't have ignored him without the project but the repo gave me enough info to know he was capable. If he hadn't already done that, then we'd just have to go through some demonstration of programming ability.

It's been a few months and I'm ready to call this a win.

As a hiring manager it’s just an additional piece of information that can add to or enhance the resume in some cases. It’s not something that candidates should stress about or worry about in my opinion, and it’s hardly required. Most candidates have nothing of interest or true significance.

But in some cases we’ve certainly become more interested in a candidate because we were impressed with something on their GitHub profile.

I've done a fair bit of technical screening of candidates at various levels. In my experience, unless you have a big open source project that people actually recognise, it's not worth mentioning. All the companies I helped interview candidates for were much more interested in

1) Experience

2) Proven programming ability, almost always measured with tests

Companies all in the Netherlands in the last ~8 years, from smaller to international.

Not only open source coding resume, but also Leetcode-hard proficiency for entry-level jobs (not joking; ofc this is waived if you know the right people). Welcome to the insanity of contemporary tech industry!

BTW, almost nobody clicks on links in your CV.

I have clicked on github links in resumes many times, and I have yet to get impressed. Most of the time you‘d find empty repositories, some forks that were never touched, and other garbage, and hardly any activity. If you can‘t clean up your profile when submitting an application, just remove that link.

Stuff you can find in my resume are links like my own self-driving car, humanoid robot, music studio, links to software that was #1 on HN etc. Yet still almost nobody clicks on them :D Recruiters/HR/interviewers seem to be quite lazy and what is on the paper must be sufficient to convince them to give you a shot or make you likable enough.

I don't know about recruiters but I am interested! Would you mind sharing those links here?

Isn't most of it about having something public you can talk about and show your contributions for?

It's not a filter in and of itself, but almost all of your other experience will be proprietary and closed, and you can at best talk in generalities about problems you've solved. You can't evidence half of it.

Open source projects allow someone who's umming and ahhing to have something concrete to see whether or not you're selling them donuts. Certainly isn't a requirement though.

I think the going consensus is that your github etc does not matter if you can leetcode. However the equation might have changed drastically in the last 8 weeks as now there are number of laid off people searching while most companies have put hiring on hold.

Tangentially related point - I've had several recruiters contact me through my Github profile (I have my location on there). While I don't know if really it makes a difference having a link to it on your resume, it can be a source of opportunities.

> do companies still want to see engineers spending their spare time doing unpaid coding?

This is a festering rot in the core of the dev hiring process. Too many applications have a required field for your side projects before you've even gotten past the first page. The fact that this is being pushed by someone and enabled by some portion of devs is dangerous.

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