Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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