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Comment by bb123 | Hacker News Reader

> I want to be with people that are sharing links to things they’ve read, people who are trying out new technologies and languages, people who have weekend projects, or who are contributing bug fixes back to open source projects.

I hate this culture in software engineering. There are many excellent engineers out there who work to live, rather than live to work. Why do we have this expectation that programmers want to spend every waking second coding something? I'd hire someone who appears to have balance in their life with other interests and hobbies besides computers (all other things being equal).

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Let's be honest. The guy reviewed 22 CVs and went to write a blog post about it.

I have interviewed hundreds of candidates, not just red their CVs (typically around 1 candidate a week for the past 15 years, currently 3 candidates a week on average).

What I have learned is to be very cautious when looking through CVs lest you select for candidates who can make good looking CVs.

I have met many nice and competent people who don't write blog post and who can't make nice CV. They don't make projects for show because they have enough work at... work and they don't do ten other projects because they want to focus where it really matters for them. They might have other non-technical hobbies like riding a bike or picking up girls at the bar. They may not feel the need to impose their interests and thoughts on everybody else or they might think their thoughts and experiences are not at all valuable to general public.

A person who writes blog posts, for-show github repos, who creates public image, is just one of many types of developers. If you select for this you are missing out on many excellent people.

But issue is the people you are talking about rarely gets noticed.

They do, just not on the front page of HN.

I don't know about that, most of the people I've ever worked with (and hired or helped hire) seems to fall in to the category of not writing blogs, etc. A silent majority, if you will. I may well be wrong of course, and I don't doubt that being better at marketing gets you noticed more easily but that's not the same as everyone else rarely getting noticed.

Exactly.

Not every act of noticing must be noticed by general public, if that makes sense.

You might be doing a good job and get promoted and be part of 99.9% of population who will never make headlines.

And the beauty of it is that they are perfectly happy with that.

How can you say on behalf of every one of them?

I hope my backend self never needs to make a snappy looking pretty something. If I am ever judged by the quality of my visual design skills, I’ll be executed for crimes against eyeballs.

I just run a script that auto-generates a pdf via html from an edited markdown file. The css just defines the font and a few spacing parameters. It takes all the headache out of trying to format everything nicely in Word, and any fanciness will look dated real soon.

For my CV, I just use a PDF of my LinkedIn Profile. Seems to work well enough. Maybe a bit long, but the page space is used inefficiently, so I blame big fonts and large sidebars.

Exactly. It's one type of candidate, that the OP happens to like; you don't need this stuff to get hired. Personally my gut reaction to lots of side projects or social media is slightly negative, simply because my experience has been that those candidates tend to interview slightly worse.

I think side projects can be valuable when you want to demonstrate competence at something, and you don't otherwise have experience to draw on. If you're a barista who's learning to code in their spare time, or you want to understand a hot new technology, sure. Otherwise, I'd rather ask you about your actual work.

my experience has been that those candidates tend to interview slightly worse.

Mine hasn’t been that way, but in my experience those publicly visible artifacts tend to be high noise signals anyway.

Over time I’ve generally converged on a few criteria for the resume stage: (1) does this person have a minimally credible claim of being able to deliver projects at the level of the position? (2) if the job requires background knowledge, do they have a relevant background?

If they have a public Github profile, I might go look at some PR’s created by them to confirm that they’re generally respectful to others and that their actual code looks not-insane.

Once you actually watch them work and talk to them, you will get a better sense for them as a candidate, but CVs really don’t tell you much, so it’s best not to pretend that they do.

I came here to say this. He also states

> if someone was not on LinkedIn or didn’t have a public Git account, I found myself thinking ‘well, what exactly do they do?’

How about spending time with their family, Hanging out with friends. Relaxing and refreshing themselves so they are fresh and ready to go in the morning.

Other options:

- working for a company which doesn't allow external contributions

- working on stuff which doesn't make sense on GitHub (does anyone care about a servo driver for a specific component used only on this board?)

- working for orgs where they're not allowed to say much beyond "I'm working for the government"

- not being interested in opensource (gasp!)

- word of mouth, specific industry consulting

I agree with the sentiment, but I feel you're misrepresenting the text you quote:

Creating a LinkedIn account takes what, 30 minutes? You don't need to be one of those high achieving "Can you endorse me for X/Y/Z on LinkedIn" morons to "be on LinkedIn".

Similarly, your parent didn't for a Github account with weekly contributions to OSS projects. Let's be honest, I've seen so many accounts that are just "I was bored during a long weekend and threw together this 200 line utility script". And that's great!

This reduction of people into black and white comes up again and again in this discussion, and I cannot understand it to this day.

Agreed. I will not show you my repository accounts. Never ever will they get attached to my real persona. They will be taken down on the day they become public.

Pay me 300,000$ a month and we could talk about it without commitments from my side. Otherwise I don't want to justify myself towards my employer if I work on private stuff or not. Especially not with contracts in tech, which are already borderline abusive.

That said, I haven't touched my public repositories for quite a while. Why? I have a fucking job! Aside from that I also host gitea on my domain that you will also not get to know. Maybe I would create another one for public display, but that is very unlikely.

I get that some people are forward with this stuff and in general social media presence, but I am certainly not.

edit: Of course there is also bad code in my repos, but that is completely besides the point.

There is bad code in everyone's repo. Several of my repos are from courses in grad school. From a software engineering standpoint, they are horrendous. But, they solved the problem the professor assigned and taught me what the professor intended by the assignment.

It's probably more helpful, in evaluating a developer, to see a progression of thought rather than shiny, functioning code.

In my experience personal projects get reviewed so infrequently that I'm not all that worried about someone digging down and evaluating the code quality of a 4+ year old repo.

It's fairly evident to me that many tech hiring managers today, and for the last 20 years really, are just stabbing in the dark and calling it science.

Absolutely.

It's just luck and survivor-ship bias.

The best way to recruit is to use a network, period. Having multiple people vouch for someone is far more valuable than seeing if he has a github. And even then - it might be a bad fit.

Companies never look internally when it comes to recruiting either. They blame other things, like developer "passion" and not fitting a "work hard play hard culture."

You wouldn’t want to work at this company anyways. The system works.

Different strokes for different folks.

And not to be a party pooper but that narrative and image could also steer choices away from women, partnered men, individuals with families who practice work life balance as well as disadvantaged candidates. But this trope lives on with vigor in HR...

It’s more fun to work with people who enjoy work rather than people who work to enjoy. At least that’s my 2 cents

I enjoy my work, but it is just that - work. I give my work 100% in good humour when I am working, but I think the expectation that I'm going to go home and do more of the same on my own time is unfair and unhealthy. No other profession expects this.

> No other profession expects this.

I don't think this is the case (anecdotal evidence from friends and family in varied professions)

I think the problem is that there seems to be an expectation of knowledge of the exact technologies. I have to say that lately I have seen a lot more: X or equivalent but this might be related to devops engineer job adverts where maybe they've realised that the tools are similar enough that you can get up to speed quickly enough between them ...

I don't know why people would enjoy work with all of the process stuff we impose on development.

Reminds me of a snarky comment I read, "If you love doing something, keep it as a hobby or you'll begin to hate it."

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