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Comment by michaelchisari | Hacker News Reader

Despite having written tens of thousands of lines of open source code, I have yet to have an interviewer who has looked at that code and asked me about it.

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Really? That's the most surprising thing I've read today.

As an interviewer, Open Source contribution is one of the first thing I look for about a candidate.

I think most people look for it, but that the poster is talking about due diligence. It is easy to read that someone contributed to open source and give them brownie points. It takes a bit of effort to find the work they did, figure out what its doing, and determine whether they actually did a good job. People try to conserve their mental resources, so they don't always put in that effort.

That speaks volumes about the interviewer(s) and their company. Did no one look at your resume before speaking with you?? If not, that's inexcusably inefficient.

Do you mention it in your resume or cover letter? We try to look up information about people (blogs, open source contributions, etc.) before or between interview rounds, but it depends on how much the candidate pushes it and how much time the interviewer has to look into it.

Just having committed to an open source project would put you way ahead of most of the people we interview.

Whenever I see a resume with open source code, I always visit and try to read some of their code. I rarely ask them about it (there's little time), but it does inform which questions I want to ask in the interview and my overall impression of their skills.

> my overall impression of their skills

If you do this, please take into account the time they wrote the code too - they might have improved their skills significantly since then.

Even bad code would make for an interesting discussion topic during the interview. The code may turn out not to be as stupid as the interviewer thinks after all. Or maybe it is, in which case it's great to talk about lessons learned. I think every developer has some bad code floating around out there, including the person conduction the job interview. They'll understand. And if they don't, that's a great litmus test for the type of company you are applying to as well.

My last interview at the company I'm at now went somewhat like this: "Your CV looks fine, we wouldn't care if you're an axe murderer, now what would you like to do/tackle?". Should have been a warning sign: interesting company to be at.

Interesting has it's ups and downs.

What do you mean by interesting? Do they have a lot of axe murderers there?

Doesn't every company have a Murder Division?

Everything practical-wise is done my the boss, who is painfully slow at anything practical (salaries, supplies, workstations, etc etc). My project is a sideproject, others have projects with constantly changing features, deadlines and requirements.

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