GitHub Won’t Help You with Hiring

Based on the people I've worked with (both great and mediocre programmers), I think that is highly uncommon.

It's almost always yes for the former and no for the latter.

Notably the first. You fixed a bug, you contributed, you did your part but it was ignored. Did you learn anything from that? Beyond "Open Source is a waste of time" I guess?

It's easy to look at things negatively, but there's often positives to be found if you simply look for them. Not to say you're wrong, just, trying to offer some perspective.

Opensource is enormous at this point. One data point(or even 30!) is no longer particularly relevant. Instead think of it like any endeavor in life. You are taking a leap of faith. Sometimes you'll have a great experience that may even blossom into greater things you never expected. Sometimes you'll be let down despite your best efforts and intentions.

You mentioned the full extent of your attempt at contributing to open source consisted of a grand total of two meager pull requests.

I'm sorry to say but if throughout all those years you only managed to put together two patches then quite obviously you did close to zero contributions, both in absolute and in relative terms.

In fact, it seems you complain more about floss than actually contribute stuff.

I find that I general it's terribly easy to get your pull requests accepted to random FLOSS projects. Whether your PR is janitorial work, fixing bugs or adding features, you don't need much work to get your contribution in. So, quite frankly it sounds like you are grossly exaggerating and overstating not only the extents of your work but also the challenges you supposedly face.

> Then there's the issue of dependencies. My cool tool for analysing satellite photos won't be of much use to anyone who doesn't have API access to a satellite ground station.

In that case your so called cool tool to analyse satellite photos sounds very poorly designed. I mean, the whole FLOSS earth observation stack is designed literally from the ground up with extensive separation of concerns in mind (see GDAL and proj4 and orpheo toolbox for example) and apparently somehow you failed to learn the lesson that everyone doing professional, academic, and even amateur work knows by heart.

Submitting a PR allows others in the community to apply your patch (or incorporate into a forked version of the project) if the PR doesn't get merged or deleted. From a project maintainer's point of view, significant patches can be difficult to test & review, and merging a PR implies accepting the long term maintenance of those changes. I've left some promising PRs for much longer than I'd prefer to because of factors like time to review and the risk of merging code which may not have adequate tests. If an open PR attracts some community interest or discussion, that can give project contributors a helpful signal for prioritising.

If a PR is featured somewhere, this can be an opportunity to raise your profile and perhaps introduce those inquiring users to something you can benefit from more directly. If I get direct emails about a PR or project I contribute to, I try to politely point those users to the right channel (eg raise a GitHub issue) and ideally a contributor guide so they can be empowered to contribute directly. This may not be a straightforward reflex to develop, but I think responding with "This is a volunteer effort -- here's how you can help with docs, testing, or code" is a better viewpoint than "Ugh, more entitled users". I've been pleasantly surprised to see this approach turn some agitators into useful contributors.

If a project has very niche dependencies (like requiring API access to a satellite ground station), there can still be an audience and they may be even more motivated to collaborate on your open source project. I feel like this may have the best upside in terms of potential ratio of users to collaborators.

I think your last example is the most challenging. If you are concerned about someone else benefiting by stealing or repackaging a project you have openly shared, it would be best to keep that effort private. Compliance with open source licenses (or the spirit of open collaboration) requires ethics that are not universal across developers, companies, and countries. This problem isn't unique to open source (commercial licenses also don't prevent piracy), but is a harder blow when you are personally affected.

niche projects that can only be used by a small group of people still benefit from open collaboration that FOSS enables.

also, i might patch your code to work without that ground station on publicly available satellite image data.

that last example is clearly a copyright violation. you should have legal means to go after them. i realize that is not trivial and may cost you a lot of effort, and while i would love to say there is help available i can't right now point you to one.

is there an organization that helps any FOSS project (not just their own) with license violations?

Well, it does. It says he doesn't have a portfolio for some reason. Is it because he is incompetent and has nothing to show for? Perhaps not, but if the candidate makes it difficult for recruiters and interviewers to get an objective way to corroborate his claims regarding his level of expertise then just for the sake of avoiding wasting your time with yet another paper tiger... It would be better to cut him out of the shortlist for further interviews.

I just self-host Gogs, GitLab, Trac, cgit, etc. They are independent of each other, of course. :) Different teams, different needs. As far as my personal projects go, I just self-host cgit, and I accept "pull requests" through e-mail. It works.

Don't know what they though that my involvement in open-source projects would correlate well to e-commerce CMS work (I've worked in e-commerce dev well before opening a Github account). But it's probably some weird "tie breaker" decision given that I am not local to LA.

I've been coding since 1995 and my open source contributions tailed off around 2002 or so. Wasn't how I wanted to invest my spare time.

The point isn't that the hypothetical banker can't have an active github profile, it's that there are reasons they might not.

Take me for instance, I haven't really done anything significant in the public for over a decade now. The vast majority of my code has been for one private company or another.

And that's the case because either my job has me working the hours or after putting in 8 to 10 hours of code in private, there's exercising, practicing guitar, socializing with friends and family, building Lego sets, reading, playing video games, and other activities that don't involve me writing more code.

That's not to say I don't, it's just I don't have that much time to do it outside of work.

I just spent the past 4 years getting an MBA, my github repos are all horribly out of date because I had more important things to do. It doesn't mean I'm any less passionate about the technology.

Even the github profile isn't a strong positive signal, it's a weak signal. But that's ok. That's really what we're looking for: a lot of weak positive signals.

So that person had a github profile. Everything else could either be a neutral or negative signal. Compare that with someone without a github, but has every other positive signal you could ask for. I'd take non-github person over github person every single time.

Is it unreasonable to say "more data allows me to make a better decision?" It could be completely noise! But it is still data.

I think in fact you are making assumptions based simply on the fact that he is observing data.

Not very useful when working on open source, which is why I don't.

I argued about this before signing, but this has been in every contract I have ever read and when I argue about this they will always say it is standard practice to include.

Most of these companies would only need 1/2 - 1/4 as many "coders" if they'd get rid of their Not Invented Here syndrome and let the coders dictate how the product functions (technically). So many times I've had to build products that are arbitrarily designed by non-technical folks who don't realize that dictating their preferences, instead of flowing with the existing tech, quadruples the implementation time.

That's just my rant of the week on stubborn folks who think their company is a snowflake that requires a bespoke software solution.

Passing programming assignments or university projects is very different to actually knowing how to code or think about solutions on your own I think.

Suppose a given class has a 40/60 applied/theory split. Our hypothetical student is average in some sense and gets 75% on the theory. Now if they get at least 37.5% on the applied portion they barely pass the class.

There are minimum GPA considerations, and you might need at least a C in some classes rather than a D to continue, but it's pretty common to spread the hardest classes out so that you only have one super hard class to focus on each semester, and easier courses and generals will help pad out the Ds on your transcript to maintain a passing GPA. Throw in a retake or two for a couple screw-ups, and you still graduate in 4 years with a whisper of a shadow of an ability to program.

Filtering for high GPAs and whatnot can help (or it might exclude people who had family emergencies or other complicating factors and still know their shit), but in the worst case that's just a measure of the amount of time and dedication spent per course. You also probably need to set a pretty high threshold -- you can bomb all your algorithms, data structures, and applied programming courses and still have a 3.5+ GPA if you do well enough elsewhere.

All of them are medium / small sized.

Someone with followers still indicates that at the very least some people are interested in that person's projects.

* BurntSushi: 4.4k followers

* wesm: 9.6k followers

* tj: 43.6k followers

The followers section of the post may have cherry picked a non-representative example.

I do think that tools like GH are important for helping to introduce ourselves to others. As with any tool, it is up to us to use it properly.

For me, I am not actually looking for work, but I get tired of not being taken seriously, so I make a point of ensuring that my work is made available for anyone that wants to see it.

My motto is "Don't just take my word for it. See for yourself." I am grateful for tools like GH, that allow me to do this. The Stack Overflow Story is another one.

Nobody is deep diving your code like this, btw.

Looking at someone's code projects can tell you some things like how they might write a README, if there is one. It might present a concrete project they built that you can discuss in an interview; what was the hardest part of this project? It can tell you where they are roughly on the scale of "barely started programming" and "clearly are experienced" (an experienced developer can glean this very quickly from someone else's code—even what they choose to paste from Stack Overflow—it isn't as hard as you think).

Reading the code line by line looking for "strong code" is something that beginners think employers will be doing, but they don't. Just like developers don't evaluate libraries like this, they do a more topical, holistic page-through.

Of course it isn't going to tell you exactly how someone will perform on the job. That's not the goal post (the absence of Github usually means you have nothing to look at at all). It just has a few useful signals like looking at a chair that a carpenter has built.

It seems like you are suggesting that the chair a carpenter built in his own time couldn't possibly give you any reliable signal about how the carpenter works, because what if the carpenter was in a rush? Well, let me point out that a rushed veteran and a rushed beginner will cut completely different corners. Kind of like how a skilled artist with only 10 seconds to draw something can still express a great deal of their expertise merely by how they attacked the problem.

How do we know this to be true? Has anyone checked?