Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

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Whenever someone asks for your github ID as part of the hiring process, you can say "Next!"

Yes you can, but your words do not convince me that this is a sound job-seeking strategy. You say:

...have a stakeholder in the business, who is a competent engineer, look thru the resumes, pick the ones they want to meet with, and bring them in.

To persuade me, you must establish that the companies with a strategy of "look thru the github profiles, pick the ones they want to meet with, and bring them in." Everything else, the thirty minute interviews and what-not, can be identical between the resume-driven filtering companies and the github-driven filtering companies.

I am not saying that selecting candidates on the basis of a github profile is superior to selecting candidates on the basis of resumes, or--even better--selecting candidates on the basis of either an outstanding resume or an outstanding code portfolio (my personal choice).

But your claim is that as a job-seeker, the best strategy is to refuse to interview with companies that select candidates to interview on the basis of their github profile or who want to discuss it in an interview. The onus is on you to establish that this is such an obviously unsound practice that you can infer that these companies are poor places to work once you receive an offer and accept it.

It is an obviously unsound practice because at its core is an ideological prejudice: We're going to judge you, not on the quality of your skills, but on whether you contribute to open source software or not.

Candidate are better off working for companies that are interested in getting to know them in order to make hiring decisions, rather than running them thru a political correctness filter.

I don't really care whether I convince you or not. I believe the basis for wanting someone's github id is a prejudice, and I've not had luck convincing prejudiced people that they shouldn't discriminate.

We're going to judge you, not on the quality of your skills, but on whether you contribute to open source software or not.

That's interesting. I don't see it that way, and neither do a lot of other people. Here's how I see it: Those people that do write code I can review provide me with more information than those that don't. They make my job easier. I judge the code, not whether the code is open source.

This is exactly the same phenomena as writing a readable resume, or blogging where I can read it. It increases their chances of being hired simply because they reduce the friction involved in the hiring process.

Now, does that mean that I will not hire someone who doesn't have a github account? No. It's my job to hire them too. But as an employer, it is remiss of me not to use all of the information available to judge hires. This is not prejudice, this is a business strategy.

Your words seem to indicate this is not a question of tactics and strategy. You introduce a lot of emotional rhetoric such as "political correctness." Frankly, I have NO idea what you are talking about, as Github has zero to do with whether one uses the word "bitch" in a presentation at a conference ;-)

I cannot read your mind, but in the conversation between you and I, YOU are the one introducing emotional baggage like "ideological prejudice," not me. I therefore suggest that if you want to stamp out all this zeal and prejudice, you start with YOURSELF. I am not the one claiming that people who write things I can read are or aren't better than those who don't. I am not the one with an axe to grind. I am simply a fellow trying to get my job done and looking for efficient and effective strategies for doing so.

" if you want to stamp out all this zeal and prejudice, you start with YOURSELF."

You're talking to the person, rather than the point. In fact, looking at your original response, it is constructed to do the same thing.

I'm done here.

I literally cannot believe that you have no interest in evaluating a programmer's code base for the purposes of a hire. That is so unbelievably counterintuitive and, well, just not very smart.

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