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Comment by ganafagol | Hacker News Reader

> Build a small personal project and put the code on GitHub.

This has lost its effect and partially turned it upside down. In school people seem to be instructed "have a github with personal project" to improve hiring chances so now everybody an their mother has an account with a bunch of meaningless crap projects that they have 0 intetest in but put it there to try to boost interview chances.

Don't. Whenever I screen a job candidate and go to their github, if I find that this is just there so you can tick off "projects on github" from your employability checklist, you get huge minus points from me. Then better not have it at all.

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How do you distinguish between "made a crappy chat app with Python+Flask because I wanted to play with Flask [and perhaps by making it public my hiring prospects will improve as a bonus, or not, but I don't have a strong reason to just keep it private on my machine]" and "made a crappy chat app with Python+Flask because I want to put Flask on my resume and hopefully my hiring prospects will improve"?

Or is it just that it's crappy enough to turn you off? If that's the case I'm kind of in agreement with the sibling that it seems overly harsh. Github-as-code-archive is a fine use case, I've never expected that someone linking their account should also be actively contributing to some projects used by other people. I'm happy just to see code of any sort, I don't care if the project is dumb or half-completed or finished or abandoned or still being worked on with a bunch of other people.

The only account that rubbed me the wrong way when I interviewed FTEs and interns was the kind that had nothing but a bunch of forks of other repos on it, no commits in them. It's like they were trying to pull a fast one on me, hoping I'd only look at it for a few seconds and think "oh lots of repos, good coder!" I'd have preferred an account be literally empty, because then at least I can believe they only linked to it out of some imagined (I hope) dumb HR filter as shallow as "has github acccount? check!"

> The only account that rubbed me the wrong way when I interviewed FTEs and interns was the kind that had nothing but a bunch of forks of other repos on it, no commits in them.

Maybe they didn't understand how GitHub works exactly? In the first weeks of me using github, I didn't notice the star feature, so I just forked a project, so I have it on my list. Even today, if I see an important repository, I just fork the repo if I'm afraid the original author will delete the repo.

That's a possible charitable interpretation, sure. Still, it's weird, the only reason you should want to link your github account is to showcase some of your work. If there's nothing of your work there, not even any gists, what's going on? I don't care if you have a ton of forks so long as there's also something of your own I can look at.

Why would you give people negative points for trying anything they can do to compete in a fucking ridiculous job market? I mean, suggest alternatives if your genuine intention is to help people find work, rather than just saying that you actively look down on people for trying something.

You get negative points for being a dick. Of course, I'm making assumptions, which you should never do.

If what you do comes across as manipulative, and specifically trying to manipulate me into believing you are more qualified, then it’s entirely rational for me to compensate for that by assigning negative points.

The job market is indeed ridiculous right now. Companies need more qualified SWEs than they can find. That causes wages to rise. Rising wages, buzz, and large numbers of openings attract more people to the field to compete for these jobs. Unfortunately, a lot of the people newly attracted aren’t fully qualified SWEs. People not qualified are rarely selected and so keep applying and interviewing. To inject some sanity, companies look for more ways to filter the incoming stream to find the signal in the noise. Applicants look for ways to make their application look more like signal. And the wheel in the sky keeps turning…

And you default to assuming that someone who wrote code in order to have something to show a prospective employer is attempting usurp the integrity of your hiring funnel. Wtf is a fully qualified SWE anyway, and how is someone supposed to get there if not by getting in the door?

Lastly, it's absolutely not rational to follow that line of reasoning. If you find yourself out of work, and discover that the interview process has changed so dramatically that your resume basically accounts for fuck all, then you need to stand out somehow. If you assume someone is automatically unqualified, you might just not be very qualified to make these determinations. Ya filter however you're going to filter, but this is just prejudice.

If somebody is trying to stand out by having a github with two projects, one is a merge sort implenentation they typed essentially 1:1 from a book during an algorithms 101 class and the other is an almost-trivial shopping list app that neither compiles nor they can explain anything about it, and then put a link to this github at the top of their resume, then they'd have been better off not having created that github account at all. It's easy to see through this nonsense and the filter of evalutating this helps avoiding wasted time of a few interview hours.

And yes, I'm totally preducied agains people with those kinds of github contents. That's my whole point.

Github is used for all kinds of things. Most of mine is forks that I used to try and issue a PR to some other repo, or gists that I use for personal reference. Likewise, I have a website that I barely use, but it's there. Neither are indicative of professional capability or are labeled "portfolio", they're indicative of some of the stuff I do in my spare time. Employers ask for a Github link almost 100% of the time, this is a problem created by the filtering process itself and the proselytizing of having a "passion" for software.

Being prejudiced towards that is as stupid as anything.

Now if someone labels themselves as "an open source contributor" or something along those lines, sure whatever be as critical as you want. I'd probably expect to see at least frequent commits to a repo that people use.

"Ridiculous job market"? The job prospects for devs in todays market is an essentially 100% guarantee that you get a job. The demand is huge and there are more jobs to fill than candidates available. You may not get into the company of your dreams, but overall, what's ridiculous is not how low the job chances are, but how high the demand is. If you do 100 interviews and 0 offers then you have an issue. It may not be your fault. Maybe it's a visa problem or some medical/psychological condition that makes it hard for people to see a good future colleague in you. But in the general case, there should be no problem getting a job if you're not too picky. Compare that to many other industries where it actually is ridiculously hard to even interview.

My suggestion is to go for quality. Only put up on you github stuff you are genuinely interested in or proud of or do. Not some mandatory exercise which is obviously only there to check a box.

> You get negative points for being a dick.

Giving you the benefit of doubt, I'm assuming this was a "generic you".

If the job market was 100% guarantee, it probably wouldn't be rational to assume that everything on someone's github profile needs to be there to try and impress you; they wouldn't need to try anything extra, or grind leetcode problems, and Who Wants to be Hired threads wouldn't exist.

I'd personally prefer a low likelihood of getting an interview, because that's way more manageable than current hiring practices where many companies hold global talent contests as the first step, and send them to everyone, as though they're Amazon.

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