GitHub Résumé: Service that creates a résumé based on your GitHub repos/activity | Hacker News Reader

GitHub Résumé: Service that creates a résumé based on your GitHub repos/activity

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145 pointsrg11167 comments

I've seen a lot of Github user profiles where there is no ulterior motive when committing code (like trying to impress potential employers with a resume). In a sense this is the old African philosophy of ubuntu[0] (Not the Linux distro). A large cohort just commit code because they enjoy it and keep it strictly as a hobby & just want to contribute to a greater good.

> Ubuntu (Zulu pronunciation: [ùɓúntʼù])[1] is a Nguni Bantu term meaning "humanity". It is sometimes translated as "I am because we are" (also "I am because you are"),[2] or "humanity towards others"

On the other hand it's easy to spot those who use Github as a form of virtue signalling to potential employers. 'Look at my activity graph & see how talented & productive I am!'

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_philosophy

Why does it matter though

Because I want to hire people who can deliver value and work well as part of a team. I consider a Github profile littered with numerous inconsequential contributions a possible red flag in that regard.

Why? What does that have to do with being able to "deliver value and work well as part of a team"?

Think that yourself

This is like saying that if someone you are considering for a technical documentation position has also written numerous books of poetry, you would consider that a red flag.

Likewise, if someone has written a blog full of recreational programming ideas while working full time in the industry, you'd consider the blog a red flag for inconsequentiality.

Why not also consider all hobbies red flags? I'm not sure that my rock climbing is consequential in any way. Isn't that a red flag that I don't completely buy into hustle culture? That I don't spend every waking moment thinking about how to impress you?

I'm not personally offended or worried that my entire life is one giant red flag for your hiring process, but I do suggest you are going to generate a lot of false negatives with the outlook your comment implies.

You do you, but here's why I don't follow this practice. I start my explanation with an old joke:

One evening, I spotted a man staring intently at the ground under a lamp post. "Looking for something?" I asked. "My watch," he said, and continued staring at the pavement.

"You lost it right here?" I asked, just to confirm. "No, I think I lost it in the alleyway back there" he replied. "Then why," I asked, "Are you looking for it over here?"

"The light's better."

This is the general problem of GitHub as a source of data for whether someone is a productive team player. If they did a lot of productive team playing in public on GitHub, great. But many people do their productive team playing off GitHub, or in private repos. They're like the fellow who lost his watch in the alleyway.

But we can only see what's under the light, and evaluating them as a complete developer based on what we find or don't find under the light is like looking for our watch under the light. We're doing it because the signal is easy to see. But that doesn't mean it's all of the signal, or the most relevant signal.

If you have a statistically significant data set showing that people with inconsequential GitHub contributions in public are inconsequential contributors in a professional software development environment in private, I'd like to see it.

But lacking a rigorous study establishing a statistically significant correlation, people's public GitHub profiles are not a reliable source of signal for hiring professional developers.

What a strange metric. Why do you imagine that any significant fraction of the work someone has done in their career would be visible on their personal Github profile? Don't most developers make their living writing proprietary software, after all?

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Or my favourite flavour of Goodhart's Law:

"You show me a metric, and I'll show you a game."

Don't blame the player, blame the game.

Cute idea but it doesn't work for me very well. There's a project that takes up 90% of my time and I'm a major contributor but it only gets a single line under "Contributions" while useless old projects that nobody uses any more are highlighted under "Popular Repositories" with several lines of information.

I think the heuristics need tweaking a little. "Creator & Owner" shouldn't carry as much weight and recency should carry more.

Exactly! This puts too much weight on ownership rather than contribution. Also, it doesn't list the forks where I have made local changes just for myself!

It's a cool concept, but I agree. I have several projects that I started then other people took over or ownership transferred. No mention on the resume.

A clever "popularity" trick - you must star the project in order to try it.

It may be a "growth hack" but it does seem like a decent way to prevent people from surreptitiously looking at others' information (even though it's all already public anyway).

It advertises itself as "Great for all the tech-savy bosses who want to have a quick view of person's git/github activity, before the interview".

I guess the tech-savy bosses are savy enough to run this locally with the "opt-in" check patched out.

I mean anything coming from GitHub is anyway public. (Except for private repos of course)

Probably best to assume the private ones are public too

Honestly, that sounds like another growth-hacking strategy; when someone uses it, they get a pat on the back for being "tech savvy"

What’s the benefit from “surreptitiously” viewing people’s public information?

I'm not imaginative enough to envision a nefarious scenario, but that doesn't mean none exist. Maybe just curiosity? The format does seem a bit nicer than the public profile at least.

This is a GitHub project, I think? Based on the (non-working) resume.github.com URL anyway. It seems more like a "hack" to me, and not really a "growth hack"; "what can we use to opt-in people for this experiment without adding a setting to GitHub proper?"

> This is a GitHub project, I think? Based on the (non-working) resume.github.com URL anyway.

I believe it's just a typo, the correct URL is https://resume.github.io

i could be wrong here, but I seem to remember that many years ago GitHub pages were originally hosted on <username>.github.com

Yup:

https://github.blog/2013-04-05-new-github-pages-domain-githu...

https://github.blog/changelog/2021-01-29-github-pages-will-s...

I was able to work around that by putting a breakpoint at the moment of check and changing the flag via console :)

I really loved seeing that, this is probably one of the cooler parts of this project IMO.

I've only barely used GitHub, what's the star supposed to indicate?

I like to Star Repos that I wanna take a look at later that I may not have an immediate use for. You can view any repos you've starred right on Github.

Basically equivalent to a like, just one measurement on how popular a project might be within the community.

Definitely not an indicator of quality of any kind.

It can also be used like a bookmarks system. You add a star to a project and then you see all repos that you added a star: https://github.com/<username>?tab=stars

I tried it just for that reason :D

Super cool. Yeah sure the stars help boost popularity but I actually like the approach. Just like https://utteranc.es/ uses GH issues as a way to store data, I was thinking about how stars can be used as opt-in for things just the other day.

Also do note that the "Contributions" section is misleading. Without looking into it I'm quite sure it's only pulling contributions for the current calendar year - I also know that's the info GH gives you on that endpoint if you don't want to keep iterating over commit lists until you get to the end.

That then paints a wrong picture of someone's contributions to projects over time :D A quick note about this would "solve" this by making the tradeoff explicit.

Doesn't work at all for me! Most of my good work is on internal repositories for the companies I have worked for, or private projects on gitlab cloud. My personal GitHub (and bitbucket and gitlab) account has very little activity, and most of that is "clone some project and submit a 2 line fix" 5 years ago.

this is mostly where I'm at.

One of the problems is that I'm not going to work on a project just for the sake of working on it. If I'm going to work on a project in my personal time, it needs to have personal significance to me. As it turns out, I don't actually have that many needs that aren't serviced by existing software.

As a result, the personal time I spend on skill development tends to be in the form of broadening my horizons or deepening my understanding of a topic rather than producing useful software.

So most of my github activity is filing a bug report, possibly with a small patch.

Same here. It also doesn’t show any of my organizations (which is where most of my main personal projects are).

It makes for a poor showing when you work mostly on private repos and occasionally submit fixes for dependencies of your public hobby ones.

I massively appreciate the opt-in mechanics here. One click, using a native feature of the site that you must, by necessity, have an account on. Very nice! And, in my testing, un-starring that repo also opts out.

It's a nice idea, but it doesn't actually work very well. The "contributions" section in particular is just wildly inaccurate -- it shows a lot of repos for me as "1 commit(s)" when I really have hundreds.

Any hypothetical "tech-savy bosses who want to have a quick view of person's git/github activity" aren't getting that here.

Great work! I had built something similar but in the form of a web app. It uses GitHub to generate a resume for you and also creates an API to power your portfolio website.

-> https://gitconnected.com

Feedback: The profile is super generic, just lists your languages/repos. It's less a resume and more a condensed/flattened version of exactly your github.

TBH was hoping for some quirky GPT-3 text about what drives me and how I solve problems. Oh well.

Many people don't realize what they are really giving up by sharing personal information on their GitHub account(s).

Once you share that account with a company and sign an an agreement don't be surprised if they at some point they sue you just because your code may look similar to something you did while working for them.

On disability but feel well enough to maintain some personal projects? Good luck.

Working on a personal project that is taking off? Suddenly the company can build a competing solution and then later say you violated a non-compete agreement.

The list goes on and on. I'd suggest people stop sharing their personal GitHub accounts and not use personally identifiable information on your profiles.

Any examples of this actually happening?

Sounds to me more like the plot of Silicon Valley than something that's a common risk.

I would expect any company that actually did this to get some serious negative PR from it, such that they have trouble hiring talented engineers in the future.

> I would expect any company that actually did this to get some serious negative PR from it, such that they have trouble hiring talented engineers in the future.

Except employment agreements provide significant leeway into getting injunctions and for fines, so while an employee could go on the offensive and say that this is an issue, there could also be an injunction or agreements that prevent them from even talking about it without the risk of significantly more financial harm or contempt charges.

This is all well and good but not everyone is coding on GitHub. My only contributions on GitHub are for my side projects and those are never finished. Most of my coding is done on Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, GitLab, etc. so while the idea is novel, the reality is GitHub contributions are a terrible metric for employment and any company who uses those isn't a company I want to work for. Also, while my profile says there are less than a dozen repositories I own. I actually have over 100 private repos on GitHub.

Some previous discussion from way back:

8 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6752800

10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4466883

11 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2185666

I have a bug report. I've committed to llvm and to rocm's llvm fork but it's only showing commits to the fork. GitHub account JonChesterfield.

Interesting idea, thanks for sharing it.

Identity is the single biggest miss I can think of for Github. Clearly there is some thinking going on about it with SSO, profile README, this, etc.

I think they are missing the point however. Linkedin for Developer is probably interesting on some level, but Github has much more interesting and useful information they could be using. What languages you prefer, where you like to run your workloads, if your code quality is decent, frameworks you are using, etc.

I hope they continue to miss this "identity" thing. Seriously, these suggestions would cause me to ditch github very quickly. I just want somewhere public to host my git repos, not to be profiled and quantified every which way.

This is likely just a me problem, but it would be neat to throw some kind of machine learning behind this. If it could recommend what one should peruse - what one seems to be most interested in + seems to have the most aptitude for.

I have a lot of varied interests and an AI suggestion on what I'd likely have the must fun / success perusing would be neat.

My own profile is my resume. You can see what I'm listening.

This seems to focus mostly on recent contributions - I have 400+ commits in some projects and it only shows 62 (presumably from the past year/6 months?).

Many years ago similar script was used in our team to automatically write weekly reports.

if anybody wants to see their resume but doesn't want to star the repo

1) type your username and go to the error page

2) run the following code via inspector "github_user_starred_resume = function() { return true }; run()"

(2016), surprisingly

The repo goes back to 2011 and someone has posted links from submissions back then.

maybe solve a few issues? idk

Examples?

(2016)

99.99% of my relevant work experience happened (and is happening) behind closed doors, and I suspect this will be true for a large majority of developers. So, not very useful.

Super common response. Same here, despite decades of open source contributions, most of the code I write these days is behind closed doors. But, 100% of the code is on Github, so I have it so that it shows my private commit numbers in public.

I also tend to depend on a lot of open source projects... which means that I also find/report/fix bugs and contribute to documentation... all of which shows up in my public history.

It isn't just about relevant work experience...

You're lucky (I guess?), I have yet to work on an organization that uses GitHub internally. I've seen gitlab, bitbucket, and, oh, the horror, Gerrit and subversion.

I try to give back to stuff I use when I can, too, but I'd love to do much more. Time is limited, unfortunately =(

Using this means devaluing your software related skills. Do not do that!

Why do you think that?

"If you would like to opt-in, simply go to our GitHub Project page and star the project."

Be warned! This language will get creepy lawyer emails from github. Security github "engineers" will start emailing you threats - tricking you into corresponding with them. I have used similar language before on a fun weekend project and was banned/canceled/erased - all my project lost on github. The good news: now I know they allow some projects that do this.

Feel free to checkout my deleted profile: https://github.com/ransom1538

Was your profile canceled? Gives me a 404

Also, care to share more of your story? I'm curious

"Was your profile canceled?"

My github profile is ransom1538. Yes. It was totally blocked - the account is frozen - it 404s now. I was doing a project to let users view and see random github projects. It was just a funny weekend project. It got legs and I was banned.

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