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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

I have things out in github that is very embarrassing, so go for it.

But I wonder if putting embarrassing things in github would hurt future job searches ? I very much doubt that since the people doing the hiring will not have any idea what they are looking at :)

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One can put a disclaimer in the README to mitigate this saying "I wrote this when I was twelve", then future employers may forgive that your game code isn't optimized for 64 bit multi-core CPUs and your comments don't compare favourably to Fred Brooks' comments (may he Rest In Peace).

I have a lot of embarrassing stuff on Github and an interviewer has never asked me about any of it. Sometimes they'll ask me to show them my work that I can (is not proprietary from previous employments) and I'll pick a few of the better looking repos to browse thru and provide context. But nowadays I put half my prototypes out there in the open by default so maybe the interviewers just don't go through many of the repos if they do check them out.

I do it, as I like the idea that if one other person finds it useful then it's worth it. I don't put my github on my resume, but my username is my name so it's easy to find and definitely has come up (sometimes indirectly) in interviews. For me, the best interviews have had good discussions about the good, the bad, and the why. From the perspective of trying maximise my desirability to all employers, it has definitely "hurt".

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