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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

"The only reliable gauge I’ve found for future programmer success is looking at real code they’ve written"

This a thousand times over. Go through their github (or whatever) profile, look at their commits, see how they write tests, etc. It doesn't take a huge amount of time, if you are any good at what you do, you'll quickly be able to filter out a failure (like, he doesn't have code that you can browse).

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Every time I read this it frightens me, I don't have an active github account, therefore I am a failure? I'm currently working a 16 month internship before graduating with a Computer Engineering degree. My code from this work will not be available anywhere of course.

Not through any fault of that though, I realize that having a github account with projects and such that you work on is a great help, and I accept that myself not having one yet is a great disadvantage. What do you recommend to get started out on github? Is helping out open source programs still viable? Or now it seems either writing self-run projects, or forking others projects and helping them with those. Is there any clear starting point for githubbing? (and how do you squeeze it in after a 10 hour work day!)

Just questions from someone worried about my empty github profile :)

Don't worry, the "github or git out" attitude is only common among people you wouldn't want to work with anyway. They're the ones who will change languages or frameworks according to what's fashionable, rat-hole the team on fun but irrelevant projects, and not talk to you unless you dress like a hobo and swear like a sailor. They're over-represented here on HN, but real engineers know that most good code isn't on github and never will be.

My experience with gung-ho githubbers is the same. It's great to try out new technologies, but gitguys take it to an extreme. They'll shoehorn any new technology into their stack without a second thought about product stability.

Gitguy: "I used EC2, Blazboo and Chingbang to create an HA job queue that will never fail! It uses counting Bloom filters and I wrote it in Brainfuck."

Me: "What do you use it for?"

Gitguy: "Sending password reset emails."

These Rube Goldberg wannabes are generally more trouble than they're worth. You end up with a system that's a technological pastiche. The drawback is apparent when you try to hire new teammates. It turns out you can't find someone who knows the 12 esoteric packages your business is running on.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this. I really like the energetic fluorescence of some open source communities, but the punning names, over-extended metaphors and religious devotion to novelty uber alles are really starting to take their toll.

The state of programming is so awful, that I'm literally just looking to know: do you write fat controller actions..or whatever equivalent exists for the specific technology you used.

That, to me, is 100x more important than "how many zeros are in 100 factorial"

Funny, I thought github was a code repository, not a personality type...

real engineers know that most good code isn't on github and never will be

Irrelevant. Fact is, having code out there makes it easier for prospective employers to get a feel for you, there's no way around that. No one said it had to be the best code or all the code.

Now, if you are working your ass off on proprietary code and write absolutely no code outside of your work, then you won't have it. That's understandable, but doesn't change the fact that it makes it harder for someone to figure out what you can do.

Thanks for the steawman. I was explicitly referring to a mentality, not to github itself. I use github. I don't share that mentality. It's not github's fault that some users treat them as an oracle, but it does happen. I have on multiple occasions heard people say that they won't hire people unless they can check out their work on github - github specifically, and no qualification or allowance for exceptions. Every time, the speaker was exactly the kind of hipster idiot that I just described. I suppose that could just be a coincidence, or it could be that people who follow one stupid trend often follow others as well. In any case, that one stupid trend is sufficisnt to make working with them unappealing, and since there are plenty of sensible employers out there it's unnecessary as well.

Just to let you know, I agree with you in substance. If it makes a difference to someone whether you have your code on github or sourceforge, then they're obviously pushing a dogmatic view. But like you say, that's not github's fault, so conflating them and a subset of their users in an argument doesn't seem productive.

Don't you write any code outside of work? Even if the main stuff I'm working on wasn't GPL'd, I'd still have my little side projects. They're nothing fancy, but putting them out in public doesn't hurt.

Exactly...the source code for your BYOB you used to learn python say? Or even a fork and pull request to a project to fix even a small bug or add a minor feature.

On the one hand I'd agree for students/juniors it isn't a deal breaker. But students/juniors that do have it are showing a great deal of enthusiasm and passion for programming.

I would recommend to start looking into contributing to open source projects. This is already big enough to notice and become even more mainstream in future. IMHO. But, of course, it is not absolute truth. If you want to land .NET job at some big consultancy firm - they probably will not care about open source work anyway.

Not all, in fact many, programmers won't have a public github profile. If they do, great, but it can't really be a requirement of your hiring process, unless you want to limit yourself to candidates with public profiles.

Actually that wouldn't be the worst idea in the world.

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