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Comment by reidmain | Hacker News Reader

From the comments it seems like there are three points of view:

1) Yeah this is dead on. Employers should only care about the code you've written.

2) No your always need a resume because your job history is more important.

3) GitHub complements your resume.

I'd say that this is totally situational. It is like a cover letter. You position yourself for the jobs you want. A lot of startups would probably put more emphasis on your GitHub account then on a resume. If you want to get into the enterprise world then they'd probably care more about your resume.

None of this is needed. It is simply your way of showcasing yourself to get the job you want.

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What GitHub (and others) are for the developer is leverage. There's nothing worse than going into a job interview that you know you are (over-) qualified for and being given fizzbuzz because the person interviewing you doesn't know if you are a rock star or a fraud.

Handing them your GitHub commit log lets you walk in on more equal terms. If they are interviewing you, they already think you're good enough for the position from a coding perspective.

It's fizzbuzz. Why would you optimize around it? Just write the silly fizzbuzz answer and move on. We don't "fizzbuzz". We have a more realistic interview challenge (with a similar purpose). But we apply it uniformly, even for candidates that come in with lots of code in their Github accounts.

Why? If they have code samples and you think they are good, why are you giving them a pop quiz?

Because of what kstenerud and robododo wrote below

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3622191 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3622441

Interviewers don't owe you anything. If you are over-qualified then within five minutes of talking you should be able to prove to them that you are worth skipping over the bullshit.

If the person still wants to go forward then that would decrease the value or working at that company in my mind.

To verify that they can bang out code when they need to, not just when they're in the right frame of mind to create code samples. Also, ours is domain specific and measures multiple things about the candidate (but the primary one is just that they can produce sane code).

In this case, we're talking about FizzBuzz. The point of FizzBuzz is that it's a test that can be passed by literally anyone with an elementary ability to code. Optimizing for it is silly. Just bang out the fizzbuzz answer (make fun of it if you like) and get on with your life.

I'm obviously against any quizzes in an interview; it puts the interviewer and the interviewee on unequal footing, but that's not the point in my comment. I'm not optimizing for fizzbuzz here. I'm optimizing for "I'm not some guy off the street here, here's some proof". I'm optimizing for "let's skip past the bullshit".

Except that it's not bullshit, at least not in the traditional sense. Think of it like your most basic unit test. Regardless of what the evidence suggests, can the candidate bang out a quick algorithm, without aid, in your presence?

Interviews are a HUGE time sink for companies; not just in the interview itself, but also in the examination of candidates, their resumes, their code, their references, discussions among team members to decide if they'll be a good fit, etc, etc. One interviewee can blow away two days work easy. So we're not in the mind to lose any more time than we have to.

Fizzbuzz is a sanity test. To the candidate it may seem absurd, but once as an interviewer you've dealt with enough fakers, or even people who honestly believe they can code and yet can't, you begin to appreciate the simple elegance of a 5 minute fizzbuzz test as a kick-off to the interview.

You're assuming that the person interviewing trusts your absolutely in your statement that that code is yours. They can't assume that. It would be irresponsible of them to just assume that that is proof of your abilities. Whilst fizzbuzz doesn't prove anything either, if you fail it then they know that you are lying. It's better than just blindly accepting it.

The unfortunate truth is that there are fraudsters out there who will attempt to cheat or bullshit their way in. Fizzbuzz is so utterly trivial that you could bang it out in a few minutes. And yet it's amazing how well it weeds out non-programmers, no matter how much they bamboozled over the phone or built up a web of deceit online. You should treat fizzbuzz or the like as a secret handshake, where you write it and then everyone nods with a grin as a member of the fold is recognized, after which the real interview begins.

Totally agree.

A shockingly small number of candidates I've interviewed have heard of fizzbuzz. The first time I mentioned it to someone, I assumed they already knew it and would just chuckle and crank it out. However, that's actually kind of rare.

When I do talk to a candidate and get that "knowing grin", my estimation of them jumps up a couple of notches. It seems to actually mean something outside of coder forums.

The real downer is how dismaying it as that candidates clearly have never prepared. How could they have done any research ahead of time and NOT seen fizzbuzz?

Actually I don't consider lack of exposure to fizzbuzz a problem. The whole point of it is that it's trivial to implement, even if you've never heard of it before. But a non-programmer (or a "programmer" with no grasp of simple algorithms) will struggle with it.

It's basically a "secret handshake" that non-programmers simply cannot do, and competent programmers can figure out in less than a minute.

Do you really think someone is going to fake a GitHub account, including thousands of commit messages? I just don't buy that. To me that's definitely enough.

If you take a look at my github account you might think it's nothing special. But what you'll also see is that I have several commits per day, despite working a 40 hour/week job and a 15 hour/week job. So at minimum it should be obvious that I really like coding. If you think my code sucks I'm fine with that, please don't invite me to your interview. But at least the company I apply for will know who I am going in.

I've examined a lot of github accounts while hiring, and seeing thousands of commits is rare. If I'm satisfied that there's no chance someone is faking, I'll forego fizzbuzz, but really in the end it's nothing more than a 5 minute formality (and I make a point of telling the candidate that it's just a formality and yes it's trivial, and we both laugh at the absurdity of the situation as he scribbles it up on the white board). At that point the real interview hasn't even started yet.

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