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Comment by nitwit005 | Hacker News Reader

The act of taking a serious look at people's github repos, blogs, or whatever else, appears fairly unusual. I've asked.

I always linked my gitlab profile in all my applications. If I had any code on it which might be relevant to the position I also mentioned it in my cover letter. Barely anyone ever mentioned my gitlab projects or ask things about it. Just this one guy, he was confused that my master thesis was stating I handed it in in 2021 and asked why i didn't have a job yet. Thanks to this man I found out there is a typo on the cover of my thesis, because i handed it in 2022.

It was kinda embarrassing, but I also felt joy that there are actually people out there who look at my stuff. The job didn't fit, but it was still a good experience.

So yeah: Investing a few minutes in writing up a personal readme which gets shown on my gitlab was worth it. I can recommend!

You need to distinguish between filtering and interviewing.

Most interviewers will not discuss your public work because they want to be unbiased and have the same discussion with multiple candidates without any other factors other than your performance in the interview itself influencing their assessment. They are doing the right thing.

Where a portfolio can help you is in getting you from application to being invited to interview, which can be a challenge when there are many applications for a role.

In some cases it might also influence a hiring manager's or hiring committee's decision as a tie-breaker between you and another candidate who did just as well as you did in interview, but I believe that's less common.

GitHub can be faked by taking work of others. When screening there’s no time to investigate each artifact. It’s nice if someone has a github repo, but it’s by no means the deciding factor.

Yeah. I often look at a candidate’s GitHub profile before an interview to get a sense of what they’re interested in - but mostly so I can ask interesting interview questions. “So, I saw on your GitHub you’ve made a few projects building terminal based UIs. What got you into that?” / “What are the big challenges in making modern terminal UIs? Why don’t more people do it?”

Just happened to come across a coworkers GitHub today and really only looked at it for like 5 minutes. My take always were: “wow they have a LOT of recent activity”, “all the history of this repo is 8 years old”, and “didn’t know they coded with next|node|ruby” But it gave positive impressions

I'd say that's what the README page is for that you can create and gets shown at the top of your profile. I summarized my most important projects, the languages I know and some other simple facts about me. Mainly because i have a lot of "trash" on my gitlab which is just for personal use (I am always unsure if i should keep that public anyways)

Yeah, I have a fairly prolific GitHub portfolio so the first 5 minutes of most interviews are flipping to a random GitHub repo and asking me what is going on there. Makes me think they're trying to have me prove that I'm the author of it.

Anecdotal, but I've changed jobs 3 times in the last 6 years (oof) and in two of the interview processes they dug deep enough into my github (linked from the CV) to be able to ask tricky questions and have discussions.

Heck, as part of the most recent interview process I was asked to provide a code walkthrough of a part of a personal project of mine for two developers from the company I was interviewing for. It was fun actually.

I can only speak from interviewing candidates at a big corp, but generally HR shortlists a bunch of candidates, schedules interviews then send me the resume about 16hr before the actual interview.

I’ve never come across a candidate where anyone has dug into someone’s online presence prior to an interview.

And to be honest, I’d rather speak to the person that read something they wrote.

But again, that’s big corp so obviously other companies might do it differently.

I host my own website. I can see from the logs that recruiters etc don't click on it, bar a rare exception.

I’ve had an in person interview where we talked about them actually reading through my website. It was awkward to be honest but also cool they read it - was also strange to talk about “extracurriculars” during a technical interview.

Always had a really really difficult time with how to present “myself” on a personal website - too many sides (code, personal preferences, opinions, etc) in one place. But whatever just send it and own it I guess - am still content selective though.

I always do and will spend as much time and attention as necessary to really understand what I'm looking at. A lot more than I do reading a CV.

I really just don't know what to look for. Occasionally when looking at resumes I'll see a github link, and I never get any useful information from looking at it, so I mostly don't bother.

Your blog, open source contributions, or conference talks are often the thing that gets you to the interview, but I’ve never been asked about them directly during an interview.

That's why the article suggests screenshots and a README. Even that level is unusual, of course, but it doesn't hurt.

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