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Comment by scruple | Hacker News Reader

I don't know. I don't think people actually care. Maybe I'm a cynic, maybe I'm jaded. I've sat through a handful of interviews after submitting a resume with links to my GitHub profile, links to my (former) co-founded startup, the parents we received for our work, the projects I painstakingly polished before open sourcing, etc... At the end of all of that, I can recall exactly 1 person who even casually mentioned this stuff. He ended up being a manager and he would sometimes bring it up as a point of conversation with others on our team but it never found traction. My conclusion is simply that exceedingly few people (in the wild) give a shit about this stuff. Probably other like-minded folks.

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I totally agree with you. Nobody gives a fuck. I sweated 6 months on my CS Masters thesis. After the day of the presentation, I walked up to my Professor's office. As per the rules, you are supposed to hand a printed copy of your thesis to your thesis advisor. So I handed over the printed thesis proudly. Then we chatted, I said my goodbyes & left. In those days we had no github internet etc. All the C++ code for my thesis was on a 5 1/4 floppy. When I reached home I found the floppy. I was like, God I've forgotten to give him my code! So I picked up the floppy and trudged back to the university. Then I walk up to my advisor's office again & knock on the door. He is ofcourse surprised to see me. I say - Sorry I forgot to give you my code. Here is the floppy. I'll put it next to my thesis. Where is my thesis ?

He doesn't say anything. I look around to see if my thesis is on his bookshelf, but no, it isn't there. Then I turn around & I find my thesis. It is in his trashcan. I was so stunned & shocked. My advisor says sheepishly - look its just a Master's thesis. Its not like you have discovered a new theorem or something. These results are well known in the literature.

I just put my floppy in that trashcan and walked out. Its been more than 2 decades now but I still remember that incident like it was yesterday. Literally, nobody gives a fuck.

That's a pretty gutting experience; I'm sorry for you. But especially with the internet, the are people who value Masters work. I sent an email thanking someone for their thesis, and mentioning that I had added it as a citation on Wikipedia, but I didn't get a response. Maybe there is a vicious spiral of apathy towards undergraduate and early postgraduate work.

> Literally, nobody gives a fuck.

you are taking a single experience and applying it universally - maybe most people don't care, but there are some people who do.

It’s true that some care but the great majority don’t give a duck so it’s almost universal

Wait, whaaat? I've had issues with my thesis advisor myself but that's a whole other level altogether lmaoooo.

But yeah, Master's thesis are usually useless. (although if I had followed what I had written in my master thesis, I would be quite wealthy smh)

Hah, don't count on it.

I worked on my master's thesis quite a bit, even worked on submitting a publication (it was in control systems and was only rejected because they wanted more empirical results). The stuff was extremely groundbreaking - we were able to get 2 orders of magnitude of better performance compared to existing solutions.

Fast forward to a few weeks back, when I was talking with a process team at a multi-billion dollar biotech company (yes, it's a huge) somewhat casually, when that idea cropped back up. Their response was basically "meh, we really don't need that much higher performance".

I'm sure if I were to start up around this, I would be able to get enough funding from the recent AI rounds from VCs. But I wouldn't have customers willing to buy this in the first place! I would be like the proverbial solution looking for a problem to solve.

> I was so stunned & shocked. My advisor says sheepishly - look its just a Master's thesis. Its not like you have discovered a new theorem or something. These results are well known in the literature.

The gesture is unfortunate and I understand that you were shocked. I'm curious if your view of it changed with experience however?

I mean, unless you actually discover something great - which very rarely happen, is frankly exceptional and would probably lead to a paper on top of the actual thesis - a master thesis is mostly something you do for yourself. The point of doing it is what you learn durint the exercise. It's not really intended for being read outside of your jury. An advisor might keep a few good ones to give as reference to future students but that's pretty much it.

Hopefully, your advisor actually gave a shit when he was advising you. That's where he could have been valuable.

I always look, and I'm always happy to see something meaty enough to actually talk about in an interview.

Somewhat to my surprise, I've found that at least 90% of candidates who include a GitHub username, when I go look at their repositories, either have nothing but unmodified forks of existing open-source projects or obvious "go through the tutorial for technology X" projects. I can totally get how, after seeing that kind of thing ten times in a row, people might give up looking.

But I still always look, both at the person's public repositories and at their contribution history in other public repos.

Precisely this. I often check GitHub profiles if a candidate provides them, but I have the same experience. It's often times completely empty, or just a half-finished tutorial. Once it looked like a really active developer (like commits on almost all days), but that was from a repo with generated commits to make the GitHub contribution history look nice... not actual work.

Tip: If you're applying and want people to look at your repo. Mention this in either your cover letter or on top of your resume. If it's empty, better to leave the link out altogether.

I’ve open source something from every project I’ve done at work since I’ve started my current job. Again - after going through the open source approval process.

So I’m thinking about with each major bullet point of what I did in STAR format, I’ll have a footnote to the open source code that came from it

Yeah come on just throw it on the CV if you are proud of it. Expecting the interviewer to actually click through your GitHub account and figure out what you did is additional work for them.

I am at a point in my career that aside from my current company, I haven’t done a traditional submit my resume and interview in years. Even this job kind of fell into my lap without me seeking it out.

My prior two jobs came from knowing someone who knew someone looking for my particular combination of experience and meeting them.

I’m not saying I’m a special snowflake. But I’ve previously been hired for more strategy/architect type positions where the CxO or director wanted someone who was vetted.

I think scruple meant not just putting a github nickname, but specific links to repos. That’s what I do - but people still don’t give a shit.

12 years ago I was interviewing for a job and I was surprised that it didn't include any coding bits, only a few light technical questions on the first interview.

When I asked for this I was told they had looked at my GH account and that it was clear that I had the skills they needed. That was nice.

Something similar happened on the job after that.

But in the last two gigs I had to do a coding exercise and I was a bit disappointed that my GH didn't seem to have an effect.

The difference? In the last two jobs the companies were big organisations, with a clear interviewing process, and the technical interview was on hands of almost random engineers that could even not be part of the team I was joining.

When I have been involved in the process, I always look for public open source code. So far I have never had a candidate with an active GH account.

Personally, I have been happier working with the people that cared about these things.

Can you explain why people should care? I get a guy who is not well adapted socially, who thinks he is the best thing to ever walk through the door and I know he’s going to be a short-lived nightmare for his sup and potentially for HR. A GitHub portfolio doesn’t change the fact that it’s already a broken deal.

On the other hand, I get a guy who I can see is optimistic, friendly, humble, hungry etc and know I’m going to be happy to give him his raise every 6 months. He will be a good employee which is only really 10-20% about his skill. If he gets through our technical interview then why would I even bother looking at his repos? A homemade stupid flashy website tells me he has a rudimentary understanding of computers, he’ll figure out the rest if he doesn’t know it. Are these applicants going through my history or my companies history, painstakingly preparing questions about something tangentially related to their position? I hope not, there is simply too much movement to expect anyone to care that much.

> Can you explain why people should care? I get a guy who is not well adapted socially, who thinks he is the best thing to ever walk through the door and I know he’s going to be a short-lived nightmare for his sup and potentially for HR.

You shouldn’t care in most cases. I wouldn’t care. I hadn’t had any open source contributions since 1994 when I submitted code to the ftp info Mac archive until 2020. The only reason I have any now is because I get paid for it.

> On the other hand, I get a guy who I can see is optimistic, friendly, humble, hungry etc and know I’m going to be happy to give him his raise every 6 months. He will be a good employee which is only really 10-20% about his skill.

Are you going to do a strategic hire who only has 20% of the skill you are looking for? Are you going to hire him as a team lead? Someone leading a major new initiative without having proven industry skills?

> A homemade stupid flashy website tells me he has a rudimentary understanding of computers,

And that’s why I don’t do coding outside of work. Every piece of code I have on GitHub is running at a company somewhere and they paid my employer to use it. I more than likely spent hours on calls gathering requirements, vetting the design, teaching them how to use it, etc.

I've had some really good experiences as a candidate, since my GitHub has a couple repos that are actually used by people and have some stars. I've even had an interviewer tell me he had used one of them before, that was nice.

As for hiring for my team, the results are unfortunately much less useful. The vast majority of GH repos are completely useless, half finished tutorials or some long abandoned project.

Sometimes I have found some really interesting work though, and this always earns the candidate an interview from me.

But I agree that I'm in the minority, most other senior developers or managers don't care about it at all. And I've never had a recruiter mention it.

I think you're probalby right. There's no way to know that a github repo represents the actual work of the applicant. References from former employers/clients are going to be the main thing I would care about.

In my case as I mentioned originally - my open source code came directly from client work.

On my resume while I can’t say who I did it for, I can say what I did and point to open source artifacts that came from it.

At my age now and at this point in my career, I would never spend significant time outside of work coding.

As someone on the hiring side, Github projects only matter when they show impact via serious industry adoption (this is not sufficient, leftPad won't get you hired).

The problem is that a Github repo is too much time an effort to evaluate on technical merits. And even if the work is good, how fast can you do it? Some people turn out good work at 1/3 the rate their peers, I don't want to hire them. Between other parts of the evaluation I can give the repo 30-60 minutes max, just not enough time.

If I were looking at a Github portfolio, I would be more concerned about reading their documentation. I want to know about their communication skills and why they think their code matters. What problem were they trying to solve? Even if it was to scratch an itch that they had and only three people including themselves ever use it. What was their motivation for doing it?

I find the signal from this is still too low for it to be worth looking into. Quality of documentation has a lot to do with:

1. Correctness

2. Matching the content to the intended audience

I find that in general I have no time to check correctness, nor is it obvious who the intended audience is. A blurb and basic setup instructions is fine if the intended audience is the author. A tool intended for a particular set of power users may not require motivation. The author may well know how to write more accessible documentation and chose not to for a sensible reason.

I am more concerned about #2 than number one. I want to know how well they communicate. But then again, I’m highly biased toward communication skills.

It’s almost impossible to be a force multiplier without them.

I think we have similar priorities, I just find github to be an extremely poor predictor of on-the-job communication.

I kind of yada yada yadad over what I actually do.

My last two jobs before my current one and probably my next one aren’t really based on traditional submit my resume and interview. It’s based on networking and now mentioning “check out my GitHub profile” when you get a chance.

From my time on the hiring side, I was looking for passion. Side projects, githubs, etc all showed passion and. It wasn't the github project itself, it was the passion. That's what made the hires.

So keep doing it and talking about if it's your passion. Don't do it if it's forced. It's the passion that stands out and humans can tell if someone is really passionate about something or not.

Fwiw, 90% of the time when I visit a cool package I don’t interact with the creator at all.

If you do want nice notes, solicit them in the readmes. “If you see this, send me a note at foo@bar and tell me your thoughts!”

I rarely email a random person my random thoughts unless I have a smart question or bug report. Maybe only once have I sent a thank you this is so interesting email. Don’t want to bug people.

On the opposite end, two of the jobs I’ve had in the last ten years noted that they saw my emacs config (one interviewer admitted to borrowing from it) and I’m pretty sure it had a positive impact on my prospects.

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