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Comment by siva7 | Hacker News Reader

Is this really a thing or just some local phenomena? I can't remember that the github profile played a role in any hiring committee i've been part of (western europe) as people understood that most of the experienced software developers aren't active open source contributors.

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In my experience it's a positive sign to have an active Github profile or open source contributions, but it is not a negative sign if a candidate doesn't have one.

At higher levels (Principal, Distinguished) you often have to show external contributions to the industry, and some companies count open source towards this.

I can honestly say that my profile has been a huge benefit to my career, but that's more due to 20 years of open source contributions and a very customized (and automated) profile page.

https://github.com/tedivm/

I am infinitely less qualified/smart than you, but I will steal your format for my own shitty and lame accolades and accomplishments nonetheless

Yeah, when your GitHub profile looks like _that_! I would take that into account as well as a hiring manager. I do regularly click through candidates’ GH profiles and they’re usually not noteworthy so don’t count them for or against them. If they looked like yours though I would definitely read more deeply.

Yeah, that's not a github profile that's a landing page for a one-man consultancy. Very impressive.

An Ada image with zero use of Ada.

What Ada image?

What bugs me is when an applicant prominently includes a link to their GitHub profile in their resume and then that profile has zero activity. All I can gather from that is that they aren't paying attention to what they're doing: they created a profile solely because some seminar said to put it on a resume. If you don't have anything to show, simply don't include the link!

Here in a flyover type state in the US:

It never served a a cheat-code, or a skip-the-line or any such goodness. What it did was serve as a conversation starter, “I see project Y in strange language X. What is the story there?”

That’s your cue to sell yourself, your skills, your experience, etc.

I could never know, but perhaps having it also got me on the short-list for an interview to begin with?

I would say GitHub has featured in at about half of my interviews.

I had a friend working with a well known startup founder. The founder was interested in me from what my friend told him, all he wanted to see was my github profile. All of my github projects are private. That was the end of that, even after he already knew that my experience was perfect for their company. So ya, some people definitely put too much emphasis on the github profile.

You can share private repos? Granting access for a week isn't hard.

Why should parent bother if the startup ceo can't be bothered to interview on the signal of a personal referal?

Because they want a job and need to pay for the goods and services they desire to utilise?

I would presume they are organizational/protected repos which cannot be shared due to a contractual obligation, not private and personal repos.

If you were to share your current job's private repos with me, I wouldn't hire you since that's a signal that you would do the exact same when you leave my company.

this is a perfectly reasonable decision when hiring for a startup, why waste hours, that you don't have, on interviews testing the candidate when you can lookup their past work

That's in no way reasonable and would show pretty weak hiring skills in a ceo obvious to people who have hired many engineers in the past.

Considering how important networking is to startup businesses, you'd think a startup founder would put a little more weight on an employee referral than only considering their GitHub profile.

Almost 100% of my work (in midsize to big tech) is confidential. I cannot go sharing my work due to 10,000 confidentiality agreements.

I can share my random side projects... but what is the use of that? They aren't that impressive compared to my actual work.

My fear is that I will have to put lots of advertising into myself for things that don't describe what I actually do.

I can anecdotally attest to contact and employment happening solely based on Github profile - without it containing anything impressive - in Scandinavia, as well as a few cases where the profile was used as input in a regular interview process.

Do what you want with that info.

It’s just another site to scrape for dev profiles.

Same, albeit they had no idea about its content.

Same as for linkedin

In this case the code was actually reviewed, but I imagine existence itself is also used in some cases.

I doubt many people cheat stars to get hired, it’s just not a major signal there. But with stars being a signal of traction for open source startups, I definitely think there are some companies out there buying them.

Particularly in crypto where people want to quantify “community” and star count is a crude but very available way to do that.

+1 seems like a much "better"/more valuable signal to game for startups built on OSS than for individuals.

When I get a resume for someone I've been asked to interview, I'll certainly look at any github profiles, and if there's something relevant there, I'll often use their project as a basis for whatever coding exercise we do, such as extend this class to add X functionality. Or use it as a basis for design questions.

A nonstandard interview process like this is illegal in some jurisdictions. It may run afoul of US law too, depending on the outcomes.

It is safer and easier to use a one size fits all interview.

Genuinely curious, which jurisdictions is it actually illegal?

Interview with coding and design is nonstandard and possibly illegal? We must be living in different timelines.

Except it's pretty much standard. If there isn't a github link, I'm still going to tailor the programming questions to a context that I infer from the past experience on their resume (as in, they said they did X, so they should know about Y) but with a bit less accuracy.

Most of the interview is getting the candidate to show me that they know _something_ in depth and I'm not super concerned with exactly what it is. (If they've learned something in depth, I expect they can also learn the details of what we do. :) So the exact same questions to every candidate serves no one's interests.

I think the nuance here is if you tailor ALL interviews for a specific job based on each candidate to the point where the interviews are no longer directly comparable, that could constitute a hiring practice that would run afoul of some laws in various places.

However, what you're describing sounds reasonable to me - you're offering the same overall interview structure, just tailoring the question to delve more into someone's bespoke experience. That's a hell of a lot more work than a one size fits all (ala leetcoding style) question - kudos to you.

Don't know, but you can definitely find GitHub profiles built on reattributing other people's PRs to OSS projects, and they end up working for Google.

Any examples? How do you reattribute other peoples’ PRs?

I've seen it more in the context of security, if you want developers to use a malicious library or extension, you can buy stars to give it a fake reputation boost making people more likely to use it.

> (western europe) as people understood that most of the experienced software developers aren't active open source contributors.

that's probably true for western europe. compared to the US there is significant less open source projects,businesses and developers.

Most experienced software developers in the US also aren't active open source contributors. Most experienced developers who have contributed to open source probably did so as part of their job whether because they worked for an open source business or because they fixed an issue with an open source project that was important to their employer's business.

I personally have contributions to an open source project because I was employed by it for around 3 years but I generally spend my free time on hobbies other than writing code.

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