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Comment by VolatileVoid | Hacker News Reader

This bothers me. I consider myself very passionate about programming - I think most people who know me would consider me to be a hacker.

That said, I work for a company that does not allow its code to be open-sourced. The job is demanding and after I put in 60+ hours a week, I simply feel worn out. On top of that, I have an 8 month old son which means that my sleep is fragmented at the best of times.

If you're unwilling to take the time to have a conversation with me to see my passion (and this is something I firmly believe comes across in any interview) then I am unwilling to waste my precious time with my son to have an inane dialog about my lack of a public portfolio.

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I think what the OP is trying to convey is that, passionate people leave external residue of their passion. Which I think is true. Do you have anything (code, scripts, blogs) to show (stuff which you worked on) when you worked at a different place?

On a different note, 60+ hours a week sounds too much, not sure when you started working on this job, but if you keep continuing that. You. Will. Burnout.

Been 7 years, been burned out for nearly 6. ;) And I've been here since I've graduated university in 2005.

And to answer the next question: it's a bank. Every time I've contemplated leaving, there was some major life-changing event that prevented me from doing so (i.e. getting married, wife losing her job, buying a house, moving abroad, having a kid...). Likely I'm making some excuses here, but my point remains: I know a lot of hard-working hackers that simply don't have the time to build a decent GitHub profile.

Those hackers - whom I work with - all read HN extensively to stay abreast of trends, and toy around with side-projects. But all that "side coding" happens whilst at work. And therein lies the problem. If you have ever worked as a programmer on Wall St. you won't need me to spell it out for you, but for those who haven't: your firm owns your intellectual property. Even if it's not related to the firm's business, if you do that work on the firm's premises, it is theirs, and you are not entitled to export it. If you try it is generally considered as grounds for termination.

It's not just Wall St. Everywhere I've worked has had similar clauses (even though some of them are of dubious legal stature in the UK).

Here's the problem from the company's perspective:

You get thousands of resumes, and you can't possibly call every one of them. So you try to find ways to build a funnel, hoping that your heuristics are weeding out the majority of those who are unsuitable for the position and keeping the majority of those who are suitable.

It's not that the company is being a dick, or that they don't value the candidate's time; it's simply that they can't possibly find each and every needle in the haystack, or find any at all unless they start filtering on SOMETHING.

So unless you have something compelling on your resume and cover letter that makes you stand out (not saying it has to be source code; just saying it has to be compelling), you're a lot more likely to be filtered out of the first funnel and never make it to the phone screen to have a dialog.

If there is such a scarcity of software engineers as companies claim, then what haystack?

The haystack of unqualified applicants (people lacking the skills needed for the job, people who can't even program, people who aren't a good cultural fit, people who don't take pride in their work, etc). You'd be surprised at the crazy shit that comes in via the jobs@mycompany address, or the sheer amount of obviously poorly matched resumes that come in via recruiting companies. It's enough to make you tear your hair out in frustration, and that's just at the initial resume scan phase! The general scarcity of engineers only exacerbates the problem by lowering the needle ratio.

It's hard to grok how difficult and complex hiring good people is until you find yourself on the hiring side of the equation. The leaked Valve manual does offer some insight, but even that's barely scratching the surface.

I've got two things to say on this.

1) I'm not that surprised. For example, I know that half the recruiters who call me are asking about positions for which I'm blatantly unqualified and which simply don't appeal to me. When I've carried through to an interview, this often becomes abundantly clear to both sides.

2) If you're only even interviewing such a tiny fraction of the many, many applicants you hear from, you simply don't get to claim there's an engineer shortage. There's a shortage of engineers you like.

If you only hire the top 1% of applicants, you will never hire more than 1% of the applicant pool... no matter how large it is. You'll just get the vast majority of the engineering population pissed-off at your hiring practices because you reject 99 resumes for every 1 you offer to while complaining of a shortage.

Most start up companies have open source at the core of their philosophy, so it naturally follows that people working at such companies will have a rich open source portfolio. For instance, today I contributed a fix to a plugin we're using. Making open source contributions is just part of my normal workflow.

If you are working at a company that doesn't value open source now, and you don't contribute to open source, it will be hard to transition to a job that does value open source contributions.

You mention your current job is in banking. If you were to apply to another banking job, you'd probably have a better chance of getting the position than someone who has a rich open source portfolio, but no experience in the industry.

Having a GitHub account with x projects is just the new has x years of experience in Java.

Sounds like cult-speak. "If you're not one of us, you're against us. Join us! Or be damned to eternity!" Lighten up.

Lots of startups disdain open source, for good reason. Been working at startups for 20 years, and none of them used open source for more than incidental reasons.

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