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Comment by gmurphy | Hacker News Reader

We call this the 'dark matter' problem - when you're trying to hire great people, for every well-known rockstar, there are tens of people who are better, toiling away in obscurity.

The early JavaScript scene was like this - there were people who published amazing JS work and everyone on DHTMLCentral knew who they were, and it was easy to find them and try to hire them. Yet we felt this huge frustration because occasionally we'd interview someone who was as good or better, but we had only found them by accident.

I'm excited about sites like Dribbble and GitHub, which make it easy to showcase your work without having to go through the pantomime of a large folio piece. Though it can be a pain for introverts to do, I've never met anyone who regretted overpublishing their stuff.

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I think that GitHub merely shifts the "dark matter" problem. I think your assertion about "rockstars" applies to GitHub just as well - for every person with an impressive GitHub account, there are tens of people who are better, toiling in obscurity.

The point is that you can't just look for people who are famous or prolific on blogs or twitter or GitHub or whatever else.

Exactly. Github (and every other flavor of the time) is an example of the problem. Not the solution.

Nah, Github is a step in the right direction. They make publishing online easier which gets more people to do it. It's like how twitter grew the blogging world by making it easy to do. Sure, not everyone does it yet, but it's better than before

Also with Github you are publishing actual code, and not just writing about code (I am looking at you, coding horror).

I'm not sure that helps much when it comes to recruitment, though.

When someone starting out in the industry asks for advice on how to get recruited, it's very trendy for wisened old souls on places like HN and Slashdot to mumble something about making sure you contribute to Open Source projects and have a GitHub account.

But on the big OSS projects, where making a contribution wins you significant geek cred, is anyone involved in a hire/no-hire decision really going to take a load of time to look through a bunch of commits you made and figure out whether they were any good and what sort of impression they give of you? IME, you're lucky if everyone making that decision even read your whole CV before the interview.

And on smaller projects, no-one recruiting you knows what they are unless they've shipped and have an obvious presence to see, in which case that is probably a far more effective advertisement than the underlying code anyway.

If you've got your own personal project, which is complete and something a potential recruiter can immediately run for themselves, then sure, include a link to it. Likewise if you've got a blog that's going to give an immediate positive impression and is clearly down to you personally, go ahead and include that. But those are things where you can immediately see the whole picture as a recruiter, with minimal time and effort.

I remain to be convinced that there is much value in linking to things like GitHub accounts or major OSS repositories, because they don't offer the same instant gratification. They do demonstrate that you're a keen programmer generally and not just in it for the money, but that's going to be all they do for most potential employers.

While I've never seen a hiring manager looking at the code actually committed to open source projects, I've certainly been asked in interviews about the contributions to well known projects I list on my CV.

Other interviewers haven't mentioned the contributions at all. So I guess it depends on the interviewer.

Sure, anything you can list as a contribution is potentially going to come up at interview, and anything you can honestly say you've contributed to is potentially valuable on a CV/resume, particularly early in your career. I'm not disputing either of those things at all.

But if you get to the point where you're discussing your contribution in an interview, you've already got past one of the big hurdles, and the guys interviewing you are now going to be forming opinions based on what you actually say to them personally. In that respect, contributing to an Open Source project or hosting something on GitHub didn't convey any particular advantage just because in theory the recruiters could look you up, and just giving a link to a GitHub account rather than highlighting specific contributions isn't really worth much at all.

My advice to someone wanting to stand out in those early days would simply be "Make stuff, preferably stuff that looks interesting". Whether you contribute to an OSS project or build something else makes little difference IME, and so I think the cookie-cutter "You simply must have a GitHub account and contribute to OSS" wisdom is just plain bad advice.

This is true, but not the point (at least until automatic tools run through the commit history and rate the contributions automatically).

Contributing to OSS projects gets you through filters, in the same way being Ex-Google will open a lot of doors.

The fact I'm an Apache committer and have code included in Spring gives me some credibility as a Java programmer (even if I haven't been active in either of those roles for years). Hiring managers are more likely to put you on the "worth looking at" pile rather than the "doesn't have a clue" pile based just on that.

Fair enough, but is the advantage here that you have worked on OSS projects, or that you have worked on big name projects that a recruiter might have heard of?

> I'm not sure that helps much when it comes to recruitment, though.

I've gotten a cold-call email from a recruiter who started the email out with "I found your github account…" And all I have in there are two tiny personal apps I wrote to scratch an itch I had.

As a hiring manager, I do look at github accounts if a candidate includes one. Even from a small project you can often tell if the person is clueless or not.

I question your assumptions. It is every individual person's prerogative to decide whether they wish to publish, and we should avoid setting up systems that exclude those who decide not to.

The majority of the most intelligent and productive people on Chrome don't blog, don't have github accounts, and they only way you'd have a hope of finding them is because Chrome is open source so you could trawl the repository and discussion lists. But there must be similar networks on tons of close-source projects.

I guess the takeaway is that:

- If you're looking for work, be public. It is still a huge differentiator. Edit: Actually you should try and make a practice of being public even before you're looking for work.

- If you're looking for people, personal networks are still probably the most effective approach. But looking through the activity of open source projects (not just on github) is also very effective. You'd have to put in a lot of work though to actually read code and discussions to find the best people.

For context, unless I'm mistaken, aboodman wrote GreaseMonkey, went on to work on Gears at Google, and since then has been on the Chrome team.

Yeah, sorry if the comment was a bit context-lacking. gmurphy is a coworker on Chrome.

This problem is why, as a hiring manager, you should be asking your best people whom they know and would hire. Then, talk to tose people, establish a relationship over years, and be ready to jump during the small interval between projects when they might be looking.

Recruiting top people is a multi-year project. Every time.

The only exception is when there's a meltdown (e.g. Sun is acquired by Oracle). And you can bet in most of those, serious players are literally flying down people to recruit out the best people. When the whole Borland/Inprise debacle happened, I dealt with one full-time recruiter who we'd used to capture the few great people who were poachable after that terrible transition happened.

Github suffers the same issue. What about Bitbucket, Google Code, and Sourceforge?

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