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Comment by cbarrick | Hacker News Reader

My public repos on GitHub are not a good way to judge me as a candidate. Not even close.

Frankly, I don't have much time to contribute to open source these days. I send a PR maybe once a year.

Almost everything on my profile is from my university days, and none of it is related to my career specialty (ML SRE).

And my employer asks me to fill out a form before I publish personal projects, so that they can be sure it is unrelated to my job (and thus that they do not have a patent or copyright claim over the code). This means most of my weekend projects simply aren't public, because I can't be bothered to do the paperwork.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, clearly shows where I've worked and what I've worked on. It's a much more accurate resume for me that GitHub.

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Same here. I don't care to publish my personal projects on Github and my work projects aren't there for obvious reasons.

I think a tool like this would be targeted more towards eliminating false positives, rather than eliminating false negatives.

I think this tool as a whole is probably an awful way to judge a candidate. But that's not really the point. The point is to find additional candidates with a low false negative rate.

E.g. over the past year I've written tens of thousands of lines of zig code. But that's not on my resume nor my LinkedIn. this would allow someone to include me. Is the code good, or am I a good candidate? Impossible to tell... Ah, but now you have heard of me! :D

There's more fluff on the page, but it's just fluff, and safe to ignore.

> And my employer asks me to fill out a form before I publish personal projects, so that they can be sure it is unrelated to my job (and thus that they do not have a patent or copyright claim over the code). This means most of my weekend projects simply aren't public, because I can't be bothered to do the paperwork.

Your employer is bad and they should feel bad! If you have the option you should consider changing to an employer less willing to make the world worse... or maybe a jurisdiction where that toxicity is unenforceable.

> Your employer is bad and they should feel bad!

For the record, my employer is Google.

They call this process the Invention Assignment Review Committee or IARC.

From what I understand, the process is not actually enforceable anyway. Code I write related to my job is owned by them; other code I write is owned by me. I don't necessarily have to go through their process for this to be true. And their lawyers certainly know this.

I've done it once, and the process is lightweight. And I probably could ignore it in practice with no one actually caring. But the fact that the process even exists is enough of a blocker that I don't readily publish my hobby projects anymore, and that's kinda shitty.

> I've done it once, and the process is lightweight. And I probably could ignore it in practice with no one actually caring. But the fact that the process even exists is enough of a blocker that I don't readily publish my hobby projects anymore, and that's kinda shitty.

and they know this, and that's the point... there's a reason people talk about the chilling effects of shitty, but not technically illegal behavior

> For the record, my employer is Google.

Yeah, I knew that from your hn profile. Which caused me to ask a friend, also SRE at google, how onerous it was, he said basically the exact same thing you did, just intrusive enough his github is also completely empty.

I wonder what cool stuff doesn't exist today because of it

over the past year I've written tens of thousands of lines of zig code. But that's not on my resume

why not?

i have included every significant contribution to any project, whether it is paid or not on my CV. why would i leave that out? it's experience. only code that i write for my own use and don't publish may not be worth to be listed

Because it's across a few projects and none of them are popular enough to be worth listing.

Yes, I'm in the same situation. The majority of my work is on private repositories, even though I've contributed to public repositories for many years. This tool wouldn't accurately reflect my current skills.

Then clearly you would be ranked very low by something like this. I think that is the whole point of this: tell the people who have solid commit history from those who don't.

But the ranking is not reflective of actual skills. That's the critique. Aside from very frequent open source contributors (and I think these people are the minority of devs), devs will tend to be "profiled" by this tool according to the dot scripts, university projects, Advent of Code, or other half-hearted projects they happen to have put on their Github. (Maybe I'm just projecting...)

The issue isn't that not everyone has a Github presence, the issue is that for most people their Github presence is somewhat unrepresentative of their actual job skills.

It is one dimension of many showing amounts of practice. I understand why that makes people sad, but that sadness just feels narcissistic.

I might be interested on people who can help me solve my particular problem. Those people might not be the same who have lots of commits on Github.

Then, logically, you would not hire them solely based on this one tool.

I completely understand your situation. GitHub isn't the perfect fit for everyone, especially for those in specialized roles like ML SRE

GitMatcher is primarily aimed at the sourcing stage, where recruiters can find devs based on their actual code contributions. But I agree, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution — it's not meant to replace LinkedIn or fully capture your career.

I think the problem runs deeper than that. What you’ve done is an interesting tool for finding out more about a relatively small slice of developers.

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