Ask HN: What do employers look for in a github profile? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do employers look for in a github profile?

3 points1475 comments

I see lots of posts saying that potential employers were looking at your github profile. If you were reviewing somebody's profile, what are you looking for?

View on HN

I'm mostly interested in how well they play with others.

  * Do they contribute to other projects?
  * Will they follow "upstream" coding standards?
  * Are their commits descriptive?
  * Can they work with maintainers to get the patches right?
  * Was an effort made to split larger patchsets  into   smaller bits?

It's also nice to see folks who attempt to isolate the occasionally necessary hacky bits from the rest of the code base.

If the job requires using and committing to open source, the employer is looking for involvement in open source projects. Otherwise, the employer is looking for a vague indicator of "gets it" (at minimum gets Git and at least one language.) If the employer is evaluating code quality, they are looking for someone who codes similarly -- neither significantly worse nor better along any axis. This last level of code analysis is a sign that the employer has a weak culture and is unable to teach its standards, or is so strapped for time that the position requires immediate productivity. Therefore it's not worth worrying about the last kind of Github inspection.

I just want to see that they can write code and that it isn't awful. When looking at their code you can get a feeling if you would want that person mucking around on your project. If the person is passionate about programming they will have code they are proud of and that can be the start of a conversation.

> If the person is passionate about programming they will have code they are proud of and that can be the start of a conversation.

This statement works better as a negative. If a person is not passionate they will not have such code but a passionate person can have many reasons that they might not as well.

Code they've written. Review and evaluate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com