Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Probably less than 1% of developers have GitHub repos and there's no correlation between skill level and having a GitHub repo.
If you have extensive and current open source contributions, for most people it means you're unemployed, or you're violating your employer's contract terms.
Evaluating a GitHub repo for a summary of skills in not a trivial task, as scanning a resume is.
When all of your work is online, it suggests you are not spending much time contributing value to whoever is employing you.
Companies that can't find developers often have bizarre and useless criteria such as "must have GitHub repository" or "must have LinkedIn" or "must have FaceBook", none of which is correlated with ability.
We hire lots of capable people without GitHub repositories.
That said, if you're a Rails developer and you don't have a Github account, I'm still probably not going to read your resume.
It's not about requiring everyone who works for us to be a 23 year old with no family or life who spends every night hacking on shit, just about a baseline standard for community engagement. Lack of Github account with some level of activity (even if that's just starred repos, forks, etc) is a pretty strong indication someone wouldn't meet that level of engagement, and so wouldn't be a good match.
>> not having a Github account at all would be kinda weird these days
and this ...
>> if you're a Rails developer and you don't have a Github account, I'm still probably not going to read your resume.
Thanks for the heads up hansef.
What's the business need for stating it in those terms, then?
Bingo (at least for me). Both companies I've worked for require you to submit a proposal to an open source review board for approval. I went through the process at my previous job and approximately 2 months later I was given the go-ahead. Not worth it.
And if you count Google Code, Bitbucket, Sourceforge? Github alone has "2.1 million users hosting over 3.7 million repositories". What's your source for your statistic?
> When all of your work is online, it suggests you are not spending much time contributing value to whoever is employing you.
Or that you enjoy writing code so much that you do it in your free time.
> Companies that can't find developers often have bizarre and useless criteria such as "must have GitHub repository" ... none of which is correlated with ability.
Source?
I scoffed at this article for being too hopeful.
"there's no correlation between skill level and having a GitHub repo"
It definitely depends on the culture of different companies - for example, I work in finance and my day-to-day work is proprietary and not for public consumption, but my strange personal side projects wind up in bitbucket or github.
This is silly. I interview plenty of people who can barely code.
If someone has interesting projects on github, I'm reasonably confident they can code. Hence, correlation between having projects on github and coding ability.
Evaluating a github repo, while nonsimple, is far more accurate than scanning a resume.
I certainly hope a resume remains relevant for people in my position, because it's really all I have.
I'll always ask for live code from people at interviews, if only to filter out the total posers.
On the other hand, there are benefits to posting code online that they can review. Instead of spending hours writing code for each company that you're interviewing with, you can just write code that you're actually interested in and throw it online.
Say you're talking with 20 companies. Each of those 20 interviews have an associated overhead of 3 hours (if you're lucky): 1 hour screening call, 1 hour technical call, 1 hour live coding call. So 60 hours of screening, versus writing some code that might actually be usable by others in the future.
Don't be afraid to say no to live coding interviews. Unless you have nothing to show :-).
In most domains, code is proprietary. Few ask for code samples because unscrupulous interviewees could reveal proprietary code, potentially opening the company to legal liabilities.
I make it a point not to read code that interviewees supply because I don't want to be sued by XYZ company because of code theft. In my industry, it has happened many times. Google "Sergey Aleynikov" and "Misha Malyshev" for an example of what can happen.
Therefore, don't interview any Russians and you should be safe!
Someone who won't write code upon request is an instant no-hire.
So you're saying they can use git-filter-branch, but not write Fizz Buzz? Sounds fishy to me.
Maybe, but I bet you'll still have to spend hours writing to code in order to prove that you wrote and understand the code, rather than copying it.
I've consistently found open-source code to be a much better sample since the person being interviewed is not under such pressure when writing it. And yes, the pressure from being in a room with 3 ppl watching you is very different from "deadline pressure" to complete a task when employed.
I don't think the github resume is going to be the standard for quite awhile, but I know it makes my job when hiring much easier when we can discuss code and techniques used in an open-source project the interviewee wrote, than arbitrary questions that only prove he's recently memorized an algorithm book.
The real thing developers should think about, is the competition. This is what made "has college degree" an easy filter for employers. If you have 800 applications, tossing the ones missing a github repo in addition to the college degree trims it down a bit more.
Will you miss some possibly great people? Absolutely. Same with the college degree filter. But you'll still likely end up with a bunch of "would like to hire" candidates and it'll be easier to see what their work actually looks like. If you're applying for a job, you should absolutely consider how to stay ahead of the competition, and I'm sure companies in the future when bombarded with so many applications will add things like this to the resume filter.
To resume means to summarize. Your GitHub profile is not a summary, it is a raw dump of everything that you have done without weighting.
So, of course a resume is still relevant today. And it is still up to the applicant to present himself to the employer, because most of the time the applicant is looking for a specific job when the company is not looking for a specific employee.
After a series of emails, we proposed that we should pay him a few months consulting fee - to help us integrate. As a bonus of course, he could take the improvements and fold them back into his his open-source project.
Things continued like this and eventually he proved useful in other ways, so he is permanent hire now.
In this day and age, there really is no excuse for having "no experience" (in the software world at least). Moreover, who really cares about what university you went to if you can prove your immediate usefulness in other ways?
You'll never see the flight computer system of an F-16, but it's probably a much cooler project to work on than an iPhone app. Or nuclear reactor engineering.
Is a resume relevant in this day and age? As a device to portray the best of what you've accomplished yes. For a few people, the answer will be no, that's best done through portfolios like github and open source projects.
In the end, everything old will be new again but with a twist.
If you're applying for a position at a company that has HR minions guarding the gates to the hiring manager, then yeah this is great. If you're being hired by an individual with development experience this isn't likely to cut a lot of ice.
Here's why: several of the best developers I've ever met do not have degrees. Some didn't even bother graduating from highschool. I've worked with many developers that had degrees from name brand schools that couldn't find their ass with both hands and a map. Everyone I know in industry has had similar experiences.
"having a position in a well known company"
This at least gets you some name recognition and opens the doors to quality networking opportunities, but there's no guarantee that Name Brand Corp. didn't make a hiring mistake when they brought you on in the first place, so again, time for some healthy skepticism from the hiring manager.
"receiving a prize recognized in the industry"
Either this kind of opportunity is so rare that it's effectively out of reach for the overwhelming majority of developers in $industry_segment OR it's a valueless rubber stamp (see also: MS certifications).
"Unless you're talking about internet marketing positions, these are the things that really matter to an employer."
Your talking points imply that you define "employer" as medium to large corporation with a formal HR department and it's hiring practices stuck in the 90's. Typically a great gig if you're into grinding B2B middleware code for industry median pay and two weeks vacation. If that's what you're into that's cool I guess.
Compare/contrast an experienced FOSS contributor for a well-known project. Fending off recruiter calls and getting cold called for consulting gigs three or four times a week is the norm. Tech interviews are typically pared down to seeing if your personality will fit with the rest of the team because they already know you can code.
Resume? No thanks. Show me your code and then let's have a beverage and chat.
What is this hipster hiring? Give it 10 or 20 years bud you'll be singing a different tune or afraid to try to get hired as a coder and just pulling manager duty 3 or 4 levels up in the middle quietly re-assuring yourself that you could code and get a job in that new language eebbityfribitz ... if you really wanted to.
2nd assertion, that at some point in the next 10 to 20 years I'm going to run into some unspecified difficulties with the hiring process, resulting in me shifting career tracks to management? Would you mind unpacking the thought process behind all of this?
"Isn't likely to cut a lot of ice." I've heard that before...is it from "Mad Men?"
Item the 2nd: haven't seen Mad Men, couldn't say.
Jobs at technology companies might be what ArsTechnica and Hacker News readers go for, but those jobs are such a small percentage of the jobs filled every day in the US.
So you are looking for a concise and centralized resource for listing your qualifications for a job. And you are asking if a resume is still relevant? It seems like the way to tell employers about your github, SO, udacity, etc, profiles is to list them on your resume.
The biggest unanswered questions I'm trying to figure out are:
* what value are you going to bring to the organisation (from the value you demonstrate bringing to your previous positions)
* how well you're going to fit into the team (from how you talk about your previous roles)
* how well you understand the position and the organisation (from how you target the information you present)
GitHub et al don't really help with these much.
What GitHub et al do is make fact checking / reference chasing easier. You include some links to github and lanyrd and your background looks more credible - but by themselves they're not going to get you the job.
Completed live projects instantly visible on any browser or smartphone with a quick technical explanation have always been far more valuable for me.
You don't need to ask anyone's permission to build amazing software.
(Unfortunately, you continue to need permission to build many other things.)
And how many of those people are the ones making hiring choices?
Also, an emerging trend is "Github for X". You have sites like Grabcad (Github for Mechanical Engineers), Dribbble and Behance (Github for Designers), Benchling (Github for Biology), Proformative (Github for Accountants), etc. As these professional communities grow they'll increasingly be looking at by employers.
It's early for this trend but we believe deeply in it.