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Comment by hansef | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what stack you're working with, and the associated broad engineering culture. I haven't hired anyone who didn't have a Github repo in 2 years, out of 18+ FTEs and contractors - but we're a Rails/Scala/node shop building fancy web apps for startups. Not having a huge OSS track record is fine, but not having a Github account at all would be kinda weird these days. If we were doing embedded systems stuff or financial modeling software or game development, probably a lot less relevant. The "show us your Github, not your resume" line in a lot of job posts is more about the specific engineering culture in a particular kind of startup development, not a hard and fast rule for every software firm everywhere.

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.

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Where to begin ...

>> 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.

The "show us your Github, not your resume" line in a lot of job posts is more about the specific engineering culture in a particular kind of startup development, not a hard and fast rule for every software firm everywhere.

What's the business need for stating it in those terms, then?

Do you expect Rails developers to have their own pet projects that they put a lot of time into? I agree it would be strange if no one had any forks, had never done a pull-request etc.

Pet projects? Absolutely not, although never a minus. ;) More: are you engaged with the community enough to be aware of the current ecosystem, (handwaving) "best practices", libraries/gems, etc. If someone claims to have been building Rails apps for 5 years, but has never heard of Devise and Carrierwave, it's definitely a red flag for me. If you're trying to get a job on the Google search team and can't whiteboard a quicksort it's going to be an equivalent red flag for them. I'm trying to attract a specific type of developers for a specific kind of programming work where caring about this kind of stuff is useful as a signaling factor to me.

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.

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