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Comment by smallsharptools | Hacker News Reader

This is a rant. They must not have much worth sharing on GitHub.

These days if I interviewed 2 developers and one had a very nice resume full of recommendations and stories about successful projects and the other developer had an active GitHub account with their own active projects with many watching them as well as multiple accepted Pull Requests for other projects... I would easily lean toward the developer who has been actively writing code, sharing and interacting with other developers. It shows they have passion, drive, dedication and an eagerness to learn from others and contribute back to the community.

A fancy resume cannot replace all of that.

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That presumes that either (a) they have time to spend doing substantial work with open source outside of their day job and other obligations, or (b) they have a day job which allows them both the time and the regulatory freedom to contribute to open source. For many programmers with the desire to contribute to open source and substantial work experience, this is not the case.

> It shows they have passion, drive, dedication and an eagerness to learn from others

No, all it shows is that they wrote some code and put it on a website.

The developer that has just a resume might be just as (or more) skilled that the one that uses github but for whatever reason can't post code up like that. To exclude someone simply because they don't have an active github is foolish.

However did you screen, interview, and hire people before github came along?

As someone currently looking for an entry level position in development work I agree with this. Currently I'm learning about cryptography and web security. There's not a lot of development work from that I can put on my github account. Especially since Matasano's Cryptography challenges which I've been slowly working through don't allow me to publicly display the challenges or my results. Does that mean I don't have as much drive as someone who's working on machine learning currently and can write a library and post it on github?

Getting active on GitHub was important to me after interviewing last year at a couple of great places. I learned I was out of sync with the developers I wanted to work with. So I got more active on GitHub by sharing code I created which I thought was useful to others. And when I used other libraries I looked for ways I could improve on them and managed to get some Pull Requests accepted. There were lots of benefits. One great benefit is regularly reading code written by developers with more experience than you. And if you form relationships with these same developers and they start coaching through changes on their projects you can accelerate your learning. This work csn even lead to a job. Being active on GitHub is a distinct advantage for sure.

These days an active GitHub profile gives a developer a distinct advantage. It helps them form relationships with other debs who can teach them so much, even by just reading their code and commit comments. I watch multiple projects just so I can read about the changes they made, what their thinking was and the changes to the code.

Even if you cannot post code does not men you cannot watch and clone projects so you can learn and stay aware of trends in the community. It keeps you sharp. And it better than any industry magazine out there.

It may be a rant, but your anecdotal evidence doesn't prove its point wrong. In fact, a recent influential paper by sociologist Lauren Rivera [1] suggests that cultural "fit" is indeed an important aspect in many hiring decisions.

Rivera finds that interviews are where "fit" is ultimately determined, but résumé screening is a first step: "firms mandated that evaluators assess candidates’ fit along with a variety of technical and communication skills in résumé screens and first- and second-round job interviews" (p. 1007).

1: http://www.asanet.org/journals/ASR/Dec12ASRFeature.pdf

And GitHub is all about fit and culture. What makes GitHub so valuable is more than just making a lot of code available. It allows me to interact with many developers, discuss reasoning behind changes and learn from mistakes and successes. Being able to interact helps prepare developers for working on a team anywhere. I know many developers work in isolation even at companies and GitHub allows them to get that team experience.

And my evidence is personal experience. I do not need a study to know that interacting more with people makes me a better team player. I know that I have benefitted greatly by cutting back on time reading articles and attending meetups and more time with GitHub activities.

A thing is worth exactly what another is willing to pay for it.

The author's work may very well not be worth sharing on GitHub - it may be worth much more than "free".

If you think GitHub is just about sharing code you are missing out.

I was specifically responding to the parent's comment about "sharing on GitHub". Hence my focus on sharing code on GitHub. I have plenty of code on GitHub, which the owner to whom I sold it would not like it shared.

It's also possible that the first developer gave 100% to his job, while the second blew it off to work on whatever he wanted.

I place myself in the first category. I am going to have to start committing my code samples to github, because 90% of what I write is proprietary and of no use to anyone but my clients and when not bound by NDA, the code would be a waste of other developers' time and would be on github just to be on github, since I and my employer have our own repos. Whenever I'm interviewing I end up pulling code from larger projects and coding a fake context around it to create a sample. I'd love to be more active in the OSS community but I have frameworks to learn, a 10 hour a day job and a wife and kids. No new job for me.

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