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Comment by ispivey | Hacker News Reader

Imagine being a single mother with a young child. You're a great programmer. But you spend 90% of your time outside work raising your kid, so you can't make the time to make significant contributions to OSS.

...

You can't get a job that requires a Github OSS history. You're severely disadvantaged in job hunting when OSS contributions are a major metric.

If people tested your suitability for a job by pair programming with you, or looking at code samples, you'd look just as good as someone who contributes to OSS. But because OSS is an important metric, you're disadvantaged.

Does this make clear how it's discriminatory?

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It's pretty clear that requiring a Github history is discriminatory. I wonder, though:

(1) Are there any companies which literally remove a person's resume from the running if his/her fit seems to be good in other ways, just because they do not have a public facing github repo? Or is this just something that people are talking about but not actually implementing.

(2) In what sense is any job requirement not discriminatory? Requiring 5 years of Ruby experience discriminates against those with only 6 months of Ruby experience. Requiring a Masters degree discriminates against those with a Bachelors or no degree. Making the candidate do a programming test discriminates against people who don't perform well on tests. The question is whether the programmers that a company hires based on a Github criterion are measurably "better" than those hired using different criteria. As far as I know, no such comparison has been done.

I could absolutely see myself using this as a screening mechanism. When I was hiring developers, I would get literally hundreds of resumes sent to me. Filtering through resumes is a waste of time. You cannot tell from that piece of paper (PDF, Word Doc, etc) how technically capable a person is, or if they would be a good fit for the team.

I do not have time to interview hundreds of people, so we have to apply some filtering. Are we going to potentially filter out a good candidate because they didn't take the time to make themselves stand out? Maybe, but I'm okay with that.

Good point. If you have to go through hundreds, then you're more or less looking for a reason to say no. Better that you miss the odd good candidate, than waste weeks of productive time trying to make the process 100% perfect.

What makes her a great programmer? Some natural ability? Surely during the time she has developed all of these skills she has developed something that is worth showing off? If she is such a great programmer, how is she maintaining her skills if all she is doing is working on what her employer puts in front of her?

If that single mother literally has no time outside of her 40 hour work week to be learning new things and staying current with technology, she will have a hard time finding new jobs regardless of the screening methods used.

This is also one contrived example. Not an entire "social class" of the programming population.

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