GitHub is your resume so keep your resume in GitHub | Hacker News Reader

GitHub is your resume so keep your resume in GitHub

davidhampgonsalves.com

34 pointssoggypopsicle54 comments

As mentioned several times, Github is not your resume. At the very least, it's not mine. Sure, I have a github profile, but the little side projects there don't really have anything to do with my professional work (most recently, data deduplication and video processing).

Also, LaTeX can produce much, much better resumes than markdown. Here's a link to my (extremely dated) resume using the moderncv template: http://jsaxton.com/resume.pdf

It's great for a number of reasons:

1: It immediately gets the attention of the hiring manager, since it looks way better than the typical MS Word resume.

2: It's really easy to edit. If I want to add an item, I just add "/item Did X". It's great.

3: It's plaintext, so you can throw it in git, which is really nice. Since I don't want the public to know if I'm updating my resume, I keep my resume in a private git repository (the same private repo where I keep all my Coursera work).

I am sorry but that CV needs some spacing. The font rendering might be top notch but it's way too cramped.

I don't mind the public knowing I am updating my resume, I too use moderncv and love how nice my resume looks with very little work.

What you mentioned about people liking the way the resume looks is absolutely true, but I still get a lot of people that ask for it in Word format, especially recruiters. I've in the past caught recruiters that have added/changed my resume to suite their requirements better, so having only a PDF actually helps stop that nonsense.

http://bertjwregeer.com/Resume-files/BertJWRegeer-Resume-Apr...

(Side note, I am looking for work, feel free to contact me!)

Oof. I know you didn't put up your resume for critique, but it is far too wordy... A resume should be something that a person can glance at to get a general idea of your career.

The interview (and to a lesser extent, cover letter) are where the specifics come out.

No it's not. Github only shows an extremely small portion of the story. If you plan to be seen as a straight code monkey - sure. My github is practically empty because I'm doing high quality work that people would prefer I not share. Also, github doesn't capture much more than the capability to slign code.

Some of us share everything as a matter of principle.

It disappoints me that so few people here read the linked article. This article talks about writing your resume in markdown and only tangentially mentioned git at all in that writing it in markdown will make it versionable. The only direct mention of github is a link to a repo that converts resumes to pdf.

Perhaps the link title should more accurately describe the post content, then. It's up to the author and link submitter to clearly communicate.

I agree with you and perhaps someone should change the title. But I am still disappointed one would see fit to dash off 50-100 words without taking the time to read the article. "Ooh, this guy pressed one of my buttons! Here we goooooooo."

Sure, but does that justify commenting on a link without even reading the content?

Keeping your resume in source control makes sense, whatever technology you end up using is completely up to you, all you really need is changelist history.

My comments actually do reflect the story. The concept is cool, I get it, and it's useful. I'm commenting on the intent of the concept as well as the post title. The intent of your resume being derived from Github means that one believes your code is your "work". Maybe I'm hung up on semantics - i can see how this would be useful for augmenting and dynamically updating the resumes for a certain group.

Glad to see some pushback on this whole "Github is your resume" thing. I know I'm not the only person whose employer demands that their code be kept closed-source. My Github profile is full of weird little experiments and is definitely not meant to be some kind of polished, "hey please hire me!". Feel free to ask me about what's in there, but it's not some kind of showcase of my best work. Everything in there (that's public) is just stuff I've done for fun.

I feel like programmers should all realize this, which makes me think that the people that are going to be "judging" based on what's in there are not exactly people that are equipped to know if I'm a good programmer or not anyway.

I wouldn't state it as intensely as justizin, but I agree with him. ~60% of programmers I'd call first to work on a project with me don't even have a github account.

Github is a great resume if you're young and don't have real work experience, if you want to change "tracks" and show you have skills in a different domain, or if you really love and support open-source.

I guess it's a self-resolving problem as companies who take not having github activity as a negative probably aren't places people without github account would want to work anyway.

i was more going after these angles:

  (a) once upon a time, it was _expected_ of a competent developer to be able to run a server with a web server and a resume html file.  putting your resume in github is no more impressive than putting your resume in your personal wikipedia profile.

  (b) some of us have been programming a lot longer than github has been around, and it does not come close to effectively showing community contribution over such a career.

  (c) as someone responding to my original comment noted, not all code can be published.  i have a lot of commits, even in github, which you can't see.

All that said, I do expect people increasingly to examine github for recent community work, I would be concerned with someone who had never used it, though outside the fad bubble of the sf mission, a lot of people are using bitbucket and - GASP - hosting their own git repos.

GitHub is a great tool, a useful community 'hub', but also a SPOF and a relatively young player in the source control space.

I can say from experience, however, it's just very frustrating to have a recruiter say that some founders ten years your junior who probably have a great idea and could be great to work for want to see a github profile.

kids, i helped build Rackspace, without which there would be no GitHub. Give those old-timers a call. ;)

Anyway, this debate may not be fair to OP who was just showing how to use GH to host actual resume. There are some advantages, but really, fire up a $5 DigitalOcean VM and show me that you know about code running some way other than foreground in your laptop console.

Here's mine, http://philcv.com/. It's also generated from Github and a simple push to gh-pages has changes up. It's HTML, but modular and would be easy enough to convert the chunkier bits of text to markdown.

If you hit print you'll get a stylesheet suitable for distributing a PDF... or printing.

You can even change the colour theme with the left/right arrow keys, but that's just to help me pick a colour scheme, rather than a feature of the CV itself.

Clear case of: http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-r...

The linked article (title "Painless Resumes With Markdown") doesn't even mention GitHub.

Why not keep your resume as pure git repo? That's more in the spirit of git, no? That way you could even track ppl's CV for updates. (More of a joke than a real CV https://github.com/kidd/Me )

now that's a resume in Github :)

Honestly, Ohloh works far better as a resume than Github; the vast majority of the projects I contribute to live elsewhere.

Even better, though, I have a real resume, much of which consists of a section "Open Source Project Experience": several paragraphs explaining the biggest projects I've contributed to, what I've done, and how that work is significant. That section in particular works very well with potential employers/interviewers. THat works far better than just saying "there's my work over there, evaluate it yourself".

github is not your fucking resume, whippersnappers.

Couldn't agree more. Once, in an interview, I was asked for a link to my "Github resume". I replied, "I don't have one. I get paid to write code." I got the job.

Everything I've ever done is on my github account. I also get paid to code.

Well, for the majority of us that is not the case. If you work for Mozilla (or something like that) then great, but to expect the same from everyone is just ridiculous.

Where do you work? (At most companies I have worked for, I can't even talk about "what" I am doing for them, forget about releasing code.)

I agree with you. But please do read the article.

Wow - there is a lot of hating going down here, and it took me a while to work it out. The majority seems to be "But my employer won't let me Open Source my work". Well, yes.

We are entering a world where companies will have to compete to hire harder than ever before. Coding is a job that can be done anywhere in the world - so if they want to hire the "best" the companies need to be the most attractive.

OR ...

They need to guarantee low risk.

If you work in a company that does not expect to release some work product as open source, then it is not a company that is going to compete on that world stage.

If so then look at its approach to keeping employees safe and risk free - no layoffs, a nice profitable niche to exploit, no exploitation, no crazy deadlines, nice low turnover of staff.

If the company you work for is not competing for talent, nor is it giving you low risk in return for your work, then I strongly suggest you update your CV, on github or not.

JoshTriplett comments are the sanest - in short "I have a github account for bugs I fix on major projects. I put that in my normal CV along with why what I did was important"

Now that is how to use a github account. I have some catching up to do.

Github is not your resume.

http://osrc.dfm.io/

You can generate an open source report card based on your profile, but you should not see github as your CV:

https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-c...

Two reasons you shouldn't cite James' post as an argument:

1. He blocks HN traffic (hence the idiotic octopus gif)

2. His post is incredibly inaccurate and simply wrong on so many levels

Nice to see this getting some publicity. The markdown-resume-js project that this uses is based on my own markdown resume project at https://github.com/there4/markdown-resume.

It's a project that generates both html and pdf versions of a resume written in markdown. It's distributed as a phar file so you can keep a copy in your bin folder and just keep your resume.md in it's own repo.

This was originally a way to experiment with css descendant selectors and learning more about the capabilities of wkhtmltopdf. It's limited compared to LaTex, but it's reasonable for a simple resume.

Thanks for your work! I'm the author of markdown-resume-js and it wouldn't exist if I didn't have your repo to blatantly rip-off :)

I'm actually surprise the library is getting any use at all. I hacked it together over a week after being frustrated with the options out there, then finding yours and wanting the same thing in node.

Quite opposite. Github is an anti-resume for dedicated hackers. You should not mention it, if you want to get 'normal' job in some corporation.

- github shows you spend too much time programming outside of daily job

- it shows how much more productive you are outside of work, possibly creating some uncomfortable questions for your boss.

- running project with 10K+ users could interfere with your daily job

- companies prefer younger 'not so much' experienced people who just follow

- most companies have strict ban on any open-source activities outside of job, advanced Githubers are filtered out even before interview.

You'd have to be a goddamn idiot to put your phone number and email address directly into a git repo or gist.

I get enough spam from recruiters on LinkedIn thank-you-very-much.

Maybe not my real phone number but Google Voice number? Sure, who cares?

What do you all do when they require it to be in Word, then? While I could just have a resume on at my personal site, about 99.9999999% of every job I've ever applied for, through a recruiter or not, has required my resume in Word format.

Also, I have several resumes, depending on the role of the job I'm applying/striving for.

But I appreciate the sentiment of using GitHub for a document version manager.

I've had a Word document as my resume, but these days while using LaTeX I just have a PDF.

This has had two good benefits.

1. Recruiters can no longer modify my resume easily to match their requirements. Yes, I've caught some recruiters modifying my resume they sent on to the company to include more keywords. (Which incidentally is also why I bring my resume to jobs with me) 2. I can have a more consistent formatting that is enforced. I've found that even with Microsoft Word different versions across platforms would display my resume differently.

Even if recruiters/companies require Word documents, most of them are more than willing to take a PDF instead. Most online forms that pull information out of a resume can pull information out of a PDF just as well as out of a Word document.

I have a dedicated email for my Github profile. Interestingly, I've received several unprompted job offers at that email, which is not the email listed on my resume. So there are at least some groups (most of these were startups) who may be hiring based off Github profiles alone.

Depends on the company. The majority of companies that I work with would not even have heard of github, much less know how to extract information from it (in any meaningful sense).

A smaller percentage wouldn't care one way or the other.

The idea that github is a resume is, to my mind, wishful thinking at best.

I am using rst2pdf and github for keeping my resume. http://github.com/ragsagar/resume

Repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732025

Did you click on this link? It is not the same as the one you linked to.

is it possible to get this resume exported to Pdf? I might consider it in that case, but i dont really have that much trouble using Latex and it really is quite beautiful once it comes out. Thanks Latex template makers!

What resume template for LaTeX do you like?

I personally like this one: http://jblevins.org/projects/cv-template/

Thanks!

I'm working on a web app that does exactly this; you write your resume in Markdown, pick a template (which can be graphically rich; it uses LaTeX), and get a pdf. I'm so sad it's not up and running, what with all these resume threads going!

Use a PDF printer, Mac OS X has this functionality built-in.

markdown-resume-js takes a format parameter and will export to pdf with wkhtmltopdf.

Github is not my resume. Stackoverflow is a piece of my resume.

It's not styled for print.

Who's printing?

Interviewers

HR and interviewers.

Even though it will be developers looking at your GitHub profile, if they are looking to interview a batch of people they’ll likely pass off a bunch of “resumes” to HR to be printed and reviewed by others and used in interviews.

I just got two great job offers without showing them a GitHub account. So this is b.s.

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