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Comment by eklavya | Hacker News Reader

Still it's pretty hard to sell GitHub projects to HR drones who want "commercial experience" and might not even know about GitHub. No matter how good your code is, if it's not seen by someone who can judge it, you can't even get your foot in the door.

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Wow, gotta disagree there. I found that having projects on Github was impressive to potential employers 100% of the time I brought it up. Before I had them on there (in particular, two small personal side projects) it was much more difficult to prove that I know stuff because I commit to private repos.

My solution to this is to write beautifully formatted README.md's with demo links and gifs.

Since most HR (and most engineering managers) aren't going to clone your repo and install your code to test it, this is the most efficient way to illustrate your awesomeness.

I just record the desktop with QuickTime screen record then edit in something like GifBrewery to get brief gif loops.

You'll want to make sure the demos are short and to the point... maybe 15 seconds per gif.

I don't expect them to clone my repo and see my work AND I don't expect them to see the readme. They won't understand (quite understandably) most of the work I do and it will not have any GUI candies to show either :)

What you suggest is useful in many scenarios given that they are willing to go thorough the trouble of following the links and checking up the work. All they want to hear is "x years on y tech a z company". Not all of them are like this but so many are.

Try to avoid dealing with these people unless you really must; your time is better spent directly targeting line managers with hiring authority.

Yeah. Top comment is true, but not too relevant. If you're not dealing with someone who appreciates this stuff, then you're not dealing with the best person. If the company you're applying to doesn't have such a person, then it's not a good company to join.

Unless they're a start-up recruiting you as CTO/similar to be that person. But that's quite a different proposition.

The code isn't necessarily the relevant thing. My early Rails code was terrible, but my manufactured experience WAS "commercial" experience, since I had real users (in some cases paying users).

You were lucky that you were able to find customers :)

I have faced problems with HR people demanding "commercial" experience in some technology and not caring at all about your open source work.

Finding customers is more a function of skill + effort than luck. I visited over 100 hair salons, did a bunch of cold calls, and more. You can get customers if you try hard enough for long enough, and try enough different business ideas.

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