Please don't withhold hiring company names. Recruiters do this and usually it means they don't actually have a job and are just canvassing resumes. I don't wish to accuse you of what has become a standard way to bootstrap (fake it 'til you make it) but it leads me to believe the content is imaginary and the last thing people need when they're job hunting (and possibly severely strapped for income) is time wasting leading them down the garden path.
It's not only unprofessional, but I'd suggest borderline immoral. :-)
And if they are real jobs, the first question will be who is the company anyway.
People who a) work on open source, or b) have enough free time that they're able to publish in their free time are the only people you want to hire? Great, have at it. But you'll quickly be wiping out a lot of people with experience behind them because they have a family.
Some of them would have been the type to actually write code in their spare time when they were younger, you know, before github was around and before they had kids, they're probably still smart, but github isn't their CV and may never be.
That said, code examples are a very nice thing to have, so it goes both ways.
Whilst worthy, a developer's contributions to OSS or public code commits aren't the only determining factor of their quality/hireability.
From a purely practical perspective, being a developer who exclusively works on closed-source code in 2014 is a bad career decision.
Depends on the context. I have lots of pure crap in my bitbucket and github accounts, because I tinker and explore outside of my day job. I even have one project that is almost complete (that is, it functions without bugs and doesn't make me want to scratch my eyes out when I look at the UI), but because I work on it for an hour here, an hour there, in the capacity of said exploration, the quality of the code is...less than stellar. Yet somehow I manage to be employed without a single gap in my resume.
That I don't have a high-code-quality complete project in these locations says one thing and one thing only about me, with respect to being a signal to employers: I'm not willing to devote myself 100%, heart-and-soul, to programming at my peak for 10+ hours a day.
You're deluding yourself if you think your comment about being a bad career decision applies outside of a small sphere (usually web-dev or mobile-dev for startups seeking a very particular kind of employee (young, naive, willing to work long and hard for relatively lesser pay). I have yet to see a job I'd be otherwise qualified for or interested in list "have a github profile with projects for us to look at" as a requirement, or even a nice-to-have. Certainly that won't necessarily last forever, but right now it's not a bad career decision for a great many (vast majority) to eschew public display of their personal code projects.
Frankly, I view the insistence on public display of personal code in the same category as I view trivia-quiz-interviewing: they're both bandwagon nonsense things that people convince themselves are highly effective ways to measure people.
> I have yet to see a job I'd be otherwise qualified for or interested in list "have a github profile with projects for us to look at" as a requirement, or even a nice-to-have.
Every job on this job board has such a requirement.
That may be true, but there's a whole world of programming jobs out there that have nothing to do with "web development". There's all sorts of internal corporate app stuff, embedded system/firmware, control systems / automation of various sorts, scientific computing, simulation software, data mining / machine learning stuff, etc., etc., etc.
You mean 99% of developers? There are very few companies who let you work on open source as part of your day job, and if a company only wants to hire devs who work on open source in their free time then I don't want to work for that company.
If you have a job that's exclusively closed-source and with no down time there's a good chance that's a bad job. You have to think about your own career. Unless it's a prestigious position that will make you attractive to other employers, you have to consider that being isolated from the larger software community puts you at a disadvantage in the market.
I guess that's where I disagree. I don't know how you can tie "ability to work on open source at work" to how good a job is. What does one have to do with the other?
Also, "down time" is just another way of saying "free time". If I have free time, I won't be in the office. Which brings me back to, I don't want to work at a company that only wants people who work on open source in their free time.
I really think the amount of open-source you work on has nothing to do with how good of a programmer you are or your work ethic. Which is why, for me, asking for a github profile is a red-flag when applying to jobs.
I appreciate that not everyone has or even cares about Github which is why it's an optional item when posting an ad. However, one of the differentiating factors of RemoteCoder is that it provides for tight Github integration in case an employer is interested in your github work. But perhaps this feature should be off by default? (at the moment it's on by default).
There's nothing wrong with having the GitHub account available for companies that want that, but using that as the only authentication and perpetuating the "GitHub is your CV" thing limits the site to that slice of companies and potential employees who know and care about GitHub -- mainly the startups you read about on HN. The other 95% of IT/tech jobs don't work like that.
Let me search for that elusive remote FORTRAN position! :-) I would prioritize this over all others as it lets you search for "european" or technology, or "hip chat" if, for instance, you're sensitive to the chat system the employer uses.
Covers a lot of bases.
-Matt @ https://www.wfh.io
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(My github username is the same as my HN handle)
If it succeeds, it will be huge, but the odds are always against any chicken-and-egg service like that.