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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

On slide 16:

  Shows you actually care about programming

I have yet to meet an employer that is actually looking for this. Caring about programming only gets in the way of the atrocities my employer needs me to commit to make things work. Now. One of the differences between academia & real life, I guess.

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I am a hiring manager. I do want my people to "care" about programming, more specifically I want them to care about the quality of their work. Not all managers in all companies realize the costs incurred by doing garbage work and the follow on consequences. For those that do, it makes sense to have employees that care to do that level of work. If you are constantly committing atrocities, it may be time to seek out employment where you don't have to do that (I admit, that is far easier said than done)

  ... easier said than done

That's just it. An employer who understands those hidden costs and the consequences of software quality (and its lack) seems to be rather rare.

Agreed, to clarify my comment. One will not find that company working at the sucky company they are at. Might as well quietly network/research those companies in an effort to make the jump.

I'm a hiring manager and it's a surprisingly rare but strong signal that someone has a record of contributions or portfolio, especially given how low the barrier to entry is. It's practically an automatic interview given the CVs I've seen and hire if you can talk intelligently and engagingly about what you've worked on.

Yes, I put a link to my Github on my cv, and it was never mentionned - my Github doesn't have anything really interesting though.

Then why would you waste space (and interviewer time) by putting it on your CV. The CV is basically your first impression with a company (assuming you aren't coming in through backchannels). Basically everything you put into it should have a purpose.

Well, I put it because I thought it would be relevant, but apparently it wasn't. How could I know beforehand what will not be relevant or interesting to whoever will read my cv?

Well, if your github had nothing interesting why would you think it was relevant?

When I said "nothing interesting", it means that I don't have an open source project people are using, and I am not a massive contributor. However, I have some ELisp code to help me write Python a bit faster, a contribution in the Rust language - I dabbed with Rust once, stumbled into a problem, asked on IRC and they told me "oh, it's a bug, add this one line here and push it" - and couple of other stuff, so while it doesn't make me a top coder, I hope it proves I am someone curious and it would give the interviewer extra stuff to ask ("I see you that played with Rust, what do you think of it?"), just as the presentation said, but sadly that didn't happen.

Recently I've noticed that several companies look for this

(mostly in Canada)

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