Hacker News Reader

Comment by timjahn | Hacker News Reader

How does Github alone determine a good match? If I don't have much on my Github, I'm ineligible?

Recently, there seems to be a trend that everyone should be pushing code to github. While it's great (real project is much better than a paragraph in CV and it shows your activity over the time), there are a lot of devs who just don't have time or just can't push code there for good reasons.

For me, I push my toy projects there - my first RoR app, and that kind of stuff. Would I like an employer to decide hire/no hire based on my weekend projects? Thanks, no.

GitHub profile is a nice add on for a job application, but it shouldn't be the whole job application.

My thoughts exactly.

I strongly agree with this, I push a lot of toy projects to GitHub, and some of the more interesting work I've done can't/won't end up there (I designed the algorithms behind an advanced analytics startup, but can't share the code since the startup failed because I don't own the rights, for example).

What if you were looking for a job, how would you demonstrate or prove your skills? What would be a good way to share the most interesting work you've done (since you can't just post a Github link)?

I usually combine sharing what I can with showing my credentials (I've a PhD and can share the work I did for that, which I don't put on GitHub because it doesn't feel like the place for it), as well as share anecdotes and get others to vouch for my ability. I've found actual credentials are the best help, but your mileage may vary.

That the most common case, though, not the exception. You make a CV that highlights your accomplishments, and you make sure you're prepared to dive into technical details during discussions. The hiring company tries to put your through your paces, somehow or other. It's imperfect, but the GitHub profile approach is going to weed out a lot of candidates who you probably ought not to weed out.

By far the most interesting work I'm doing is for my current employer; and it's not OSS (and wouldn't make sense to open source).

In theory, I could cut back on my work-work, and spend more time on side projects; but I have a family, and other interests as well. I'd rather have good overlap between "interesting work" and "work I'm paid for" than sacrifice my time with my kids or my guitar so I can work on interesting technical problems I'm not paid to work on.

For some people this could work out well -- e.g., maybe the crucial and awesome component of your company's infrastructure that you're building can be open-sourced! -- but for lots of other people life simply won't line up that way, and building something serious (but a personal project) on GitHub in your spare time means you don't have spare time for anything else in life... I wouldn't demand that of myself, or of anyone I was hiring.

We don't actually use Github for determining any part of the match, it is just a social sign in so that we can minimise the friction when signing on. The match is generated based on primary information gathered by our app.

We will add another form of social sign up soon so that people who do not use GitHub can sign up - most likely Twitter.

Use Facebook or LinkedIn.

Honestly, for anything "career," LinkedIn should be the norm unless their API has unsurmountable technical problems.

Quite frankly, I don't like tying my career to my github account. My best work is closed-source!

This is great feedback - from this entire thread about Github based sign up. We will be reviewing our strategy here and other social sign ups. Thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com