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Comment by throwaway1979 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway1979

Cool, commendable effort. One frustration I have is the (possibly soft) requirement for showing your work ala github profile or something else. I've noticed quite a few job postings where they ask you for a github profile. All my code belongs to my employer and I can't put stuff up on github. Not sure how people who are in this stupid situation deal with the new reality that github is your resume these days?

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I've been on the same boat (NDA's and stuff) .. my best recomendation is to get involved on opensource and contribute.. I've got tons of good feedback from doing that.

I've got plenty of open source code in my github, and the irony is that I don't know if anybody I've interviewed with has ever really looked at it.

They might want to know it exists, but it's not like they do code reviews.

I have yet to go to an interview and the employer looked at my github or portfolio. I know it's pushed hard but so far it hasn't mattered in the least.

My current one poked through it, but that was three years ago, when just having Github repos at all still had some signalling value.

I think it is. Most good people I interviewed so far had something on there from pet projects. I wouldn't expect that code to be brilliant, but just the fact that they know how to use git, maybe even react to issues / PRs is a good start.

I personally have a lot of small cruft on mine (old blog migration scripts), a commandline video downloader that has a few issues, ...

None of that code was done on company time, but most people I know and like to work with find a few hours on a Saturday from time to time to just hack up something.

> Most good people I interviewed so far had something on there from pet projects.

So the good people who didn't are just SOL? I say this as someone who actually has crap published, albeit nothing complicated.

Furthermore, The "Github is your resume" crowd always claims they want to use it to see examples of how you code, meaning at least some of whatever you put there is supposed to be production-quality and representative of what you do or would write at your day job. They have a point, because otherwise Github is basically useless as a screening tool.

I just want someone that also hacks on things in their free time and likes it so much that they even want to publish things.

(same idea with a technical blog)

Will your company not give you clearance for code written outside of work? I asked and got something in writing about code I write at home being mine.

I just do all of my spikes and silly side projects in the open now. If someone is even interested enough to have a look I count that as a win.

That's totally fine. In fact, my GitHub account is in a similar boat: most of my work is in private repos.

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