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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that cheating on this would be unethical. Programming is about getting things done. As a hiring metric, nothing can beat open source.

The open source portfolio really is kind of a golden standard. It is real work that you have done, that has (hopefully) advanced the commons, because you love programming and have something unique to add to the world. Some fake video game programming may indicate something, but is simply not as strong an indicator.

Who are you going to hire- TJ Holowaychuk, who wrote Express, or the guy who placed 3rd on TopCoder in 2012?

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I think it is wrong to except everyone to contribute to open-source and I have seen that even the very smart programmers are not interested in making personal projects or contributing to existing ones.

Honestly, after mind-taxing eight hour job, you want to go home, watch a movie, read a book or some other relaxing activity. Not to mention that for people with families, it is nearly impossible to find the time to contribute. The rockstar-ninjas with thousand-starred repos on Github are very rare.

> Honestly, after mind-taxing eight hour job, you want to go home, watch a movie, read a book or some other relaxing activity.

Then this person probably wouldn't find much time to do CTF challenges, either.

Yet, somehow, I managed to find time after a crappy day to tear into MicroCorruption.

That's awesome if you're the guy who wrote Expressjs, and less awesome if you're an extremely talented systems programmer nobody's ever heard of who hasn't hit on a project that happens to capture the industry's attention.

Exactly. I know some amazing programmers who happen to also like mountain biking and building robots with their kids, who happen to work for companies that don't publish their code to github♯. The idea that all the good programmers work with open source in their own time and spend every waking moment pushing to github is a dangerous and fruitless one, because you're missing out on great talent with those blinkers on.

♯And let's be fair, 99% of what's "open source" is junk anyway, just because you wrote an 80% done static blog generator doesn't mean you're "advancing the commons"

As a hiring metric, nothing can beat open source.

I don't agree. Only a small segment of the talented programming folks I know do open source contributions.

What is Express?

express.js

http://expressjs.com/

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