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Comment by silverbax88 | Hacker News Reader

I have hired a lot of developers over the last 15 years and not once have I cared if they have a github account.

Probably lots of people are like you. I think the world is changing, though, and I think it is instructive to note that the person complaining about the lack of Github content is 20 years old. I've read hundreds of CVs for web developers in the last 2 years and I could point to only a handful that didn't include some kind of reference to a portfolio (usually on Github).

Even though you say that you don't care about a Github account when hiring, you went out of your way to look at this person's website on HN. I suspect that it made a bigger impression on you than if the person had simply emailed you a Word file with their CV. The fact that the person cares enough to craft something and show it off says something about them.

Personally, I go and look at every single portfolio that gets sent to me. If there is anything half way interesting on there it gets an automatic telephone interview even if their CV is otherwise unappealing. I'm looking for people with decent technical chops -- I'm not bothered about how they got there.

I've gotten jobs through my portfolio before as well. I have one fairly large but poorly written Ruby app, a handful of well-intentioned but abandoned projects, and an egotistical semi-blog (which has some cringe-worthy content that I really should edit ASAP ;-) ). As bad as my portfolio is, it is miles better than 99% of what I've seen (generally cut and paste rails projects).

For anybody with real talent this can be a differentiator. It will get you to an interview and give the interviewer something to ask questions about. For me what the OP built would be much more than enough to interest me if we were hiring an intern, but the point of linking to whatever else they have done is a very good one. Especially for a permanent position, I would be following up on that.

A problem you might find here is that people with actual real world experience but without being 'rockstars' are stifled by contracts that stop them being able to have a decent github account.

Of course in many cases you can't just publish internal code from your place of work but a lot seem to also include clauses that claim ownership of anything you do outside of work too. Personally speaking that's why my own github account is full of tumbleweeds anyway

I hear you. I have lived through that. When I worked at a few Microsoft partners back in the bad old days I even had stipulations in my contract that I wasn't allowed to contribute to free software projects without permission. Every time I asked for permission I was denied. When I was young I put up with it because progressing in these companies seemed to be important to me. Now I simply would not sign such a contract. I'm a contractor now and so I'm a lot more free than before, however in my last job I got explicit assurances up front that I was allowed to write my own code.

Luckily there are a lot of places around that will accommodate you these days. They may not be the highest paying jobs, but I'm willing to take a huge pay cut to ensure my freedom to code.

Indeed, but many company don't want to hire people who just take, have a decent life using free software, but never take the extra mile or sacrifice free time to contribute back.

It doesn't really matter much to me whether the projects somebody has worked on are open-source. But if they can't be demonstrated to exist, that's something else entirely.

For a front end web dev that makes sense. If you have been working on e.g. internal tools or some other proprietary stuff for a long time, how are you supposed to prove their existence?

Obviously it doesn't apply to everything. But for something like a public website or mobile app that would be reasonably expected to be easily findable, the fact that it isn't is weird. One project like that makes me wonder what the situation is; several make me suspicious.

For what it's worth, some Googling turned up these links:

http://www.spse-po.sk/web/

https://github.com/mochja/odovzdaj.to

but it shouldn't have been so difficult to find them.

I promise you I can figure out if you can code or not in about 15 minutes. I don't mean cobble together Angular and Bootstrap. I need to figure out if you can actually code and what kind of person you are to work with.

Comments like this make me think that I never want to be interviewed by you. What do you think about going over code that someone has written previously and asking them questions about it? Do you ask the same coding questions every time?

Nope. Why would I ask the same coding questions every time? Nobody has written the same code or worked on exactly the same problems with exactly the same tools during exactly the same time.

I would question you on the specific things YOU wrote and how YOU would solve problems.

Well, I have a pretty good github profile https://github.com/apsdehal but I still had a hard time finding intern this year. So I would say most of the github profile doesn't matter much, but it sure makes you look impressive. Also as far as I have experienced, if you apply in big companies, nothing matters for internship, only thing you should know is competitive programming.

Having a quick scan of your Github profile it looks like a lot of lists or collections of things or forks. I think you may be suffering from information overload as I was unable to find a decent example of code within 30 or so seconds

I haven't taken GitHub into consideration in hiring; it doesn't matter where the source code is. Just show me that you are passionate about what you do, that you enjoy learning and can learn well from others, can work as part of a team, and that you have some code out there that demonstrates what you've played around with.

I'd be cautious if an employer wanted you to specifically have a GitHub account.

Maybe there's a market out there for "ghost developers", i.e. programmers who manage activity on the Github accounts of other programmers, the aptitudally-challenged types who need them to cheat interviews as they hop their way through technical jobs on their way to a career in IT management.

I've hired a lot of developers over the last 10 years and I put a lot of stock in guys contributing to open source or showing their work and interacting with the public.

>"over the last 15 years"

Well in the past several years I've worked with a lot of developers and I care a lot about their github/bug tracker/public accounts. I don't care if there aren't a lot of repos or projects... just that they're active participants in software and CS. Github is a pretty good indicator of that. Bug trackers are another great indicator. Seeing someone rant about: 500 errors on a website, poor extensibility in an API/lib, unexpected CLI behavior -- those are good signs that the person cares about their chosen profession.

Coding is only one part of engineering. Being able to work with a team, recognize requirements, and ship are other important components. I find that engineers who have strong profiles on SO, github, bug trackers -- they tend to ship. They may not be the best coders in the world but from a business stand point that doesn't really matter. The best ideas in the world are useless if they never get shipped.

I have no (public) github account and I approve this message.

Out of the 120 developers where I work, about 5 have active github accounts.

Hiring based on github is ridiculous.

I don't expect to see one for professional devs, a lot of time what we develop we aren't allowed to share. Or, if its a side project, its not necessarily open source.

However, for college grads, or those without a CS degree and transitioning from a bootcamp, a github account really sets you apart and is becoming a must.

I don't agree with that. I actively hire guys off of internship. I welcome it. And I've even told guys when they were good enough to get more money somewhere else and I couldn't get it approved to keep them. Because a few years later, when they are established and I'm hiring that level of dev, I want to be able to try and get them again. And I have.

I don't really need to see a GitHub account. Actually, I don't want to see it at all, because I don't have time. Let's just talk about what you've built, what got you excited and what types of things you like to really get heads down in. I'm going to slip in some tech questions during the conversation but if you're a solid programmer you probably won't even notice it. If you're not, you're going to give me a deer-in-headlights look or worse, try to bullshit me. I'm not going to call you on it, but I'm not going to hire you, either.

Are any of those 5 githubbers in the "lower half" amongst all 120 developers?

Mixed. It's mostly people with interest in open-source. Or some people that encountered bugs, fixed them and then abandoned/forgot their github account.

That being said, we use private bitbuckets for all things internal. It's not as if people couldn't work with git. People are simply not interested in open source / github.

That said, english is a second language here, so that may explain why people are not interested in working on open source projects that are mostly made in english.

Agreed! If a developer has a github account, then they're thinking about some other programming thing on the job instead of the cruddy stuff they're being paid to do.

That's not how people work.

Well since GitHub is only ~5 years old it is not very surprising...

It's a little bit more than that: around 7 years old.

I think he was referring to sites that allow you to manage and collaborate with others, etc. e.g., sourceforge

I'm more likely to ask what source control you have used. If you say Git, I'm going to ask why. I'm going to figure out if you really understand source code or you just use what's popular. That is not a statement about Git or any other source control. But I don't need to see your github account to figure out what level of developer you are (or what level you think you are).

"Because it's popular" is a great way to pick your plumbing, though. The opposite is the awesome developer who is so religious about all the tools and languages that he uses that nobody wants to work with them.

It's a good place to start. But I want to know that the person using a tool has a better understanding of what they are using than "everybody else uses it".

The most popular solution could be the best one. I just want to hire people who think for themselves because I don't have time to do their thinking for them. But first I need to make sure they are really adept at problem solving and can adapt.

I use git because I was taught it and have found no reason to transition elsewhere. I know that's not a good reason to use git. If I'm to consider alternatives, I'm going to have to set aside the 10 million other things I could be learning, many of which are actual obstacles to my workflow.

Oh, I could learn SVN. Or Mercurial. Or Node.js, Groovy, MFC, solaris, AngularJS, Adobe Illustrator, Guitar, Unicode, Python, Web Services, Satellite Radio, JNI, C#, Haskell metaprogramming, Android, Client-server models, Nuclear Physics, ASP.net, Flex/Yacc, Cocoa, COM, Blender, DOM, TCP/IP, XML, Finance, Azure, Cassandra, VIM, Emacs, Arch Linux, Regex, Category Theory, Statistics, Maya, Color models, IEEE-754, Compiler optimization, OS design, Database management, LINQ, Piano, Struts, ML, Prolog, Scheme, Homotopy Type Theory, NLTK, GTK+, X windows, WPF, ...

Why would anyone care that I know git and haven't explored other options? Do you happen to need someone who can write source control software?

Well, for starters, the person interviewing you (in this case, ME) DOES know all of the different source control versions. That doesn't mean you have to know them, but it does matter to me why you think yours is best. Mercurial guys think theirs is best. SVN guys think theirs is best. Why? Why not? That tells me a lot more about how you think as a developer than which tool you actually use.

I mean, I had to use ClearCase for years and hated it. But I know how it works and why I hated it.

But I don't think mine is best, I think it is merely good enough.

From this end, it would strike me as a hypocrisy: "I don't care which religion you follow, so long as you believe the one you follow is the best and you can rationalize that to yourself."

That doesn't really tell you much. It's like if you are interviewing a philosopher and say "where is your toga and beard? How you choose your toga and beard style is important to evaluating what kind of philosopher you are." What are you basing that on? Why do you think source control selection is relevant to the work you are trying to do?

It seems to me like a totally pointless question, except for the fact that it is a question and it will fill the time and require someone to talk.

As a student, when you don’t have a lot of professional experience, having a good GitHub profile is a huge advantage in some companies. I got my current internship because of that. And the last one. And the one before.

And other hiring managers do care, like the guy who wrote this article HN discussed a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447173

I have also hired a lot of devs, I love it when they have a github account, especially those with less experience or as interns.

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