[HN Gopher] Resumes are dangerous?
___________________________________________________________________
Resumes are dangerous?
Author : allenleein
Score : 133 points
Date : 2022-04-25 07:50 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.alexmaccaw.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.alexmaccaw.com)
| irjustin wrote:
| Resumes are dangerous, agreed - but only if you give them enough
| power to be dangerous.
|
| The point is, resumes should only open the door to live
| interviews and be very rough notes about what a person can do.
| You always need a way to test what the candidate claims.
|
| I'm not sure if this is obvious, but I work in the loan
| underwriting space now and any piece of data that the clients
| have the ability to control, we take but we must verify with
| other pieces of data that the client doesn't have access to
| manipulate. i.e. Accounting software like Xero needs to be back
| with bank transfer data.
|
| Seems like a prudent route with resumes.
| gitgud wrote:
| People that lie on their Resume's, may also lie on their Github
| profiles... but that's admittedly a bit harder to fake
| jeroenhd wrote:
| It's pretty easy to grab some open source project from Gitlab,
| alter the commit history to pretend it's all you who wrote it
| and uploading it to Github. You can also grab some
| inconsequential JS library, change the name, and publish it to
| NPM.
|
| If you're putting in the effort to take your resume, you might
| as well fill out a fake Github. After all, the "hiring experts"
| only seem to care about the code you've pretended to write.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Finally the tables turn! Engineers cry "hiring is broken!" not
| undestanding the game is not optimized for the candidate. The OP:
| "Resumes are dangerous!" not understanding they're a gate-keeping
| mechanism that's gamed to get an interview. They were never
| intended to provide the interviewer with a complete
| representation & background material. That paper rockstar got an
| interview; would you have given them one otherwise?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I think the best alternative to the Resume is Q&A. I think job
| applications should include a long list of questions to get
| specific information from the candidate, which would (for
| example) show how much they know about coding, about working with
| peers, about what kind of company values they care about (if
| any).
|
| Of course, filling out the same hundred questions for every job
| would be terrible. So there should be a website that collects all
| the questions and lets you resend them to each employer, and lets
| the employer pick which questions they require and which they
| don't.
|
| The employer could also fill out questions from candidates,
| because the candidate _should_ have a lot of questions for the
| employer. Candidate should be able to select the questions they
| want answers to.
|
| If both candidate and employer answer questions, an algorithm
| should automatically sort for which candidate and employer had
| the same questions, and (assuming multiple choice and
| weight/priority) which answers were the same or closest. In this
| way you could simply fill out questions and immediately find the
| job that matches you best, and the employers could find the
| candidates that match them best.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| > Of course, filling out the same hundred questions for every
| job would be terrible. So there should be a website that
| collects all the questions and lets you resend them to each
| employer, and lets the employer pick which questions they
| require and which they don't.
|
| This is what I did with Obsidian.md, any questions for the
| applications will be copied and pasted to Obsidian with my
| answers. If I come across a different applications that have
| similar question, I look up in Obsidian and use my answer from
| there with small modification of my answer to fit their culture
| or mission statement.
|
| It helps a lot because often the company I applied for usually
| asked for Cover Letter. Obsidian.md have my cover letters for
| various companies I applied for and it is easy to look back to
| those and find the one that fits best or create a new entry
| with a copy of the previous letter and modify it from there.
| nharada wrote:
| Would this just create a market for answers to the most common
| questions found at the large companies?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I don't think so. There are so many roles at a company, and
| each one could have potentially hundreds of questions, and
| each team might be looking for different answers. Select
| between 4 answers, add a 6-degree weight, plus additional
| comments for each answer. For 100 questions, that's hundreds
| of millions of possible combinations. And many of the
| questions should be subjective or based on personal
| experience, so that you can find the person who matches what
| the team cares about. If you see two people with the same
| answers, it would be almost impossible for them not to have
| been copied.
|
| I guess the challenge would be to get companies to create
| good questions. A giant pool of community-curated questions
| for companies to start with would be good, and they should
| add questions from the team looking to hire.
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| This explains a lot about the state of the industry and why so
| many good developers have a hard time finding a job. This article
| does everything except consider the possibility that maybe,
| management uses the wrong metrics to determine the usefulness of
| a candidate and that resumes are flawed to the extent that you
| can't describe a humans experience on one side of one sheet of
| paper.
| gopaz wrote:
| I also look for github links, especially for sysadmins, it can
| give an insight of how they solve things. Bonus points for pull
| requests.
|
| However, if the person doesn't have a profile, or an inactive
| one, I don't put any weight on it, it's more an alternative way
| instead of asking interview questions for me.
| jimmydeans wrote:
| quanticle wrote:
| _The first thing I look for in a resume is a GitHub URL. If I can
| find that, I stop reading the resume and start reading code.
| Doing open source is not a be-all and end-all by any means, but
| it 's a good starting point. After five minutes of reading
| through a candidate's code I have a good handle of their skill
| level and style, making the interview run much more smoothly._
|
| All this makes me want to do is delete my entire Github. I do
| _not_ want a future employer judging me on the basis of the half-
| finished amateurish experiments I knock off on my free time as I
| 'm learning a new language or messing around with a new framework
| or just screwing around in general because I'm bored.
|
| If all this person is evaluating me on is my Github, they'll
| think that I've never advanced beyond an amateur level despite my
| having over a decade of experience in the industry... all because
| I treat my open source work as a hobby rather than as a second
| job.
| arinlen wrote:
| > All this makes me want to do is delete my entire Github. I do
| not want a future employer judging me on the basis of the half-
| finished amateurish experiments I knock off on my free time as
| I'm learning a new language or messing around with a new
| framework or just screwing around in general because I'm bored.
|
| I don't understand your complaint. We have free code hosting
| platforms which support private projects, such as GitLab. You
| only showcase the projects you want to show, as a public
| profile is also your portfolio. It makes no sense to showcase
| half-assed projects you care nothing or feel ashamed to show,
| as no one forces you to make a git repo public.
|
| It's perfectly fine if you do not curate your portfolio, but
| you also get the same problem if you don't curate your CV.
|
| Personally, I received job offers based on my GitHub profile
| alone, as I happened to have a pet project which uses a
| particular tech stack used by a company. I know people who were
| automatically excluded from job applications as they claimed
| expertise on tech stacks they showcased in their GitHub
| profiles, and their pet projects included blatant eggregious
| problems which can only result from incompetence.
|
| Companies hire based on the skillset they can evaluate, and if
| you make it your point to showcase shoddy work then that's a
| problem you create for yourself.
| dottedmag wrote:
| GitHub is not a portfolio website. It's a code sharing
| platform.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Has GitHub introduced some "showcase" feature, because this
| is the first time I've heard that a normal public repository
| should be a treated as a showcase.
|
| Historically, public repos were just where you put code that
| didn't _need_ to be private, like hobby code and experiments,
| just as much as showcase work or supported open source
| projects.
|
| Has the culture changed so much that this way of using GitHub
| isn't familiar to you? How do others here see it?
| autarch wrote:
| > Has GitHub introduced some "showcase" feature, ...
|
| Yes, you can pin repos to your profile. But you can also
| create a profile repo. See
| https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-
| an...
|
| I wrote a blog post about this and the profile generator I
| made for myself - https://blog.urth.org/2022/03/28/yet-
| another-github-profile-...
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| A good employer will not judge you based on your half-completed
| personal work. The point isn't to see perfectly executed
| programs, it's to get a sense for the kind of interests this
| person has. Seeing a couple half-finished Go projects is better
| than seeing nothing at all.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| In the Soul of a New Machine Tracy Kidder relates how toward
| the end of the development of the Nova that Data General
| started rejecting applicants who had anything computer related
| as a hobby or spare time interest. If memory serves, they
| believed on the basis of experience that people with a broader
| range of interests were better team players and more resilient
| to burn out.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| While this may be technically accurate, the rest of the
| descriptions on how they interviewed & hired was brutally
| narrow-minded and biased. You're missing the part where they
| basically didn't hire anyone with a life outside of computing
| because you were being hired for an all-consuming death
| march.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| No, I didn't miss that point. That was the reason they
| finally changed their opinion.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Why include your Github URL then if you think its only awful
| code?
| mrfusion wrote:
| Perhaps consider a personal account and a professional account.
|
| Only put your best work on the professional one.
| em-bee wrote:
| unless they changed it githubs terms of service do not allow
| multiple accounts. you'd have to split them over multiple
| hosting services, which, depending on the project, may not
| always be practical or possible
| bgroat wrote:
| This.
|
| Whenever an employer wants to look at my GitHub I tell them,
| "Look, this is all going to be half finished tutorials... as
| soon as I'm halfway decent with a technology I go out and build
| something proprietary"
| pferde wrote:
| Do people really put stuff like "half finished tutorials" and
| little exploratory non-projects up on the Internet? What for?
| That stuff normally does not need to leave your local
| harddisk. Maybe exceptionally, if you want to explicitly
| share it with someone you have been discussing it with.
|
| Maybe I'm getting old and no longer "with it", but to me,
| this is just like teenagers entering way too much personal
| info on social media just because there are empty text boxes
| available.
|
| I have a "code" dir with dozens of subdirectories where I
| keep all that stuff. Some of those are local git repos
| because I'm starting to do something actually non-trivial
| there, and yes, some of those eventually get the "git remote
| add ..." treatment, and get published on a public code forge
| somewhere.
| bgroat wrote:
| > Do people really put stuff like "half finished tutorials"
| and little exploratory non-projects up on the Internet?
| What for?
|
| If I want to track version control across multiple machines
| without rolling my own git server or bothering to mark the
| repo private?
|
| I don't think it's an old thing. I think it's a HN crowd
| not really understanding user experience thing
| pferde wrote:
| Thanks for the answers, everybody. I guess I am the weird
| one, as I still think it's mostly just adding useless noise
| to an already noisy public web, and therefore kind of rude.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| > Do people really put stuff like "half finished tutorials"
| and little exploratory non-projects up on the Internet?
| What for? That stuff normally does not need to leave your
| local harddisk. Maybe exceptionally, if you want to
| explicitly share it with someone you have been discussing
| it with.
|
| Github is a code repository and not a social network
| account, so yes many people use it for "half finished
| tutorials" and little exploratory non-projects up on the
| Internet?"
| Hackbraten wrote:
| I publish as much as I can, and deliberately so. Not so
| much for internet points but because:
|
| 1. It forces me to write a README. No matter how small the
| project, I afford it an introductory paragraph,
| installation instructions, usage instructions, and a
| license. Doing that all the time helps build good habits.
| If it hurts, I'm not doing it often enough. Doing it often
| enough helps overcome resistance one day when it actually
| counts.
|
| 2. I contribute something back. It's not exactly curl, but
| who am I to judge whether my project will be too trivial to
| be useful for others? I prefer to leave that decision up to
| the visitor.
|
| 3. Future me is going to get a README for free a couple of
| years down the road, when the details are long forgotten.
|
| Example: this repository [1] is for a 50-line Bash script
| [2].
|
| [1]: https://github.com/claui/aws-credential-1password
|
| [2]: https://github.com/claui/aws-
| credential-1password/blob/main/...
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Also, my public repos are all code I've done before I started
| working. My code has improved a lot since I've been coding
| every day for my job but it's all private.
| beej71 wrote:
| Private repos are great for those half-baked projects you don't
| want people to see.
| antholeole wrote:
| I think this is forcing me to choose between two evils - do I
| want to look like I can only write half baked weekend
| projects, or do I want to look like I don't write any code in
| my free time at all?
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Fair point, for me its the latter. I cant put on my CV
| brief descriptions of side projects I'm working on, during
| an interview I can give more details on those, etc... Still
| not ideal because they'd probably want to see the code, but
| its the lesser of two evils for me
| [deleted]
| laurent123456 wrote:
| If you don't have much to show on your GitHub profile, simply
| do not provide the URL. It's just one data points among others,
| but it's true that it's useful to see the candidate's coding
| skills in advance and the easiest for that is open source code
| (since anything else probably can't be shared).
| Aeolun wrote:
| > it's useful to see the candidate's coding skills in advance
|
| Yes, but only if it's representative of their work. Good luck
| finding the one kind of sensible library I've written in the
| 100 forks and experiments.
| lolinder wrote:
| That's what pinned repositories are for. It's your
| opportunity to highlight the projects you're actually proud
| of. Any half-reasonable prospective employer will look at
| those first, and probably only those.
|
| And again, if you have nothing worth pinning, there's
| always the option to leave it off your resume.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I've googled people's names + github if their GH wasn't
| provided, just out of curiosity.
| tsukikage wrote:
| +1. Additionally, in general, I personally prefer to keep
| work and leisure separate. Things that I bring to the
| awareness of potential / future employers are selected and
| curated, and distinct from places where I keep the half-baked
| stuff I do for fun for my own consumption.
|
| It's certainly possible to get from my real name to my
| leisure activities and vice versa with a concerted effort,
| but the first page or two of a casual Google search won't do
| it.
| isthisfree wrote:
| As an employer that does the same thing as the person who wrote
| the article; I do, of course, look at the seriousness of
| whatever is on that Github profile.
|
| I am usually easily able to tell if it is a half-baked project
| for some hobby-thing or active participation in e.g. a well
| known piece of open source software.
|
| Someone who does this, is likely also skilled enough to
| separate those things. I don't only look at the user's own
| repos but also at contributions/comments etc. to others.
|
| And just as the author, I too experience more often than not
| that people have NO idea how to set the level for own
| experience.
| TheaomBen wrote:
| Could you list some things that are red/green flags when
| perusing someone's public code/projects?
|
| I'm preparing to publicly release a project with the intent
| of building it up to demonstrate my own experience level. I'm
| asking as someone with next to no prior public code despite
| developping back-end almost full time since I dropped out
| 10ish years ago. I guess I'm asking for external criteria for
| whether I'm impostor-syndroming!
| jenscow wrote:
| For me, there are no "red" flags when looking at someone's
| public code.
|
| I consider them as conversation items. I don't think anyone
| is expecting to see multiple completed products with 1k+
| stars.
|
| The worst case is, you waste time agonising over the
| quality of your code and either: don't publish, or no one
| even looks at it (highly likely)
|
| You're not about to get code-reviewed. At most, if
| anything, it would be:
|
| "explain this class/function": I'd expect you to vaguely
| know the answer after reading it
|
| or, "why did you do <something> this way?": answers like "I
| got it from SO", "I don't know of a better way" are
| perfectly fine.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Just a few things I usually notice when going through a
| potential hire's GitHub:
|
| 1) All projects have a bad commit history. Just one commit
| and that's it. Usually it's something for school with
| really basic stuff inside. Most might be IDE provided
| "generate code" boilerplate.
|
| Even a single commit beyond the GitHub provided initial
| commit example is enough. Multiple ones in a sane cycle is
| even better. Even if you just update some comments.
|
| 2) Does the project run? If I check out the project, is
| there a clear way to run it or does it rely on the compile
| & run commands being on the submitter's bash history?
|
| Add a make/magefile or run.sh or anything.
|
| 3) README. Does it exist? GitHub pushes you really hard to
| add one, if you're lacking even the default one, you
| clearly don't understand how GH works.
|
| 4) Bonus task: does the repo have integrations or GH
| Actions enabled? If the project automatically runs some
| tests or builds on commit, it's a big green flag for me. If
| I'm going to be paying you over 100EUR/hour, I don't want
| you spending your time doing stuff manually if it can be
| automated with 15 minutes of boilerplate work.
| jstx1 wrote:
| These are some very low bars for a project to pass.
| orwin wrote:
| It is the point though. My public github projects are
| either empty (i pushed nothing cause everything was bad)
| or are half-baked projects. They would still pass those
| bars, which i can feel gratefull for.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| > GitHub pushes you really hard to add one, if you're
| lacking even the default one, you clearly don't
| understand how GH works.
|
| This is a strange one, I am not sure why the priorities
| of a third party hosting platform should take priority.
| Many people use it is more of a cloud repo backup than a
| social sharing site.
|
| So why knock people for using it differently? It does not
| measure their understanding of how Github works.
| TheaomBen wrote:
| That's a good point, but it does raise the question of
| how best to transmit notes or information with anyone who
| stumbles on the repo. I understand these platform-
| specific features to be a way to show you do your
| homework and can integrate third party tooling or
| workflows into your own things.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Adding a README.md isn't just GitHub specific, it's a
| good idea to add it to any project you do.
|
| My memory sucks, that's why I write down what I'm
| planning to do with a project into the readme. It doesn't
| need to be super fancy with images and status badges and
| all that jazz.
|
| This is perfectly enough: projectname
| =========== This fizzes TODO
| ---- Add buzzing later Check if bazzing
| library is ready for production
| TheaomBen wrote:
| Your points make sense and they're on The Checklist,
| thanks! I probably won't sweat CI/CD integration for the
| demo yet but ship (as the other commenter mentionned,
| also thanks!) something readable, mostly testable and
| usable (but limited) on day 0 and go from there.
|
| I do wonder what a recruiter looks for in a good README
| though. Technical chops or perspective on potential
| applications/intended project direction or ... ?
| eropple wrote:
| You don't have to go whole-hog on CI or anything, but
| GitHub Actions is pretty easy to just knock together a
| thing that runs `make test` or equivalent.
|
| I've ended up building boilerplate workflows for various
| languages, environments, etc. to just drop in and tweak
| per-project.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Honest question: If someone uses, for example, sr.ht,
| will you scrutinize it as much as a Github project? Would
| you check out the project and look for its equivalent of
| GH actions?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| To be honest I've never seen a single project on sr.ht :)
|
| But I think it's a plus for using something off the
| beaten path, provided that the other conditions are met.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _README. Does it exist? GitHub pushes you really hard
| to add one, if you 're lacking even the default one, you
| clearly don't understand how GH works._
|
| Yes GitHub pushes you really hard to add one. But I
| disagree that not having one on a personal project means
| you don't understand how GitHub works. I don't need (or
| really even want) a README for a personal project. It
| detracts from _writing code_. If I neglect the personal
| project for months or years and come back to it then I 'm
| not going to give a flying crap about the README anyway:
| I will have come back to it specifically to look at the
| code. Whether that's because I had a new/better idea or
| wanted to reminisce or maybe to copy/paste some idea from
| it.
|
| All of the rest of your points are good though.
| Akronymus wrote:
| I mostly interact with github via a standard git cli,
| which does NOT bug me about it.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Which is something I would think someone who assesses
| people based on how much they know Github.....should
| probably know
|
| How ironic ;)
| scruple wrote:
| As a programmer (with a busy professional and personal life),
| I don't really care for the fact that it's like this but I
| acknowledge that it is and I also understand that it can be a
| strong signal in the right hands.
|
| I use my pinned repositories to showcase side projects that
| I've worked on that are either complicated/challenging
| problems or that solve a specific problem in a complete way.
| These 6 repositories are "the most serious" work that is
| available in my public GitHub profile.
|
| Some time ago, when I put my mind to doing this, I made sure
| to put extra effort and attention to detail into about a
| dozen different projects that were in my public profile, so
| that I had options across languages, project types, etc., for
| what I'd pin. I put each project through its paces, made sure
| it ran on multiple platforms (or, that there were notes in
| the README about how to get there otherwise), cleaned up
| Makefiles, test suites, etc.
|
| At least one of these projects is incomplete and/or a work in
| progress, but I've indicated as much in the README, but it's
| also obvious to see exactly where (and why) that project
| stalled, if you read through the code.
|
| I can't say that it's helped get me a job (I haven't changed
| employers) but I do feel a little better about the other 100
| or so projects in my public profile now that are in varying
| states of completeness.
| lbotos wrote:
| You can do that or you could also put a readme on your GitHub
| that it's a place where you explore hobby projects and you are
| interested in "x, y, and z".
|
| When I go to a GitHub as a hiring manager, I try to get as much
| signal as I can. You are scared that I'll _solely_ judge you on
| the code, but I 'm looking for _metadata_. Is this person
| interested in or exploring problems /technologies that are
| related to the problems/technologies we are using here? Oh,
| They are exclusively doing music based coding? INTERESTING.
| Let's talk about _that_ in the interview.
|
| Oh, They've contributed a bug report to an open source project,
| lemme see what that looks like. Nice, repro steps are clear.
|
| And yes, some hiring managers are gonna say "welp, this
| candidate isn't an open source ninja so we don't want them."
| But that's not all hiring managers.
|
| What _is_ a big turn off for me personally is the "I'm gonna
| slap something on github to tick the box" group. I had someone
| submit a resume with a link to their website and a link to
| their github. The website was literally just a demo site, but
| they had changed all of the blog titles so it looked like real
| posts, but if you clicked through, it was all lorem ipsum. The
| GitHub was also just the code for this site.
|
| I'll take a graveyard of personal exploration everyday over a
| half-baked sham site. (Note: They could have just been playing
| around BUT TELL ME THAT! Because it sure looked like an attempt
| to look the part.)
| unboxingelf wrote:
| 100% this. Show me you're actually interested in this stuff.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| why do you care?
| yiyus wrote:
| I could show you, but my github account is not
| representative of my actual interests. That is precisely
| what resumes and motivation letters are for.
|
| If recruiters start looking only at github accounts,
| dishonest job seekers will quickly learn to create fake
| github accounts, just as they present fake resumes now.
| unboxingelf wrote:
| I've been interviewing candidates for ~5y across two
| companies and have yet to see a motivational letter. And
| most the resumes I see are either overly verbose and
| don't tell me what you actually did, or are simply a soup
| of buzzwords.
|
| A few of the most successful and memorable hires I was a
| part of have real github accounts with something more
| than a bunch of forks or fancy profile readme.
|
| In my opinion, it doesn't matter if the content isn't
| representative of what you want to do at work. Seeing
| that you're curious and interested in building things,
| trying weird experiments, and so on is a strong data
| point in and of it's self.
|
| Here's a similar example from an unrelated field: there's
| a handyman that lives down the street from me. His humble
| home is neatly manicured and I often see him outside in
| the morning, dressed for the job and working on projects.
| Observing the pride he takes in his craft was a signal to
| me that he probably does good work. And after hiring him
| for a small project, my hunch was correct.
| fartcannon wrote:
| The soup of buzzwords is because of the shitty
| algorithm/outsource your org uses to pre-screen for
| candidates.
| yiyus wrote:
| Your example is excellent. I agree with you in that
| choosing a developer in basis to a github profile is not
| much different from choosing a handyman in basis to what
| he does in his garden on the mornings. What if there was
| a much cheaper and more efficient handyman living up the
| street, but he always works in his backyard so you have
| never seen him outside?
|
| I am sure you can find valid candidates with your method,
| but also that you could be missing much better ones.
| floren wrote:
| I've seen applicants with lots of Github repos, which all
| turn out to be forks, and all the applicant did was make a
| trivial change to the documentation (not fixing a technical
| error or expanding the comprehensiveness, but adding periods
| at the end of list items, capitalizing some proper noun that
| got missed, etc.)
|
| It seems pretty clear that the Github link in resumes has
| been cargo-culted for several years now.
| chakkepolja wrote:
| I didn't know why people fork repos arbitrarily on their
| GitHub. I thought they were doing that unnecessarily before
| cloning or something. So this is the reason?
| floren wrote:
| I'm sure it's not the only reason. Maybe some people fork
| repos they depend on just in case the original owner
| decides to take theirs offline, etc.
|
| But if someone lists their Github on a resume, and then
| the whole account is just full of do-nothing forks and no
| original work, I'm going to be a little suspicious.
| bjourne wrote:
| No. The reason is because when I and others investigate
| some code we like to make small refactorings as we go
| along. Change a variable name here, redefine a type here,
| and see what breaks. If you think those changes could
| ever be pushed upstream you save them in a github repo.
| That it looks "random" to hiring managers is something
| I've never thought of.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Too bad, because "fixing a technical error or expanding the
| comprehensiveness" of existing documentation would be a
| very strong signal to hire!
| torginus wrote:
| You mean, when it's meant to signal that a given person
| fixes every little thing they come across, and not 'hey,
| this guy contributes to LLVM!'
| floren wrote:
| Yeah, honestly seeing someone add a big chunk of fresh,
| useful information to a project's documentation would be
| even better than seeing code go in, because most people
| hate doing docs! Unfortunately what I've seen is absolute
| lowest-level "get a commit into the tree" stuff.
| soneca wrote:
| > _" And yes, some hiring managers are gonna say "welp, this
| candidate isn't an open source ninja so we don't want them."
| But that's not all hiring managers."_
|
| So probably is good risk management to not include your
| GitHub ever when applying.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| There are risks either way, and this is one of those
| processes where you just want a single good hit. So I guess
| the optimal course here is to maximize your risks (unless
| they are biased into not-hire), not to minimize them.
|
| There are other processes where you must never fail. For
| those you want to minimize risks. If you want a job at X
| and nowhere else, this is your situation. But that's not
| very common.
| soneca wrote:
| Good point
| conro1108 wrote:
| What's more common - hiring managers who see the inclusion
| of a GitHub as a small positive signal but don't scrutinize
| heavily (or even more likely don't bother to click into
| it), or those that dig deep and scrutinize open source
| contributions as a primary decision factor?
| jimbokun wrote:
| Or maybe the managers will decide to only interview people
| with a GitHub link?
|
| Could go either way.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| This strikes me as unnecessarily bitter and cynical.
| Application is a two way street. _Would_ you even want to
| work for a company like that?
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Most people work where they find work, not where they
| want to work. It's less true in IT, but I'm still betting
| it's mostly true there
| wiseowise wrote:
| If they pay well - absolutely.
| soneca wrote:
| Not bitter at all, not sure where you got that impression
| from my post. If I have something that does not present
| me in my best light, why should I volunteer to show it in
| a hiring process? I am just being practical.
|
| I do think all hiring processes have a component of
| arbitrariness, so I don't think it is necessarily a bad
| sign that a company quickly dismiss candidates from
| poorly-maintained GitHub accounts. I would gladly not
| show my GitHub and try to get the job showing my skills
| in some other way.
| slothtrop wrote:
| A company doesn't necessarily begin and end with the
| person hiring.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Giving as few reasons to deny your application before an
| interview just seems like good practice. The whole process
| is arbitrary anyway.
| nsv wrote:
| This depends on how many options you have. If you have
| many options it can be a good thing to filter out
| companies that would not be a good match for you.
| codefreeordie wrote:
| As a general rule of thumb, if you don't want to be
| evaluated at least in part based on something, don't put it
| on your resume.
|
| (and the inverse holds as well: if you do want to be
| evaluated at least in part based on something, consider
| putting it on your resume).
|
| Still, I'd be pretty irritated to learn that someone
| decided not to even talk to me because I included a github
| link to some toy project that they didn't like.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > All this makes me want to do is delete my entire Github. I do
| not want a future employer judging me on the basis of the half-
| finished amateurish experiments I knock off on my free time as
| I'm learning a new language or messing around with a new
| framework or just screwing around in general because I'm bored.
|
| This is my Github too; part of me thinks I should finally arse
| myself, remove unused repos, and build a portfolio with some
| example projects of how I build software (hopefully allowing me
| to skip a technical interview assignment), and maybe build some
| libraries for various purposes. Doesn't have to be anything
| unique.
|
| I mean my CV is impressive (according to recruiters /
| employers), but it's a high level overview of projects I've
| been involved in, it doesn't really boil down to my individual
| achievements because projects are generally team efforts.
|
| I do believe this is the danger of judging someone by CV alone
| though; just because they were a part of a project, doesn't
| mean they were big contributors to it. I've seen plenty of
| people who do one small commit per week and call it a day.
| There's always the one team member who gets carried by the rest
| of the team, just like in school. (childish as it might be, I
| do believe managers should review individual team members'
| contributions and to let people go if they're only along for
| the ride.)
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > This is my Github too
|
| This is a very common problem and I solved it in a very
| simple way: one account for playing, experimenting, testing
| and enjoying, and another for showing off. This is not
| fundamentally different to how people treat HN accounts.
| Juliate wrote:
| Why should some specific people (employers, recruiters in
| this case) should have a relevant authority as to pretense
| what a GitHub is supposed to be for.
|
| If someone's GitHub profile is a mess, mixing experiments,
| serious work, goofy stuff, etc. as a result of their
| multiple uses of it (it's a _tool_ per se), that's up to
| them and it's up to no one to say "well, that doesn't look
| very professional to me, does it? your worth doesn't look
| great here".
| jenscow wrote:
| Use github for what you want. However, when you put the
| link on your CV, _you_ chose to use it as a portfolio.
|
| But for me, experimental work is fine - I use github for
| conversation items.
| Juliate wrote:
| If you put the link on the CV, sure, you just assume that
| it may be relevant to your profile.
|
| But that's not necessarily a portfolio per se (something
| _really_ curated for that purpose, which is something
| specific). If it says so on the GitHub profile page
| "Portfolio", so be it.
|
| And the recruiter is perfectly fine looking at it, but
| only for what it is.
|
| What I'm rather aware of, is the pressure/mandate for
| everyone in the industry to showcase themselves, while
| that's not a relevant proxy for their fit to this or any
| job posting.
|
| Sure there are people in the industry making themselves
| visible through github, twitter and whatnot, and some of
| these are also excellent. But that's only a tiny piece of
| the crowd that's available for hire.
| [deleted]
| pizza234 wrote:
| > I do not want a future employer judging me on the basis of
| the half-finished amateurish experiments I knock off on my free
| time as I'm learning a new language or messing around with a
| new framework or just screwing around in general because I'm
| bored.
|
| In this case there's no need to publish this type of code;
| Github offers private repositories for free. If one is
| convinced that there is value for other people from half-baked
| experiments, it's definitely worth publishing them in the open
| (it's possible that they're valuable), but if there isn't, why
| doing it?
|
| I also notice that many people display private commits in their
| profile stats; this way, one can signal the amount of activity,
| if they want (within the limits of what's possible, as
| certainly commits don't necessarily correlate with intense
| activity).
| lmarcos wrote:
| Agree. I do have a GitHub account, but I do not link it in my
| CV (nor I link my personal website).
|
| I like to write "toy" software that more often than not does
| not leave my laptop. In the rare occasions I believe the
| software I write could be of help to others, I do publish it.
| But man, I code in my free time for fun! I couldn't care less
| about following guidelines or the latest patterns or using
| docker, or whatever.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| _I do not want a future employer judging me on the basis of the
| half-finished amateurish experiments_
|
| I would not want to work at a company where the tech people are
| not aware that most repos are precisely that.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I'm never going to work for a company whose hiring managers
| require me to post hobby projects on Github.
|
| Won't even entertain interviewing with them.
|
| I shouldn't have to spend thousands of hours a year working on
| shit outside of work to prove that I can do my job. If it's not
| obvious from the interview and whatever test I'm given, then we
| have nothing further to discuss. One of the reasons I don't
| suffer from burnout is that once I'm finished with my full time
| job and my consulting side-gig, I leave it alone.
|
| I might dabble in some new technology from time to time, but
| there's no reason to announce that to the world.
| tym0 wrote:
| This was also my reaction, the way I write code when I have a
| 20 minutes of free time after work is really different from the
| way I write code for production. The author is lying to
| themselves if they think that most people Github projects are
| any more representative of the work they'll do once hired than
| their resume is.
|
| I think looking at the Github of applicants is useful as a
| conversation starter however: "Oh I see you've built X with Y,
| what was interesting about that? What did you learn?"
| mauvehaus wrote:
| I don't even code professionally any more, but when I gin up
| some code to solve a problem for myself in 20 minutes, I'll
| definitely try to clean it up before I throw it up on GitHub.
| I don't get any competitive advantage or economic benefit
| from my code, so maybe it's different for me, but if somebody
| finds my stuff and wants to use it, I feel like it's basic
| courtesy to not hand them something I vomited onto the
| internet.
|
| If you just want an offsite backup for your noodling around,
| make it a private repo; the contributor limit won't be a
| problem. If you're putting it out for the world to see, take
| the time to comment it, put a little polish on it, a decent
| README, and a license. If nothing else _you 'll_ be starting
| from a place of sanity if you ever have to revisit the code.
| pc86 wrote:
| I disagree but want to explain why.
|
| I don't view GitHub as a place to show off your code, or a
| place to find new code, or whatever. It's where my code is
| stored. I trust what's on GitHub more than I trust what's
| on any server, or any laptop, or running on my dev
| environment right now. As such, the idea of "cleaning it
| up" _before_ putting it on GitHub seems backward. Code gets
| committed as soon as it 's written, and if it gets cleaned
| up that history gets saved too. If somebody wants to pull
| my shitcode down that doesn't even have a readme, that's on
| them.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I agree with the conversation starter part, but I think
| there's still something to be said for seeing how someone's
| code looks when they're writing it not-for-production.
|
| Like does that just mean overly long functions? Lazy symbol
| naming? Linter violations? Lack of tests? Those might all be
| reasonable through the "not prod" lens, but there's other
| pretty important stuff that can still bubble up, like the
| person reinventing the wheel where a well known library could
| have been used, or using obviously non-idiomatic structures
| like an indexed loop in Python.
|
| None of this should be a deal breaker, but if you're seeing
| stuff that's obviously like "I would be annoyed to be
| reviewing this code" then it's worth talking about.
| cnity wrote:
| I thought that the commenters who were sheepish about
| including their GH repo were being unreasonable until I
| read this comment. I could not disagree more about the
| purposes of side projects. In fact, if "reinventing the
| wheel where a well known library could have been used" is a
| deal breaker for people _in a side project_, I must be one
| of the least hire-able people on earth.
|
| I love breaking things down to understand them. Rewriting
| them (sometimes better!) to get a feel for what is
| involved. I think it makes me a better programmer. It
| saddens me to hear that this is an undesirable quality in
| seeking engineering candidates, for some.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I like re-implementing things too! But usually there's a
| pretty clear difference between "I'm doing this
| deliberately differently from established-solution X for
| reasons Y and Z" vs "I'm doing an unrelated task and am
| using urllib because I'm blindly copying in SO solutions
| from ten years ago and have never heard of Requests."
| This kind of thing is the fizzbuzz of ecosystem-
| awareness.
|
| For an example from my own code-- I was learning Rust via
| AoC a few years ago, and I deliberately chose to do some
| of the challenges with natural language inputs using Pest
| rather than just dumb regexes [1]. The regex solution
| would have almost certainly been shorter and quicker for
| this limited task, but I would have no trouble justifying
| this design choice to an interviewer as having been an
| intentional learning experience.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mikepurvis/advent-of-
| code/blob/master/202...
| cnity wrote:
| The thing is, reasons Y and Z for me very often are
| "because I want to". I don't even really want to fluff it
| up and call it something nauseating like "professional
| growth". I just followed my curiosity. My personal
| projects are a safe space from stiff professional
| judgement (or at least were).
| fartcannon wrote:
| You're my favourite kind of employee/colleague. Someone
| who knows something about what they're doing because they
| took it apart and put it back together.
| II2II wrote:
| > other pretty important stuff that can still bubble up,
| like the person reinventing the wheel where a well known
| library could have been used
|
| One of the reasons why I enjoy programming as a hobby and
| avoid it as a profession is the pleasure of reinventing the
| wheel. For example: I learnt how to use git and am learning
| how to read datasheets is by taking simple Arduino programs
| then refining it until most of the abstractions are
| removed. Likewise, it can be fun to implement my own data
| structures and algorithms. Contrast that to simply using
| libraries. It's mostly an exercise of reading documentation
| and hoping that a tiny subset of what's learnt is
| transferable to other libraries.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Okay, understandable. I do feel there's a pretty big
| difference between doing something a bit different for
| the sake of preference or taste or experimentation vs
| doing it because you just didn't know, or you don't have
| the familiarity with the ecosystem to even know what's
| out there. And this difference is _usually_ fairly
| evident in the code itself.
|
| If nothing else, again, it's an opportunity for a
| conversation-- the person might have a great war story
| about how they deep-dived on library X after finding it
| lacking, or tried to submit a PR that was shot down. Or
| even if they had no idea, it's an opportunity for them to
| demonstrate teachability, like "oh that looks nifty, yes
| I can definitely see how that would make this whole
| section redundant and the rest easier to read."
| swatcoder wrote:
| This smells of career stage myopia.
|
| As an early career developer, your team wants you to
| write useful code with few errors and that works best
| when you can rely on established libraries.
|
| But as your career progresses, your value comes from
| understanding how those libraries work and from being
| capable of writing new libraries that support and
| stabilize the early career developers coming up behind
| you.
|
| And the only way to go from the first group to the second
| is from getting your hands dirty. Writing personal and
| hobby projects that "reinvent the wheel" is one of the
| best ways to do that.
| II2II wrote:
| One of the nice things about open source, and modern
| development tools, is the ability to easily go beyond the
| documentation to explore the library code itself. While I
| wouldn't consider that as a substitute for implementing
| your own, it is another means of figuring out how a
| library works and can be seen as more results oriented.
| Yet it is nowhere near as interesting, in my opinion.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > other pretty important stuff that can still bubble up,
| like the person reinventing the wheel where a well known
| library could have been used
|
| OTOH, reinventing the wheel as a hobby and to deepen
| understanding makes perfect sense.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Overly long function names and lazy symbols, fair enough.
| Linter violations, Im not sure sure, standardised code
| style is most important when working in a team, working on
| your own it doesnt really matter as much, but fine. Lack of
| tests, theres no way I'm writing tests for a fun weekend
| project not meant for production. I'm not even sure I'd
| write tests for any project not meant for production or
| anyone elses uses (obviously what production is in that
| context differs, if your writing a library for dev tooling,
| their dev is your production).
|
| As for "reinventing the wheel", this overuse and
| overdependence on hundreds of libraries is how we as an
| industry keep running into the same old issues, so I'd
| quite happily reinvent the wheel for production. I'm not
| adverse to libraries, but they shouldnt be approached as a
| first resort.
|
| I'm just glad I don't have my github on my CV
| mikepurvis wrote:
| > I'm not even sure I'd write tests for any project not
| meant for production or anyone else's use
|
| See that's interesting-- I'm far from a testing-
| absolutist, and I agree with the basic premise here that
| there's no point having an elaborate "testing" strategy
| for a one-off script, stuff that isn't very branchy, etc.
|
| However, there's also some stuff that I basically always
| write a trivial unit test for, assuming the language is
| set up to allow me to do so cheaply. Obvious examples of
| this include any kind of string processing, parsing, or
| regex-type logic-- I'm just like, this looks fragile, and
| I'd like to know _for me_ that it does what I think it
| does and I 'm not going to be tripped up later by some
| subtle bug that boiled down to an edge case in this
| particular piece of trivially-isolated and testable
| logic.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Yeh, that makes sense, I just doubt I'd even think to add
| unit tests for a quick and done project. Even if it did
| cross my mind, I think I'd just add exceptions and print
| statements. Its dirty, but its also very quick and
| painless.
|
| Then again, I haven't used unit tests much at all in any
| language other than Python (maybe a few others, but not
| for some time certainly), maybe other languages make it
| much easier.
| whiddershins wrote:
| What if I wanted to reinvent the wheel to increase my
| knowledge?
| lbotos wrote:
| Make a readme that says "This project is me exploring how
| to do Y so I can learn the ins and outs". Solved.
| reificator wrote:
| And what if I'm not tracking that in such detail or even
| thinking about viewing it like that _because it's a side
| project_?
|
| My repos are hidden specifically because I do them for
| fun. I'd make them public if tinkering were an understood
| thing but its not.
|
| > _If you give me six lines written by the hand of the
| most honest of men, I will find something in them which
| will hang him._
|
| Better to have a clear separation between work and play.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Make a readme that says "This project is me exploring
| how to do Y so I can learn the ins and outs". Solved.
|
| Your comment is a great reason for me _not_ to share my
| Github profile.
|
| I'm not going to treat my Github project defensively. The
| notion that most people need to worry about what they put
| in their README because some interviewer is going to look
| at it - it's just so much better not to let them see your
| Github profile.
|
| The irony with this article is that it's proposing a
| solution to a problem - yet that solution is as
| problematic. A resume is a poor indicator of one's
| skills, _as is their Github profile_.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > like the person reinventing the wheel where a well known
| library could have been used
|
| This is a particularly shitty signal to my mind. Half the
| reason to experiment with writing software _outside of
| work_ is to reinvent the wheel and see what shakes out -
| you 'll almost never have the opportunity to do that at
| work, and if nobody ever does that, we never discover
| better ways of developing software.
| chipsa wrote:
| I think it's a difference between: "reinventing the wheel
| because I didn't know better", and "reinventing the wheel
| because I feel like trying to make it better". There's
| usually a distinct difference in how the code shakes out
| between the two.
| Zababa wrote:
| > there's other pretty important stuff that can still
| bubble up, like the person reinventing the wheel where a
| well known library could have been used
|
| I wouldn't call not using a well known library "reinventing
| the wheel". The wheel in that expression is a concept, not
| a implementation. A library is an implementation of a
| concept. Writing yourself code instead of using a library
| is a great way to learn about what that library does and
| the tradeoffs it makes.
|
| When I think about "reinventing the wheel" as something
| negative, I think about something like "Medical researcher
| discovers integration, gets 75 citations":
| https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-
| research....
| jameshart wrote:
| Imagine you're hiring a structural engineer to work as part
| of a highly skilled team on a skyscraper project. They
| previously worked on a bunch of major building projects
| around the world.
|
| What you're going to do, though, is ask them to let you
| have a look round the treehouse they built on weekends in
| their backyard.
|
| After all, the choices of materials and techniques they use
| there in that 'not for production' context probably tell
| you a lot about how they approach their work, right?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Sure. But not because you're expecting the treehouse to
| be at the caliber of a major building project. Rather
| because it's an opportunity to witness:
|
| - What their work looks like when they're solely in
| charge of it and it's not a massive, long-lived team
| effort.
|
| - Obvious flaws that shouldn't be acceptable to anyone.
| Like, loose boards, nails sticking out, a fence that's
| not supported and may collapse if a kid leans on it
| wrong.
|
| Neither of these things are the entirety of the
| evaluation, but IMO they're a relevant signal to use in
| combination with talking through past professional
| projects, particularly if the professional projects
| aren't visible or known to the interviewer.
| jimbokun wrote:
| The difference with software is that you are not allowed
| to look at the skyscraper, because it is the intellectual
| property of another company.
| jameshart wrote:
| So you're saying that, if skyscraper engineering designs
| were considered confidential and proprietary, preventing
| you from being able to directly investigate them, it
| would be perfectly reasonable to fall back to evaluating
| structural engineers for skyscraper projects on the basis
| of how well they put together treehouses?
| jimbokun wrote:
| Nah, you could just have them come and build something at
| your office while you watch them, and ask them leading
| questions when they get stuck.
| shikoba wrote:
| > Github projects are any more representative of the work
|
| They are, that's the moment you see how the person code when
| she/he is responsible. You see the real skills and potentials
| of that person.
| jameshart wrote:
| I disagree profoundly with this assertion.
|
| On a personal project there is _no_ accountability. The
| developer didn't have to understand what someone _else_
| wanted and try to figure out how to make it real. They set
| their own goalposts and had freedom to move them at will.
| You have no idea what their ambition was.
|
| Adam Savage had some interesting insights relevant to this
| in the context of evaluating model makers and artists for
| special FX work. While portfolio pieces showing their own
| concepts or creations might show off heir basic _craft_
| skills, it doesn't show that they can create something to
| fulfill someone else's vision - and _that_ is the job. So
| what you want are portfolio pieces where they have drawn or
| built something recognizable - a replica or a scale model
| or portrait or something. Because that shows they can
| direct their skill to a particular goal. You know what they
| were trying to go for, and you can tell whether or not they
| nailed it.
|
| Mostly I'm hiring for developers to work in a large team,
| within a large organization. What they can accomplish when
| left to their own devices is scarcely relevant to what they
| will be able to do in that work environment.
| [deleted]
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > They are, that's the moment you see how the person code
| when she/he is responsible
|
| There is no responsibility in small side projects. I write
| better code during my day job _because_ I know other people
| will eventually have to interact with it.
| ozim wrote:
| That is one person so I would not read too much into it.
|
| When I read CV and I see github link it is "nice to have" so I
| check it after I consider that person has enough work
| experience.
|
| I have only seen "meh" code on GH. If someone would have
| contributions to some real OSS project he would probably jump
| queue to front, but it is not like I would throw away
| application because person is trying just stuff out on GH.
|
| That said - I don't see value in putting my own trash projects
| on public GH profile. I can have it in local repository or in
| private repo if I want to synch it between computers or deploy
| to VPS.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| If all a person has to evaluate me on is public Github
| contributions, it'll seem like I only work one day every 3
| years or so. With all the other things I do with my life
| (sport, art, socialising), I very rarely have any time (or
| motivation) to program in my free-time. Having all of these
| "extra-curricular" activities is probably good for my mental
| health and makes me a better engineer than I would otherwise be
| if I spent all my time both at work and in my own time working
| on software.
| idop wrote:
| Please don't delete your GitHub account because of this one
| person's article. I have interviewed over a hundred of
| developers over the years, and I have actually adopted the
| habit of _not_ looking at their GitHub profile because I find
| them to be very non-representative of the person's skills and
| abilities 9 times out of 10. The article isn't bad, by the way,
| and OP is making very true points, most prominently that
| resumes are mostly bullshit and shouldn't be relied upon by
| themselves, but that's what the interview process is for.
| deepstack wrote:
| > If all this person is evaluating me on is my Github, they'll
| think that I've never advanced beyond an amateur level despite
| my having over a decade of experience in the industry... all
| because I treat my open source work as a hobby rather than as a
| second job.
|
| Thanks you for bringing that up. That is one of the reason I
| don't use GH. Other being the acquisition by MS.
| starkd wrote:
| He's talking about the case where the applicant explicitly
| provides a github link in their resume or profile. In that
| case, they could have been expected to pin their favorite
| projects or remove the ones they don't want seen. Plus they are
| merely suggesting it be used as a jumping off point for
| conversation with the candidate.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's a strange thing to do, in my opinion. That makes me want
| to put my Github (which is half half-baked nonsense, including
| this stupid `hello.S` from when I was barely learning amd64) on
| the resume. I do anyway, but it is now a reason to double down.
|
| After all, if my hiring manager can't correctly evaluate which
| code is toy and which code is real (I have both on my Github),
| I don't trust _his_ competence and I want to not talk to him so
| it is important that he filter me out. This way, my time is not
| wasted with incompetents.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| So don't put your github URL in your resume? If you don't want
| a potential employer to look at something and judge your
| ability based on it, it doesn't belong in your resume.
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| Lots of resume aggregators and ATS require or at least
| present a Github URL field whether you like it or not.
| mdm12 wrote:
| In such cases, I stick with the tried-and-true 'N/A'. I
| still get offers, so it doesn't auto-delete my application!
| lordnacho wrote:
| Huge problem with this, apart from not everyone has a GitHub, is
| that code and expertise are not the same thing.
|
| You may spend years learning about some field like systems
| programming, and then when you make a contribution to the Linux
| kernel it's only a few lines. There's no way to know from that
| how well you actually understand the kernel. You might have a lot
| of experience, but so did previous contributors, so it looks like
| you only did a little bit when actually you know quite a lot.
|
| Also there's a lot of work in coding a few lines of code that
| isn't just those lines. You may have taken apart very large
| systems and grepped huge amounts of logs to understand something,
| while having written many intermediate versions of a solution,
| only for you to figure out the problem could be elegantly solved.
|
| For me the smart way to interview has always been the open ended
| technical discussion. People who don't know the vocabulary show
| this very quickly. Imagine pretending to be a surgeon, you'll
| last one minute. People who are close to the work but haven't
| done it will last a bit longer but there are so many technical
| terms they will also drop out, typically when you ask for some
| sort of judgement on A Vs B. This still hasn't gone wrong for me,
| my only dud hires have been people who wanted to do something
| else rather than couldn't do it.
| gwd wrote:
| > Also there's a lot of work in coding a few lines of code that
| isn't just those lines. You may have taken apart very large
| systems and grepped huge amounts of logs to understand
| something, while having written many intermediate versions of a
| solution, only for you to figure out the problem could be
| elegantly solved.
|
| If that's the case, then that should be evident in the commit
| log.
|
| My one commit in the Linux kernel mostly just moves a few
| assignments / variables around; but the commit message should
| make it clear the effort that went into it.
|
| https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
| jasfi wrote:
| Resume parsing is something I'm working on, see
| https://lxagi.com, it's in the examples.
| nojito wrote:
| >The first thing I look for in a resume is a GitHub URL. If I can
| find that, I stop reading the resume and start reading code.
| Doing open source is not a be-all and end-all by any means, but
| it's a good starting point. After five minutes of reading through
| a candidate's code I have a good handle of their skill level and
| style, making the interview run much more smoothly.
|
| We get well over 500 applicants per role. It's absolutely
| unreasonable to ask our hiring teams to go through the applicants
| githubs
| keskival wrote:
| Much fewer than 500 would be left after the initial screening I
| would hope.
| cryptica wrote:
| Resumes are not as dangerous as technical tests. 90% of top
| companies have terrible technical tests which select mediocre
| candidates and pass up on excellent candidates.
|
| Technical tests with time limits are the worst; this is in part
| because if the candidate doing the test is more skilled than the
| engineers who designed the test, the candidate might take longer
| than anticipated to complete the task because they've thought to
| do some additional sub-tasks which the people who designed the
| test did not anticipate and which they would not appreciate or
| understand. For example, extra logic related to error handling
| and security will take more time to implement but are critical in
| evaluating a developer's skill level.
|
| It's happened to me multiple times that I did a test but could
| not complete it within the allocated time. Then explaining to the
| engineers why it took longer to complete just doesn't register
| because they don't seem to understand how important this error
| handling logic is or why it's important to reset the state of the
| system between each test case.
|
| I usually don't insist much because if they are like this during
| the interview process, I can be sure that they will be even worse
| if I start working there. It's sad because many of these jobs are
| highly paid and would provide credibility on the resume - At
| least until the industry figures out that the financial success
| of a company is usually not correlated with tech talent;
| certainly not the kinds of companies which solve every problem by
| throwing 100 engineers at it... That's just brute force; it
| doesn't require much skill.
|
| Another issue with technical tests is that some developers with a
| background at a famous SV company will expect you to do things a
| certain, very specific way (based on how the famous company did
| it) and not realize (due to lack of other industry experience)
| that there are multiple valid ways to achieve the same (or
| better) results for the specific use case which is being
| discussed. They are overfitted to their past role at the famous
| company.
| shagie wrote:
| > ... 90% of top companies have terrible technical tests which
| select mediocre candidates and pass up on excellent candidates.
|
| This is one of the confusing parts of interviews. They are not
| necessarily designed to select the _best_ candidate, but rather
| the least risky candidate.
|
| It is quite possible to have a technically excellent candidate
| who would be a very risky hire and the interview process is set
| up to _avoid_ hiring that candidate.
| cryptica wrote:
| This sounds like kicking the can down the road because the
| quality of technical tests seems to keep getting worse each
| year. All these supposedly low-risk hires have caused the
| quality of engineering to decline over the years which caused
| a decline in the hiring process which creates a vicious
| cycle. The risk actually builds up in the long run. It's not
| surprising why security is becoming such a big issue for big
| companies nowadays.
|
| If you always hire below your current level of talent (I.e.
| the apparent 'safe zone'), overall talent will keep
| declining.
|
| Unfortunately, developers in many companies feel
| uncomfortable hiring people who might be more skilled than
| them because they don't want to risk being displaced from
| their current position or introduce more competition for
| future promotions. I've seen it happen from the other side
| where I gave my approval for a candidate who was very good
| but they were rejected in favor of a different candidate who
| was below average. It was obvious that the second one was not
| as good but I suspect that my colleagues may have felt
| threatened by the first one.
| mgas wrote:
| Too many people here are crowing about the GitHub thing, and not
| enough about:
|
| > Above all, I try to hire people who I'd want to pair with
| tomorrow. People who are better than me, and people who I can
| learn from.
|
| It seems the only way to get hired period is to have all the
| experience in the world, at least from the author's perspective.
| This mentality is far more dangerous since it disallows the idea
| that someone can get better at a job over time.
|
| Also I feel like this conclusion is just a longform version of
| "we only hire ninjas and rockstars". The author openly disdains
| applicants who are so "full of themselves" that they send in
| overly detailed resumes, but conveniently omits the fact (which
| everyone here knows) that resumes have to be catered to the
| filters of your HR software to even land on a hiring manager's
| desk.
|
| His conclusion is that stuffed resumes are for losers, and only
| he, the hiring manager with the Midas touch, can see the true
| value of an individual by glancing over their code and preparing
| some pitfall questions. This smacks of self-centered egotism and
| coder bro mentality.
|
| Also as others have pointed out, good coding jobs exist in
| fintech, government, and 1000s of other industries that this guy
| sneeringly looks down his nose at.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Not the author, but . . .
|
| Better can mean better at learning or teaching, cleaner
| approaches to problem-solving, interesting combinations of
| ideas I wouldn't have thought of, more potential, or any number
| of other things.
|
| I firmly believe in only hiring people who are better than I
| am. That involves looking for ways the candidate is better than
| I am instead waiting for the candidate to fail the entrance
| exam.
| em-bee wrote:
| well it depends whether you hire a junior or a senior position.
|
| the general rule is that if i don't hire juniors, then as a
| manager i want to hire people who are better developers than
| me.
|
| otherwise if i hire juniors, i obviously expect them to learn,
| but the paring point is still relevant, and even juniors may
| bring an interesting perspective to the team, not just their
| coding skills.
| mgas wrote:
| Totally agree on jr vs sr. Another point that is conveniently
| overlooked in the article so the author can have his holier-
| than-thou moment. It seems he's hiring seniors, and only
| wants stars.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I wouldn't call them "dangerous," _per se_ , but they are mostly
| done to fool AI screeners, these days, and are nothing more than
| a few data points and buzzwords.
|
| _> The first thing I look for in a resume is a GitHub URL. If I
| can find that, I stop reading the resume and start reading code.
| Doing open source is not a be-all and end-all by any means, but
| it 's a good starting point. After five minutes of reading
| through a candidate's code I have a good handle of their skill
| level and style, making the interview run much more smoothly._
|
| My experience, is that interviewers don't look at this stuff _at
| all_. It 's downright crazy. Instead, they rely on leetcode
| tests.
|
| These are short, academic tests, using algorithms that are seldom
| seen IRL (I have been coding for over thirty years, and have
| never seen one single binary tree. I've seen one or two roughly
| similar structures in some image processing algorithms, but only
| in a couple of ones that weren't very performant, and we ended up
| removing these).
|
| But they can be practiced, and are quite familiar to folks just
| barely out of college.
|
| I've not bothered to practice these. I can do OK on them (they
| are usually just common sense exercises), but some kid that has
| spent most of the last month (of their current employer's time)
| practicing these, will absolutely kick my ass. It's not worth it.
|
| Also, I have noticed that interviewers are looking for rote
| answers, which also applies to more practical exercises, like
| take-home tests. They don't like unusual approaches. They are
| controlling for conformity. That's interesting, as some of the
| companies doing this, are crowing about "disruption."
| kerberos84 wrote:
| resumes can be full of lies, github profile as well. that is why
| you have an conversation (interview) with the candidate and get
| to know them.
| keskival wrote:
| People keep saying that, but I have never encountered an
| untruthful resume.
|
| Fraud is a crime.
| code_runner wrote:
| My biggest takeaway from this article: this is why I deleted all
| of those projects from github never to be seen again (prior to
| private repositories).... the projects where I was just having
| fun for once and learning instead of being stuck in analysis
| paralysis and trying to think about 85 different OWASP
| recommendations at once.
|
| My biggest takeaway from the comment section: thank god that
| there are more reasonable people than I first assumed.
|
| I have an idea for a hobby/fun webapp I could build that maybe
| one or two people I know might get use from.... and I'm excited
| just thinking about it because its going to be low stress and a
| fun learning experience. Thats what my personal github is. I
| don't put the link on my resume and I don't really have a desire
| to either.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| "Tell me a story of when you solved a difficult bug."
|
| "Tell me about a time you found yourself in conflict with your
| coworkers."
|
| These two questions, in the hands of a skillful interviewer and
| interviewee, will get you all the info you need.
| dopamean wrote:
| I dont understand the point of these blog posts. Is he trying to
| say this is how everyone should hire? Because if we all only
| hired based on "would I want this person to be my boss" or "is
| this person smarter than me" then no one would ever get their
| first job in the industry.
|
| I cant help but feel like this isnt even how this guy actually
| hires. This feels like a post intended to gain linkedin clout or
| something.
|
| Edit:
|
| I feel like it's worth noting that this guy is "Chairman of the
| Board" at his company and previously "CEO." So his expectation is
| that everyone he hires who is presumably paid less than him be
| more talented than him. What does he think this blog post
| communicates to potential hires?
| davidhyde wrote:
| > "Then, come the interview, the guy can barely code, much less
| know the ins and outs of variable scope. It turns out there is
| very little correlation between how good a resume is, and how the
| interview actually pans out."
|
| I think that this is more of an argument about how inaccurate and
| dangerous interviews can be compared to how dangerous resumes
| are. You can practice interviews and get better without actually
| becoming a better developer. Same with algorithmic coding tests.
| Developers who are happily employed rarely get to practice
| interviews.
| keskival wrote:
| I'll second this.
|
| It is more likely the interviewer has misjudged the ability of
| the candidate for any one of myriads of potential reasons in
| the interview proper, than that the resume was somehow
| deceptive.
| jameshart wrote:
| Mostly, resumes I see are just... lifeless.
|
| A list of places you have worked, with dates, and names of
| systems or applications that will mean nothing to me, and the
| technologies upon which they were built.
|
| A resume like that tells me nothing more or less than that you
| have remained employed as a programmer for X years.
|
| I am usually sifting through multiple such resumes, all of which
| tell me that these candidates are... yup, definitely programmers.
| They have programmed stuff.
|
| Please, when writing your resume, try to add one thing to each of
| the date-range jobs that you list:
|
| _Tell me how you grew and developed in that time_.
|
| Just a couple of sentences highlighting the main things you
| learned as part of that role. Why do you consider yourself a
| better, more hireable person now, than you were before you did
| that job?
|
| That is worth _so_ much more to me than exactly which version of
| .net that particular SaaS billing platform was built in.
| jjice wrote:
| As someone who was in college very recently - this is exactly
| what they tell you to do, at least at my college and with all
| the new grad resumes I've looked at as well. It's unfortunate.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > The first thing I look for in a resume is a GitHub URL.
|
| Wow - that would narrow the field a bit (if the github account is
| a pre-requisite). For example, I don't interact with Microsoft
| online properties at all. I don't much care for git. And even if
| I did use git, I'm not in favour of entrusting important
| information to online service providers such as Github.
|
| Lucky I'm not looking for work, I guess.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I just assume anything I do will be seen as a negative. Don't
| list a GitHub - negative. List the Github - they assume that's my
| top quality code and that it wasn't mostly written 8-10 years
| ago.
| TimPC wrote:
| Resumes are mostly useless in tech. Juniors have too little of
| note to put on them and Seniors only need to demonstrate enough
| experience to get a tech screen given the severe shortage in
| talent. Filtering out someone because they didn't put enough time
| into their resume is silly. It's even more silly when that resume
| may be a scrape from LinkedIn and may not even be provided by a
| first party.
| motohagiography wrote:
| > _Would I want this person to be my boss? Would I learn a
| significant amount from him or her? What if this person went to
| work for our competition?_
|
| Sincere question I would have is, people who work at companies
| with intense vetting processes to find just the right person,
| fire fast, and avoid bad hires at all costs - how is that going?
| You're in, do you see yourself still there in 3 years?
| 7speter wrote:
| I see a lot of comments here deriding githubs, but what if you're
| breaking into the industry? Surely in this case its a good thing
| to have a github link on your resume? For me, being one of those
| people trying to break into tech, I curate my github with
| projects, whether success or failure, to show the sum of my own
| initiative and research, whether borrowing code structure from a
| given online course for a bigger project, or practicing a concept
| on my own (I got much better at this recently). While I may not
| have a degree or previous work experience, I think my github can
| be a useful indicator for a prospective employer; whether I'm at
| a place they are fine with and/or I'll be someone they could get
| up to speed with if need be. Maybe I'm wrong...
| Juliate wrote:
| And that's perfectly fine.
|
| The issue is to set/have the expectation that necessarily
| "github = portfolio" and "no github or messy github" = not a
| good fit" and that candidates not fullfiling this expectation
| would not be relevant.
| cudgy wrote:
| The person that wrote this won't hire anyone unless they are
| better than themselves. So only experienced and top notch
| candidates will be hired. I find the criteria stated to be more
| about an ideal hire rather than a typical hire. Pie in the sky
| expectations that do not really provide much insight into
| general hiring in my opinion.
| watwut wrote:
| There is difference between judging people based on what they
| claim to be their portfolio and based on everything they have
| on github. What you describe sounds like a portfolio.
|
| But for many people, their github is more of free backup space.
| They dont curate it. The whole "stop reading what they done
| seriously and look only at what is in their github" is the
| issue.
| 7speter wrote:
| Oh, I have a portfolio too, which is a distillation of the
| "complete" (enough), mostly front end projects I've worked
| on. My github has those as well as attempts at fullstack
| projects for whom I get hung up with affordably and
| practically hosting... I think both can help create a picture
| of where someone is.
| pydry wrote:
| This'll probably get me downvoted but I suspect the comments
| come from a position of insecurity as older tech people with
| kids and without much spare time are afraid a line on their CV
| might not be competitive with 20 somethings with a shiny github
| profile.
| 7speter wrote:
| Whats more absurd is I may end up like these people rather
| soon since I'm a 30 something :)
| Juliate wrote:
| There's part of that, and that's a good thing: having kids,
| not having much spare time for work-related stuff _is a good
| thing_.
|
| As the contrary. It's up to your options and your choices.
|
| And that's irrelevant to your employment/work capacity.
|
| A decent recruiter is aware of that. Others are optimizing
| for something else than a balanced contractual work
| relationship.
| pydry wrote:
| it's entirely irrelevant to work capacity. It's a popular
| thing to look for because where it does exist and is good
| it's a strong hard-to-bullshit signal of a good developer.
|
| That doesnt mean that the candidates who dont have it
| _arent_ equally good. It just means that you cant easily
| tell it without investing resources into interviewing them
| and others who look as good as them.
| watwut wrote:
| People "without much spare time" are actually fine. Their
| github profile is actually empty or non-existent. So, this
| whole thing is not threat to them at all. OP will continue to
| read their CV without finding something bad on github.
|
| But, people who do use github a lot as a place to mess in are
| threatened.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I have these things called _hobbies_ and a _life_ outside of
| coding. When I was single, my hobby was teaching fitness
| classes, personal training, weightlifting and running.
|
| Coding has merely been a method to turn labor into money to
| support my addiction to food and shelter for over 25 years.
| mcv wrote:
| Of course a resume could be full of lies. That's why nobody hires
| blindly based on the resume but always has an actual interview.
| During the interview, talking about code, you'll notice soon
| enough whether the candidate knows what they're talking about.
| And that doesn't have to be (whiteboard) coding challenges or
| questions about obscure language details. Just talk about how
| they code, what coding style they prefer, how they organise their
| code, etc.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Not sure what a "whiteboard" coding challenge is.
|
| The last interview I did, I was asked to find and fix a bug in
| a small code fragment. On my own, I'd have fixed it in a jiffy;
| with two interviewers looking over my shoulder I was nervous,
| and it took longer.
|
| But if you're interviewing on the basis that the candidate
| claims in their resume to know language X, then a brief test of
| that is essential; and an online test doesn't cut the mustard -
| it could be anyone doing the work.
| mgas wrote:
| A Whiteboard coding challenge is the exact thing you
| describe. But instead of interviewers looking over your
| shoulder, they look at the whiteboard as you stand in front
| of them and write code on the whiteboard.
| beej71 wrote:
| I've found this works to great effect. I ask the prospective
| interviewee ahead of time for an example of some code they
| wrote that they're proud of.
|
| And then in the interview, I ask them to teach me how it works,
| what could be improved, etc. I might not know anything about
| it, but I can tell when someone's pretending to teach a thing.
|
| Once had someone bring in a device driver in C for a JavaScript
| position. Now, I've never written a device driver, but I know
| the general concepts, and the applicant's description was
| cogent. They got the job, and they were a great hire.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Oh goody. Now I can anticipate an article in a week or so talking
| about the issues people are having relying too heavily on using
| GitHub trawling as a hiring signal.
| vmception wrote:
| 2012 with 2012 logic
|
| A couple hiring managers and recruiters here still do it, thats
| cute
|
| One things thats changed since 2012 are that private github repos
| are free
| Distozion wrote:
| It's an interesting duality of engineers - love the coding
| challenges when they are the ones evaluating, while refuse to do
| them themselves :)
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I'm usually open to coding challenges when the challenger is
| going to dedicate at least 10% of the time I've put for a
| feedback.
|
| Some people think it's OK to ask the candidate to dedicate 2
| hours, then send an automated email rejecting. I don't think
| this is polite, let alone respectful.
|
| At least have the decency to dedicate 10 minutes to writing
| down three bullet points for why they were rejected.
| Yhippa wrote:
| You even get a rejection email?
| [deleted]
| torginus wrote:
| I think (moderately difficult) coding tests are a great tool
| since they establish a clear, and mostly objective benchmark
| for performance, which is hard to fake. While they certainly
| don't give you a complete picture, I think they are one of the
| most efficient tools for establishing a base line of competence
| with regards to both the interviewers and interviewees time.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| People use the take home tests the wrong way. They should be
| sent to a small number of candidates that are close to the
| final stage. But most people send them after the first filter.
| Then they waste both candidates' and their time and also spend
| zero time to send any valuable feedback since the pool of
| candidates is big at that point. And this creates a frustration
| to experienced engineers not wanting to spend any time on such
| a process.
| dvtrn wrote:
| > But most people send them after the first filter.
|
| I once got sent an automated email after applying to an org
| with a coding challenge _before the first filter_. Before
| even any recruiter /HM or anyone actually _at_ the
| organization sent me an email acknowledging they received my
| application.
|
| I initially bristled, and reached out to the generic
| "recruiting@" email that was present in the HackerRank email
| for the company, asking if I could at least have a screening
| call at minimum before committing time to a coding
| assessment.
|
| They said no.
|
| In the position of "needing work yesterday", I did the
| challenge.
|
| And was promptly ghosted.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| I really like coding challenges when they're done in a
| productive way:
|
| - Short and fully automated, for instance to skip an initial
| technical screening;
|
| - Longer, but leading to a follow-up interview.
|
| It's a tool, it can be misused. Be respectful and both parties
| can benefit from it.
|
| It's like whiteboarding: I don't enjoy companies that expect me
| to have seen the problem already and regurgitate the answer,
| but it can be a pleasant experience too.
| wink wrote:
| We once asked someone for some sample code. Anything they'd
| done at university really. Let me tell you, the whole team had
| no idea that you could actually run Python code with such a
| formatting of tabs and spaces and whatnot, being a white space
| sensitive language and all. With all goodwill this still looked
| like someones first program that accidentally ran after fixing
| the interpreter/compiler errors. Imagine a printed out cover
| letter but you fixed the typo in your last name with a sharpie
| and it had coffee stains on them.
|
| There are differences between "code this weird thing on a
| whiteboard" and "show us some code that you're not terribly
| embarassed about" (instead of searching on github)...
| makach wrote:
| Hiring people comes with a high degree of risk. That is why you
| have a probation. Reading code is also risky. I usually forget
| why I did what I did and more often than I would like to admit
| the BLAME is mine - a resignated "..who wrote this?" often turns
| into - a-ha, it was me.
|
| Resumes is good in the same way grades are good. They might get
| you to the interview, so don't knock it down just yet.
|
| The hard skills are absolutely important! But the soft skills are
| equally so. When you talk to your candidate your first impression
| will be the most important indicator on wheter you will be able
| to endure working on varieties of task in the immediate future
| and far away future.
|
| My favorite soft metric is to take them to lunch and observe how
| we can interact, talk and <sic> hygiene.
| the_snooze wrote:
| I think more organizations should have candidates (especially
| senior ones) give a job talk. It's standard practice in
| academia, but academic job talks tend to be overly long and
| high-stakes; basically an hour-long lecture about one's
| research. An industry job talk could just be a 15-minute
| presentation about a technical topic of the candidate's
| choosing, followed by Q&A. The candidate has full control over
| what the topic is, and the audience (i.e., the hiring panel)
| gets a good feel for that person's interests, communication
| skills, and soft skills.
| Cd00d wrote:
| This is what my company is currently doing. First step after
| a screener call is a 45 minute meeting with the hiring panel
| to present anything the candidate wishes - some presentations
| try to fill the full time, some are brief and there's more
| discussion.
|
| We started doing this to get rid of the repetitive background
| summary the candidate has to give with each member of the
| hiring team in 1:1s. Overall, I think it's working well, and
| wish that places I was interviewing for myself would follow a
| similar process rather than multiple hours of 1:1 before a
| tech screen.
| smallerfish wrote:
| As a hiring manager for a tech startup, I find resumes useful as
| a filter.
|
| There is a class of applicants who produce 3-4 page resumes
| filled with tedious details, with every technology they ever used
| bolded, and turgid prose describing internal software projects as
| if they should be common knowledge. It takes me probably 15
| seconds to move on to the next candidate if I see one of those.
|
| The next thing I filter on is choice of employers. If I see
| health insurer, big insurance, blah fortune 500 firm, government
| contractor, ... over and over again, then unless there's
| something in the first half of the first page of the resume that
| otherwise catches my eye, that resume is also going in the
| discard pile after 30 seconds.
|
| Finally I'll scan for interesting projects. I generally want to
| find people who have done more than just CRUD UIs, and show some
| passion about the technology they've built and worked with. For
| somebody who makes it past this point, I'll have spent max 60
| seconds with their resume. I then customize and send the message
| in the ATS and invite the applicant to check out the company and
| job posting.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > 3-4 page resumes
|
| That's way too much, even for a long career. Two pages is
| enough. The more resume there is, the more bullshit you have to
| read. The career history part should be a list of job-titles
| and dates, with a brief description of each role, noting any
| salient achievements. Many recruiters will set aside any resume
| longer than two pages.
| smallerfish wrote:
| I once had a candidate submit a 20 page(!) resume. They were
| so full of themselves. That one I actually did spend 5
| minutes with to see what they found so fascinating about
| their history, but it was otherwise an instant reject.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| A 20-page resume bespeaks someone inexperienced in job
| applications.
|
| One of the important skills I would be looking for in a
| recruit would be the ability to express themselves clearly,
| concisely, and persuasively. Clarity and conciseness are
| marks of the ability to think. Persuasiveness is actually
| something that makes me suspicious, but in many jobs the
| ability to persuade others is an asset (leadership
| positions, for example). So YMMV.
|
| I've always struggled with conciseness; I'm in love with
| the sound of my own voice.
| astura wrote:
| Was it this guy? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible
| _Is_Nothing_(video_r...
| Cd00d wrote:
| That may be a cultural/experiential difference. You may not
| be familiar with CVs as opposed to resumes.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| In some industries (or academia) a 20 page resume listing
| every project, publication, patent, etc. is considered
| normal and desirable. If could be that case.
| em-bee wrote:
| all right, i am guilty of that. my resume has 5 pages, but it
| is split up in clear sections that i can easily remove if
| appropriate: page 1: general
| objectives current occupation summary
| of the most important or interesting skills and projects
| page 2: skills (that's the list of all tech i
| ever worked with. just the names, no details. only the most
| important ones are bold.) work history (list of
| companies, dates and titles) page 3:
| education detailed work experience (that's a long
| list of every project i ever worked on, and the role i had
| there, split up in multiple subsections that i can include as
| appropriate) software development
| sysadmin work page 4: mentor and
| teaching experience presentations and
| workshops page 5: organizing events
| experience working with kids (that i only include for
| relevant ed-tech or training jobs)
|
| so technically, you could stop reading after page 2. and only
| scan the rest if you want more details.
|
| do you think it would be better to just skip the project
| list? i think it's better than a list of projects on github
| (which wouldn't have any of the interesting projects)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > do you think it would be better to just skip the project
| list?
|
| Hey, I'm not a specialist in this stuff - I've tended to
| stay in the same job until it became impossible for some
| reason or other, so I haven't applied for that many jobs.
| But I was hitched to a careers consultant for 15 years,
| whose core trade was advising students on how to write
| resumes. Its only purpose is to get you an interview; if
| you drop your pants in the resume, then there's nothing
| left for the recruiter to be curious about.
|
| A resume is a concise overview of your education and
| career. If you feel you need to describe your objectives
| and attitudes, or expand on some major achievement, I think
| that belongs in your covering letter - which can be an
| essay of sorts (but I keep mine short). The covering letter
| is tailored to the firm you are applying to. The resume can
| then be boilerplate, so you can use the same resume for
| each firm you apply to; only the covering letter is
| customised.
|
| I treat the resume as a sort of teaser. The covering letter
| has all the stuff about "If I can't get a job with your
| firm I'll have to kill myself, because no other employer
| will do" (no, please don't say anything like that!). But
| even the covering letter should not be more than two sides
| of paper. I'd stick to one side. If your concise pitch
| doesn't get you an interview, then doubling the length
| isn't going to improve your chances.
|
| Self-testimonials are a waste of space, if your recruiters
| are any good. For example, "I am a good team player" is
| worthless, unless you can provide evidence, such as "In my
| present position I mentor new recruits, and provide
| training courses for my colleagues". And I think that kind
| of stuff belongs in the covering letter.
|
| Again, I stress that I'm not a master of these matters. And
| most of my experience is based on UK hiring; I think
| puffing yourself up is more expected in the US tech
| marketplace. I've had one job in the USA, and I think I
| probably undersold myself that time.
| em-bee wrote:
| well, the first page is more or less the cover letter.
| and i do adapt that depending on the job.
|
| hiding the list of projects for the sake of having
| material in the interview seems to contradict the idea
| that people want to see my projects on github.
|
| either they do want to see projects or they don't. the
| project descriptions aren't detailed, and definitely less
| than a github project. so there still is plenty to talk
| about.
|
| and i prefer interviews to be about things that can't
| easily be put in writing. spending the interview talking
| about historic facts feels like a waste of time.
| obviously as a candidate i can't choose what the
| interviewer wants to know, but by getting the facts out
| of the way, i feel like getting the freedom to talk about
| things that are actually interesting.
|
| worse, if i am asked to share something about an
| interesting project, i might not know what to talk about
| because i don't know what the interviewer wants to hear.
| but if they have the list of projects they can skim it,
| pick one they find interesting and ask about that. at
| least that is how my thinking goes. i haven't actually
| been interviewed for some time, being more on the
| opposite side of the table.
|
| as an interviewer i value these details because they
| allow me to find things to talk about. that is especially
| important with candidates who are not outspoken and may
| not be doing well answering open-ended questions. or they
| may just feel nervous, and not know what to say. the more
| i know about them up-front the easier it is for me to
| find something to talk about that they should be familiar
| with and ease them into the situation.
|
| i agree that a long prosaic CV where it is difficult to
| find the things that the hiring manager is looking for is
| not helpful, but a list of projects which is effectively
| a kind of portfolio as an appendix should not be that.
|
| maybe i should explicitly separate the project list from
| the CV, so that it doesn't look like the CV itself has 5
| pages.
| tqi wrote:
| From what I've seen, a few things that could be helpful
| are:
|
| - Skip the objective, they are often really generic so
| people have become accustomed to just skipping ahead rather
| than reading carefully.
|
| - Presentations and workshops, especially if they are at
| bigger conferences, could be worth highlighting for more
| senior roles.
|
| - Education is good to keep just in case there is some kind
| of automatic filtering.
|
| Personally I have an extended version of my resume that has
| every job / project written out (that I plan to keep adding
| to over time), but when I submit a resume I pare down the
| items to only the ones most relevant to the role.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > skills (that's the list of all tech i ever worked with.
| just the names, no details. only the most important ones
| are bold.)
|
| Only put down skills and technologies that you want to work
| with. I used to put Pentaho on my resume, even though it
| was the most frustrating thing I've ever worked with
| (before or since). A recruiter messaged me once about a
| Pentaho role, which I declined. I dropped Pentaho from my
| resume immediately.
|
| > summary of the most important or interesting skills and
| projects
|
| Aaand you can stop right there. Pages 2 and onward can be
| safely omitted.
| derwiki wrote:
| I feel like one page is enough unless you have a truly
| remarkable career. At this point my earliest roles just don't
| earn their keep; no one cares any more that I was a Micro
| Computer Support Specialist in undergrad.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I generally want to find people who have done more than just
| CRUD UIs.._
|
| FWIW I could describe my current role as "Building a cash
| management application to track $500m+ revenue for a global
| ethical cosmetics organisation" on my resume, which is 100%
| true, but really it's a React app with about a dozen pages of
| fairly simple CRUD actions. What the reality of the app is and
| how someone describes it on their resume are two _very_
| different things.
| astura wrote:
| >If I see health insurer, big insurance, blah fortune 500 firm,
| government contractor, ... over and over again
|
| That's where 95% of the software jobs are. Where are people
| supposed to work if not the places that employ the majority of
| software engineers?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Not to mention there's a regional bias here. There are plenty
| places around the continent that just don't _have_ many cool
| "startup" type jobs. (Or if they do there's a feeding frenzy
| for them because everything else in the area is
| insurance/finance, etc.)
| smallerfish wrote:
| I'm aware of that, and have done a lot of hiring from the
| midwest, fwiw. I've been in a position where I don't have a
| ton of time for mentoring, so I tend to hire senior
| engineers who are used to running with looser requirements
| than they may get from a bigcorp, and don't mind juggling a
| main project with a small backlog of cleanup or bugfixes. I
| learned this filter after not doing it, and having
| candidates used to a more structured environment flail.
| That said, like I mentioned originally, if you can
| demonstrate in your resume (perhaps even with a "What I'm
| looking for" section) that you have the skills necessary to
| thrive, I'll overlook this point.
|
| There are simply too many candidates to give everybody a
| fair chance, and a good number of candidates left over
| post-filters who will require fewer interviews to narrow
| down to a hire. Resumes are about marketing yourself to get
| to the initial screening call so that you can make your
| case that you are qualified. It sucks, but if you haven't
| been dealt the lucky cards and you want to break into
| startups, I think it's probably useful to know the
| filtering that you're up against.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I spent 30 seconds reading your message here and another 30
| seconds in this response. You sound like a plain awful manager.
| htkibar wrote:
| This is horrifying to read. So much bias...
| smallerfish wrote:
| Tell me one you find horrifying and I'll explain the
| rationale for doing it.
| quanticle wrote:
| _I generally want to find people who have done more than
| just CRUD UIs, and show some passion about the technology
| they 've built and worked with._
|
| CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, Delete. Isn't every
| UI, at some level, a CRUD UI? A wiki is a CRUD UI. A recipe
| tracker is a CRUD UI. A custom CMS for a community
| organization is a CRUD UI. A custom web forum is a CRUD UI.
| Facebook is a CRUD UI.
|
| Someone could reimplement Mediawiki, and you'd reject them
| because "it's just a CRUD UI?"
| ensignavenger wrote:
| The Fortune 500 one is a bit disconcerting. I know there
| are a lot of Fortune 500 developers that would not fit well
| in a startup, but there are plenty of interesting projects
| within many Fortune 500s where you would find great
| developers who would be great startup employees. You do say
| that you look for something else that catches your eye...
| but its hard to know what that may be and is probably a lot
| of chance.
|
| You also state that you want to see "passion" for the
| technology they have used. I don't really know how to put
| that in a resume. I have a lot of passion for most of the
| tech I use- I think that would show within minutes during a
| conversation or interview. But I'm not confidant my resume
| really communicates it. Putting "I Love Python!!!" in my
| resume seems a bit over the top...
| smallerfish wrote:
| The fortune 500 one I qualified (as I mentioned to a
| couple other people who objected to this.) I understand
| why it's disconcerting, but in my position (small
| startup, small team, need to not waste 3-6 months on a
| bad hire) I need to increase my chances for a successful
| hire. Lots of bigcorp devs are used to having everything
| laid out for them. Early stage startups are unlikely to
| give the same structure.
|
| Passion for tech - you are right that this is hard to
| boil down to a formula. I'm looking for people who
| exhibit signals like (for example) they read HN, have
| interests in learning languages beyond the ones they're
| comfortable in, have maybe messed around a little with
| hardware, were in technology clubs in high school or
| college, learned programming as a kid, have a hobby
| project, etc. It's not so much about the hours that
| people will put in, but rather their engagement / pride-
| in-work / creativity / ability to propose alternate-
| solutions, all of which are good things to have, and are
| easy to qualify for with "enjoys technology."
| ensignavenger wrote:
| At least at my current job at a "boring" Fortune 500, we
| don't work that way at all. I'm sure there are plenty
| that do though. I guess if you are getting enough hires
| using your current system, there is certainly no reason
| to change it.
|
| I suppose I should consider a way to indicate the I read
| Hacker News on my resume :) Thanks for responding, I may
| be able to improve my resume some by considering how to
| show more of those things. Right now, I focus a lot on
| Python in my resume, because that is my primary language
| of expertise and what I use every day. But I am very
| interested in Rust and various functional languages in
| general too.
| tqi wrote:
| What kind of projects are the people you hire working on,
| and is it more than just CRUD UIs?
| beej71 wrote:
| I think the only really uncommon thing here is that they're
| spending a full 15 seconds per resume. :)
|
| When I put together a resume, I figure I have about 3 seconds
| to get them to decide to continue reading the resume. So I do
| my best to put in whatever it takes to accomplish that
| (within the bounds of truth).
|
| No one reads a resume straight through; they skim for the
| highlights they want to see.
|
| The more skimming passes you get them to make over your
| resume because you've kept their interest up, the more likely
| the interview.
|
| And if you're thinking that a resume is a poor format for
| getting this job done, you're right. :)
| Cd00d wrote:
| Why don't you have a recruiter paring down the number of
| resumes dramatically so that you can actually give each one
| that passes that review adequate reading?
| recursive wrote:
| 1. Recruiters are expensive. 2. It's hard to find a
| recruiter who doesn't _increase_ your incoming resume
| volume without a corresponding increase on quality or
| fit. As far as I can tell recruitment has settled into a
| stable equilibrium of being a volume game.
| woodweb wrote:
| What is so horrifying? He's hiring startup developers who
| need self-direction.
|
| Look like his rationale is if you can't speak high level and
| you can't resist over-engineering solutions; it isn't going
| to work out. That saves everyone time and sounds reasonable
| to me.
| em-bee wrote:
| it also depends on the companies. where i am now, big
| corporations work their engineers to exhaustion and teach
| them a very competitive attitude. that's not something i
| want in my small company. i need cooperation and mutual
| support, where developers back each other up and not try to
| gain favors with their manager at the expense of their
| teammates.
| Cd00d wrote:
| He's flat out rejecting people for corporate experience.
| You don't know the reasons people take jobs or why they're
| looking for a change.
| smallerfish wrote:
| I qualified that by "over and over again" and "first half
| of first page". If you're switching from nothing but
| bigcorps to startups, you need to give me something on
| the resume to make me think that you can adapt to the
| cultural change.
| baazaa wrote:
| There's like half a century of IO psych literature showing
| resumes to be very poor predictor of job performance. Good to see
| this guy's own experience confirms what everyone (besides
| managers) already knew.
| [deleted]
| stmw wrote:
| "The interviews are spent discussing code, and writing code. It's
| what we programmers do day in, day out. It's the one things that
| matters." - very true. That's also literally the idea behind
| interviewing.io and similar platforms that have been making this
| point for years* - so they get to coding with the candidate as
| quickly as possible. Maximizes information for _both_ the hiring
| manager and the candidate on whether they want to work together.
|
| * https://blog.interviewing.io/resumes-suck-heres-the-data/
| nerdjon wrote:
| "The first thing I look for in a resume is a GitHub URL. If I can
| find that, I stop reading the resume and start reading code."
|
| Many others have commented on this line so just throwing in my
| opinion.
|
| I have long wondered if my lack of having public code on GitHUb
| has been an issue with getting hired. (Not that I really have
| issues, but you have to wonder what opportunities you did not
| get).
|
| My lack of any code isn't out of a lack of love of coding (I in
| fact do, I have a few personal projects I have just never chosen
| to open source them... largely because I know that I made some
| questionable decisions since I had no code review). I also
| struggle with getting into working with other projects, not
| necessarily out of a lack of desire but it just feels daunting.
|
| I do truly understand the desire for this, but if this is
| something the hiring manager was looking for... I would hope that
| once they do hire someone they encourage them to open source some
| of what they are working on or contribute to projects while
| working.
| keskival wrote:
| You don't need to open source your code to publish it on
| GitHub. You can just put the code there in a public repository,
| but not put an open source license for it.
|
| The code remains your copyright and no one else has a license
| to use it.
| woeirua wrote:
| I prefer to ask the applicant to either submit code that they are
| proud of, or to do a small toy problem if they don't have
| anything they can readily share. Then we talk through their code
| during the interview, asking them questions like: what problem
| were you trying to solve, did you solve it, what problems did you
| run into along the way, how would you design this code
| differently, and of course any specific questions if we find
| glaring technical issues in their code.
|
| I've found this approach to have a very high signal-to-noise
| ratio as it's virtually impossible for someone to talk at depth
| about their code if they don't know what they're doing. Also, you
| can't study for this type of interview, so you can't game the
| system.
| bern4444 wrote:
| I had an interview where this was the case. I had a bit of code
| I was very proud of and had fun writing. It wasn't more than 75
| or so lines. This was the best interview since it allowed me to
| share a related interest of mine through the code sample I
| brought.
| didcot wrote:
| *I'm only upvoting this article in hopes that people will read
| the comment section.*
|
| "The first thing I look for in a resume is a GitHub URL. If I can
| find that, I stop reading the resume and start reading code.
| Doing open source is not a be-all and end-all by any means,..."
|
| I really enjoy coding in my few hours (read < 1 hour) of spare
| time after my son goes to bed, and while I could spend that time
| preening immaculate projects to impress employers and keep my
| commit history alive, that would kill the joy of programming for
| me. I would seriously consider a career change if maintaining
| code as a second job was required to keep my career alive.
| Additionally, I have seen many job candidates attempt to make
| github accounts specifically for resumes and the results are
| mostly mediocre due to the lack of time and motivation required
| to build something informative enough to effect the outcome of a
| hiring. If anything the general consensus from looking at theses
| github accounts is on average more negative than positive when we
| see repositories of "bootcamp" exercises.
|
| The author states a disclaimer "Doing open source is not a be-all
| and end-all by any means" which may be true in his case, but what
| he is doing is encouraging this behaviour in other workplaces.
| IMO resume-github showboating has lessened in the past few years,
| but I would hate for us to regress again.
| fer wrote:
| Yep, fully agree.
|
| I'm considering writing a small library that I've always needed
| at every job I've had (and always had to half-ass implement
| part of its functionality due to time/budget constraints). To
| have it slowly cooked, pristine, fully tested, reliable and a
| pleasure to use for people. Because that's what I wanted at
| those times in those jobs.
|
| Not only I would love working on it, but would also help with
| an aggressive "if you like it, good, if not, good luck with
| your coding tests" approach to being hired. Disclaimer: I do
| poorly in tests.
|
| But if I was required to have that, I wouldn't ever had a job
| until now, simple as that.
| k__ wrote:
| _" first thing I look for in a resume is a GitHub URL"_
|
| Ah yes, gatekeeping at its best.
|
| Because every skilled person has time to build stuff in public.
| eric4smith wrote:
| You know what kills an interview really fast?
|
| When you ask the candidate to see some code and they tell you
| every single thing is under NDA.
|
| Brah, if you're a programmer, you have at least some tinker
| code lying around that you can show.
| [deleted]
| hocuspocus wrote:
| If that were even remotely true then almost no Apple employee
| would ever manage to find another job.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| The only thing I have is project Euler in haskell. What
| insights will you get about that corporate java job
| dinedal wrote:
| If you're slinging Euler in Haskell, the insight is that
| you're probably overqualified for most corporate java jobs.
| recursive wrote:
| That you can write code. That's a positive signal. There's
| a reason FizzBuzz exists.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I haven't written a single piece of code outside of work
| since I started working - in 1996.
|
| The only reason I have any open source code is because my
| company has a very easy open source process. I extract
| reusable non customer identifying code from projects and it
| usually takes at most 3 days for approval.
|
| There is also a company sponsored open source project I
| contribute to.
| Silhouette wrote:
| The point is that you might not _want_ to show toy code. Toy
| code I 've written for fun is rarely written to the same
| standards I'd use for anything important, including code
| written for work.
|
| It probably won't have elaborate CI/CD tooling with a clear
| branching strategy.
|
| It probably won't have a comprehensive test suite.
|
| It probably won't have systematic error handling.
|
| It probably won't have carefully written comments to help
| other people find their way around it.
|
| Most important of all it probably won't be designed or
| cleaned up to the standards of good professional code,
| because I wrote it for fun or to solve some specific problem
| and not to be a portfolio piece and I stopped once the code
| had served its purpose.
|
| If anyone I might work with insisted on judging me on code
| like that they'd never get a realistic view of my level.
|
| If I wanted to show someone an example of code that did
| faithfully represent what I can do I'd want to show them some
| of the many projects I've completed to a high professional
| standard at work. But of course that code really is usually
| confidential and at least in my case that tends to be because
| it's important to the business and might not be public
| knowledge yet so it really would be very unprofessional if I
| went around handing it out to anyone who asked.
| astura wrote:
| I don't... I haven't written any code outside of my 9-5 job
| since I graduated from college almost 20 years ago.
|
| I am still a really good employee and I always get excellent
| performance reviews.
| pydry wrote:
| I see this attitude everywhere and I swear it makes no sense at
| all. Interviewing and selecting and hiring candidates _is_
| gatekeeping. Thats literally all it is.
|
| I guess the implication is that it's elitist or somehow unfair
| gatekeeping?
|
| If you ask the question "is it a more _elitist_ form than
| gatekeeping than looking at your fancy university credentials
| or experience at a FAANG? " then I think it's not so much.
|
| IME it's less time consuming than leetcode and take home
| projects and about 1000 times less soul sucking than both.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| It's not unfair gatekeeping, it's incredibly dumb
| gatekeeping. You're definitely going to miss out on
| interviewing good candidates.
|
| If the candidate can show code and you're willing to look at
| it because it saves everyone's time, then sure, go ahead. But
| there are plenty of very good reasons a candidate might not
| be able to do so.
| pydry wrote:
| For sure, but I cant really think of another _low friction_
| way to detect high quality candidates.
|
| CVs are easy to bullshit as the OP points out and
| ascertaining performance on a technical interview comes at
| a high cost.
|
| Search costs matter. Other than "I worked with this guy"
| (which doesnt scale) I dont know of a quicker method of
| uncovering an obviously decent programmer.
| Juliate wrote:
| Search costs matter, and GitHub browsing is low friction,
| but extremely low signal on a very narrow bandwidth.
|
| A lot of the best (technical-wise and ethic-wise)
| collaborators I've had had and have no public profile,
| some even not on LinkedIn. You won't find them there.
| pydry wrote:
| _shrug_ this is the exact opposite of my experience. All
| the really great people I 've worked with have had at
| least _something_ there and I 've _never_ worked with
| somebody with a great github profile that wasnt also a
| great programmer.
|
| Having a decent profile is rare enough that it cant be
| your whole hiring pipeline but IMHO it's a great reason
| to let somebody skip an assessment stage or prioritize
| them for interview.
| mouzogu wrote:
| tbh would prefer someone look at my code instead of some
| leetcode test.
| DJHenk wrote:
| It can be worse. As I understand it, this person just wants to
| see code. I'd imagine that sending a zip file, or express
| willingness to do some small assignment would suffice too.
|
| Meanwhile, I have been blocked from applying for a position
| multiple times because the online form required me to enter a
| LinkedIn profile, which I don't have. It would require a lot of
| time to create a profile and message all my relatives and past
| co-workers to build a nice looking network.
|
| I just treat this as a sign that we were probably no a good
| match anyway.
| felipemnoa wrote:
| And here I thought I was the only one. Glad I'm not the only
| one without a LinkedIn profile.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Honestly I'm not sure you need one for programming. In
| accounting it's kind of required.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Wow, that's awful! What a thoughtless requirement. On the
| other hand, it's helpful of them to filter themselves out of
| consideration so quickly. Who'd want to work at a place like
| that?
| zarzavat wrote:
| Software engineering is a highly-compensated professional job.
| It's a given with such jobs that professionals are expected to
| spend some of their free time on their own career development.
|
| This means working on open source, staying up to date with new
| technologies, learning interview techniques.
|
| Everybody is entitled to _a_ job but nobody is entitled to a
| fancy job.
| RalfWausE wrote:
| And not everybody (as a personal statement from me) is at all
| interested in a "fancy" job...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > a highly-compensated professional job. It's a given with
| such jobs that professionals are expected to spend some of
| their free time on their own career development.
|
| Except most highly-compensated professional jobs don't expect
| people to get continuing education on their free time. The
| state bar and medical boards not to mention engineering
| certifications all require continuing education. Everyone
| I've known in those fields is paid for the continuing
| education credit time.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| It doesn't have to be a _real-world_ open source project.
|
| Could be a project you built to learn a language or framework,
| for example.
|
| Or some library you wrote for your own personal use. If there's
| nothing sensitive, you can publish it under an open license or
| even without any license at all...
| nemetroid wrote:
| My employer doesn't allow publishing code that was written
| during working hours.
| Gravyness wrote:
| Why would you publish code that was written during working
| hours?
|
| Why not publish an university project, a learning exercise,
| or something you built for fun? Surely there is more reason
| to create something than you're getting paid to do it,
| right? Or are artists just silly?
| marssaxman wrote:
| I publish practically everything I write in my free time,
| whether it goes anywhere or not, but I would never link
| to that playground on my resume!
| nemetroid wrote:
| I think some of my university projects are published. But
| they're quite old by now, and not representative of the
| production code I write. I do learning exercises quite
| frequently when getting into new
| libraries/frameworks/languages, but again, that's on
| company time.
|
| I don't begrudge others that do, but I don't code in my
| free time, I have other hobbies. Thus getting back to the
| original point made:
|
| > Because every skilled person has time to build stuff in
| public.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Some employment contracts claim ownership of anything you
| create even outside of working hours, so even publishing
| those little learning projects could potentially be
| problematic.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| This is another problem.
|
| For this purpose, you only need to show _authorship_ ,
| which is different from _ownership rights_.
|
| In general, your employer can't stop you there. Some
| exceptions would be if it conflicts with their products or
| if you disclose technological knowledge that could
| jeopardize competitive advantage.
| quanticle wrote:
| _Some exceptions would be if it conflicts with their
| products_
|
| Amazon has that provision in its employment contract. The
| problem is that Amazon has its fingers in so many pies,
| no matter what you write, you could potentially get in
| trouble with legal. One person I knew there had to wait
| six weeks for approval from legal so they could work on a
| Lisp interpreter.
| sofixa wrote:
| How are those legal anywhere? Thankfully they aren't here
| in France.
| maccard wrote:
| Even if it's not legal, I'm not going to sue my employer
| to stake ownership over an evening project.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| You don't need ownership here, just _authorship_.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| American exceptionalism at its finest.
| astura wrote:
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-
| side-pr...
| bluescrn wrote:
| Even if they're not likely to win in a court battle, most
| people don't want to risk a dispute over something
| trivial.
|
| Would you expect a little game jam game created in a
| weekend to lead to an ownership dispute with an employer?
| - Probably not, but I'm aware of a case where it has
| happened...
| agentultra wrote:
| > Then, come the interview, the guy can barely code, much less
| know the ins and outs of variable scope. It turns out there is
| very little correlation between how good a resume is, and how the
| interview actually pans out.
|
| Be careful with this assumption.
|
| Interviews generally measure how well a person responds to
| anxiety. This can overwhelmingly dominate and mask any signals
| about their competency.
|
| I can talk about algorithms and data structures all day and have
| little difficulty solving fairly challenging problems.
|
| Stick me in an interview and, depending on a lot of different
| factors, I can easily come across like this person. Sure I've
| built open source libraries, written countless articles, and have
| given talks at open source conferences but at the end of the day
| I can't handle 5 hours of talking with people and then do even
| the most basic tasks. Anxiety and exhaustion will over-ride
| everything at that point.
| xena wrote:
| I wonder if that's why I tend to do better at job interviews
| with a mild bit of entheogens in me.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Wouldn't hurt adding a (2012) to the title.
| verytrivial wrote:
| (Or editorializing to add an accented-e. I honestly thought I
| was about to read a story about resuming some process after it
| was interrupted!)
| irrational wrote:
| >Surely resumes are the only way to deal with the volume of job
| requests some companies get?
|
| This is partly true. It is truly shocking to me how many resumes
| has spelling and grammatical errors. If there is one single
| document you will ever write that must be spelling and grammar
| error free, it is your resume. As soon as I come across a single
| spelling or grammar error in a resume, it immediately gets
| trashed. I don't care how good a programmer your are, details
| matter. If you are going to be sloppy with your resume, you are
| going to be sloppy with the company's code.
| miguelrochefort wrote:
| > I don't care how good a programmer your are, details matter.
| irrational wrote:
| How do you know I didn't do that on purpose? ;-)
|
| But, I don't care about your spelling and grammar mistakes in
| emails and slack messages (and hacker news comments) after
| you are hired. Its just on your resume where it matters.
| maxk42 wrote:
| > It is truly shocking to me how many resumes has spelling and
| grammatical errors
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The nice thing about this method of hiring is that I probably
| wouldn't want to work for a company that trusts someone with such
| silly biases to pick candidates anyway. The code I write and push
| to my self-hosted Gitlab is none of your concern.
|
| If you're going by some trivial standard (github repos, leetcode
| ranks, whatever the case may be) you're going to be talking to a
| lot of people who made it a priority to get hired, not to write
| good code or even work well in a business environment. I'd argue
| that high-effort resume stuffing is even worse than the lazy
| kind, because you might be tempted to give the candidate the
| benefit of the doubt or skip over some of the validation
| questions that a resume-based hiring process might demand. You
| might even end up hiring bad coders who are better at making
| stuff up and repeating textbook excerpts than writing or
| maintaining any real code.
|
| The author states that during interviews he talks through the
| code the interviewee has written and the decisions they have
| made, but such a process could easily be reversed as well. Grab
| some company code with known architectural flaws or technical
| debt and walk through that. Ask what they would've done
| differently and why. Ask what they would do to improve it. This
| probably works best with some archived code from stale branches
| or sunset products so you don't give off the impression that
| you're doing this for your gain and you won't risk leaking any
| important company secrets anyway. Better yet, grab some of your
| company's open source projects (Your company has a public Github
| as well, right?)
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| >The code I write and push to my self-hosted Gitlab is none of
| your concern.
|
| Agree and this is a reason I selfhost my own git server and
| repositories. I still want to use git, but what I personally
| write is none of a third parties business. I have a bunch of
| scripts and a few programs in various language's, some side
| project websites and the like. But none of that is something a
| potential employer needs to see or start dissecting.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I probably wouldn't want to work for a company that trusts
| someone with such silly biases to pick candidates anyway
|
| The good news is, it's probably not true anyway. Whenever you
| see these posts, they're almost always written by somebody with
| a weak resume who spends all of their free time maintaining
| open source, hoping to convince somebody _else_ to read their
| github profile.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _The code I write and push to my self-hosted Gitlab is none
| of your concern._
|
| From an intellectual-property standpoint: it actually might be.
|
| But I do think intellectual property laws need to change.
| [deleted]
| thunderbong wrote:
| This article is talking about seeing only aspect of the
| interviewee. In my opinion, although coding capability is
| obviously required, there are so many aspects of an individual
| that needs to be seen before they can be hired.
|
| Also, Github is not the only code repository in the world!
| Juliate wrote:
| The whole article gives a strong "never work with this type of
| person" vibe, with a big NO to their own 3 closing questions.
|
| From the naive "GitHub profile is relevant" take, through the "a
| developer MUST know the ins-and-outs of their techs anytime or
| they're just not worth it", through the "code is the one thing
| that matters" (sheeesh...).
|
| I would happily fail and laugh out from an interview with that
| kind of employer profile.
| eric4smith wrote:
| I saw something here a few days ago in about "reading code for an
| interview". We were in the middle of hiring. And I decided to
| give it a shot.
|
| It was eye opening.
|
| Our stack is Elixir and I made the programmer tell me what a few
| functions were doing line by line and he aced it. I'm hiring him.
| (He does not know Elixir).
|
| This is completely right. Resume's are a waste of time. They
| don't tell you about any of the capabilities of the candidate. If
| anything some candidates are smart enough to make a really
| beautiful resume to fool you.
| [deleted]
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