Why GitHub is not your CV - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv/ <comment><USER2> I disagree with this article completely. I'm a woman and a software developer and I think my Github is very valuable as a portfolio to me. Before I used Github, if I wanted some of my code to get shown off, I would make a blog post about it and call out specific chunks while linking to a ZIP of the whole thing. If a potential employer wanted to see samples of my code, they'd have to find my blog and dig through its archives. Now, they just find my Github. The author acts as though when an employer asks for someone's Github, it's going to be the main or only component to determine whether to hire or not. In interviews where I've been the interviewer, we've used it as a filter to determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own, if they contribute to open source projects, what their coding style is like, what languages they gravitate to writing in, and just as a general personality guideline. It's cool to see the kind of stuff a person codes in their personal account, whether it's joke repos that give a glimpse at the person's personality and sense of humor, or actual serious projects.

<comment><USER3> You either missed the point, or do not think it's a problem.

> determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own

Which he is arguing that you are not a bad developer for doing other things outside of work. The vast majority of people _need_ to not code to regenerate.

I can use myself as anecdotal evidence: I'm the goto guy when it's particular difficult to solve a bug, when it's a new framework, or when the teams are unsure how to solve a problem. I love coding, I constantly get compliments for my code and solutions. I do rarely code outside of my work. I used to before I got a "real" job after my degree, but now I (almost) only code at work. I usually think about solutions and architectures outside of work though, and I write a lot of pseudo code on paper if I get an idea for an algorithm - but I do not make binaries or contribute to OOS or a public Github repository. I have a spouse, children, friends, and hobbies that simply doesn't get as much of my time as they deserve.

I would never pass the bar at a startup that's looking for the typical startup stereotype developer. I'm 100% certain that I make more business sense to hire than all of your average workoholic startup developer, but I would never be considered. I have seen so many developers with great personality and glowing Github repo fail so miserably because they have poor work ethics and are unable to do "the boring stuff" that needs to be done in a business.

I can make a sensible plan, estimates that aren't completely bonkers, and I can tell when we're no longer on track to meet the deadline the same week it starts to slip. If I make a promise I keep it, or let you know that I'm unable to. I can also work completely agile, and not some "agile-but" that is so prevalent in the industry. In short there is soooo much that you need to consider when hiring. Screening based on a Github account is excluding developers that would be just the guy/gal you're looking for.

<comment><USER4> This.

While I understand that many people enjoy writing code and do so for fun, there are a large number of fantastic engineers that don't (myself included). Just as I wouldn't give someone preference for a robust profile, I'm not going to penalize someone for lack thereof. There is only so much time in the day and if they can do ten hours worth of work in eight hours and choose to spend their off time with their family, friends, or hobbies, good for them. Knowing how to decompress and enjoy both work and life is just as valuable to me as crafting solutions to engineering problems.

<comment><USER5> If you are working with the same technology stack we work and are not finding bugs or implementing new features you are not playing in the same league.

We don't contribute to FOSS because we are hobbyists or good Samaritans, we do it because we need the features or fixes. We do it because in the long term it is cheaper and more efficient than maintaining a fork or developing a closed source component.

<comment><USER6> Many software developers don't work with FOSS technology at work. I work in embedded systems and much of the library code I work with has been provided by manufacturers of the devices I'm using. I do find bugs in it and report fixes to the library developer, but they often have strange licensing and don't use github (or even public version control) so this work doesn't end up visibly attributed to me in public.

This doesn't mean that the people working in non-web industries "are not playing in the same league" with respect to skill, it just means that they don't have a huge public representation of the work they do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Beatniks.

That's what we'll get.

The Beats were a genuine movement of talented, hard working literary types. They were hip. They were cool. They were who everyone wanted to be, so people started emulating their dress, their mannerisms, their speach.

But they were not driven by the same passion. Their motivation was different.

Ginsberg said of the Beatniks: "If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash man."

If we let companies continue to use GitHub as a hiring tool, the OSS community will gradually become overrun by people attempting to achieve the same success as the OSS pioneers by mimicking their actions...but lacking their same motivation.

It's hard for me to say this. I like GitHub. I like Open Source. I am proud of what little I have managed to contribute to that community, and I think it is _to my advantage_ if a company considers my GitHub profile when making a hiring decision. That said...I'd rather give up that advantage in exchange for keeping GitHub as an open community to share source, instead of a cauldron for the latest start up founders to pluck their next engineering hire from.

<comment><USER8> This is always what happens, and it's usually a good thing.

The people ahead of the curve _have_ to be more motivated, but if we get more people sharing, more eyes to find and fix bugs, more people from other walks of life that understand a bit more of the hacker mentality, more acceptance of sharing code as a normal part of life, then the world is a better place.

Yes, it's a shame that not everyone who plays the piano has the dedication and vision of Rachmaninov, or that everyone who paints is Picasso, but I think the world is a better place for amateurs and dilettantes. Sure, we'd perhaps have better art if it were restricted to those who must, but we have a better society because those who are moderately interested can.

<comment><USER9> The nice thing about programming: You don't have to perform in the 99.9 percentile (like Picasso) to make something people want.

<comment><USER10> are you implying the only worthwhile fine art is the 0.1th percentile?

<comment><USER11> There's a lot of art out there.

<comment><USER12> And almost all of it can be enjoyed for free, without its creators ever seeing a penny.

Artists practically invented the 'race to the bottom' effect.

The Internet and digital media came late to the party, magnified the effect, then widened the number of domains impacted

<comment><USER11> They also invented the 'sea of mediocrity' effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say.

But I do find it funny that they don't think that Github should be used as a resumé but their "conferencing", tweets, books about diversifying and podcasts should do.

Talkers or Makers?

I write OSS on my free time because I feel like other alternatives might not be good enough. I spend a couple of hours in the morning, weekends and etc. It's hard and time consuming. I can take two days if just figuring out what the selector should be called or argument names.

Right now I am getting paid for OSS, but I even spend my free time on it because I'd like to make sure it comes out good.

It's very slow and time consuming, and sometimes keeps me up at night, but I LIKE IT. And I like acknowledgment to it.

These sorta articles invalidate what I make just because I FEEL like making them. Not sure what to feel about that.

I have friends who make stuff to Go-lang because they want to learn the language and make stuff that doesn't exist. These articles invalidates their passion.

And saying bullshit like LGBT or other genders are actively being excluded... well it makes me hard to take you seriously. I'm not white, and I am part of LGBT.

<comment><USER7> The article does not say that conference talks, tweets, books, etc. should be used for hiring decisions and only GitHub should not. It says (right there at the end), that _hiring is hard_ and _any_ shortcut to try and get around that fact is wrong. It just so happens that "don't send us your resume, tell us your GitHub username" just happens to be the shortcut of the moment.

Also, I'd challenge you to find where the article says or even implies that you shouldn't be making stuff because you FEEL like it. Quite the opposite, in fact. You _should_ be making stuff because you _feel_ like it and _not_ because you have some expectation of getting a better offer or being able to show off your GitHub profile at your next interview.

As for the white, male bias...not sure what to tell you. It's real. The statistics don't lie. I'm glad that you have had success as a non-white member of the LGBT community, but as the saying goes: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

<comment><USER13> > The article does not say that conference talks, tweets, books, etc. should > be used for hiring decisions and only GitHub should not. It says (right > there at the end), that hiring is hard and any shortcut to try and get > around that fact is wrong. It just so happens that "don't send us your > resume, tell us your GitHub username" just happens to be the shortcut of the > moment.

Actually, Ashe has that on the Hire Me Page.

>As for the white, male bias...not sure what to tell you. It's real. The statistics don't lie. I'm glad that you have had success as a non-white member of the LGBT community, but as the saying goes: the plural of anecdote is not data.

I understand this is a fact, but how this can be used against Github as a resumé or against OSS on your free time, I have a hard time seeing that. It comes off as incredibly stupid.

<comment><USER7> > I understand this is a fact, but how this can be used against Github as a > resumé or against OSS on your free time, I have a hard time seeing that. It > comes off as incredibly stupid.

I _really_ don't think anyone is saying _not_ to do OSS on your free time. That there is a greater lack of diversity in OSS than in software engineering as a profession suggests that whatever it is that keeps minorities out of software engineering might be amplified in the OSS community, but it is not proof of this.

As for being an argument against using GitHub for hiring decisions, I'd pose you a scenario...two recent college grads are looking for their first job. One had parents who could pay for college, so in between rounds of beer pong and slacking off from class, this student found time to write a handful of OSS libraries and posted them to GitHub. The other was raised by a single parent in poverty, and is now working two part time jobs to fund their education. Between work, this person studies hard, does well in class, but has no time left to work on any open source side projects.

Which of these two students will be the better asset for your startup? Which of these two students will reply to your job post that says "don't send us a resumé, just link us to your GitHub profile"? Statistically speaking, which of these two students is more likely to be a racial/ethnic minority?

<comment><USER14> It doesn't sit well with me that Ashe is trivializing the time commitment with 'oh they're just white dudes', when it's usually more a case of 'they love what they do and they make time for it'. If writing open source gives you the competitive edge in the market then that's great no-one should feel guilty about edging others out of higher profile work because they represent their skills better at recruitment. The drivers aren't geared to social wedging (seriously who even has time for that crap?), I think open contribution is more about skill, creativity and passion than anything else. Race, minorities, gender, orientation has ZERO to do with anything, stats are only corrolary. Where are the stats that OSS engagement is becoming a trending hire filter?

It kind of reads like a no-child-left-behind or no-child-gets-ahead (can't remember which) proponent piece. We all have busy lives and saying its a race/gender etc. issue is way off the mark. I wish that whole section was left out as it just confuses the pretty simple point I think she was trying to make that open source engagement should not be an authoritative filter.

<comment><USER7> I honestly don't think anyone is trivializing anyone's commitment. Rather, I think what Ashe and James are pointing out is that the _opportunity_ to contribute to OSS is not distributed equally between the sexes and races. Who's to say that more minorities wouldn't contribute to OSS if they had the time, access, and resources?

Or, to take it to an extreme, why is Silicon Valley in California and not Botswana? Do you believe that the people of Botswana are inherently less intelligent? less motivated? less capable?

Or is it their environment which is working against them? Jared Diamond has probably one of the most interesting takes on how these sorts of inequities can arise on a regional level (Germs, Guns, and Steel: [http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates- Societies/dp/03...](http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates- Societies/dp/0393317552)), but is it such a stretch to imagine that the same sorts of inequities don't exist at smaller scales as well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ashe Dryden's original post has merit, I'm not contesting that. James' post however, is wrong on so many levels.

It's worth noting that James is a UK based developer. Most of his points may be completely valid in the US but they are completely at odds with the UK climate. I've worked with an inordinate amount of tech companies in the UK and consulted with many more and I've yet to come across any that hire based primarily on the merits of a candidates github repo.

In fact, I'd argue his understanding of the request for a candidates github URL is completely wrong. One of my first requests when speaking to a potential candidate is for their github/bitbucket profile so I can see some actual code examples. I know that it's rare to find a true indication of someones ability from just their github contributions but for example, it can help me discern whether a ruby candidate adheres to ruby best practices or not. A small example of a minor indicator that someone might be a good fit for our company.

A man with significantly more experience in the industry than me once put it better than I ever could:

 _The more information I can get, the easier it becomes for me to make a decision, and to feel comfortable in it. And the best sort of information to give me is to show me what you can make, whether that 's code for a backend position, or interesting design/UI for a front end position. It also gives us another thing to talk about during interview; and more opportunity to ask about design decisions and rationale._

Some of the best people I've ever sourced didn't have any publicly accessible code but if they had, I would have found them a hell of a lot quicker.

<comment><USER16> 'I know that it's rare to find a true indication of someones ability from just their github contributions but for example, it can help me discern whether a ruby candidate adheres to ruby best practices or not.'

The problem with this is that you can't really make a logical decision when the code (on Github/bitbucket) is removed from its context. Maybe none of the code follows best practice, but there is a compelling reason why this is so. If your decision on whether to pursue a candidate or not does not include a discussion with the candidate about their available code, you are missing an integral piece of the puzzle.

<comment><USER15> _If your decision on whether to pursue a candidate or not does not include a discussion with the candidate about their available code, you are missing an integral piece of the puzzle._

You are absolutely right. I can honestly only ever think of one circumstance where I dismissed someone based exclusively on what I saw in their github repo. I felt guilty so I phoned them a week later to discuss my thoughts and it turns out my suspicions were correct but that was categorically an edge case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > the demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed > toward white men than the software industry is, which is saying something

What?

> You just get what other people think is useful. Aside from which, GitHub > displays a lot of useless stats about how many followers you have, and some > completely psychologically manipulative stats about how often you commit and > how many days it is since you had a day off.

You get social proof, some measure of conscientiousness, and a crowd-sourced filter. All on one page. That sounds great. I don't see the problem.

Companies want to hire influential workers. It's relevant. So is putting in the work.

And products which people find useful are vastly superior to those that the author finds well engineered. I'm guessing many company owners will share that view.

<comment><USER18> It's a system which disproportionately rewards the lucky few whose employers allow them to either open source their work, or contribute to open source projects... or the people who spend their free time coding. I know plenty of folk who are damn good at their job but like to spend their free time on other, unrelated hobbies.

I'm actually lucky enough to fall into the former category, but I feel that if you only hire people with a respectable presence on github, you're disregarding a large number of people for something beyond their control that doesn't accurately reflect their ability.

<comment><USER19> >you're disregarding a large number of people for something beyond their control

What you spend your free time on is not beyond your control (at least when you're a software dev and presumably paid enough to actually have free time). And you might decide to spend it on other, unrelated hobbies. That's cool, but you should be aware that unless you can present that hobby as interesting, unless you can sell it as something that helps you grow, you are making yourself look less good that someone doing the same kind of work, and then doing OSS in their free time.

A company is not going to disregard you for not having a respectable github presence if no other candidates have a github presence either. But if there's a clear disparity, why should they take an extra risk by hiring you, rather than hire the person that can show them their actual contributions?

<comment><USER18> "at least when you're a software dev and presumably paid enough to actually have free time"

...or you know, don't have family obligations.

I do agree to some extent with what you're saying, but as others have stated, it should be one of many factors taken into consideration, and it depends on the culture the company is trying to foster.

I personally have looked at github profiles of people I'm interviewing, if they chose to share it with me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been able to get through my career without LinkedIn or GitHub accounts as proof of my skills. I've pored my time and energy into the jobs I hold and hadn't gotten inspired to start contributing to OSS until just this week[1], so I have no publicly available proof of my skills. However, I can give in depth descriptions of interesting algorithms and data structures I developed and deployed related to:

1) Motion detection algorithms for security cameras in outdoor environments with a lot of ambient noise that needed to be ignored.

2) Medical informatics data model with a recommendation engine component for predicting which ICD/CPT/SNOMED code to use for optimal chance of insurance coverage.

3) R&D, implementation, and deployment of an EAV/CR [2] open schema based analytics platform using the neo4j graph database for persistence

So far I've had the luxury of only using meatspace networking to find interesting jobs to work at, but I stress over suddenly finding myself unemployed in the future and having to face the modern interviewing process with social networking activity used as a screen.

Can anyone describe how one's GitHub is used in an interview? Is a candidate with an interesting, non-trivial personal project on GitHub considered, or are candidates judged on their contribution to others' projects?

[1]Started working on a neo4j data science project involving gathering, refining, and translating film, actor, and director data into a graph data model for efficiently answering deeply recursive queries.

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model#Representing_substructure:_EAV_with_classes_and_relationships_.28EAV.2FCR.29)

<comment><USER21> Recruiter here. I've seen GitHub used in interviews where the interviewer may look at the code before the interview, and then bring up the repo during the interview to discuss it. This is usually to challenge why certain decisions were made, what could have been done differently, etc.

It isn't much different than how a conversation would go after a live coding exercise to review the work, with the exception that the candidate in the case of a prior GitHub work will have had the advantage to clean things up and perhaps has gone through several iterations already.

<comment><USER22> Except in a live coding exercise most people are trying to be efficient or 'to it right' and paying attention to what they are doing and how.

I realize this is anecdotal, but 95% of the public code in my git repo is stuff I did as fun. I didn't care about being right, or care about memory issues or being thread safe or anything other than 'I wonder if...'

In that instance, and I suspect a lot of other people public where they aren't contributing to something using the repo code as a talking point is counter- productive.

Why did I do it that way? Because I wanted to see what would happen.

<comment><USER21> Sure, but if you were aware that your public git repos would be up for discussion in an interview, you might go back and switch some things up, no? At least a handful of times, I know that the repo that would be discussed was referenced before the interview as an agenda item - "we'll talk about PROJECT A from your GitHub account".

<comment><USER22> Odds are no, I won't do anything to the code. Why? Because for one, it would likely take a bit of time to 'make it decent' and secondly, by the time I've been informed that Project X will be talked about the interviewer has already looked at it.

If I change it at that point then I'm either being disingenuous or taking away the aspect he wanted to talk about.

All that said, if I put my github url on the resume then it's fair game to _talk about_. My point is (same as the articles) using it as a filter is generally a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "If you want to find out whether someone's worth hiring as a software engineer, their code is of very limited value compared to talking to them, discussing design and architecture, previous engineering constraints they've faced, and what they're like at solving problems"

I have a hard time thinking of a better way to see how good someone is at all of those those thing than to look at code they've written in the past.

Also, the title of the article is "Why GitHub is not your CV" yet all it talks about is how it can't replace an interview. Which I don't think many people advocate.

</comment><comment><USER24> __First thing __: The _white /black men_ discrimination issue seems totally out of place, almost ridiculous!

As for the main argument, I think it's flawed. Github (or any other online repo) is an important asset and Open Source contributions matters. Especially if you don't have prior job experience. It's a very good way to show that you can _actually write code_ and you will be hands on from the first week, or day, or hour.

</comment><comment><USER25> (a) if someone I am interviewing has no idea what github is, that's a negative sign. this is completely unrelated to whether the person has time to contribute to projects (b) many great engineers have small forks of other projects. This shows me that: (i) they know how to find and adopt open source projects into their workflow, which will save me money (ii) when there is a bug or something that does not fit how they want to use the project, they are able to make that 15-line change or fix. (iii) if their fork is merged back into the original project, that can indicate quality of patches, ability to work with a community, explain benefits to their changes, etc.

Honestly, those skills are very valuable indicators and do not require someone to be giving up their nights and weekends to OSS.

<comment><USER5> His theory is based in the premise that most GitHub (and FOSS) contributions are made by hobbyists in their free time. This is a common misconception of the FOSS economy.

Open source is not about donation, it is about cooperation and cooperation makes economical sense for a lot of business. Yes, there are the free-riders, but they are the copycats, we are the ones setting the pace.

Startups tend to be pushing the envelope, people from all genders from all over the world are being PAID to fix bugs and implement new features during the business hours, not over weekends. I do, I'm Brazilian and not white by north American standards, so this whole "github bias" thing is BS based on a naive assumption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This post is horribly misguided to the point of being malicious.

Nobody is using Github as their only hiring filter.

On the other hand, Github is just about the best generic indicator of useful contributions of a coder back to society: visible code that someone else found useful. If someone wants to provide whomever is interested with more custom evidence of their work, that's great, and there is a way to link to your homepage for that. But Github stats do not lie, and the constrained profile format is a feature, not a bug.

</comment><comment><USER27>
      willing and able to work for free

For me, GitHub is a gallery of my art, not work, so:

Me working for _free_ for an employer that tells me what to do does not lead from me working in my spare time doing what/how I want.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think this article needs to be split in two because it seems to be conflating 2 opinions.

I'm not sure I really understand what the author is trying to say. Is it that OSS encourages a culture of being exploited and that GitHub is inadvertently pushing that culture? Or is it that recruiters don't know how to assess the code they see and this is somehow GitHub's fault? Or is it that working on code on your spare time is really a bad thing? Or maybe it's that only white men create GitHub accounts.

</comment><comment><USER29> OSS/GitHub is what let me crack into the industry without having a CS degree or particularly good contacts. I started learning to code a year or two ago, then started contributing to open source and now I have a pretty solid track record on interesting projects that's helped me get some interest and interviews. Not sure how I could have done that otherwise...

</comment><comment><USER30> The article is mixing two conceptually distinct points: that using github instead of CVs produces false negatives, and that it produces false positives.

It produces false negatives because lots of people who are good coders and who deserve to be hired don't have impressive github accounts for various legitimate reasons. I completely agree with this point.

However, to employers, false negatives are not that big of a problem. In some sense it's morally unfair that I exclude so many people who "deserve" the job, but if in the end I land a satisfactory candidate, I'm happy.

So to employers, the real question is, does github produce false positives? If my screening practice (I think we all agree that githubs and resumes should be used mainly as a screening step) is to ask for githubs instead of CVs, do I let better candidates through? If you read the article carefully, there is very little evidence presented for this; the author mostly argues that using github produces false negatives or weak signals.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you have time to peddling your diversify book, write angry tweets, go to conferences and do podcasts. You have time to write code. That is, if you're a software engineer (the people who use Github mainly)

<comment><USER31> what makes you think coglan and dryden are speaking on behalf of themselves, and not on behalf of all the people who _don 't_ have the time and luxury to write code, and are being unfairly and systemically penalised for it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > That is, GitHub picks your most popular repos and puts those at the top. You > have no say about what you consider important, or worthwhile, or > interesting, or well-engineered, or valuable

Well said. This is also valid for stackoverflow, where your "top" questions are often silly ones that everyone can understand, while the ones you consider valuable are buried in anonymity. Some sort of showcase feature would be nice, in both cases.

</comment><comment><USER33> I would advise the author not to worry about this.

I recently went through a job change, and to enhance my chances, I spruced up my Github profile, and put a link to it at the top of my resume. It's not the most active profile, but all the work there are wholly self-initiated projects, all of which tackle some interesting, often original problem. One of the projects randomly ended up with a few stars without me posting that link anywhere. Having code out there would give me a little leg-up over the intense competition, right?

Of the dozen or so tech phone screens, not _one_ asked about it. Only one asked me to talk about a personal project, and it was abundantly clear he had not looked at the Github link.

At least he asked. One phone screen was with a recruiter at a famous open source company, and even she had not looked at it. To be fair, it was a recruiter call and not a technical one, but I thought she'd at least acknowledged it.

Most of the phone screens turned into onsite interviews, and again, nobody even mentioned Github. Well, it did come up in one interview, where the interviewer was doing a deep dive into IP networking details, and I told him in an offhand manner that, y'know, I had code out there that did exactly what he was asking...

The companies I interviewed with ranged from a couple of startups to a bunch of US technology giants in a variety of fields, and many of them get discussed on here regularly.

My advice is, don't put too much stock in your Github profile to help your job prospects. For whatever reasons, maybe the same as TFA's, practically nobody cares. Instead, invest in practicing the same old Google/Amazon/Facebook whiteboard-a-problem style that everybody and their grandmother uses, even if the work involved is nowhere near the kind of work (some people at) Google/Amazon/Facebook do.

<comment><USER34> As a personal anecdote, one recruiter from a well-known organization did mention my Github page as an indication of drive and initiative, but it was by no means a deciding factor. Just another piece of evidence on top of a lot of other things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any resumé screening and interviewing process boils down to only 3 essential questions:

\- How well can you do this work? \- Will you blend in (can you endure our work environment)? \- Is it easy to work with you (you are not a dick, are you)?

So get over it, everything you do online IS more real than your resumé. Why? Because we are an online company and your online reputation is more important than a single document traditionally written in a corporate mumbo-jumbo style where the author tend to exaggerate his accomplishments.

When I ask for your github profile, I'm not asking for free work - FOSS is not about free work. I want to see your pull requests. Why? Because from time to time we do pull requests, and do it not because we are good Samaritans but out of sheer greed.

We use an open source technology stack. We push it's boundaries, we find bugs, we fix bugs. We find components lacking, we implement the desired feature and contribute back. We port code from other languages or create it from scratch and open source because it is cheaper than maintaining a closed source library. Is it free work? No, it is cooperation, and it makes sense economically.

Do you have a patch accepted in a high profile FOSS project? This means:

\- You are doing serious work based on FOSS stacks \- You have some communication skills \- You have coding skills, can write tests and documentation \- You can fix bugs and implement new features

I want to see the issues you open: are they well documented, with reproducible test cases?

I want to see your stack overflow profile: do you write good questions and good answers? Because a good question is 90% of a good answer, and good answers is what our customers demand.

Do you write really odd blog posts or troll around in online forums? Sorry, I guess you will not fit our work environment.

</comment><comment><USER35> Two different kinds of open source projects are relevant to a resume. Group projects, and individual projects. A hiring manager will want to see both. If you only have an individual project, it's still better than nothing, and there is no color/gender/economic barrier to just writing code for yourself and uploading it to GitHub.

I had joined several group projects, and started one of my own, back when I was first getting into the job market. It helped a lot to tell any employer that you had been fiddling with this new-fangled "Linux" and "Apache" and "MySQL" stuff for years, versus the older Unix guys who had been using the same industry tech for 10 years. Really, open source was just like a new fad to older hiring types, and knowing something about it meant you had a different mindset.

But now everybody uses GitHub and it means jack shit.

</comment><comment><USER36> The argument that only the well-to-do contribute to OSS is bullshit, although I haven't looked at the data. Perhaps on a global scale, but within the gamut of rich and poor in North America, my own anecdata on the matter is just the opposite.

Github-as-the-new-resume is galling for plenty of other reasons.

</comment><comment><USER37> Can you name _any_ job qualification which does not put some groups at a disadvantage?

I want to be fair, but "do you have work you can show me?" is about as close to ideal as I can think of.

<comment><USER38> It's not that: it's that without acknowledging the bias, the 'meritocracy' philosophy suggests that those who do OSS are the best at what they do, which is not necessarily true.

<comment><USER37> No, but they are those _most easily demonstrably_ good at what they do.

I mean, if you had a Ruby job opening and you got applications from Aaron Patterson and 20 other people, would it be unfair to put Patterson's application at the top?

There _might_ be another applicant as good, but 1) you have to look harder and 2) you can't really tell until after you've hired them.

Picking a sure thing over a gamble is pretty understandable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I got my current job precisely because of what I have on Github. I was never asked for a CV. The people in that company were already using some of my OSS libraries before I arrived.

Today someone told me to review someone else's CV. My last comment was: "This CV does not mention a github account. This either means that this person does not have it or that he doesn't think of it as relevant enough to be on his CV". It was not a deciding factor, but it was listed on the "cons".

</comment><comment><USER40> GitHub is not your CV, but I think it should be _on_ your CV. If you're an artist when you interview they usually want to see a portfolio of your work, GitHub is a pretty handy way to portfolio code for others to view.

There's many good things about it, and reasonably few downsides to trade off against, but overall if you've got a GitHub I'd be more interested in seeing that than knowing what grades you got at school 15 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER41> Also why, after flirting with the idea for one hiring cycle, I stopped asking people if they had Stack Overflow accounts. Yes, if they had one, it provided useful information about their interests and communication ability. But it has a demographic skew that could have led me to rejecting other candidates unfairly.

That said, my own presence on Github is pretty anemic, so maybe that's another form of bias!

</comment><comment><USER42> GitHub isn't a CV: it's a portfolio. That can be incredibly valuable in the hiring process, if it is used properly, but it is not the be-all and end-all of hiring. The article is right as far as this goes.

I cannot say that I agree with much of the rest of the article, and I agree with even less of the article on which it is based. But summarily rejecting non-GitHub candidates really is a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER43> GitHub isn't a CV, but it serves as a portfolio or set of work samples.

This has traditionally been important in hiring people for creative work, though prior to GitHub and similar sites there wasn't necessarily a single particularly good/common way for this to be done in the software development field.

</comment><comment><USER44> Github isn't necessarily a new concept nor is submitting links to code sample repositories as part of a programmer's 'portfolio'

Forgive my naiveté, but why is this a topic of debate now? Did something radically change? Weren't you all doing this before Github existed?

</comment><comment><USER45> Unless you have your CV on github..

<comment><USER8> Yes, all the complaints about how you can't tell a story with your github profile seems to completely ignore gh-pages, a phenomenal service that _does_ let you tell a story.

Maybe your github profile isn't a good portfolio by default, but it's an excellent service for creating your portfolio. On top of that, even a poor github profile provides more signal than most CVs I've read.

<comment><USER46> The point (imho) isn't that literally nothing on github can be a good hiring indicator. It's that people are treating github as if, by itself, it is an adequate way to assess candidates and decide who to interview. Maybe if you make a page like you're suggesting, then you can link to that page, but then github is more or less just a host.

<comment><USER8> Well, I can certainly accept that it's _possible_ to overweight github as a hiring indicator, however that's not been my experience from either side of the interview, so I strongly suspect that if there's an optimum amount of attention to pay to services like github, most recruitment programs are on the 'too little' side rather than the 'too much'.

<comment><USER46> Yeah, while I agree with a lot in the article, I also agree with your generalization. Most companies are still looking for the boring "CS degree + 2 years experience, HR doesn't know what github is".

But there are also a lot of "hot" companies, of the sort that are talked about a lot on HN, that are pushing github as the end all be all.

The real point isn't about what the average company is doing, it's about which attitudes are sensible.

(Bias: I got my first job as a developer based on a combination of a non- technical friend's contacts and my github repos looking acceptable. I was three years out of grad school in the humanities at the time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Yeah, but tell that to pretty much everyone who is hiring devs nowadays. Everything is like, "Send us your Github link. Peace out." Uhhh, but I mostly commit to private repos…?

</comment><comment><USER48> Have two profiles - one for your projects portfolio, another - to contribute to OSS.

</comment><comment><USER49> Tell that to all the job offers in my inbox via github projects.

<comment><USER38> That's irrelevant to the point of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Actually, GitHub is just a supplemental CV. A potentially positive indicator, that among many others (including a CV itself) will be part of the body of work to determine a candidate's qualifications.

Those in hiring positions need to use various indicators of what would make someone a good hire. For most of history in the tech world, this simply meant a standard resume/CV, followed by a phone screen and then an interview where the candidate may be asked whatever questions are deemed relevant by the interviewer. Could be tests, exercises, etc - depends on who you were talking to.

Fast forward to today, where we have more ways that a candidate may show 'indicators' of talent. What about participation in user groups and meetups? Anyone can go to these things, but people who choose to go to them may have a bit more curiosity or interest (and admittedly free time) than those that don't, and that curiosity often goes hand in hand with talent. Not always, but again it is one indicator.

A healthy Stack Overflow reputation score might be another indicator. People who know nothing about programming probably won't be able to rake up major points there.

What if someone wrote a book about a technology? Another indicator probably, and if the book became a best-seller that would be even a stronger indicator since others are judging the material as worthy of their money.

As the author points out, all of these things take time, and many in the industry don't have that kind of free time. Understood.

Experience working at a known entity with a high barrier to entry is another indicator. We know that if someone passed the grueling interview process at certain firms, chances are they will get past our process as well. Another positive indicator.

There will also be some false positives. Candidates that belong to several meetups and have very active GitHubs may not be able to code.

Someone who has never heard of GitHub (or say Node.js or Mongo or whatever may be current and newsworthy at the time) will probably be given a negative indicator Would you consider hiring someone who had never heard of these things? Perhaps not.

Candidates without families that we might expect to have more free time may not choose to spend it at meetups and building GitHub repos either. I don't think we should immediately assume that they are less qualified than the ones that do, but I don't think any will assume they are more qualified.

The author says "you can't judge code without talking to its author". Perhaps you can, but I don't think anybody is necessarily suggesting that you should. No one is hiring candidates based on their GitHub activity alone without interviews, just like no one is hiring anyone based on their CV alone without interviews.

Can we just agree that all of these positive indicators are just indicators? As long as we don't use the absence of them as a negative indicator (as a measure of fairness to those who lack the time or desire), we are not doing anyone a disservice.

</comment><comment><USER12> I found it interesting that the OA OA concluded that it biased to white men. I concluded something a little different.

I concluded it biases to: folks who most have the free time and the mindset and the kind of _desperateness_ to be doing it. Or income-increasing ambition. (Like the kind that's strongest when you're unemployed or under-employed.) Therefore, it biases (again, only statistically) to young males around college or high school age. Most likely living in their parent's house, or in a dorm, or perhaps out in their own place but without a spouse, kids, sick family members, or any significant hobbies other than computers. And without a long established work history "out in the real world" and thus lots of fellow coworkers/clients/managers to help keep them fully employed out in that pesky meatspace. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing necessarily. Or that this pattern is universal and without exception. I'm just saying this is the pattern I see in the majority of cases. I didn't sense any inherent pro-white bias, or something pro-male. With avatar icons and code commits and pull requests the Internet truly doesn't know or care whether you're a dog. (Only whether you're a smart enough dog that can interact and deliver.) It was just pro-... a certain set of qualities. If a certain demographic is more likely to have those qualities, then, that demographic will be disproportionately present and active there on GitHub. It's not a conspiracy, just the physics and economics of it.

And there's nothing necessarily wrong with it. But it's important to realize it's at play. And to neither blindly assume that anyone without a GitHub presence, or an active one, or large one, is somehow incompetent/unqualified at software engineering. Or that everybody active on GitHub is a young white male in their parent's basement. Instead, treat each person as an individual. And realize that the entire world hasn't fully converted over to your wonderful new "rule of thumb" about hiring. Yet. And perhaps never will. And that too is not necessarily a bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER50> Your _Website_ is where your CV goes.

Whether it (your CV link, internally — extracts data from github? — or externally) points to your github profile or not is your decision.

Why is this still being discussed ?

Websites, people. _Websites._

<comment><USER50> In fact, I'd go so far as to say (just to see what happens to this industry): On all these "job posting" sites, [Your Website] should be a Required Field for Web Developers. Period.

Show me that you take the time to register a domain, configure a host, log in to that Linux box, and _build_ the Web.

A more pertinant question is: Why would you hire a Web Developer who has no place on the Web? It has to be Your Domain, Your Place on the Web. You. What genuine rebuttal is there against this? (There has to be a pretty Good Reason to hire a Web Developer who does not have a Website.)

Forget the "online portfolio" debate; _build the Web_ and actually be _about_ that.

<comment><USER51> NDAs

<comment><USER50> Did you just blame The Man?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> > The demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed > toward white men than the software industry is

What the fuck am I reading? Is this asshole author trying to inject racism into something that is inherently race-, age-, gender-, wealth- and location- agnostic? Github doesn't care who you are, what you code or in what language you code it. And yet here we are with a dumbfuck author who, for the sake of clicks, just absolutely needs to shit on white men, that have been the bane of all tech-interested non-white men since the dawn of time.

When I hire I ask for code samples first and the person's name last. Shit, I'd hire the person based purely on code, put up anywhere on the net, and an anonymous chat, conducted fucking anywhere, and only require their name and social security number when signing the contract.

Shit I'm pissed off now. Some people just can't accept that technology is the ultimate equalizer and instead have to project their white guilt into everything.

<comment><USER53> If you think the issue is about what Github "cares" about, you missed the point entirely.

The point is that those who have the free time and opportunity to contribute to OSS projects are more likely to be of some means. Given the economic realities of this country, those with some means are statistically speaking far more likely to be white males than anything else (which is confirmed by the data).

The conversation that has been occurring recently is about how having a Github profile is now becoming a de-facto must-have because hiring managers are increasingly seeing it as a shortcut filter.

It's great that you would hire someone based on code put up anywhere on the net, but that's not what people are commenting about. People are saying that Github should not become mandatory, for many reasons, among them because you're limiting your pool of candidates to those with some means.

<comment><USER54> > People are saying that Github should not become mandatory, for many reasons, > among them because you're limiting your pool of candidates to those with > some means.

Is that a concern when hiring? Isn't the biggest concern false-positives? Hiring bad people is the worse hiring mistake. The argument around github seems to be that while the true positive rate is very high, there is also a high false negative rate (rejecting qualified people because they aren't on github). From a hiring perspective (purely arguing economics), that is an acceptable trade-off. Your upside is limited by a smaller pool of applicants (that are still qualified), but your downside is greatly smaller.</comment></comment></comment>


The World's Largest Gobslopper - <AUTHOR> http://www.rockpaperink.com/content/column.php?id=465

<comment><AUTHOR> Sooo funny! Great Job Funny Garbage

</comment><comment><USER2> Deliciously fun!!</comment>


Teen's invention could charge your phone in 20 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/teens-invention-could-charge-your-phone-20-seconds-1C9977955 <comment><USER2> After an absurd amount of google`ing (given how much PR crap there was on the subject), I finnally found her project summary [1].

From what I understand of her description, she is not making a graphene supercapacitor. Based on her description, her device significantly outperforms other supercapacitors, and has comparable energy densities to classichal batteries. Given that this summary is what she actually submitted to the science fair, I doubt she would have won if it did not actually have merit to it.

<rant>

Googling "Eesha Khare" took me to a bunch of crap articles saying only that she won the Intel Science fair and would revolutionize batteries. Intel's winner's page provided no additionaly details, and no link to her actual work. Eventually, I was able to find my way to the list of winners, which was nice enough to mention the title of her project. Googling the title finally got me to the document listed.

Even using the title in Google, while it did bring up articles that were nice enough to mention the name of her project, still did not bring up a single article that bothered to even link to her work.

</rant>

[1]<http://www.usc.edu/CSSF//History/2013/Projects/S0912.pdf>

<comment><USER3> A good trick to searching when you're bombarded with articles regurgitating the same information is to use the date tool. By asking Google to limit the search date to before the regurgitation of articles started, you're more likely to find quality sources for your search.

<comment><USER4> Ooh I didn't know that trick!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From my understanding she's a summer student at the Yat Li lab at UCSC.[1]

This concept is not newly developed by this young student[2][3], it seems that she's just a summer student who used the labs work to submit to the Intel competition, this is actually a very common practice for high school students. As usual the media overstated her role, the work was not done in the 2.5 months she has off for the summer solely by her. That's not to say she might not be bright, but it's not her genius that developed this concept, although she may have contributed. In fact this work was first submitted for publication in 2010[3], long before she joined the lab in 2012[4][5].

[1]<http://www.usc.edu/CSSF//History/2013/Projects/S0912.pdf> [credit: gizmo686]

[2][http://research.pbsci.ucsc.edu/chemistry/li/publications/201...](http://research.pbsci.ucsc.edu/chemistry/li/publications/2012_NanoLett_12_1690-1696.pdf)

[3][http://research.pbsci.ucsc.edu/chemistry/li/publications/201...](http://research.pbsci.ucsc.edu/chemistry/li/publications/2011_NanoLett_11_3026-3033.pdf)

[4]<https://sites.google.com/site/yatliucsc/people>

[5]<http://www.ucolick.org/~raja/hs/LIST2011.txt>

Edit: Added reference showing she was not part of the Li lab in 2011. [5]

<comment><USER6> Intel Science Fair does more harm than good, since when it was the Westinghouse. It is one of the vestiges of privilege, where a bunch of rich (and a few lucky) kids get to hang out in a research lab and then write up the lab's work as their own, earning a branding of "genius" unavailable to the less privileged class.

Why is it _harmful_ , you may ask? Because every smart kid who didn't get handed a professional project to submit, and doesn't know the game, thinks that he/she is so much less smart/hardworking/creative/accomplished than these supposed geniuses, and is discouraged from continuing in science research.

Lab experience is great for kids, and we should be expanding that experience to everyone, not using it as a tool to cement the position of the upper classes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I read the article, and while it did not say how she made her "Invention" , it sounds like a graphene based super capacitor. Here is one video about them: [http://focusforwardfilms.com/contest/84/the-super- supercapac...](http://focusforwardfilms.com/contest/84/the-super- supercapacitor-brian-golden-davis)

There is lots of promise in this field, but I doubt that this young lady has jumped out in front of the pack.

That being said, I would be delighted if she made me eat my words.

<comment><USER8> This is basically what I thought upon reading the article. I find it hard to believe that a student, acting alone, would 'revolutionize' this industry, considering the dedicated teams of engineers and scientists trying to achieve this on a daily basis.

That being said, I would also like to eat my words here :)

<comment><USER9> Her invention is certainly probable and represents a significant achievement -- extremely impressive for a high school student -- but it is not "revolutionary." Her claimed specific energy is 20 Wh/kg, comparable to the state-of-the-art in nanostructured supercapacitors (not always graphene!) which a quick Google shows to be around 31 Wh/kg:

<http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl2023433>

So her supercapacitor is roughly on par with similar nanostructured supercapacitors being developed. I must stress that the highest specific energy does not always mean the best technology, but practical/fabrication considerations can lead to different things making sense for different applications, in particular you have to watch out for the nasty tendency of some capacitors to short-circuit, which at supercapacitor energies means " _kaboom!_ ".

That last bit is why expensive tantalum capacitors are often preferred over cheaper fabrications with higher specific energy: tantalum is safe and reliable, which matters a lot.

edit: I should also point out that _neither_ her supercapacitor nor other current nanostructured supercapacitor electrodes achieves an energy density on par with a cellphone battery. The specific energy of a lithium-ion polymer battery used in cellphones is roughly 150-200 Wh/kg: nearly _ten times_ as much as this girl's claim!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone seen a "teen's invention" ever work?

<comment><USER11> When Gauss was a teenager, he put forward the theory for least squares. He also published the 17-gon creation proof before he was 20.

<comment><USER10> So the last time it happened was in 1795? That's encouraging.

<comment><USER12> You asked for a single example, not the most recent one.

<comment><USER10> Clearly, I meant "in recent memory, preferably on Hacker News", not "was the inventor of the wheel younger than twenty?".

<comment><USER13> A _slightly_ more recent invention that I recall would be Jack Andraka's pancreatic cancer testing. Via Wikipedia[1]:

"Andraka's sensor costs $0.03 (to compare to a $800 cost of a standard test[10]) and 10 tests can be performed per strip, taking 5 minutes each. The method is 168 times faster, 26,667 times less expensive, and 400 times more sensitive than ELISA, and 25% to 50% more accurate than the CA19-9 test"

Discussion on Hacker News from last year: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4265830>

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Andraka>

<comment><USER10> That's a much better example, thanks. Still, I wouldn't place the odds very in the title's favor, but at least there are counterexamples...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On a complete side note: did anyone else notice that the page changed urls as your scrolled to new articles. However, the page didn't reload. It was interesting, but it broke my browser's back functionality. Since I scrolled down and back up, my browser had ~10 pages in its history before I got back to HN.

</comment><comment><USER15> Can an expert comment as to why this is too good to be true?

<comment><USER16> Not an expert, but from what I understand it's a trade off. Super-capacitors hold much less charge than batteries.

There was a very interesting article about them on HN last year IIRC.

<comment><USER17> Maybe this one: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3723943> , but I'm still unclear if OP invention or break-through is for the same technology.</comment></comment></comment>


The Zonians: Secluded tropical communities close to the Bay of Panama - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28594016

<comment><USER2> I'm a Zonian. I remember well October 1, 1979. That was the day that the Panama Canal Treaty started its implementation. That was the day the Canal Zone ceased to exist as a territory of the United States.

I lived near the Thatcher Ferry bridge and there was a false road leading to it in my neighborhood. Panamanian officials were driving around Balboa honking their horns in jubilation but got bottlenecked at the false road. A minor clusterfuck for them and we got some laughs from it. But it was a sad day for me and the other Zonian kids. The few laughs didn't assuage the sadness.

We all thought that Panama would never be able to run the canal without the U.S. We were certain that they'd eventually ask the Americans to run it again. These thoughts were part imperial arrogance and part rooted in reality. The Panamanian government couldn't even run the railroad that was given to them. But we were wrong and it's clear in retrospect that we (the United States) held back Panama's development. Not consciously or deliberately. Panama grew up when the U.S. finally left in December of 1999. The country is doing much better.

One of the ironies of America's involvement in the Canal Zone is that troubles with Panama really started over whether or not the Panamanian flag should be flown alongside the American flag at Balboa high school. Today, there is a single Panamanian flag flying there. Progress.

I miss the Canal Zone. I don't speak Spanish. Well, a little. I know cuss words and how to get around. We had our own schools, TV, police, stores, etc. It was an American colony and the luxury it provided Americans largely came from cheap labor from Panama. During the Canal Zone days the company (the Panama Canal Company) paid Panamanians to mow our lawns for us. Coming to the U.S. to live took some getting used to.

<comment><USER3> I lived on Albrook AFB from 94-97 and my parents worked on Howard AFB. This is a fairly accurate portrayal of the Americans' attitude toward the Panamanians and their ability to manage the Canal. I remember even in the mid-late 90s, there was active talk of canceling the Treaty because Panama couldn't maintain the canal and the canal is an incredibly important part of the US Navy's projection of power across two oceans.

The Panama Canal was unique in the density of military bases across different branches. At the height of military presence in the Canal Zone there were ~20 different military bases along a 50 mile corridor near the canal. By the time we were there in the mid/late 90's there were around 5-7 bases left operational. It was interesting to see the defunct bases (mostly on the Atlantic side) and realize the sheer massive operation that existed to create and sustain this American colony.</comment></comment>


Haiku Deck - simple new way to create presentations - <AUTHOR> http://www.haikudeck.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm generally pretty phlegmatic, but this provoked a strong reaction from me. This seems thoroughly vacuous, good for only communicating shallow marketing double-speak.</comment>