Lol "full stack SEO". That reminds me of a recruiter saying "What about XML, do ya got XML?" Yeah dude I can nail the **** out of some XML.

Along the same lines - hiring managers are freaking annoying. Joe McCann - CEO of node source (who I met personally when he tried unsuccessfully to pitch his product to our company) posted this mostly innocuous list about the github acquisition:



But this entry seems to have blowed up all over twitter - including a lot of other people I follow:









wat

I disagree with tweets 2 and 5. Agree with 3 and 4.

Edit: I think his tweet about the "de facto source for validating top talent" is extremely misguided. I've seen some other responses that talk about things like University degrees also being a poor sources of validating top talent. And while that's probably true it doesn't make Github better.

Last tweet is god awful.

I think in general people's reaction to that sort of comment who don't have a long GitHub history is, correctly, to cover their asses. I think having a solid body of work on GitHub should be viewed as a bonus/positive where one exists, but it should never hurt someone to not have one.

goofy, that's probably true. But in practice I don't check because there's so much noise that the signal seems super low. It's probably a useful resource for recruiters / people sourcing possible candidates. Less useful for evaluating individual candidates.

How is a code sample not useful for evaluating an individual candidate?

Lol tweet 5. Code on github is not "work for free". Its not like you're not allowed to make money from code that is publicly available on github.

i don't know why y'all have a problem with the idea that some engineers can have specialized knowledge and experience around optimizing for SEO, and that a lot of that work can touch all parts of the stack.

lol, people really really want this to be true. just keep repeating it all the time on hacker news and everywhere, and maybe it'll eventually become true.

That last tweet is the worst hot take ive ever seen

Wtf is the last tweet? Enjoying programming (to the extent that you do it for fun as well) makes you less productive? Gaining more knowlege and experience makes you less productive? Sure, if you're up to 1am working on your projects, but that could be said about anything you do at 1am.

Do those guys even write code?

So at the end of my interview today the director asked what date I am available to start. That must be a good sign right?

Only ever worked for one company since graduating college, so not much experience with the process.

Sure, its useful. And if all of everybody's code had to be on Github and they could only put code they wrote - then yeah, obviously Github would be an amazing resource.

But in practice most people can't put their interesting code their. And people that do put code generally just fork some random repo. And so going to Github is usually not useful for evaluating a candidate because it rarely has anything useful and even when it does - it takes a bunch of effort to make sure it was actually their work.

There are two things going on here:

1) Github for most companies that try to hire top end talent has at best ever been a sourcing tool, not an evaluation tool. The problem with github in the evaluation process is that it doesn't yield any kind of reliable ordering across all candidates, because it's extremely difficult to compare one person's history against another, lots of people don't have much on github and no one knows for sure who actually did what. This doesn't work, especially for larger companies that try to maintain a consistent standard while making the process extremely difficult to game.

2) Reliance on open source contribution in the hiring process has been blamed as one of the causes for diversity issues in tech, since open source contributors have historically been disproportionately white/asian male, even more so than the rest of tech. Since diversity in open-source communities is a widely-discussed issue especially on the left, any high profile post that appears blindly supportive of using github to screen candidates is likely to be interpreted with considerable skepticism.

With that said, it's pretty crazy that how quickly we went through these phases:

1) Only open source enthusiasts are on github

2) Hiring managers recognize that github is a good place to find great technical people

3) Recruiters hear about 2) and reach out to people based on their github portfolio

4) Lots of developers catch on to 3) and try to maintain a github portfolio

5) Everyone looking for a job is told to put everything possible on github, especially bootcamp/class projects.

6) Having a github account loses its signaling value and not many people care anymore

It's a pretty standard question for evaluating a candidate. If they have two applicants that are roughly equal then the one that can start sooner is probably getting hired.

So yeah, its a good sign but don't read too much into it.

Any theories what causes that? I'm assuming that most OS contributors are fairly anonymous, basically just an email address, so your group identity should be less obvious than in a face-to-face setting.

This dude (who I guess invented node?) is a terrible public speaker. But it gets very interesting around minute 16 imo.

How do you not know who he is?

His original video introducing node is pretty legendary imo. I have a hard time believing you are literally a node developer and have no concept of who he is. You must have come across him before and just don't remember.

But maybe you really haven't come across him because his style is definitely something memorable, he gets nervous.

Name doesn't really ring a bell. I started doing node in 2012-2013 or so. He had left by then.

Makes sense. I would actually be the first member of a specialized team they are trying to build out in this location so I think if they had multiple qualified candidates they would hire them all.

There's a whole wealth of knowledge that I'm sure is hidden in Youtube videos of public presentations by developers that I will never access because ffffffffff no to sitting down and watching something for an hour (I recognize this one is shorter but I feel like most are longer)

Uneducated guess is that the same factors (mostly inequality of opportunity) that cause disparities in minorities entering tech in the first place also cause them to not have as much time/opportunity to contribute to OS projects

I got my first web programming job by playing around with Java Servlets in my spare time and making a message board app (except I had no idea what a database as or how to store messages - I think I stored them as text files - lol).

I can see now that owning a PC to play around on the web with in 1999 might have involved some privilege. But other than that I can't think of anything. And everyone owns a computer now. I don't see how putting code on github isn't available to anyone with a CS degree and/or some coding experience.

Ive always used bit bucket cause they have free private repos. I was kinda surprised to learn that Github charges you for it, like not even a single free private repo. For people paying $$ on Github, why not use BB?

How long ago did usable computers break the 1000 dollar mark? Add 18 or so to that and that's when we should start seeing some changes in the demographics of who is working in IT.

I don’t think usable computers is the only barrier though. There’s still a massive variance in technology available and taught in public and private schools. There’s still the impact that income inequality has - people working more have less time to spend on improving themselves. People caring for kids have less time and resources to learn or code for fun or for free.

I don’t want to get into the politics or anything of these things but I think access to a personal computer is just a tiny aspect of this.