To be fair the days when Github was a strong signal are long over. When interviewing it is rarely worth the interviewers time to look and figure out if it is original code or just forks. Whether the CV is well formatted and free of spelling mistakes is actually a much stronger signal than whether it has a Github link on or not.
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.
While I agree that having a github is great for a number of reasons, I do not think it's a Resume/CV "replacement" when looking for "any" software job.
> A cv is useless for conveying who you are and what value you bring relative to all the other thousands of people out there. A paper is a paper is a paper.
True. Therefore if you're looking at integrating a Startup, it is great because educated developers might have the time to meticulously review every application. But when you're looking for a job, any job, especially in a more established company it doesn't work the same way.
Of course, if your github projects are "famous", say you created Redis (the 1% case), then it can act as a CV replacement. A replacement NOT because someone will dig into the actual code, but rather because they'll know you created this known thing called Redis (or they'll read about it on Wikipedia and realize it's a big deal)... so it's in a way your CV. But if your github only has random projects (which is the 99% case), it's actually quite hard and time consuming to jump into the code to evaluate an applicant's skill.
To better explain my point that a resume/CV actually makes the difference, let's look at it the other way around. Imagine you are a recruiter, you have 100 applicants, and you need to filter the list because you can't interview all 100 of them. Are you going to look into at everyone's repo?! No. Instead you will give a quick look at the CV to identify 'potentially' good candidates. Having a link to your github on the CV is a big plus at this point (independently of what it has), because it's different from most of the other ones (aka: you're special, more passionate about technology). Once the filtering is done, only then will you usually have the occasion to be heard through an interview. And it's at this point that you actually need to show you're real value.
Now I do agree that this system is flawed, but it's the game. If you want to maximize your chances, which you most likely do considering you have no options, you should play the game and get a solid cv/resume. Having said that, if you lack experience or content for your CV, personal projects (on github) are a good filler ;)
I've dealt with people whos whole CV was fake. One of the points of the interview is to sniff this out.
Diving into a github and then asking questions about it, in the same way as you would ask about stuff on a CV seems like a massive win for the skilled interviewer.
has the interviewer not looked at my CV with its link to GitHub and various live projects I've done?
No one ever looks at anyone’s Github, that’s the dirty little secret of hiring. A decade ago having a Github account was a weak-to-medium strength signal. Nowadays pretty much everyone has one and most are filled with junk (I’m sure yours isn’t but no one has the time to pore over it). You would be much better off saying “I contributed features X and Y to well-known Open Source product Z” where Z is something from the job spec.
Nah, not really, because "a github account with a bunch of code in it" is the signal.
Of course, it can be gamed by someone who just forks a bunch of other people's repos, which a recruiter won't be able to spot but "github" is a keyword that can be searched for on a CV like any other.
I have a pretty active Github. When interviewing I talked about it and put a link in my resume. People very rarely check it, but it gave me talking points when the tech of some old project matched the company's stack.
Every time something like this gets posted and even so much as mentions that they look at your GitHub, people come out of the woodwork with their fists clenched an impotent rage.
In the time that I've worked as a interviewer for some of the companies that I was employed at, if somebody includes a good hub link I always make sure to check it out. I'm not looking for necessarily best practices or the exact way that you code, but sometimes people put their personal projects on there which to me shows passion for software development, as well as the exploration of new ideas.
So sure, if your GitHub is just filled with half finished tutorials and unintentionally miss clicked forks, any interviewer worth their salt is going to notice this and then discard it as a signal.
If 90% of the people on hacker news had their way, We would discount any possible means of evaluation and just hire somebody by rolling a D20.
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.
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.
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.
The only people I've even heard of looking at GitHub for job interviews was to judge new graduates. And that was only because it would have the only non-course work they could judge.
FWIW, I'll look at a candidate's Github account whenever they list it on their resume. That doesn't mean I'll bring it up during the interview unless there was something particularly interesting to talk about.
It's pretty useful for screening candidates, especially looking at code written <1 year ago. I do keep in mind that code written in free time might not have the same standards as production code, but often there are some red flags that carry over.
I couldn't agree more. I've watched folks come and go in the various jobs I've had, and aside from one very painful case, most of them moved on due to cultural incompatibilities and not incompetence.
I feel like the "Github is not a CV" posts are about as tired as the "Why I'm leaving X" posts at this point. Honestly, if the place you're applying doesn't want your Github account, they wont ask for it. If they do they will. There's no right answer here.
Me, personally, I love using Github as a CV because it saves me the banality of trumping up my chest feathers and getting ready for a show that a resume/CV requires and lets me keep working on things that I'm curious about.
I always look, and I'm always happy to see something meaty enough to actually talk about in an interview.
Somewhat to my surprise, I've found that at least 90% of candidates who include a GitHub username, when I go look at their repositories, either have nothing but unmodified forks of existing open-source projects or obvious "go through the tutorial for technology X" projects. I can totally get how, after seeing that kind of thing ten times in a row, people might give up looking.
But I still always look, both at the person's public repositories and at their contribution history in other public repos.
"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.
On the one hand, I agree entirely. An interview should not make people jump through hoops if they can answer their questions via existing material.
On the other hand, fakers have caught on to the "GitHub is my resume" thing. I have had applicants who have basically fraudulent Github projects, or who have taken group projects on which they did basically nothing and claimed them as their own. So a Github page now requires an expert to evaluate it.
I have a hard enough time getting potential employers to read my resume let alone look at my github work. In theory you may be correct, but my experience has been the vast majority of employers don’t bother.
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