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 ;)
A resume or CV is a piece of paper to get your name on someone's desk, then you get hired by passing the interview. Github is just another way of getting (or keeping) your name on someone's desk.
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.
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.
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.
Most developers can't write a CV for shit. Part of the problem is that because they know recruiters are so heavily involved in the process, they cram it with technology acronyms that they barely touched once, just to get through the filters.
A github profile is far more useful to me than a CV.
I've seen CVs that were absolutely dire, and so I was about to pass before I saw the github URL, I checked out their work and it was solid, so I wanted to talk to them.
If you don't want to share what you're doing, that's fine. You're just not going to get a job with me. You're not going to get a job at a lot of startups, as it happens.
That's your choice. I'm not forcing you into it, but I think you and your career would benefit if we moved as an industry to CV-less employment - github, HN, Twitter, whatever, are all far more helpful than knowing what grades you got at University, and 4 bullet-points covering several years of what you did working for a previous employer, for example.
I find resumes pretty efficient - I can look them over, and make a snap judgement wrt which ones are worth a phone screen, which aren't. Over many years of doing this, I find a good correlation between first impression and subsequent candidate quality (meaning, I've had to interview folks where the resume screamed "no hire"). Stuff like coherent formatting, brief narrative and concise, useful explanations of roles and technologies are, believe it or not, quite beyond some people.
The thought of trawling someone's repo instead, having to take the time to get an in depth evaluation of what the code's doing and whether that's effective makes me shudder. But then perhaps people doing this just make a first impression of the code, rather than a deep understanding?
Honestly I can see a GitHub being a "nice to have", but certainly not the main deal.
Out of interest, anyone else that's been hiring in the UK seeing any traction with GitHub? I'm in a pretty enterprisey space, and past clutch of CVs we've had haven't so much as mentioned it.
Well sure, but you've got quantifiable product/market successes. For someone in a more one-dimensional role the spiel might not be as easy. Some folks really just want to be a dev on a team of devs, and github is a great starting point for a technical interview.
You're right though, github doesn't optimize its presentation for the resume use case. There's plenty of room for other startups (see my Work for Pie plug elsewhere in the thread) to take that information and package it especially for hiring managers. StackOverflow Careers does a bit of that, too.
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.
I see a lot of discussion over the Github comments. I understand the merits of having an account with some code on it, as well as the restrictions of corporations and time that prevent many people from maintaining a repository. However this is a red herring.
The problem is visibility.
The resume is very poor at showcasing your talents. All the common resume advice makes yours hard to differentiate from everybody else's. While having a website, Github, Bitbucket, or something else will help your case, you are already hobbled by the very generic-ness of the resume format. You can play with the fonts and format, but I've found that it's a fine balance between the "Pop" factor and annoying the reader.
The other major problem with the resume is they are very low cost in terms of those applying. A unscrupulous candidate can send out hundreds of resumes to shotgun his chances at landing a job. The time it takes to vet out these is many times higher for the hiring party, and it is multiplied by the number of resumes to vet. Companies must then increase the cost of applying, either through coding tests or puzzles, but this paradoxically turns away candidates who might be qualified and don't have the time. This is especially true for small startups who have problems with visibility of their own.
To me, the question isn't Github use or having a website, but how can I increase my visibility? Being physically present in front of people who are hiring is so ridiculously powerful, that most hires are made that way. Thus, obviously, meetups/networking/hackathons are a giant step in the right direction, but not everybody is in the correct neighborhood and can't casually attend. For those of us that aren't local, how can we disrupt the email->resume->round-file process that effectively dehumanizes most applicants?
I am warming up to short video submissions because of their ability to show the personality and creativity of the individual behind all the credentials. It allows for both a quick introduction, as well as introducing a subtle time cost, on behalf of the applicant and it doesn't add significant (as far as I know) time to the hiring manager.
On the other hand, maybe the hiring process is an NP-Hard problem.
I can see how it wouldn't be relevant if you do a lot of hiring.
In my case however, I hire maybe 3-4 devs each year and would definitely spend time looking at candidates' github repos... if any of the CV I got ever actually mentioned any!
For me at least, the more filtering I can do before interviewing, the better. A GitHub repo would also be a great discussion point during interviews.
From the comments it seems like there are three points of view:
1) Yeah this is dead on. Employers should only care about the code you've written.
2) No your always need a resume because your job history is more important.
3) GitHub complements your resume.
I'd say that this is totally situational. It is like a cover letter. You position yourself for the jobs you want. A lot of startups would probably put more emphasis on your GitHub account then on a resume. If you want to get into the enterprise world then they'd probably care more about your resume.
None of this is needed. It is simply your way of showcasing yourself to get the job you want.
Github is absolutely replacing resumes. It doesn't replace an interview, which is what the author seems to be getting at despite the title of their article...
At first I thought "No, LinkedIn is my New Resume."
But then I realized neither are. Because when a recruiter wants a resume, they want to see a concise document that details exactly how your experience matches their job requirements. Github can't be that because it would require that (probably non-technical) recruiter to slog through a lot of stuff to get to what they want to see. Which none of them will actually do.
I like the idea of GitHub as a resume, but most of the code I drop in GitHub is closed source and I don't spend a lot of free time hacking on other people's projects. So, while a GitHub resume is a great idea if you do a lot of open source hacking, it is not nearly as useful if you are working on private code.
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'll agree that in order for Github to become the personal CV (and it should!), it needs to account for all use cases (ie. profiles without any popular repositories).
but, as a hiring manager, i don't use Github as a measure for competence. i use Github as a measure for involvement in the open source community (competence usually comes incidentally).
having 30 projects with 0 stars does not really do anything for me that a single code sample through email could not. no matter how you categorize them.
While I agree that Github is a part of your resume, I don't think it's the whole thing. If I was providing a link to my account when applying for a job, I would probably link to some specific projects and provide some narrative around them, rather than just saying "here's 20 projects I've worked on, go nuts". If the recruiter wants to look through everything else then fine, but they shouldn't expect perfection from everything.
Some other thoughts I had on the article:
"Too many forked repositories": You just need to click on Sources[1] to see the user's actual repos.
"Missing or unclear descriptions": If repos are just simple little side-projects, they don't necessarily need descriptions - I know what they are, I know what they do, they aren't there for anyone but me, I don't expect them to be starred or forked.
"Old repositories": So because I wrote something a year ago, I can never go back to it? What's wrong with having a record of achievement? A display of progress.
"Mediocre code": If we were only allowed to store perfect code, there would never be any code on Github.
> 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 ;)
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