<story><title>GitHub Won’t Help You with Hiring</title><url>https://www.benfrederickson.com/github-wont-help-with-hiring/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zwayhowder</author><text>I made the mistake of thinking an active github account was a good proxy for &amp;quot;Is this person interested in tech enough to work here?&amp;quot;. I was called out on it at a conference (fortunately for me at a bar and not when I was on stage), by someone who pointed out that many people just don&amp;#x27;t have time to work on side projects and push them to Github.&lt;p&gt;Maybe they work 8 hours a day on a bank or government project that is all private and then they spend the rest of the day acting as a care giver to a relative, studying, or volunteering in a women&amp;#x27;s refuge. All noble activities that I would consider positives for a candidate, but I&amp;#x27;d never know if I just checked &amp;quot;Do you go home and cut code out of hours?&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I mistook my own privilege of free time as a universal truth and I&amp;#x27;m glad I was called out on it early on and able to change my (interviewing&amp;#x2F;screening) ways. I wonder what else I need someone to call me out on...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fxtentacle</author><text>In my case, I have found trying to contribute to open source to be a huge waste of time.&lt;p&gt;For example, I once found and patched a bug in paperclip, explained why it happened and sent a PR. It was ignored for 5 years and then they abandoned the project.&lt;p&gt;Or I once fixed Heroku issues by upgrading the ImageMagick version with a custom build pack. They featured it somewhere and suddenly I was getting entitled emails every day by random strangers who strongly felt that I should fix their Heroku deployment.&lt;p&gt;Then there&amp;#x27;s the issue of dependencies. My cool tool for analysing satellite photos won&amp;#x27;t be of much use to anyone who doesn&amp;#x27;t have API access to a satellite ground station. I.e. there&amp;#x27;s no benefit in making it open source.&lt;p&gt;And lastly, I&amp;#x27;ve had the unpleasant experience of a company taking my open source project, adding copy protection and then selling it as theirs while simultaneously refusing to adhere to my license of either following GPL or paying for closed source use.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, I only share source code for hobby projects with friends, but not publicly. Otherwise it&amp;#x27;s more work and less pleasant for me.</text></comment>
<story><title>GitHub Won’t Help You with Hiring</title><url>https://www.benfrederickson.com/github-wont-help-with-hiring/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zwayhowder</author><text>I made the mistake of thinking an active github account was a good proxy for &amp;quot;Is this person interested in tech enough to work here?&amp;quot;. I was called out on it at a conference (fortunately for me at a bar and not when I was on stage), by someone who pointed out that many people just don&amp;#x27;t have time to work on side projects and push them to Github.&lt;p&gt;Maybe they work 8 hours a day on a bank or government project that is all private and then they spend the rest of the day acting as a care giver to a relative, studying, or volunteering in a women&amp;#x27;s refuge. All noble activities that I would consider positives for a candidate, but I&amp;#x27;d never know if I just checked &amp;quot;Do you go home and cut code out of hours?&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I mistook my own privilege of free time as a universal truth and I&amp;#x27;m glad I was called out on it early on and able to change my (interviewing&amp;#x2F;screening) ways. I wonder what else I need someone to call me out on...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewstuart</author><text>How I use Github &lt;i&gt;might possibly&lt;/i&gt; show you my passion and enthusiasm and skill as a programmer.&lt;p&gt;What many fail to understand is that disinterest in Github &lt;i&gt;absolutely does not tell you anything meaningful about that programmer&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Too many hiring managers&amp;#x2F;recruiters&amp;#x2F;HR people focus only on the first point, as some sort of religion.</text></comment>