<story><title>We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)</title><url>http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>plughs</author><text>One frustration I&amp;#x27;ve had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere.  They want to see open-source contributions or an active and impressive personal github page.  If your employer is protective of their  IP ( mine is ) and&amp;#x2F;or you are not willing to spend evenings and and weekends on pet projects, you are out of the running.&lt;p&gt;Also&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;But if you think programmers aren&amp;#x27;t elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime.&lt;p&gt;If I had my way this would be considered employment discrimination and  grounds for a lawsuit.  At minimum it blatantly discriminates against national origin, expecting an engineer fresh from Nigeria to understand these secret &amp;#x27;culture&amp;#x27; norms. Age? Race? Religion?  Is a Muslim woman wearing a hijab going have any chance of making it past the first phone interview?  I have my doubts.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hyperpape</author><text>You may enjoy a tweet of Dan&amp;#x27;s, where he says his open source code has been completely irrelevant in most of his interviews: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;danluu&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;806222862663053312&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;danluu&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;806222862663053312&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Lest you think he&amp;#x27;s just a superstar who doesn&amp;#x27;t care about interviews, he says he&amp;#x27;s quite bad at them &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;danluu&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1058029337923014656&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;danluu&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1058029337923014656&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)</title><url>http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>plughs</author><text>One frustration I&amp;#x27;ve had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere.  They want to see open-source contributions or an active and impressive personal github page.  If your employer is protective of their  IP ( mine is ) and&amp;#x2F;or you are not willing to spend evenings and and weekends on pet projects, you are out of the running.&lt;p&gt;Also&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;But if you think programmers aren&amp;#x27;t elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime.&lt;p&gt;If I had my way this would be considered employment discrimination and  grounds for a lawsuit.  At minimum it blatantly discriminates against national origin, expecting an engineer fresh from Nigeria to understand these secret &amp;#x27;culture&amp;#x27; norms. Age? Race? Religion?  Is a Muslim woman wearing a hijab going have any chance of making it past the first phone interview?  I have my doubts.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>malvosenior</author><text>As someone who uses Github and OSS contribution as a strong hiring signal, I&amp;#x27;d like to offer an alternative perspective. People who do a lot of personal projects tend to be very good developers, especially when you can see a demonstrated ability to ship.&lt;p&gt;This is also helpful for people who haven&amp;#x27;t worked at big name companies or don&amp;#x27;t have degrees from elite universities. I&amp;#x27;d happily hire someone with no experience and no degree if I can see multiple impressive projects they&amp;#x27;ve built for themselves (I&amp;#x27;ve done this, and it&amp;#x27;s worked out very well).&lt;p&gt;Yes, it works against people who don&amp;#x27;t like to code in their personal time, but it also removes a bunch of filters and in my experience works better than anything else for finding good candidates.</text></comment>