I don't judge a person's technical skill through this metric (or at least I make an attempt not to), but it's rather noticeable when someone has nothing going on online. A blank GitHub, no website, no projects, etc. For an employed person, eh, whatever, maybe they just have a life.
But for a student? I'll admit I get a little suspicious. I'm not saying students should have a huge roster of projects and crazy extracurriculars. But something like a simple GitHub projects site or more than 50 commits in a year goes a long way to making yourself seem like an active, competent developer. I can count the number of people I've met with semi-active GitHubs at my school on one hand. That's not exactly a vote of confidence for my school's CS program.
"Oh so you call yourself a mechanic, huh? Well you aren't blogging about cars and mechanic-related things in your free time, so I'm suspicious".
"Oh, an architect, huh? You don't have an online presence, which is worrying".
I'm baffled as to why people expect programmers to spend most of their time behind a computer, and to make social git commits or blog about it on top of that.
I program professionally. It's true that I sometimes program after work on personal projects and write for my blog, but I also devote my time to studying Korean, and Japanese kanji. I also draw, spend time with friends, or occasionally play videogames. Programming is exhausting and oftentimes the last thing I want to do is look at code or write about it after work.
And of course, people have things like kids or other responsibilities in their life. College students may have extracurricular activities or work. Not every college student has oodles of free time as you so broadly assume.
We shouldn't have to justify NOT blogging or pushing to github. How dare I have any interests outside of computers and programming. Blegh.
Before I go to a mechanic I am checking their review online.
Before I hire an artist that would make some graphics for me I would ask for a portfolio. Nobody in graphic industry is surprised when someone asks to show some of their works.
Same with IT, you would try to do some background checking. See if there was some recommendations from person's past employers or some sort of porfolio.
Should it be everything I would use to evaluate person? Hell no! But if I can see someone's actual achievements it gives me much more insight and confidence about how I am evaluating the candidate.
Would I miss some good candidates? Probably. But the strategy is not about not missing all good candidates, it is about ruling the bad ones. E.g. in Germany if you were hired, everyone though that you were ok, but then they found out that you are shitty, they cannot just fire you. They have to give you head ups that you are underperforming, then they have to make a formal evaluation to make sure that it isn't about them oppressing you and finally they are obligated to propose a recovery plan for you - only after you fuck it up the company is allowed to fire you. So you might end up with a guy not doing enything for 6 months. In such perspective it can be better to miss 2 good candidates than to hire one bad one.
A review is not written by the mechanic themself once they get home from work, is it? My point was that people don't expect mechanics to go home and start blogging about new tools that they use or the latest in car news. It's an absurd concept, yet it's seen as normal for criticizing and penalizing prospective software developers. Artists are in a totally different boat, where they actually do need a good portfolio to demonstrate their personal style and past work, etc. For programmers they do it through known concepts called "resumes" and "interviews".
> But if I can see someone's actual achievements it gives me much more insight and confidence about how I am evaluating the candidate
If I have an accomplishment but I don't blog about it or post on github, did it actually happen?
Not only is this quite preposterous, I literally cannot share code if it was developed under an NDA. I only can discuss vaguely / without specifics in interviews.
> Would I miss some good candidates? Probably. But the strategy is not about not missing all good candidates, it is about ruling the bad ones.
Again, you are arbitrarily penalizing people for not being on their computer 14-15 hours a day. You are penalizing people with children. You are penalizing people like me who have interests outside of programming.
Not only is your reasoning absolutely absurd, you are -still- missing out on good candidates. It's lazy, and I would not want to work at a place that hires like this, because it means they do not value personal lives outside of work at all.
People like you are why people feel like they HAVE to blog and HAVE to contribute to open source projects- on their personal time. Fuck that. It's a sickening practice and as I said, it's not expected in other fields. Why is programming the exception here?
> Before I go to a mechanic I am checking their review online.
I've tried that but it's very unreliable. Online reviews are heavily gamed. Bad mechanics have many good reviews. Good mechanics have some bad reviews, or no reviews at all because they are a tiny two-man shop.
How I found a good mechanic was to first take to all the places people recommended. All these were bad. Then I went to a place I saw in my neighborhood run off of a guy's property. Wow, they were great. Went there for years. Then they retired and closed.
Tried a few other places with small jobs. No luck. Tried online reviews. No luck. Saw a hole in the wall on the side of the road in a bad area. Tried taking it there. They are great. They not only have absolutely no online presence, the business doesn't have a name, and they only accept cash. But they always fix my car right.
> Before I hire an artist that would make some graphics for me I would ask for a portfolio. Nobody in graphic industry is surprised when someone asks to show some of their works.
That is very reasonable. But if you ignored their portfolio, and asked them to spend 4 to 50 hours doing a custom project for you at no charge to prove they were good enough, after which you plan on ghosting them, do you think they would be within reason to tell you no thanks? What I just described is the "standard technical interview" in our field.
Myself I have an established reputation and don't apply to jobs any more, unsolicited job offers come to me. Nearly all which I ignore. Anyone asking for work samples should just look around at work I have done during my career. I don't do custom work for free. However I will do such work if I am interested and paid my standard consulting rate.
It's unrealistic to expect people to be willing to spend 14-15 hours a day in front of a screen.
While I don't spend the majority of my time programming any more, I still sit in front of a computer most of my work day.
My son has shown a great interest for programming and I really wish I had the time to do it with him more. But the last thing I want to do when I get home is sitting in front of a computer. My love and passion for programming are the same, and fortunately I get to spend most of my active programming and architectural time on things that can consume me completely. But I have a deep integral need to do things like cooking, gardening, training, reading etc.
Oh boy talk about straw man. Look, I directly said I do NOT do this for professionals. If you spend the majority of the day behind a computer programming, you are NOT obligated to have a blog or projects.
And again, I am NOT talking about programming for hours on end for students. 50 commits a year is approximately working on a side project once a month for a weekend, or going to maybe 3-4 hackathons in a year. Maybe that's an unreasonable burden, but that's not exactly a lot of programming.
And y'know what? Other jobs require extracurriculars too. If I wanted to get a job in politics, I'd have to take unpaid internships. If I wanted a job in business, I'd have to network. If I wanted a job in medicine or law, I'd have to study for the MCAT/LSAT. Programmers are no different. If you want a job, you do need to practice outside class.
Again, if you didn't read this and simply want to make an angry reply, I am NOT speaking of full time professionals. Simply students.
I sometimes wonder if the culture in Europe is different. I don't know a single person working in SWE who has an active GitHub presents or a personal blog. Of course, GitHub wasn't a thing during my college time (subversion was king, not sure if GitHub was available). But even now, of all the things you can do with your free time, why would you choose more coding or writing about coding? The people who are that passionate about coding have to be quite rare.
Personally, I tried to do side projects several times. But after a while I realized, that I really don't care and that it is not necessary for my employment. SWE is just a job, it's enjoyable work, but still nothing but work. I do enough at home to remain employable and to be decent at my job. There is no point doing any more.
I used to think the same way as you. Until something happened in my life that changed me.
I used to have a very fruitful open source life. I have a personal website, a blog, etc. Some of my libraries are useful and reasonably known on my niche.
Then I had a child. Everything changed after that. I suddenly don't have time or energy to devote to open source any more.
I am the same person as before, but if you looked at my online activity before and after, it's like two different people. If you "give points" to the person who had a lot of personal free time in the past, you'll be missing the one who doesn't know (but is just as capable, he just has other things to do, or less free time).
With students it's the same deal. If you give points to the ones with a very strong online presence you are prioritizing the ones which have the luxury of free time to invest. You will miss on the ones who, say, are taking care of an elderly person, or have to work in the cafeteria every day after class in order to make ends meet.
That's completely fair. I don't want to be unduly harsh on people who don't have the time.
But also, am I crazy to ask that people practice even a tiiiiny bit outside of class? I know some people legitimately don't have the time or capability, but that's not everyone. I can't even find 5 people in my school who have a semi active GitHub. It's completely frustrating, as our curriculum is a joke. I don't know how they expect to get a job when our curriculum teaches nothing, they don't do any programming outside of school and they have no other experience.
Bear in mind I don't go to a low ranked school. We just had a professor who won the goddamn Turing Award (easy to guess I suppose). Somehow though we have the most anemic, half-dead CS community.
I don't see why a student should be measured differently when the developers with full-time jobs are excused with "maybe they just have a life". Some students have jobs outside of school or obligations/hobbies that take precedence over coding projects. I just think everyone should be held to the same bar, even students.
I'm not going to judge someone for having other obligations/jobs/hobbies or whatever else, but if I find a candidate with lots of great blog posts and GitHub projects/contributions in the area I'm hiring them for, I'm definitely going to factor that into my hiring decision vs someone who has none of those.
Well then you're likely missing out on good candidates - and those good candidates you're missing out on are likely to be under-represented. Parents, carers etc. - possibly very competent developers, who just have other commitments. I smell affinity bias.
Yes, but that is happening regardless. Everyone is missing out on good candidates.
Some people can't afford to go to a fancy school and don't have big companies come recruit on campus. Some people can't get certification or evening degrees because they have sick parents/kids to take care of. Some people can't do unpaid internships or make open source contributions that look good on their resume because they rely on the income from a job in retail. Some people can't do well in interviews because they have anxiety or other similar conditions.
I'm sure a lot of them are competent developers, but the reality is that there is no good selection process that tells you that with a good degree of confidence, so you have to look for other signals.
I largely agree with you aside from the final point about resigning ourselves to using these really poor signals. Recruitment is tough to get right, but we should keep improving.
Indeed. We should not make it something mandatory or a reason to deduct points from the dev if they don't have those but it would definitely be a good help if they do have it.
Well, the developers have full time jobs programming. Students don’t. At best they get a few CS classes that provide hands on, real world programming (albeit usually outdated). I agree that there are certainly students who have time commitments which prohibit them from doing extracurriculars. But I’m not talking about a huge commitment (heh) here. 50 commits over a year is like a few weekends worth of work. If you worked on a project once a month, you’d easy get to 50 commits.
I don’t expect students to code outside of class. But I also believe students who don’t code outside of class shouldn’t expect to get a job just because they have a CS degree.
I can't speak for where you live, but being a student is a full-time job here.
And your last statement makes no sense. If you don't expect students to work after work, then don't follow it up with the remark that you'd see them jobless.
When I was at University all my spare time was taken up by running a student media outlet, playing sports, and volunteering my time to student run services.
I would argue that all of these things have been much more helpful when finding work and interviewing than having Github commits.
And when I'm the interviewer, I certainly don't care how many Github commits someone has. If a new grad can't show me that they have experience working in a team of some description then it isn't going to work out.
But for a student? I'll admit I get a little suspicious. I'm not saying students should have a huge roster of projects and crazy extracurriculars. But something like a simple GitHub projects site or more than 50 commits in a year goes a long way to making yourself seem like an active, competent developer. I can count the number of people I've met with semi-active GitHubs at my school on one hand. That's not exactly a vote of confidence for my school's CS program.