this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Programming
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“Show us your GitHub”
Sure, here it is
“Looks empty”
Ya, I code for work, it’s all in private repos or in Azure Devops.
“So you don’t contribute to open source in your free time?”
No, I spend free time with my family. Again, I code for work, why on earth would I also use my free time for extra coding
“Thanks for your time but…”
Nah thanks for yours, I don’t wanna work for a company that expects me to code for them for for 8 hours and then go and code for someone else for free for more hours. That’s not a healthy work life balance, dickhead.
Edit: well this blew up (in a small lemmy kinda way). To clarify, before I coded for a living I coded as a hobby. Since I now do it full time, I don’t have any itch to scratch, I get my fill 40 hours a week. I’d ONLY be contributing to keep my GitHub looking a certain way for recruiters that one year in five I’m jobseeking and that feels like a waste of time. In reality it’ll probably be dark green the week before I started interviewing when I updated my website and then nothing before that until the last time I was interviewing.
Also, I chose to have a family and that takes effort, time and precedence over hobbies for me. If you also made that choice and you can code full time, have a healthy relationship with your wife and kids and still find time to have hobby code projects, all power to you. I don’t have the energy to open the laptop back up and get into something by the time the kids are in bed and I’ve spent some time with the wife. I’m not staying up into the night so a recruiter can glance at a chart and judge me to be a good or bad dev by how green it is.
How do I improve my skills over time? Tbh if the company I’m working for doesn’t allow me to block out a couple of hours to half day a week for learning I’m at the wrong company. I read, follow along with tutorials, experiment and think about how what I’m learning could be applied to the product I work with. Then if an opportunity to apply it comes along, I take it and either fail fast or bring something new, of value to the table.
Yup, the chart still goes green with contributions to private company repos, but those contributions also ain’t from my personal GitHub account, they’re from the one linked to my work email and I imagine they’ll close that account pretty quickly when I leave. Idk how that works tho, I only worked in one team in my whole dev career that seriously uses GitHub as source control, and they’re being moved to ADO as we type. GitHub is the go to for FOSS, but I don’t work in FOSS, I work in enterprise software and there’s much better enterprise git providers than GitHub (imho, ymmv). You can even throw the question back “do you actually use github here? If so can you tell me what lead you to go with that instead of other source control providers?” or side step it “I don’t really use github but I’m experienced in Azure DevOps and Team Foundation Server plus I’m fluent in git command line so I’ll be able to skill up in GitHub specifics pretty quickly if I need to”. Interviews are two way streets, I’m interviewing a company as much as they’re interviewing me, I have standards on where I’ll choose to work.
If you want a portfolio, I’ve got one, it’s on my website, the url of which is on my cv. Knock yourself out, sign up if you like, it’s public. I even updated it just for you last week.
Y’know why recruiters ask to see your github? Because they read in a book or a blog somewhere that that’s what they should ask when interviewing developers. 21 year old graduate developers looking for their first junior position, sure, maybe. That isn’t all devs tho.
I'd love to see recruiters who recruit in their free time, or surgeons who perform surgery in their free time.
I suspect surgeons doing surgery in their off hours wouldn't be just weird, but also very creepy.
I suppose this happens already, with there being a black market for human organs after all.
I can think of surgeon examples but I've never heard of Recruiters Without Borders. Unless it's just CapGemini
Hobby: cooking, meat enthusiast
there are tons of developers and technical folks that still find it fun and enjoyable to work on personal projects.
i mean, how else do you build new skills or gain familiarity without stuff you don’t use at work?
That's called a hobby. And hobbies are great and lots of fun.
Monetizing hobbies turns them back into a job.
“programming” is so broad though. surely there’s room to have it be both work and a hobby ?
i mean, it is for me and lots of folks i know.
Yeah same as artists, would you rather commission an artist who says 'i don't really like art it's just a 9-5' or someone who say 'art is a passion, I love creating and am part of various art communities to develop and grow my skills'
Musicians, writers, photographers, all the creative industries are full of people totally dedicated to their passion or at least deeply interested in their field - of course people are going to want to employ someone that constantly improves and evolves their knowledge and skills
Even artists don't end up working on art every chance they get though. Most professional artists are just that. It's the artists who haven't made it yet that are making art in their off time
If you know an artist who works 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job and then paints for 40 hours a week in their free time then you know an artist that works 80 hours a week
Woodshedding. I can not learn as fast if I'm weighed down by the idea that every piece of code I check-in needs to be production ready.
Easy. Just don't work at work and read articles on hackernews instead.
Well, some people regard coding as a hobby...
Sysadmining is a lifestyle
But not expected, and they may have selfhosted repo at home.
Yeah absolutely I quickly get bored playing a computer game or something, but I just love coding (in Rust obviously ^^), creating new things etc.
I get where you come from. I don't code after work much, but if nobody did, there wouldn't be much OSS. As for that interviewer, he's a dickhead.
Fintech is easy to deal with in this regard.
"do you have code samples you can share?"
"would you be happy if an employee interviewed elsewhere and used your codebase for work samples?"
What they're asking for is a public portfolio.
Obviously, you can't give them code that legally belongs to a past employer and they're not allowed to look to avoid accusations of copyright infringement.
Especially if they do any reverse-engineering for interoperability, there must be zero suspicion that they were inspired by code they're not allowed to use.
This is where open source contributions under permissive licenses come in.
Something shown to work in a real project is also viewed better than out of context code snippets.
When you're essentially saying you have nothing to show them, you're indistinguishable from someone who actually has nothing and is lying about their skills, so the onus is on the interviewers to vet you, which for various reasons may not be possible, so they'd rather just move on to someone with a clearly proven track record.
Ok but the original point still stands. Coding outside of work and at work is poor work life balance. Even my own projects I do are to learn not solve an actual problem in the world with code.
And a public portfolio is the CV that states "I worked for this company making thier products". They might ask for the specific products, but there's a chance some people never made public ones.
Github is for college and thesis projects. That's what most people have on there.
The correct answer to these recruiters is still not stated yet. When they say
People should answer
Indeed. A clearly proven track record is a given, in that I worked at software company x y & z for a number of years each as a developer in these technologies and with these good references. You don’t need to see my individual contributions to understand that holding several multi-year dev positions at enterprise software houses tells you a lot.
Tbh, if my track record is in question I don’t expect to be at an interview, I expect my CV to be on a no pile.
I think the real issue is that recruiters learn how to interview graduate junior dev candidates and apply it across the board. When you interview mid/senior devs with years of experience for senior roles which require years of experience, maybe “do fizzbuzz” and “show us your open source work” is a little patronising, no?
Might just be me tho, maybe I’m just a prick. Could be.
you can show activity without showing the details of the activity. which is at least demonstrating you’re active.
Like this?
https://github.com/taichi/gontributions#examples