>My original plan was to find a job, but most of the companies I contacted didn’t even want to interview me.
If you happen to be in a position of authority in a tech company in the bay area, I would personally contact this guy and ask if one of these companies was yours. If it was, you have some serious work to do because your hiring practices are costing you more than you can easily imagine.
I am curious how you come to that conclusion. Framework lust, particularly in the JS ecosystem, is inflated and often not representative of technical authority, experience, or sometimes even competence.
If I were a hiring manager and the candidate couldn't write very basic vanilla JS I wouldn't hire them either. I don't care that they have a bunch of github stars. The inability to solve simple problems without a framework is a liability.
> GitHub part is so flawed... because FreeCodeCamp inflate their popularity by requiring during onboarding for the user to star their repository yet keeping them at the top. It's like if I told everyone to vote up my Hacker News posts... and gave them the link to do it and GitHub has no remedy for that inflation.
I'm also guilty of starring repos that seem cool but have not read the code or tried to use it. I've never used D3 in a project and can't speak to its quality, but I've seen some wicked cool demos and starred it as a bookmark of sorts.
Free Code Camp is a massive outlier. It received most stars of any repo at 177,914 stars in 2016, and the second most (the google-interview-university which has appeared a few times on HN) has only received a fraction of that at 28,727 stars in 2016, which likely did not use as much growth hacking.
I tend to agree that GitHub stars are a very dangerous metric to go off of. I tend to star repos that I think look "cool", often without trying to use them or even looking at the code at all. I've never considered it a damaging act, but I also didn't realize that some folks are encouraging others to make hiring decisions based off of GitHub stars.
might be as interesting to know what companies he applied at, and how he presented himself.
Did he list his projects at this time? Did he email to info@?
Do people hiring for tech positions (esp out in the bay area) still filter just on school/degree, and weed out folks like max before learning anything else about them?
I'm not trying to "blame the victim" so to speak as much as figure out what steps he took. Did he actually talk to a real person, and did that person review his resume/repos, and still pass (or... as is the case with almost all companies, just go silent and never respond again)?
The common propaganda that a GitHub-as-a-portfolio doesn't work in the real world, unfortunately. At minimum, an HR screener will never look at it and instantly dismiss the job application, even if it points to open source work, due the lack of paper education/professional experience in the field.
I'm not sure what "extreme opportunity costs" are in this context. If you're referring to onboarding time, that would be the same whether you hire someone with an demonstrated open source pedigree or you hire someone straight from Stanford.
>If you're referring to onboarding time, that would be the same whether you hire someone with an demonstrated open source pedigree or you hire someone straight from Stanford.
No, I'm referring to the extreme restructuring and HR effort required to ensure you don't lose any such candidate.
If you happen to be in a position of authority in a tech company in the bay area, I would personally contact this guy and ask if one of these companies was yours. If it was, you have some serious work to do because your hiring practices are costing you more than you can easily imagine.