> As a software startup owner I really enjoy when people send us their résumés and they include their github account so we can see tangible work they have done.
I sometimes feel very insecure when I read statements like this. I consider myself a good and a passionate programmer with "above-average programming skills", if there is such a thing. However, I have (so far) never been able to manage contributing to open source projects in any significant way. Sometimes I have been too busy with work projects, sometimes it has been a busy life at grad school, sometimes family, sometimes I have been plain shy, and so on. I have put together a bunch of great hacks at places I have worked, which sadly I cannot open source.
But I see dozens of people whom I know who are naturally prolific in their oss contributions, manage to attract a high number of twitter followers, etc. and I wish I were more like them.
Do startups really look at github contributions as the ultimate measure of one's tech chops or are looking for people who go that extra bit and make time in their schedules for contributing back to the community?
>> However, I have (so far) never been able to manage contributing to open source projects in any significant way. Sometimes I have been too busy with work projects, sometimes it has been a busy life at grad school, sometimes family,
I can take a safe bet that a lot of us here can confirm to this as well. So this is more prevalent than people care to admit/inform here.
>> and I wish I were more like them.
Not a bad wish, but if I were you, I wouldn't lose sleep over it. :)
So, just keep doing what you are doing, and the opportunities (oh, there are plenty of those around. I can assure you) that arise around those things will come to you. Good luck!
A large part of the issue is that people who contribute to OSS talk about contributing to OSS, whereas people who don't contribute typically just don't mention it.
There are people who contribute to OSS and get traction in the open hacking community, but I know also a number of "stars" in the business/closed side of the code. People that are great but just focus on fixing business problems with their great code. These people also get acknowledged for their capabilities, just inside smaller circles, but those circles are very important business side so they are successful, have an easy time to find a new position when they want to change, and so forth.
Don't fall for that bullshit. Most of the best engineers I know don't have a github/bitbucket/sourceforge/you-name-it account, which doesn't prevent them from being awesome.
To be honest, there's a little bit of "I'm too old for this shit" attitude among them. They have have demanding jobs and families, and probably couldn't care less about what internet thinks.
I also have to note that I've never met a person my age (early twenties) who I could call a great engineer. Promising - yes, talented - yes, but not great. You know, the type of people that you shut up and listen to when they talk. Guess those years of experience really count...
P.S.: OK, I lied, I've actually seen some guys even younger than me that are absolutely brilliant, mostly those actively participating in programming contests (ACM/TopCoder, etc.), but I wouldn't exactly put them in charge of a team building a product, if you catch my drift...
There's for sure a difference in people I would call brilliant "hackers" and people I would call brilliant "architects".
I think it's very difficult to be the latter without having constructed a handful of large systems, and those take significant time even if you do them back-to-back.
>Do startups really look at github contributions as the ultimate measure of one's tech chops or are looking for people who go that extra bit and make time in their schedules for contributing back to the community?
When I was hiring, yes. There is no easier and simpler way to evaluate someone before bringing them in for an interview than checking their verifiable OSS contributions. It's low friction.
Doesn't mean we didn't consider others, but for obvious reasons people who actually could prove they had done work went to the head of the line. It's just how it is.
"people who actually could prove they had done work went to the head of the line."
You mean "people who proved they would work for free," right? FWIW, I'm not interested in working for your company, but of the code I wrote which has made it to Github, most has been uploaded by people other than me.
It seems like mostly a place where people store config files, mirror code, and dump half-assed work in progress. But would "I wrote this code, and someone posted it on a website" really make someone better than "I wrote this code?"
I don't work for free: my libre software work is under the GPL in one form or another. If it's a library, it's LGPL-derived; if it's product, it's AGPL3. Either I get money, or you get to publish your changes to my code so we all benefit. Pick one. =)
> people who actually could prove they had done work went to the head of the line
Isn't that usually sorted out by the resume piece of the puzzle? By listing placed an applicant has actually worked?
I know it's not your full hiring procedure you've outlined here, but I just see that kind of filtering as very naive. You'd have to make a huge number of assumptions to go from someone's OSS contributions to anything about their work ethic.
Unfortunately it's easy to make claims on one's resume that are hard to refute. Yes, you worked there, but what did you actually do? What did the code you wrote look like?
Every writer who advocates FizzBuzz or something related has specifically mentioned these are candidates with resumes that got them to the interview stage, but who couldn't actually write code.
Looking at open source code or a portfolio is an extension of that, since one doesn't really have time in an interview to do anything more complex than FizzBuzz.
Yes. We disclaimed this. Honestly this should be obvious. There is a lot of friction in hiring; the candidates who help reduce that friction will benefit from it.
"There is a lot of friction in hiring; the candidates who help reduce that friction will benefit from it."
Translation: "Hiring people takes my time. People who save me time will make my job easier, so I'm more likely to hire them." I think I have your hiring process more or less figured out, though I'd never want to work there.
> "Hiring people takes my time. People who save me time will make my job easier, so I'm more likely to hire them."
Uh, yes. That is trivially true. Do you think you stumbled upon some genius snarky comment? Given two options with zero tradeoff in quality, I will choose the easier path.
Internal studies also showed that employees who contributed to OSS were more productive, more loyal, and created better value.
It doesn't really matter if you'd want to work for us or not, so keep that zinger in your back pocket. (Considering I don't even work in that field anymore and you'd likely be unqualified anyway.)
There's an entirely different reason for using github as a filter.
But isn't one of the major reasons we look for a github portfolio, really as an ideological filter for finding cofounders? I wouldn't go so far as calling it communist, but contributing to open-source projects requires a dedication to the 'common good'. If it is communist, it is a great filter for people who would like to own the means of production (equity) rather than getting paid from surplus profits! (salary). I'm not great on communist ideology, but anyway startups are a mix, they're a bit socialist at a very early stage then mature.
At any rate, if this is the correct way to view github, then the counterexample we're looking for isn't people who say "I'm a great engineer and I have no github" but - "I am highly interested in working for equity alone (in a pre-revenue context!) as a cofounder, building a project from scratch with no initial reward except a sense of ownership, and I have no github".
That rings a lot more hollow than being a well-paid engineer with no github.
The biggest contributor to open-source are companies like IBM. Calling IBM communist, is well weird.
If you remove extremists of each movements, seeing value in common-good has nothing to do with communism or socialism or capitalism.
The only filter you apply by looking at github is social. You select individual based on how involved they are in a community. If your company evolve in the same community that can be beneficial. If not, well it is only slightly a bit more relevant than looking at hiring a plumber based on how recognised he is in the car modding community.
I disagree. If you want to review a candidate's code, GitHub is one of many useful tools to do so. Having code on GitHub does not require one to participate in its social features.
If GitHub lets you verify that someone is capable of writing code that you think is of high quality, is that not a useful tool to apply in a wide variety of circumstances?
The point of the article was looking at influencial people in GitHub, the ones for which an automated resume even make sense.
Now indeed, you can also look at the code that even regular people are producing. The problem here is that you filter people that uses GitHub as a code repository, storing learning material (i.e. rubbish), quick hack (i.e. dirty, no tests), ..., or people that use GitHub as a code portfolio with a selection of their best piece of code.
But really, whatever works for you. There was the same talk about LinkedIn first, then StackOverflow accounts back in the days and nowadays hardly anybody cares.
This is an interesting and weird comment. I'm the exact opposite of a communist or socialist, but I love contributing to open source. And I certainly don't see open source as communist. (I don't see it as opposite to communism either.)
I think there is a rather large distinction between "contributing to the common good" and advocating communism, which is a political philosophy. I think whether you want to help others is wholly independent from your political philosophy.
A fair number of people get paid to make part of their work open source. I know a couple people whose github profiles are entirely populated by projects for their employers.
You don't have to contribute to open source to have a github account. I use it to dump all my projects on (most of which are incomplete). I've made only one pull request to OSS (months ago) and it's still sitting in the request queue!
Wouldn't be an active github user devote less time to the work's projects? Personally I know that after my 8-9 hours work day, I barely (no at all) have energy for a side project. How these people can spent almost full time working on the OSS project? (I know some of the developers' job is to work on OSS project, but what about others?)
For these sorts of folks, side project programming doesn't require or consume energy, it creates it. Some people relax by watching tv or reading the internet. Some people relax by coding features for an open source software project.
Is there a correlation between the latter type and productivity in a day job? Employers who ask for a prolific github account would seem to think there is.
But what about personal projects? For me, the best way for learning new programming languages, libraries, techniques, etc, is to build something with that language. Naturally, I put this type of work into a public repo on Github and slap an OSS license on it. It's a great way to learn, but also to showcase your work to potential employers (or fellow hackers, etc).
"Here is my very first project" seems like a horrible thing to show off to potential employers. My first projects in any language are full of hacks and "just-get-it-working" type stuff until I figure out the Right Way to do things.
Putting up half-finished junk like that doesn't serve anybody's interest. At best it is ignored. At worst it is just pollution being dumped into the world in that any newbie seeing it would become actively dumber.
Maybe, maybe-not. Couple things: some of my "personal projects" are more than just learning some new things. Often the project is for scratching an itch, and is a useful thing to me. That's the type of stuff that I will "polish." This forces me to not only learn the new language, but to write code idiomatically, write unit tests, etc.
For "junk projects" that are solely to play around with some new thing, I think it's okay to make that clear in the README of the project and still put it in a public repo. If I'm an employer, I'm going to like the fact that you're actively learning new things; if it's a "play" project, made clear in the README, I wouldn't hold against you writing crappy code. Instead, I'll be more impressed that you're actually learning new things. Just my $.02.
FizzBuzz is also extremely easy, yet somehow a lot of applicants seem to fail that. So, any running code would probably elevate you above people without any code.
I've always had the impression that it's just an easier way of dealing with potential hires but by no means the only way. If the company you are applying to is an active contributor to OSS then it would probably be more important as a gauge of some workflow they'd like to see. Maybe I'm wrong though– I've never gone through that process myself.
The guy you're quoting hired me around the time he made this, and I have next to zero OSS chops.
All of my free time that I put towards software selfishly goes into my side project, but it does mean I have some interesting stories to tell on problems I've solved.
Let me give you my take as someone who has had to hire a lot of developers. Firstly, I'll say it depends a lot on the person doing the hiring. Different people will look for different things.
For me though, any practical experience that you can show alongside your resume/CV is helpful for a few reasons:
1. If I see code of an excellent standard, I know I just need to use the interview to make sure you really did write it yourself, then if you're a good personality fit, you're hired. This makes my life a lot easier because it's very hard to tell if someone will be a good coder without seeing them code. Not everyone is willing to do a practical trial, and not all employers have time to organise these either.
2. It lets me see if any assessment you give of yourself agrees with reality. Some people understate their abilities, but most overestimate themselves greatly. If I know where you sit on this spectrum I have a better idea of what to expect in terms of mentoring requirements, how to approach the interview, etc., to figure out if you are competent and whether any poor judgement is a problem, or just typical egocentrism.
3. It gives me things to talk about in the interview. Like, "I saw you used X, why did you do that and not Y?" Usually it's when people can actually start talking about things like this that you can tell if they really understand what they are doing or not.
So, I wouldn't be put off by the idea that you don't have a lot of open source contributions out in the wild for employers to look at, simply because it may not matter to everyone. However if you do, it's always of value and something you should highlight.
In any case, don't underestimate the value of being able to show some work you have done. If your best work is closed source, try to get permission to show some of it to potential employers, while bearing in mind that they will be very busy and not hoping to wade through a ton of code figure out if you know what you're doing or not. It's an extra resource: if your skills look interesting, it allows them to see some evidence of what you've done, and poke around for interview talking points.
Often just knowing the type of projects you worked on and having proof of your contribution is enough to tell if you are the real deal or not. So if you can't get access to sources, just indicate the projects, say what you did and try to get some evidence, like endorsements/references from colleagues. If you can't provide evidence, expect the interviewer to grill you on this: it will soon become apparent if you were exaggerating your contributions.
The most important point is that if your CV/resume does not look good, they won't want to look at your code anyway. Don't shove it down their throats. Start off by selling yourself as concisely as possible, and use these kind of extra resources as evidence to back up what you say.
What I like most about these Github resumes is not so much the fact I can see individual contributions, but that I can very quickly see a project history and % breakdown by language, which is what I'd expect to see on a paper resume, except here I know it's based on real data and not just something the candidate may have just made up. From data like this this I can tell within a few seconds if that person might be a good fit, and from there I may decide to go investigating further.
Just remember that if you apply for say, a Ruby job and 90% of your open source contributions are Python, you probably want to tell the employer somewhere e.g., "I work with Ruby in my day job but most of my open source contributions are in Python". Only if the data is misleading though, like if as you said you have some open source contributions, but not enough to be representative.
TLDR: Employers are busy. Within a few seconds, they want to know "does this person appear to have the skills I am looking for?". If that answer is yes then they may spend more time re-evaluating it, based on any evidence they can get. Source code is usually the best evidence a programmer's ability. Less up-front evidence means any interview will be a lot more hit-and-miss: interviews alone are not a good way to assess coding ability.
Personally, I like http://osrc.dfm.io simply because it provides way more detail and insight into the user. Just my opinion though, this is still pretty cool.
Meh, pretty frustrating. All it shows is that I have no life. Wish I could hide my github profile. I don't care to impress employers with how nerdy or willingly to contribute I am.
The less they know from 3rd party, but me, the better!
Creeped out - it told me I should be friends with someone I follow & talk to regularly on Twitter, but we've never contributed to the same project. How did it know that?
Yup, it's pretty inaccurate. I think it's inaccurate to not "deface" people, or an act of nicety. Altough, seeing that someone is 24 coding all week, isn't a good sign of health too.
methinks osrc.dfm.io doesn't actually look at what you contributed. In my report, it looks a lot at stuff that I starred but I never sent pull requests for.
I am usually a hater but I think this project is pretty neat and useful.
Traditional resume asks people to list their skill and describe the project in a couple sentences. Instead of pretty chart there is a dead simple language percentage count. Instead of rewriting a README it extracts the description from the repo. It's quite useful as a quick resume.
Github's detail page is not useful. It serves merely as an activity dashboard, not a resume for people looking for talent. This goes to the other resume project a month ago a designer showed off his HTML5 skill. That kind of resume burns my eyes and is not useful for recruiter - nobody wants to click/arrow through 20 animates to get your email address. Same thing here in Github.
To credit the original author, Github profile pages have evolved a lot since this project was created (~3 years ago) and much of what you see now is likely influenced by projects like this.
I understand, and I didn't mean to discredit the site itself. I was just pointing out the weird upvote behavior here. It would have been very useful and clever idea back then but why is it #1 today? is what I don't understand
I wish HN was more about real hacking. Black-, Gray- or Whitehat. The highest upvoted things aren't startup's but privacy related posted (ie. NSA) and HTML5/CSS3 experiments... Not to say, I don't see gem's in here, but most are more interested in webdesign stuff.
Ok, I don't know why it got downvoted ; cannot reason the logic. Do people assume "this guy doesn't know the various definitions of the word hacker"? However, thanks for the feedback.
It's because you said 'black, gray or white hat'. Those are all computer security hacker types, and have little to do with the topic of this site, which is tech startup news and relevant inspiring/educational material.
Ahhh, ok now I see why it looks stupid in this context. Me wishing the swap of content to another definition of the term hacker, esp. 'black, gray or white hat' sounds illogical. Thank you, really appreciated! Sometimes I don't get these details.
This project is at least 3 years old. Interesting it has got picked up by HN folks again. For those not familiar with GitHub pages, somebody got username "resume" in order to create this page. I had to explain this because this actually looks like something GitHub launched, just like http://status.github.com/ but it is not.
As a guy who routinely has his resume tossed because of a lack of technical degree, Github is a godsend for the auxiliary benefit of companies that want to take me serious can find my code there. I routinely have stuff trend in Objective C and it's slightly frustrating when interviewers think the toughest question is what's different between an NSArray and NSMutableArray because my resume says "Majored in Graphic Design."
I love contributing to the community, and that's obviously the first reason why I push OSS, but that extra hiring benefit is extremely helpful for other coders like me who don't have a technical degree.
Personally, I don't like the idea of a GitHub/OSS resume.
While for others this is great, it does not work for everyone.
Many of us are not able to contribute to open source projects...
How many professionals are asked by their future employer about the work they do for free in their spare time?
Would you ask a doctor how many patients he/she treated for free? Or a lawyer how many cases he/she did for free in their spare time?
I don't think so...
By all means, I think contributing back to the community is a noble, great thing to do (and we should all strive to do it), but this should not be considered the sole measure of one's technical skills.
> Personally, I don't like the idea of a GitHub/OSS resume. While for others this is great, it does not work for everyone. Many of us are not able to contribute to open source projects...
Of course, not everyone can. But likewise, not everyone can go to college and get a degree in computer science, which is generally pretty important for one's resume.
Open source contributions on github should not be the sole or even most important measure of one's technical skills, and neither should having a college degree. But the more options there are to prove one's skills, the better a chance talented people have.
In other words: For those that can't afford to go to college, but are good at programming, github can make the hiring process more fair.
No, but I do care about what cases my attorney takes on pro bono or what community service my doctor participates in. It goes to showing what one does to give back to the community, whether it's geographically (putting your volunteer/civic organizations on your resume) or professionally (putting your GitHub account on your resume).
Having a doctor or lawyer who gives back is important to a lot of people, and I'm sure that translates into wanting to hire employees who give back to their communities as well.
To be useful, this needs to also crawl the projects I contribute to, not just the ones under my account. I am a maintainer of a project under another github account but that completely escapes this tool.
Yeah, same here. Almost all of my meaningful commits are to repositories that belong to my Organization, and not to my personal account. But this generator only seems to factor in the personal ones.
And then you have to consider the way Github routinely detects the wrong language for repos. I see Grails apps detected as "Javascript" all the time, including one of mine right now. sigh I don't know why GH don't give developers the ability to declare the (primary) language(s) of the project explicitly.
I don't care if there's 6 billion lines of JS in libraries that nobody ever touches, and only 10 lines of Groovy code, it's still a "Groovy project" in every meaningful sense, if that's what people need to hack on to modify the project. :-(
Probably because for historical reasons, my repo is not the "root" on GitHub (it started out an an anonymous snippet on EmacsWiki and someone else put it in its own GitHub repo, which I later forked).
It looks like that's because its using GitHub's timeline API, which -- in addition to GitHub's general repository API -- only retrieves repositories which are actually rooted at the given user. Sort of a shame; I feel like most people's most interesting/important open source activity is on repositories which they don't own.
At the same time, this probably cuts down on "me too" contributions. I have a repo that has been gaining popularity lately and have been flooded with pull requests that do nothing but add a jshint file or other dev environment changes.
Some of my most important projects are open sourced under my company's account and this won't show any of them even though I contributed 90% of the code. This only shows my personal side projects that are done for fun. Any chance this could change in the future?
One thing that struck me as painfully obvious about this is that the actual coding aspect of someone's job is only a small fraction of what makes them a good hire. Not to mention, they might have JavaScript or what-ever language is good for an open source part of a system, but if they're working in DevOps, DB guru, etc. none of that comes through in this.
I don't think I'd call this a GitHub Resume, more of a formatted GitHub summary that could be part of someone's Resume.
Sure, if you're inundated with so many resumes that you can't decide where to start (doubt this is a problem most companies have) this might be a good place to start.
This is awesome and just what I've been wanting. One request would be to show the repos I contribute to the most instead of just the ones on my account.
I went and looked up the open source report card which used to work the same way. Looks like they've recently changed it though to pull from your most contributed repos, so for me is much more accurate of my activity on Github. http://osrc.dfm.io/
Improvements might be allowing you to hand-pick which repos to highlight.
Also, I'd love a way to highlight my contributions to popular open source projects on github that _aren't_ in my own repo, or a 'team' repo I belong to. For instance, I have, I think, 2 or 3 commits in Rails -- but you aren't going to find that out from looking at my github account, or from this resumé thing. I have yet to figure out _how_ to figure it out in fact!
It reminds me that I need to clean up my github account.
Unfortunately I use github for two separate functions -- putting up projects some other people may be interested in and for throwing up scratchpad projects. So I end up with a lot of garbage on my account.
The bulk of my really interesting stuff is in private accounts.
I've replaced almost all my scratch projects with gists using the `gist` command [1]. It's a nice utility because it authenticates as your GitHub account, and you can modify existing gists (which can contain 1 or more files) with the `--update` flag. Really works great for those one-off things.
Any employers looking to use this to seriously evaluate candidates -- you are wide open to having your analytics gamed by people looking to get their foot in the door. And commits are much easier to fake out and automate than degrees. :)
Kudos. This is a great start. As someone constantly on the look for great technical talent (as both an entrepreneur and investor), I am constantly looking for tools that help me source candidates in a credible way.
I have looked at several sites like this and using GitHub to query and then present is smart. Some suggestions:
1) Find a way to notify the user when their resume has been built. This could be a great distribution tactic.
2) Allow the user to reveal non-detailed summaries of their private repos. This is where the real power of a tool like this would come in. Allowing a generalized summary of the private repo's could lead to an "IMDB for programmers"
I would not want an employer to use this to evaluate me because it is called my "github resume" and somehow implies that it is my summary of my experiences, abilities, skills and potential.
You don't need to be an active github user to be a good developer (I am not even a good developer) and you should be able to present your resume as you deem fit.
Obviously if this allowed me to own my account and easily customize how my github works gets displayed I'd be more interested. Until then, this feels like pushing my github work through a meat grinder and evaluating the sausage instead of me.
Interesting but deriving anything from this one is near useless. For example, this completely fails to list any of my current open source project because I created them under my organizations name.
This doesn't include contributions to other people's repos, which makes it not so useful (and a bummer if someone tries to use it to summarize my GitHub work). I spend the majority of my time contributing to pydata/pandas, which doesn't show up at all. Bummer.
Unfortunately, this ignores forked repositories. The open source contributions I'm most proud of were to projects that I didn't start, so none of them are listed here.
I think that's probably by design. From the point of view of "project as CV items", most forked items have very little in the way of useful contribution to them - that doesn't defeat your point that some forks are very cool indeed.
You're probably right that most forks aren't very interesting - I wonder if it would be possible to parse out actual diffs made by the user on the fork. I've contributed a fair amount of code to BioPython, which is going to be impressive to people in my field. To contribute you work on your own fork and submit a pull request. Under this scheme a single person is getting credit for all the work of the BioPython developers on their own development forks that gets merged into the main repo (or maybe no one is getting credit, as the central repo is owned by an organization.)
It would be nice if it included gists, because I have some interesting non-trivial snippets on there that it doesn't make sense to put into a full repo on Github.
This is dumb. It merely duplicates the exact same information that is available front and center on everyone's GitHub profile to begin with, but in a worse format. Only idiot VCs would think this is cool or useful. Coincidentally, the creator of "GitHub Résumé" thinks Coin is a great idea and wants to invest: https://twitter.com/davidcoallier/status/401075383971627008
On the related note - if you need a solid looking offline resume and don't want to spend hours formatting it, check out Almagreta Resume Templates - set of 5 great looking Word templates with some cool features.
I sometimes feel very insecure when I read statements like this. I consider myself a good and a passionate programmer with "above-average programming skills", if there is such a thing. However, I have (so far) never been able to manage contributing to open source projects in any significant way. Sometimes I have been too busy with work projects, sometimes it has been a busy life at grad school, sometimes family, sometimes I have been plain shy, and so on. I have put together a bunch of great hacks at places I have worked, which sadly I cannot open source. But I see dozens of people whom I know who are naturally prolific in their oss contributions, manage to attract a high number of twitter followers, etc. and I wish I were more like them.
Do startups really look at github contributions as the ultimate measure of one's tech chops or are looking for people who go that extra bit and make time in their schedules for contributing back to the community?