Re:On asking job candidates to code
by pyb on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @12:06PM
(#11290644)
Same here, companies don't ever look at my Github code.
I built up a portfolio partly in the hope to make future interviews easier, but it hasn't worked at all!
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I have like 3 projects with > 1000 stars and they are used in production by atleast couple of people.
But, noone gives a shit about that they would rather have me reversing a binary tree on a whiteboard.
I remember reading that comment about Google... even though a ton of people at Google use Homebrew. The question is, what would would you be writing at Google? Would you be reversing binary trees? Would you need to instantly know which sorting algorithm would be most efficient at the drop of a hat? or would you be building more tools like you already have. The one thing that isn't immediately clear from your GitHub is if YOU wrote the code and HOW you wrote the code. I'm not defending worthless practices like asking you all kinds of CS riddles that the interviewer doesn't even remember... but I am saying that there are reasons to test your ability to reason through a legitimate problem. Because of this, I am a huge fan of this style of interviewing: "We have a problem... tell us how you might approach solving this. What resources would you use? Why?"
"The one thing that isn't immediately clear from your GitHub is if YOU wrote the code and HOW you wrote the code."
Spend a few minutes looking at the commit history and all shall be revealed...
History shows when you forked from somewhere, not copypasta.
If you can copypasta a complex project with >dozens of active users and a commit history showing that you've made improvements to it over time, I'd argue that it's hard / pointless to distinguish that from actual programming. If you can ship working code, support it over time, and enough people appreciate what you've created to use it regularly / rely on it, why does it matter if some parts are even verbatim copied from SO or elsewhere? Thought experiment: compare this to using a library someone else wrote.
That "github is the new resume" meme a few years ago was quite funny, in retrospect. People panicking that they'd never be able to get another job, as they didn't have free time to code at the weekend...