When I've had time to prepare, I've taken the time to review candidates' GitHub repositories, and it has surely helped to really understand what "open source experience" means vs "coding camp attendee". It's fun to ask about a particular class or set of files and ask the candidate to teach me something about the project. It shows we care, and also helps me tease apart a candidate's communication abilities.

As a software engineer who does technical interviews, I also regularly review GitHub contributions if mentioned on the resume. It's not a deal killer if someone doesn't have these things...but if you're up against another candidate who does (and their work is good)...then the other candidate is likely getting the job.

When I hired people, I looked around on the internet for people with public work (whether side projects, university homework, open source development, essays, whatever), I scrutinized all of it, and then I talked to the people about those things.

Because I myself feel that this is such a good and reasonable way of hiring people, I wouldn't want to work for an employer that wouldn't let me do open source work.

I mean, it's also because I consider open source to be the public sphere, and I really do believe in software freedom. Maybe my professional metaphor would be the coder as a writer. Of course I want to see your published work.

What % of candidates have side projects to show you? When I did interviews, I saw probably less than 10% have any side projects to show.

I work in consulting, almost entirely for federal and state government. Here that number is low single digits.

This is what I think most people fail to understand. It's not a _requirement_. The vast majority of people DON'T have side projects. Companies can't afford to simply auto-reject everyone who doesn't have side projects. The point is that if you do have any, it can help make you stand out dramatically.

That's a surprising number. Did you interview mostly recent grads?

Not surprising at all. None of my colleagues have anything public. If that's not your thing I struggle to understand why should you.

And most of my work mates have public open source code.

I would guess the environment candidates are selected from influences these numbers significantly.

And you're right, I'd understand that in some of these environments, OSS isn't necessarily considered fun or relevant.

Then again it's all speculation.

> except for the bootcamp grads who all have identical Githubs

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by this? What sorts of things do they all have in common?

From my experience (of talking to bootcamp applicants), bootcamps are not so much about learning how to code, but rather how to get an entry-level job. At first glance of somebody's Github, it will look like they have lots of open-source projects and collaborate with other people. But this is just part of the bootcamp "script".

Bingo! Bootcamps are basically multiple month training sessions for interviews. Princeton Review for dev jobs.

Regardless, I actually think this paradigm works for entry level jobs at most companies. You don't have to know anything for your first year in most cases. You just have to be able to show up and follow instructions.

Basic Angular project. No contributions. Poor code. CS 101-style projects.

How deep of a reading is your reading of the profile though?

hope you guys realize there's more to opensource than github..

show me freebsd or linux kernel contribution on github, for example

Here you go: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/692b48258dda7c302e7...

I do understand what you're saying though but I don't think people are going to just search Github for your name on the off-chance that you're on there, I suspect that what most people do is look at the things that you've specifically mentioned in your CV.

Searching Github for your name can backfire. My name is not very common, but there are 2 people on Github that have it and I'm not one of them. I do have a huge body of stuff on StackOverflow though.