It's also worth noting that many companies have policies against open-source contributions, the use of public forums (like stackoverflow), and so forth. This is obviously more common in big tech as opposed to startups. I know employees in those corps that love coding and do that stuff in their spare time - but because of the policies they do it under a screen name and certainly don't mention it in their resumes, etc.

In some of those corps there actually is a "dont ask dont tell" kind of policy around personal projects/blog posts/oss contributions/etc. as the company forbids them unless you have special approval. However on the flip side managers know that the people with those projects and experiences often have a stronger drive than those simply treating coding as a 9-5 job.

I also know of cases where the interviewers were very impressed by the candidate's Github repo/oss contributions but stated that the candidate would have to stop working on that stuff after being hired. I know people who upon graduation seperated their projects for this purpose, continuing some under a screen name and having other less important ones for resume purpose knowing that they may not be able to continue working on them under that name in the future.

Worth noting, yes. But it's also not unreasonable to prefer candidates that avoid such environments.

I actually did not know that was a thing, and I’ve been working in startups for over a decade now. I’ve never worked in big tech though, so maybe it’s common there. If a company told me I couldn’t work on side projects without approval, I’d tell them to fuck off.

>> I’d tell them to fuck off.

I just tell them "this is something I do" and if that's a problem "I'm not giving that up". Leave it to them to end the interview, no need to get an attitude.

I understand the anger from the ancestor post... that this is "standard practice" in the purported "land of the free" is just fucked.

but you do give a classier way to handle it which does leave the off chance that they'd make an 'exception' for some "special" candidate, still I wouldn't like to work in a place like that.

lol I’m not being literal. I couldn’t imagine ever telling an employer literally to fuck off. But I’d decline any job offer that came with that string attached. No amount of money is worth the freedom to do what I want with my own time.

Sweeping assignment of all copyright—including for things done off-hours—to your employer are common features of employment contracts in the US, which means no open source work without requesting an exception. This is true even in many startups. Absence of that kind of provision is seen as risky by investors or acquiring companies, who fear current or past employees will try to claim parts of the company's IP as their own.

Most are chill about adding exceptions (they don't actually want to claim copyright to that children's book you're writing in your free time) though. Still, sucks and probably ought to be illegal.

As the article says, they’re looking for reasons to say “yes”, not reasons to say “no”.

If you say you don’t have any open source contributions due to company policy, that’s not a bad thing, it’s a demonstration that you respect the policy.

Totally agree. This all sounds like a impressive sounding bullshit.

> well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos

Same. I've been in the industry for nearly 25 years and have written hundreds of thousands of lines of code and tens of thousands of sql queries, but I can't share any of it.

If you want to play the game: https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history

If I am considering a candidate enough to look at their GitHub, I will actually look at the content.

If someone was actually trying to pass this off as relevant work, I’d disqualify them for being dishonest. They’d be 1000x better off by having no GitHub history.

Not if it's in a private repo... you won't be looking at anything. Are you going to outright reject a candidate because you can't see contributions to their current employers private org/repo? I believe this is the point the poster is trying to drive home. You can't see their contributions because they're private.

If you commit only to private repos then you shouldn’t be linking to your GitHub, as this article also says.

Resumes are for communication. Communicate! Tell the reader what you do, and demonstrate it as much as you can. Everyone knows that private repos are a thing, that’s okay. This can be articulated.

I've never linked to my GitHub, yet it sometimes still comes up in interviews.

The article says verbatim "Don’t include a link to your GitHub link if it’s empty." yet you're giving 1000x (your words) credence to an empty profile versus someone working privately. Private contributions show up on the graph, you just can't see the content of the commit. So it's not empty and to your point it can be articulated. Sounds like you just want to see some examples of work, just ask for that, but that's not a resume.

“A commit graph and nothing else” is approximately equivalent to empty as far as I am concerned. If I clicked such a link on a resume, I’d say “wtf am I supposed to be looking at here?” If your repos are private, just tell me they’re private.

It is well known that many engineers can’t share their work. It isn’t a requirement. But if you do share your GitHub, make sure it adds value to your resume and doesn’t detract from it.

>doesn’t detract from it

I don't know if that's truly obvious from a candidate's POV, especially if they don't know the person reviewing their stuff

My Github has projects I have worked on in the past. Most of them are stable and don't need anything more than a few npm dependency updates a year. Linking to it to see these projects is useful to the kind of company that wants to see some small things I've built. If fake contributions to a private repo will tick a box somewhere, so be it.

> If fake contributions to a private repo will tick a box somewhere, so be it.

In what scenario does it? I am suggesting that such a scenario does not exist.

There are three types of people who might read your resume:

* people who are technical and will look at your code. (Likely, the author is in this camp)

* people who are technical and don’t have the time to click on your GitHub link

* people who don’t know what a commit is

The scenario is the author of this blogpost, who apparently wants to see that I'm dedicated enough to write code every day. I am, but it's for my employer, not the public. I'm not going to go home and waste even more hours of my life in front of a keyboard to prove that I'm doing something I already am.

I am sure the author is aware that not all software is public. I think the authors point is that you should find the best way to demonstrate your dedication, not that you have to do it in any one particular way.

If employers use stupid metrics, they get stupid data. Making a Github account look active is exactly as honest (in some ways more) as saying with a straight face that I'm passionate about <boring sector served by company's product>, and that's been required for decades.

Yeah, that attitude is plenty enough to get you a job at a megacorp looking for a good-enough coder to fill a position.

But early stage startups, as mentioned in this article, don’t really work that way. You’ll be working closely with people who are enthusiastic enough about the company to make major sacrifices to be there, and they will want to work with people who feel the same way whenever possible. You’ll be interviewing with these people, they will be senior, and they’ll recognize feigned enthusiasm.

If it's in a private repo, there's no point. Your GitHub stats exclude private repos when viewed by anyone besides you.

You can set it so it shows contribution stats from private repos. Also companies with healthy attitudes to devs can allow their enterprise GitHub instance to transfer contribution stats to dev’s personal GitHub accounts.

^this

> How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it

Which would bring us to another favorite Hacker News topic, i.e. venting about how tech interviews are terrible, and why don't interviewers just look at the candidate's resume and projects instead :-)

And that's fine. I think there's confusion that every SWE can work at every company. Every place has bias in their hiring. It's literally the point of screening candidates. This place chooses to bias against folks who just want to code at work and want to use a traditional resume. Makes sense when every hire can make or break your company and you don't have the resources to put someone through a multi-month boot camp before letting them touch the code base.

When every hire can make or break your company, then you are looking at this from a very wrong perspective. In that case you should be hiring in network, candidates you know, or are vetted by people you trust. Or hire people on contract and convert them to full time. Or work with trusted vendors in the field who can source great candidates.

Not every SWE can work at every company, that is pretty much true. But creating arbitrary “signals” to figure out who will be a great fit will doom your company with a very specific type of people, which is not what you want when every candidate can make or break your company.

To be fair, they explicitly say that github/so/etc is optional:

We understand that not everyone has time to contribute to public discourse, so #2 is optional.

Making something optional on an application is a waste of everyone's time.

If it is optional, and it doesn't have bearing on the application process, then don't ask me to include it.

If it is optional, but it does have bearing on the application process, then I assume that I'm not a good fit for you.

If it is optional, and it officially doesn't have bearing, your screeners and interviewers may still have an internal bias that favors applications which "go the extra step" to do the optional work. Even if they don't, I'm going to assume that they do and that we're all wasting everyone's time in asking me to apply.

Disagree. There can be multiple optional things, where nobody is expected to have all of them, but everybody should have some of them.

It’s a way to expand the pool. Startups especially need a lot of diversity of skills, so rather than specifying the one ideal set of skills/experiences, it’s better to be open to a wider range and then use what you’ve gained from this hire to inform what you need in the next.

Rigid checkbox criteria makes sense in dinosaur companies, but not small ones.

They're literally flagging one "sanctioned" way to provide signal as an example in a resume advice post--how is that a waste of time? This lets people infer what other types of "optional" content might provide signal: publications, blog posts, etc. Transparency in the application process is fantastic and it's wild to me that people are upset about a company posting some ways that applicants can make themselves stand out. This is order of magnitudes better than VC, finance, etc.

This. Companies just like to make candidates go that extra mile to finally not even look at their resume. Job listings where they already are interviewing candidates or have hired one are still up. Imagine how much time is wasted with frivolous optional questions.

How interesting. The first two assertions would imply that you model candidate fit as a pure product of the dimensions you have. i.e. if any of the dimensions are absent then the candidate isn't a fit.

Well, the difference is that my candidate fit model is not a pure product. It has some sums in it. Your teammates at my org will be people like that.

My interpretation of "optional" is note: if someone else checks the box, you are doomed.

Slightly disagree, they're just providing one potential way to signal experience. I'm sure there are other ways not listed (firth author publications from tier 1 conferences or journals) that are more valuable. I think you're right that this could be used as a tie-breaker, all other things being equal.

Yeah, those bullets are really low point. A lot of off-guide in consideration going on (tbh, lots of bullshit)

> Well too bad that I don’t want to work opensource or use stack overflow (I don’t for work because we have our own internal one for years)

Then communicate that. The point in the article is just to demonstrate that you deliver consistently. If you have meaningful contributions to an internal system, tell me about it.

> whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000 employee company is probably not going to be enough for you.

Working at a large company is definitely different than working at a small company. The breadth and depth of the job responsibilities will be different.

That’s okay. Not every job is for everyone.

> How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it

What do you mean by “check”?

Resumes are a place for the candidate to tell me about themselves, they’re not some sort of background investigation. I presume they are honest unless the candidate gives me a reason otherwise. And if the candidate gives me a reason to believe they’re not honest, I’m not wasting any time sleuthing about their background — they’re disqualified.

Sometimes I wonder sales people trying to sell vs applicants chasing interview, whose job is more soul-crushing.

I don’t think they were suggesting you have to do all of those things, but rather that those things are examples of resume content that demonstrates what they’re looking for.

Also, I've heard a lot of people asking for github, so I made one. Recruiters all say "oh very nice" and no one reads a line. ever.

Well said.

Also, for professionals who have a life besides coding and work, they might prefer spending their time with family, kids etc.

I spend my entire day at work in front of a screen coding, writing documents, meetings etc … the last thing I wanna do in my non existent spare time is to spend more time indoor in front of screen working on side/open-source projects and stack overflow.

You might use that as metric for junior/fresh out of college, but definitely not for experienced professionals.

It would not work for me and I have built tons of staff.

They're not looking for experienced professionals. They're looking for cheap, young, enthusiastic laborers with no lives.

I would love to work on a company that allows time to contribute to opensource or answering questions on SO. 15 hours a day sounds like modern slavery.

I can see valuing some clearly passion driven extracurricular activity. Like if someone is a top SO contributor, that's cool. Or if they're part of a big open source project. Or also if they volunteer at a soup kitchen or charity. Stuff like that may be worth including on your cv to show what your interests are. I wouldn't weight it much differently than anything on the hobbies section, but it's still cool.

Personally I'd be wary of hiring someone who had done just the right amount of all this stuff, and who appeared to be soulessly gaming metrics instead of actually being interested in stuff. Otoh, there are jobs and work environments that fit well for that kind of person, and screenings that optimize to make sure that's what they get. It's just as important for people that aren't that way to not get accidentally stuck in such an environment. Like a "17 pieces of flare is only the minimum" kind of vibe

Startups tend to be shockingly ignorant of the culture at larger companies (or non-startups in general), and personally I find it a bit of a red flag when it seems like nobody at a startup has worked for a real business before. It's great to have fresh takes, but there should be a few people on the team who also know how normal companies operate.

I remember interviewing for a startup that sounded pretty promising. The interview was going well and then I was asked for a presentation. I told them that I was more than happy to present on personal projects (of which I had plenty) but was not comfortable sharing details of work related projects while not explicitly representing that company.

They basically said "too bad" and where shocked that I cancelled the rest of the interview. I've worked at plenty of a companies in the past where being willing to share other companies' internal work would be the red flag, and turning down such a request would be seen as a good sign.

> I would actually not apply to this company.

Sadly that was the same impression I've had, and this is from someone who has been following the author's writing for awhile. Especially in the current economic environment.

A lot of companies are very uptight about external presentations without explicit approval. This is mostly about conferences and the the like but a private presentation to a competitor might well be looked at even less favorably.

I think the advice she has is mostly pretty spot-on for recent graduates looking for ML Engineer jobs, and I think her advice is consistent with what I was mostly looking for when I was a hiring manager for non-senior roles.

That said, I agree that the advice is much less helpful for anyone who has significant industry experience as an ML engineer.

>Regular contibutions to personal GitHub for a year,

But what you quoted is not what she wrote. What she wrote was

  Some signals of persistence that I’ve seen:
  * Daily contribution to GitHub for one whole year.
  * Being good at anything that requires consistent effort, 
    e.g. a Kaggle master, a chess master, a professional athlete, etc.
  * Having previously joined another early startup before and stuck around.

I get that the idea here is to look for positive signal but for someone talking about daily github contributions her own https://github.com/chiphuyen?tab=repositories falls a bit short. Not a good look.

No one really knows how to hire so they chuck in random filters that sound good.

That said I get the impression overall that the OP preponders each CV and tries to evaluate it on its merits. Small companies can’t afford to turn good people away because of silly reasons like you haven’t produced code on an open license and uploaded it to Azure.

Impact is about understanding the impact. Which talks to then getting jobs where you can write a good story about them after. Which you might do. I don’t. I optimise for joy and teamwork so I take the hit in bragging rights. However there is usually a story to tell of how you helped the company be better.

All this said I am curious if the “no cv” approach of fly.io will catch on. They have an interesting sounding application process.

Don’t worry, pretty clear from this comment you’d be a terrible match for an early stage startup.

I don't think it should all be taken that literally. It's not about literally using GitHub or stackoverflow but about having anything demonstrable, even if it's just words on paper about what you did in your role and not a link to something public.

If you can't show anything, you're a tough sell no matter where you apply, and that's not meant meanly but it's the problem literally everyone has when looking to get their first serious job without having done side projects or other demonstrable things in the past. You might be offered an entry level position if they don't simply take your word for it or have tests available to assess claimed skills. (On the other hand, a friend once took a test for a job, like hacking some application for a security consultant position, did very well at it, better apparently than someone who joined a month earlier and gets a principal consultant title and salary, but my friend was given a junior position... YMMV how much they care about tests if you can talk the talk and are of the age to get grey or bald.)

Oh they literally want code on github. And that’s a hard no for me and should be for most.

I don’t play these games. I don’t take tests, I don’t have public repos, and I’m not going to change that.

Why? Because these tests are arbitrary, faulty, and highly based in subjectivity. They are costly to me both in time and mental health.

Back when I was fresh and did them, I found that I always ended up starting a new job with a bad attitude. Well duh, it’s abusive to make a person stand in front of others and have them evaluate their worth live. It’s abusive to ask someone to work for you for free so that they can see if they like you.

It’s a terrible cycle and it shouldn’t be justified or normalized.

There are plenty of people out there who want to hire you without coming up with idiotic games for you to have to play. Seek them out.