Comment by Ben Buchanan (200ok) on "Github profile for hiring?"

Ben Buchanan (200ok)

I make some bits of the web.

Jun 11, 2018

Your github profile is no more or less than an indicator of your activity on github.

The problem is when people take the absence of github activity as absence of activity or experience. It's an intensely narrow view of what "good coders" look like.

Github profiles are misleading for...

people who use other services like Bitbucket and Gitlab
people who split their work across multiple Github accounts
people who code outside work but don't store it in a public DVCS
people who work on closed-source code
people contractually prevented from working on open source code
people with commitments that take up their time outside hours (eg. family/kids)
people who can't afford to give away their time (eg. they may be doing freelance on the side for extra income)
people who need to protect their identity (or prefer to keep their professional and open source identities separate)
people who have hobbies other than coding (I mean, how dare people be well-rounded? ;))
people who have worked on open source in the past and stopped now
people who don't meet all the conditions required for activity to show on a github profile

From my perspective as a hiring manager, a github profile is a crapshoot. If they have very little activity I pretty much just move on to other sources of info (ie. it doesn't really help or hinder); if they have heaps of activity it creates its own challenges:

Which of these projects best represents the person's current coding style?
Which ones did they write from scratch, as opposed to contribute a three line fix?
Commits to private repos are recorded but don't reveal anything
...and so on

You can work it all out but it is really time-consuming to build a good picture of what's actually going on behind that strip of green squares. One thing I can guarantee - hiring managers are time poor (by definition their team needs more people), so if you want the job you really want to make it easier not harder on them.

Unless someone is showing absolutely rockstar levels of gh activity, it's unlikely starting with gh is the most effective way to evaluate them as a candidate.

So when I'm hiring it's not a disadvantage if you don't have a github profile; it's not automatically an advantage to have one; mostly I'm going to use it to work out questions I'm going to ask you when I talk to you.

Mark

Jun 11, 2018

I think it's a good approach to look at it but not disqualify applicants who don't show a Github profile.

Interesting insight about the time-consumption. I had always heard that the recruitment process costs thousands of euros per candidate, and had assumed the problem was the difficulty of evaluating people with little information, but I guess people's time is probably a big driver of costs.

To nitpick: people should probably send their bitbucket if they use that instead of github, indicate some specific repository, and configure their profile correctly. And preferring people who code in their spare time over people who don't because of hobbies or family seems, although mean, a valid business consideration.

When people talk about recruiting costing thousands they probably mostly mean recruiter's fees, which are usually around 15-20% of the new person's annual salary (where I've recruited, at least). If you're not paying a recruiter; there's the cost of however you are advertising and promoting your company ("employer brand" is the usual term I've heard for that).

The time cost of hiring definitely adds a lot though, particularly if you're dealing with a recruiter who is in the habit of sending a dozen applications and leaving it to the client to filter them (ie. the average recruiter).

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