Sorry, but this would prevent most people who work for big corporations from 
ever getting hired.

It might work for smaller companies trying to sift through a bunch of 
applicants and they need a way to get a little more insight into their 
abilities.

I’ve always been amazed at the off-hours interestes of other devs where I’ve 
worked. They seem to go in one of two directions:

1) they spend time off-hours working on stuff they enjoy that’s unrelated to 
their job; or

2) they leave the programming at work and  prefer spending time on totally 
different things.

I’ve met a few folks who like plaing with open-source projects, but none of 
them ever said they thought it made a difference in terms of getting a job. 

Keep in mind, these are big engineering companies, not small shops that do 
things like build websites. Graphic artists have “portfolios”. Programmers have 
“knowledge”. Code embodies knowledge, but doesn’t always reflect it. Most of 
what you’ll see is how the organize their code, what their coding style might 
be like, what they comment and don’t comment, and if you’re good enough to 
recognize different design patterns in the code then you can get some idea of 
how they think. If you run the software, maybe you can see their UI skills.

However, the chances of what you’re looking at having any relevance to the job 
at hand is not very good, based on my experience on both sides of the hiring 
fence.

Reading code is a slow tedious process that leaves more questions than answers. 
I want to know how you think and solve problems. 

I was working at a place as a contractor and we had to hire four more people on 
the team. Someone arranged for a headhunter, and he showed up one day with an 
18” pile of resumes. After about the first dozen or so they all started to look 
the same. The two other colleagues working with me bugged off and refused to 
waste their time. What do you do in that case?

We decided to write up a short questionaire with four questions that gave us a 
lot of insight into their understanding of some problems we were dealing with 
in our code. We had the headhunter send it out and asked them to answer to the 
best of their ability and return it. (Only about half did, which was really 
helpful.) We weren’t looking for anybody to answer all four like it was a 
Master’s Thesis. We just wanted to filter out those who had such a limited 
knowledge of what we were doing that we didn’t have to even waste our time 
interviewing them. From that perspective, looking at code on github is far more 
time-intensive than scanning a resume and four more detailed tech questions 
that applied very closely to our project.

If someone at a prospective employer has time to waste going through my github 
code looking to be impressed, I don’t want to work there because their 
priorities are messed-up. I can get what I need just talking with you. 

-David Schwartz




> On Dec 1, 2022, at 9:46 AM, Stephen Partington via PLUG-discuss 
> <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
> 
> I will be brutally honest. When I review what someone has done the resume is 
> less impressive than the work done when it comes to software.
> 
> Anything you can opensource and share with the public do so. make a website 
> that is based on the same domain as the same email you submit resume's on. 
> link any working demos you may have. link your projects via git so they can 
> look at what you make.
> 
> Keep a project journal someplace and make that available.
> 
> You can be the best dev in the world. but unless you can show off what you do 
> nobody will have an idea.
> 
> Resume's are for headhunters mostly. they look for buzzwords and consistent 
> work. as well as references.
> 
> 

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