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Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at portfolios of open source work rather

Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at portfolios of open source work rather than CV's. Every company I've worked for has requested a CV, and often does some form of test or in person interview centred around programming problems. The tests vary in quality and depth. I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a family, I value my free time. I spend work time growing my skill set as it's required, anything else I do is rarely related. I have a feeling that there's a silent majority of developers such as myself, that do enjoy programming and have a "passion" for it, but do not let this passion dissuade them from family time, or having more varied down time. I think for a lot of people it's a dangerous game to be spending every waking moment working for a company, then spending your down time scraping together stuff for open source contributions etc. I salute those that can and do though.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions. A small bug fix here or there is about the most I see from 90% of resumes. Every once in a while we see someone with a lot of open source contributions, or even full leadership of a popular project. These people would really prefer if we believed that OSS contributions and GitHub profiles replaced resumes or CVs, because it’s where they shine. Unfortunately, doing so would exclude many great hires who have done a lot of great work at private companies that doesn’t show up on their GitHub. We’ve also had trouble hiring prolific OSS contributors who spent their days working on OSS contributions instead of doing their job. One candidate wanted their contract to state that they could spend half of their paid time working on their OSS project. We passed. In my experience, anyone claiming to have a single dimension credential preference for hiring (usually GitHub portfolio, Ivy League education, ex-FAANG) is simply hiring for people who look like themselves. They’re not a good fit for unbiased hiring.
- notsuoh 5y ago
  Taking that a step further, we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who may be working full time or more. I say "often" because OSS contributions can still be an indicator of something, but it's not really clear what. Maybe it indicates drive to contribute to OSS, maybe technical ability, maybe no hobbies or commitments outside their day job. In our experience it's often the latter, but even so, it's biased against people who don't have the time to contribute even if they desired to do so. So we typically just stick with the resume for actual experience and college coursework, if any, but not the college itself. Using these heuristics we've managed to build a pretty strong pipeline of people with all backgrounds of education or experience.
  - Uberphallus 5y ago
    Thank you! When I was single I had a lot of free time to tinker and go through coding tests, etc, etc, and cater to whatever hiring shenanigans were in place. First marriage, then a kid, and I find myself grabbing my laptop after work maybe once a fortnight. I'm always "open for new challenges" and I regularly apply to positions in interesting (to me) projects, but more often than not, at some point in their process they gimme some "take home assignments" that are a literal week of unpaid work. I've heard of companies that pay for those assignments, but I've never stumbled upon one. I always drop out of that, thinking, "good luck with that particular choice of candidate sampling". I might not have been the best candidate, but most seniors I talk to are turned off by these things as well. Timed coding tests are fine, up to 2-3h, I can squeeze one of those in most weeks. But, and I'm not making it up, "implement this subset of the MQTT spec in your language of choice" as just a step in the hiring process? Hell nah.
    - austincheney 5y ago
      So I am married with kids and I have two separate careers in unrelated industries to balance, only one of which is full time though. Still I find time to spend with the wife and kids and I still contribute daily to open source. It is all about budgeting and balance. What are you willing to sacrifice. I don't have social time outside the family and I don't watch much television unless I am traveling away from the family. I balance open source against things like gardening and house maintenance but gardening and house maintenance only take so much time. The biggest killers to my open source contributions are general life soul sucking killers. For me the worst is long driving commutes to an office. I can feel my soul bleeding away.
      - notsuoh 5y ago
        That's wonderful! You sound like a very driven person to be able to do all of that. Of course, your experience and ability shouldn't be considered the norm with everyone or expected of anyone, especially because with finite time in the day and differing situations, we must strive to judge everyone on the same plane.
- VBprogrammer 5y ago
  I've seen a lot of candidates put their GitHub link in their CV. When I go to check it out its usually full of half completed Django tutorials.
  - teekert 5y ago
    Oh no you actually looked at it??!
- alkonaut 5y ago
  > On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions Do you mean it's rare to see someone hired, or rare to see someone in the hiring process? Because if it's the latter, that's exactly what I'd expect too. People with very significant and visible portfolios aren't sending their resumes because they don't have to.
- MrPowers 5y ago
  Companies should have different hiring processes for prolific open source code contributors and folks that don't do open source (presuming they want to hire both). There are plenty of amazing developers that don't to open source and are great employees. Other devs have extensive open source code. It doesn't make sense to give popular open source devs coding tests. Open their GitHub account, see their popular repos, see how they communicate on issues, etc. The most powerful teams I've worked on have a mix on OSS devs and folks that only do closed source work. Hiring both is the best from what I've seen.
- watwut 5y ago
  > One candidate wanted their contract to state that they could spend half of their paid time working on their OSS project. We passed. I like the dudes honesty. He would not be doing OSS while pretending he is working for you. He is also leaving himself time for other things. It seems to me like fair way of doing things. Company like yours passes and maybe another one will take it.
- ranit 5y ago
  > ... it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions Because these people rarely apply for a posted job opening.
- danmur 5y ago
  My favourites are people who have some personal projects (finished or not) to show. They're usually more interesting and telling than open source contributions, though I definitely respect that.
peruvian 5y ago
Same here in the US. Forums like HN and /r/cscareerquestions overrate how many people do OSS or care about it. I think maybe 5% of devs I've worked with do anything beyond the 9-5.
- Izkata 5y ago
  There's also a chunk of us in the middle, who don't do open source, but still learn and have our own projects outside of work hours.
- pydry 5y ago
  cscareerquestions is heavily weighted towards graduates fighting tooth and nail to secure a first job with companies that mostly view them as an undifferentiated commodity. There's way more supply than demand. It probably is a better way for graduates to differentiate themselves than experienced engineers.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  I never quite understood that advice. I've worked for multiple FAANGs and have no OSS or really any online presence tied to my name. Just practicing interview-like problems in an interview-like setting is a far more efficient use of time than doing random OSS work if the end goal is to get hired. Those companies really don't even look at your commits to their own codebase when they are considering promoting you - they aren't going to delve through your open source projects to hire you. Just do things like implement a heap or boyer-moore in pseudocode or python on pen and paper without referring to google.
rvense 5y ago
I can probably give the impression of a passionate developer because I'm self-taught and one of the things I like to do in my free time is write code. Still clock out at 5, though, and you can be sure I'm not going to put work Slack on my personal phone. My time is my time.
wpietri 5y ago
I'm hiring a few engineers right now. I agree that some companies exploit "passion", and that companies doing that tend to over-weight weight things in a way that encourages having no life. I think that's a mistake. That said, I do think some sort of "passion" is really useful. I've been coding a long time. I'm on something like my fifth major language. My first computer had 4K of RAM; now my phone has a million times that. I can't even count the number of business domains I've had to learn. I can't imagine people keeping up with the pace of change in our field without finding ways to love the work. In contrast, I've worked with people who learned enough to be employable and then just kinda stopped. I remember one guy, a great manager, who kept giving technical advice based on his Vax BASIC experience at least a decade past the point it was sensible to do so. Or programmers who had basically become fused with legacy systems, only employable until the old code was replaced. It's not impossible to make a career of out that, but it's risky. Especially given the release cadence of modern frameworks and tools, I think continuous learning is vital. And I think keeping up (or better, keeping up and getting ahead) is much easier to do if people really enjoy the hour-to-hour details of the work.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  I know exactly what you mean, people being proficient in some very specific legacy domain (Vax BASIC is a good example, another might be AS/400/IBM i by now). Often going above and beyond in their niche expertise. Though it's hard to get a full picture. Maybe past gigs or other circumstances have given them enough financial stability that they don't strictly need to work anymore. They then continue consulting out of passion for their particular niche, or somewhat opposite because they don't have any drive to learn anything else, but still don't want to retire completely. I feel like the people I have in mind there seem to be in a more good than bad situation. But I've also encountered the other category you're hinting at, people who are fused to a legacy system (i.e. a particular project at a particular company), not a technology in general. A few friends of mine do that, and they are much younger and much further away from feasible retirement than the aforementioned "gray beards". I sometimes do wonder about their prospects, but, again, no full insight.
  - wpietri 5y ago
ehnto 5y ago
In Australia, and I concur. No one expects you to have OSS contributions and it's enough to have work experience. Thank goodness. I didn't spend all these years working for it to be ignored in favour of a few hours a month patching people's shit for free. My work experience is also 9-5 week after week of solving real business problems, which can be messy and requires pragmatism. Just working on OSS doesn't prepare you for work, it's a great start, but OSS projects are often very clinical, perfectionist and academic. Work has messy business requirements, legacy code and the need to deliver good work in a timely manner. If I had to start as a new developer again, I would still just do pet projects, not OSS. You can be very targeted in your demonstration of skill with a pet project intended to get you a job.
908B64B197 5y ago
> I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a family, I value my free time. I spend work time growing my skill set as it's required, anything else I do is rarely related. Clearly you've never met devs that have no passion. They will actively refuse to learn new things and have absolutely no interest in doing so. If you look at other professions, growing skills and staying up do date is supposed to be done during working hours and is budgeted for. A lot of 10x I've met were parents and had a pretty strict schedule. Whatever time they had in the office was 100% dedicated to shipping results or growing and they had to be efficient at it because there was no way they would spend less time with their families.
jaaron 5y ago
I look to my art manager colleagues (I work in video games) with some envy, because their interview process is easier due to art candidates having portfolios. We just don't have that in the software industry, at least not portfolios that we can legally share or that other employers would trust, so we end up essentially torturing each other with coding tests. I don't think everyone having a portfolio of open source code is a reasonable ask, but the idea of portfolios, if we could create them, would bring some sanity to our industry's interview practices.
happy-go-lucky 5y ago
I have been a workaholic all my life and always worried sick about my job to the point of making my family feel neglected. We have all suffered together for years. I am good at what I do for a living, but I have been on tenterhooks all the time to see if my company will show me the door or close down, and now, since neither was ever the case in my roughly 20-year career, I don't know whether to laugh or cry! Currently, I am on a sabbatical to get things in perspective and mend my fences.
bartread 5y ago
> I have a feeling that there's a silent majority of developers such as myself, that do enjoy programming and have a "passion" for it, but do not let this passion dissuade them from family time, or having more varied down time. I think you're absolutely right. For me (he said, ironically, whilst responding to a post on Hacker News) it's just not that healthy to spend even more time sat in front of a computer programming away than I did at work. As it happens nowadays I don't spend that much time at work programming so this does tend to make me more inclined to do so outside of work. But everything has to be in balance: I have family, I have friends, I have other interests. I need to spend time with family, with friends, and pursuing those other interests, otherwise I start to go nuts. So no: I do not have a plethora of OSS contributions, nor will I ever have. My side projects aren't OSS and, at present, I have no intent to make them OSS. I'd need a motivation that I simply don't have in order to do that. Moreover my side projects are things that I find fun, that probably aren't very generally applicable, and that some would see as frivolous - but I deal with enough serious business at work. In any case the thought of entitled internet randos getting in touch to demand free support because I've written an OSS library, module, or tool that's accidentally become somewhat popular and is now included in other modules and is used by corporations around the world who make tons of money in some tiny part off the back of using it is deeply unappealing. Not that if you want to spend your free time on OSS there's anything wrong with it - far from it. If you love doing it then have at it and more power to you. But we need to dispense with the idea that this is for everyone any more than photography or collecting vinyl is for everyone.
jimbob45 5y ago
I’ve applied to hundreds of jobs and I can count on one hand the number of times my GitHub was looked at.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions. A small bug fix here or there is about the most I see from 90% of resumes. Every once in a while we see someone with a lot of open source contributions, or even full leadership of a popular project. These people would really prefer if we believed that OSS contributions and GitHub profiles replaced resumes or CVs, because it’s where they shine. Unfortunately, doing so would exclude many great hires who have done a lot of great work at private companies that doesn’t show up on their GitHub. We’ve also had trouble hiring prolific OSS contributors who spent their days working on OSS contributions instead of doing their job. One candidate wanted their contract to state that they could spend half of their paid time working on their OSS project. We passed. In my experience, anyone claiming to have a single dimension credential preference for hiring (usually GitHub portfolio, Ivy League education, ex-FAANG) is simply hiring for people who look like themselves. They’re not a good fit for unbiased hiring.

notsuoh 5y ago
Taking that a step further, we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who may be working full time or more. I say "often" because OSS contributions can still be an indicator of something, but it's not really clear what. Maybe it indicates drive to contribute to OSS, maybe technical ability, maybe no hobbies or commitments outside their day job. In our experience it's often the latter, but even so, it's biased against people who don't have the time to contribute even if they desired to do so. So we typically just stick with the resume for actual experience and college coursework, if any, but not the college itself. Using these heuristics we've managed to build a pretty strong pipeline of people with all backgrounds of education or experience.
- Uberphallus 5y ago
  Thank you! When I was single I had a lot of free time to tinker and go through coding tests, etc, etc, and cater to whatever hiring shenanigans were in place. First marriage, then a kid, and I find myself grabbing my laptop after work maybe once a fortnight. I'm always "open for new challenges" and I regularly apply to positions in interesting (to me) projects, but more often than not, at some point in their process they gimme some "take home assignments" that are a literal week of unpaid work. I've heard of companies that pay for those assignments, but I've never stumbled upon one. I always drop out of that, thinking, "good luck with that particular choice of candidate sampling". I might not have been the best candidate, but most seniors I talk to are turned off by these things as well. Timed coding tests are fine, up to 2-3h, I can squeeze one of those in most weeks. But, and I'm not making it up, "implement this subset of the MQTT spec in your language of choice" as just a step in the hiring process? Hell nah.
  - austincheney 5y ago
    So I am married with kids and I have two separate careers in unrelated industries to balance, only one of which is full time though. Still I find time to spend with the wife and kids and I still contribute daily to open source. It is all about budgeting and balance. What are you willing to sacrifice. I don't have social time outside the family and I don't watch much television unless I am traveling away from the family. I balance open source against things like gardening and house maintenance but gardening and house maintenance only take so much time. The biggest killers to my open source contributions are general life soul sucking killers. For me the worst is long driving commutes to an office. I can feel my soul bleeding away.
    - notsuoh 5y ago
      That's wonderful! You sound like a very driven person to be able to do all of that. Of course, your experience and ability shouldn't be considered the norm with everyone or expected of anyone, especially because with finite time in the day and differing situations, we must strive to judge everyone on the same plane.
VBprogrammer 5y ago
I've seen a lot of candidates put their GitHub link in their CV. When I go to check it out its usually full of half completed Django tutorials.
- teekert 5y ago
  Oh no you actually looked at it??!
alkonaut 5y ago
> On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions Do you mean it's rare to see someone hired, or rare to see someone in the hiring process? Because if it's the latter, that's exactly what I'd expect too. People with very significant and visible portfolios aren't sending their resumes because they don't have to.
MrPowers 5y ago
Companies should have different hiring processes for prolific open source code contributors and folks that don't do open source (presuming they want to hire both). There are plenty of amazing developers that don't to open source and are great employees. Other devs have extensive open source code. It doesn't make sense to give popular open source devs coding tests. Open their GitHub account, see their popular repos, see how they communicate on issues, etc. The most powerful teams I've worked on have a mix on OSS devs and folks that only do closed source work. Hiring both is the best from what I've seen.
watwut 5y ago
> One candidate wanted their contract to state that they could spend half of their paid time working on their OSS project. We passed. I like the dudes honesty. He would not be doing OSS while pretending he is working for you. He is also leaving himself time for other things. It seems to me like fair way of doing things. Company like yours passes and maybe another one will take it.
ranit 5y ago
> ... it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions Because these people rarely apply for a posted job opening.
danmur 5y ago
My favourites are people who have some personal projects (finished or not) to show. They're usually more interesting and telling than open source contributions, though I definitely respect that.

peruvian 5y ago

Same here in the US. Forums like HN and /r/cscareerquestions overrate how many people do OSS or care about it. I think maybe 5% of devs I've worked with do anything beyond the 9-5.

Izkata 5y ago
There's also a chunk of us in the middle, who don't do open source, but still learn and have our own projects outside of work hours.
pydry 5y ago
cscareerquestions is heavily weighted towards graduates fighting tooth and nail to secure a first job with companies that mostly view them as an undifferentiated commodity. There's way more supply than demand. It probably is a better way for graduates to differentiate themselves than experienced engineers.
oh_sigh 5y ago
I never quite understood that advice. I've worked for multiple FAANGs and have no OSS or really any online presence tied to my name. Just practicing interview-like problems in an interview-like setting is a far more efficient use of time than doing random OSS work if the end goal is to get hired. Those companies really don't even look at your commits to their own codebase when they are considering promoting you - they aren't going to delve through your open source projects to hire you. Just do things like implement a heap or boyer-moore in pseudocode or python on pen and paper without referring to google.

rvense 5y ago

I can probably give the impression of a passionate developer because I'm self-taught and one of the things I like to do in my free time is write code. Still clock out at 5, though, and you can be sure I'm not going to put work Slack on my personal phone. My time is my time.

wpietri 5y ago

I'm hiring a few engineers right now. I agree that some companies exploit "passion", and that companies doing that tend to over-weight weight things in a way that encourages having no life. I think that's a mistake. That said, I do think some sort of "passion" is really useful. I've been coding a long time. I'm on something like my fifth major language. My first computer had 4K of RAM; now my phone has a million times that. I can't even count the number of business domains I've had to learn. I can't imagine people keeping up with the pace of change in our field without finding ways to love the work. In contrast, I've worked with people who learned enough to be employable and then just kinda stopped. I remember one guy, a great manager, who kept giving technical advice based on his Vax BASIC experience at least a decade past the point it was sensible to do so. Or programmers who had basically become fused with legacy systems, only employable until the old code was replaced. It's not impossible to make a career of out that, but it's risky. Especially given the release cadence of modern frameworks and tools, I think continuous learning is vital. And I think keeping up (or better, keeping up and getting ahead) is much easier to do if people really enjoy the hour-to-hour details of the work.

anyfoo 5y ago
I know exactly what you mean, people being proficient in some very specific legacy domain (Vax BASIC is a good example, another might be AS/400/IBM i by now). Often going above and beyond in their niche expertise. Though it's hard to get a full picture. Maybe past gigs or other circumstances have given them enough financial stability that they don't strictly need to work anymore. They then continue consulting out of passion for their particular niche, or somewhat opposite because they don't have any drive to learn anything else, but still don't want to retire completely. I feel like the people I have in mind there seem to be in a more good than bad situation. But I've also encountered the other category you're hinting at, people who are fused to a legacy system (i.e. a particular project at a particular company), not a technology in general. A few friends of mine do that, and they are much younger and much further away from feasible retirement than the aforementioned "gray beards". I sometimes do wonder about their prospects, but, again, no full insight.
- wpietri 5y ago

ehnto 5y ago

In Australia, and I concur. No one expects you to have OSS contributions and it's enough to have work experience. Thank goodness. I didn't spend all these years working for it to be ignored in favour of a few hours a month patching people's shit for free. My work experience is also 9-5 week after week of solving real business problems, which can be messy and requires pragmatism. Just working on OSS doesn't prepare you for work, it's a great start, but OSS projects are often very clinical, perfectionist and academic. Work has messy business requirements, legacy code and the need to deliver good work in a timely manner. If I had to start as a new developer again, I would still just do pet projects, not OSS. You can be very targeted in your demonstration of skill with a pet project intended to get you a job.

908B64B197 5y ago

> I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a family, I value my free time. I spend work time growing my skill set as it's required, anything else I do is rarely related. Clearly you've never met devs that have no passion. They will actively refuse to learn new things and have absolutely no interest in doing so. If you look at other professions, growing skills and staying up do date is supposed to be done during working hours and is budgeted for. A lot of 10x I've met were parents and had a pretty strict schedule. Whatever time they had in the office was 100% dedicated to shipping results or growing and they had to be efficient at it because there was no way they would spend less time with their families.

jaaron 5y ago

I look to my art manager colleagues (I work in video games) with some envy, because their interview process is easier due to art candidates having portfolios. We just don't have that in the software industry, at least not portfolios that we can legally share or that other employers would trust, so we end up essentially torturing each other with coding tests. I don't think everyone having a portfolio of open source code is a reasonable ask, but the idea of portfolios, if we could create them, would bring some sanity to our industry's interview practices.

happy-go-lucky 5y ago

I have been a workaholic all my life and always worried sick about my job to the point of making my family feel neglected. We have all suffered together for years. I am good at what I do for a living, but I have been on tenterhooks all the time to see if my company will show me the door or close down, and now, since neither was ever the case in my roughly 20-year career, I don't know whether to laugh or cry! Currently, I am on a sabbatical to get things in perspective and mend my fences.

bartread 5y ago

> I have a feeling that there's a silent majority of developers such as myself, that do enjoy programming and have a "passion" for it, but do not let this passion dissuade them from family time, or having more varied down time. I think you're absolutely right. For me (he said, ironically, whilst responding to a post on Hacker News) it's just not that healthy to spend even more time sat in front of a computer programming away than I did at work. As it happens nowadays I don't spend that much time at work programming so this does tend to make me more inclined to do so outside of work. But everything has to be in balance: I have family, I have friends, I have other interests. I need to spend time with family, with friends, and pursuing those other interests, otherwise I start to go nuts. So no: I do not have a plethora of OSS contributions, nor will I ever have. My side projects aren't OSS and, at present, I have no intent to make them OSS. I'd need a motivation that I simply don't have in order to do that. Moreover my side projects are things that I find fun, that probably aren't very generally applicable, and that some would see as frivolous - but I deal with enough serious business at work. In any case the thought of entitled internet randos getting in touch to demand free support because I've written an OSS library, module, or tool that's accidentally become somewhat popular and is now included in other modules and is used by corporations around the world who make tons of money in some tiny part off the back of using it is deeply unappealing. Not that if you want to spend your free time on OSS there's anything wrong with it - far from it. If you love doing it then have at it and more power to you. But we need to dispense with the idea that this is for everyone any more than photography or collecting vinyl is for everyone.

jimbob45 5y ago

I’ve applied to hundreds of jobs and I can count on one hand the number of times my GitHub was looked at.