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Comment by martijn_himself | Hacker News Reader

I agree reality is probably more subtle that this, but I do feel that there is too much emphasis on public repositories in application processes.

It's probably more common for recent graduates to have public repositories than for the majority of senior devs. Then again I'm sure there are other pressures graduates have to deal with that senior devs don't.

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I don't know what kind of emphasis you've seen, but being able to look at a public example of code a person has written is IMO the single biggest risk reducer available to a company hiring developers (well, other than actually having worked directly with the person before, which is an order of magnitude or two less common) because it gives me a picture of performance on real world software. Hiring is substantially about risk reduction because there's a huge amount of stuff you don't know about how the candidate will do. It would be foolish for companies to not take advantage of this potential source of signal. If it's not available, then I would proceed with my normal assessment process. Lack of public code isn't going to disqualify a candidate, but it does help to increase my confidence.

I suppose that is fair enough, and I don't think there is anything wrong with it being one of the ways in which companies assess potential candidates.

From my recent experience (and anecdotal evidence) it seemed it was becoming a deal breaker for companies but maybe I reached that conclusion too quickly.

Ive been in the game a while now , almost 18 years - 7 as a dev, and still get asked by recruiters generally within the first or second question if i have a github profile. Nope, I moved to BitBucket. Recruiter: never heard of it, what's that?

It'd be nice if tech recruiters actually had a background in tech.

Too much emphasis? Most recent graduates don't even have a GitHub profile. They get jobs because they graduated. It's totally fine. If you did not graduate, you better have some projects to show though.

That's interesting. For companies I have approached recently it was the first question they asked. Maybe it depends on the kind of company (for me it was mainly start-ups).

Github full of passion projects is mutually exclusive with previous jobs being fast paced and/or requiring long hours - like startups.

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