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Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

That does not work.

After several years of hard work a prior open source project that grew to immense popularity got me employment a few times. It wasn’t the actual project, code, or capabilities that meant anything. The only thing appealing about that project was it’s popularity.

Nobody ever looked at the code, except people interested in submitting pull requests. If you think a prospective employer will take the time to analyze the code you are either applying for an exceptional specialized position or completely mistaken.

Work on open source because you like to solve tough problems, want to grow as a developer, or because you just want to build some interesting product. Don’t kid yourself into thinking the code will immediately solve some business interest.

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A part of my job is to review CVs and select candidates to interview for my team. The first thing I do is check to see if they have a github account, and if they do I check their projects. Anything that looks relevant gets a quick inspection. It makes difference to whether they get an interview, and it makes for some topics of discussion during the interview. It confirms for me that the candidate is in fact actually interested in the field, and shows be the porential quality of their work.

If you think nobody ever looks at your public code, you're wrong. It's just like wearing a bathing suit at the beach or pool: people look.

Perhaps it’s because I write JavaScript. Interviews in JavaScript, at least this year, are leet code for backend and strangely the Node API never seems to come up. The front end is islands of declarative logic in React. That’s it.

GitHub and LinkedIn profiles only serve to reinforce the job experience printed on the resume.

I think it's great that you do this, but I agree with the parent that it's rare.

Speaking as someone who has the same thing on their job duties — yeah. Same here.

This is part of what's broken. If your users aren't examining your code, then they're vulnerable to supply-chain attacks from it.

Well that's precisely how it works, why would you expect an employer to review your code for free?

Instead they'll just look at whether you contributed to big projects.

Someone who managed to make significant contributions to Linux or LLVM for example might be better than the average joe.

> Someone who managed to make significant contributions to Linux or LLVM for example might be better than the average joe.

which leads to people who want to use this mechanism to claim credit in projects they don't actually have contributions in, and because the employer doesn't actually look at the code, they cannot tell.

I recall a while ago where someone would contribute a skeleton README or some random typo fixes to many different project, and using that to make their claim to fame.

So i reject the idea that employers should use open source contributions as a metric without closely examining what those contributions are.

There will always be people that lie or embelish what they did. One of the big reasons for technical interviews is to assess how much of what the candidate claims is true.

> Someone who managed to make significant contributions to Linux or LLVM for example might be better than the average joe.

Specifically, may be better at navigating the politics of organisations. Which is a key skill at many employers - likely equal to or more important than technical skill as one ascends through the ranks.

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