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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

If you have just graduated University then it's likely that the only code samples you have will be from that and universities are known to enforce one particular style of notation which may or may not be what is used in industry.

I imagine that the number of university students who contribute anything meaningful to open source apps in addition to their studies is very small. This might be the small number of people he is interested in recruiting but being pissed off because every CV you get in isn't like that seems strange.

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Contributing to open source while in University has major benefits:

1) skill development through practice and peer review 2) skill development through exposure to "real world" problems rather than the toy problems of school 3) portfolio development for job hunting 4) network building for job hunting

If you're in University, you should be working on open source projects for these reasons and others. I suspect the article author is trying to help spread this meme. Open source contributors really do have a major advantage over their peers, but many students do not realise this.

Others don't know how to start, but that's a different problem.

Besides, open source is fun, and you probably have way more time and resources during University than you will later in life.

I agree that contributing to open source is a good way to learn many development skills, however:

Besides, open source is fun, and you probably have way more time and resources during University than you will later in life.

Not necessarily, if you are doing CS at a top university and aiming to attain the highest possible grades this requires a huge investment of time and effort to most people.

Also it is not like a 9-5 where you can 'clock off' there is always an uncertain feeling of 'if I put another hour into this , then that might just bump me up an extra grade'

Not to mention that if you just started programming at university your code is probably going to suck pretty hard for the first 2 years at least, to the point where no serious open source project is going to want your patches.

Ultimately if Universities believed that this was important to job prospects in the industry as a whole they would make open source contributions a required part of the curriculum.

"Not necessarily, if you are doing CS at a top university and aiming to attain the highest possible grades this requires a huge investment of time and effort to most people."

I would argue that you're better off with a B and a full portfolio than an A and an empty one. It depends on where you are applying, though.

"Also it is not like a 9-5 where you can 'clock off'"

Until you have kids.

"no serious open source project is going to want your patches."

That's not necessarily true. Often either your patches are small and trivial and can be accepted or they are large and useful enough that the other developers will provide feedback. This feedback is often more useful to the student than just getting the patch accepted.

And nobody can reject your patches if it's your own project you're building.

Most students aren't aware that a "B" and a greater portfolio is better.

Additionally, that is contextual. From my understanding Google would prefer the A. So a "B" with a "look at this side project" might get you iced against another candidate.

The pressure that students will get from professors and parents will be to prioritize academic work above all other activities.

Also the majority of "good" tech jobs in the UK usually have a minimum degree requirement of a 2:1 (the majority of students achieve a 2:2) and will just bin anything that doesn't match that.

There is a fundamental choice that the industry really needs to make as a whole here. When you compare CS to a degree in (say) photography, a large component of a photography degree will be to build up a portfolio to show off whereas this is not a priority in CS.

If employers shout loudly enough that they want to see students who have produced real code for real projects then universities can adapt to that. Otherwise there is a very confused message being sent "We want people with an excellent academic record, a big git log of OSS commits, oh and they should also be well rounded with excellent interpersonal skills" , there are no doubt a few people like that but good luck to the companies all competing to hire them.

>If you have just graduated University then it's likely that the only code samples you have will be from that

And that's why a university degree is almost meaningless. I had code samples I could have sent a prospective employer before I even started college. If you went all the way through getting a CS degree and never wrote a line of code for fun on your own time, I think that's a perfectly legitimate reason to reject your job application.

What you are really saying here is that you are mainly interested in people who started coding before attending university.

This is contrary to the view of most universities who are desperate to get people into the CS program who are not stereotypical 'geeks'. Perhaps the message they should be sending is 'if you haven't been coding for at least 3 years off your own back, don't apply for CS'.

I'm not even sure that this idea is completely true, I know plenty of people who attended top UK universities for CS and the overwhelming majority of them didn't write OSS code while at university, it didn't seem to hurt their development skills too much though.

In fact I'd wager that there are plenty of people doing cool things at google/MS/Apple etc who never wrote OSS code in their lives.

Personally I hacked around on a few things while at university, but pretty much every few months I would look back on the code I had written prior and realise what a pile of junk it was. I didn't shed a tear when the disk it was all stored on died.

Not OSS code, but at least some pet projects?

You might have some pet projects but I'm not sure if that really proves anything.

For example I built PHP websites when I was at university but I would never show any of the code from those as a representation of the output I was capable of. Most of the programming work was very trivial (for example a form that sends an email) and the code quality wasn't great (because I knew the project would never have to scale and if I did I would just have rewritten it anyway). So it wouldn't prove anything beyond "can do rudimentary PHP" , I would think that having a high score in a difficult class (compilers, A.I etc) would be a far better signal to an employer.

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