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Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

The majority of great engineers have GitHub profiles and have been working on projects there (open source and otherwise). The stack has become ubiquitous, and the majority of engineers either like it, or are “happy” enough with it. There are a few grey beards that rant on about Perforce or something else… but that is pretty rare :)

The majority of great engineers... in what field? Web development? Probably. Some language communities are also disproportionately represented. As a whole though, I can't buy that everyone has been totally assimilated into GitHub.

I also like how everything other than GitHub (not even Git) and Perforce has just about spontaneously evaporated according to this paragraph.

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Classic selection and confirmation bias.

I have a GitHub profile > I'm great > I only hire great people > I only hire people with a GitHub profile > Everyone I hire is great and has a GitHub profile > Everyone who is great has a GitHub profile.

I must be in the minority. I am the greatest engineer in all fields, and I don't use github because my job is not github friendly. I only say I'm the greatest because, hey, if we are throwing around value judgements about engineers I'm going to grab me some. Actually, I wish that practice would stop. Every blogger seems to know who is the greatest, and not surprisingly it's always themselves and people they know using the same technology as they are.

Personally, I'd rather have employers judge me on code I've written for projects in my GitHub profile, code that I've meticulously architected and refined over periods of weeks, months and years, targeted to solve non-trivial, relevant real-world problems in an elegant and expressive manner, over some code that I'm forced to spit out on the spot under unrealistic time constraints solving nerdy CS algorithm puzzles and doing low-level performance optimizations that's never realistically worthwhile to implement from scratch in production (at least for the kinds of problem domains I'm interested in).

I do understand the possible misrepresentation resulting from judging candidates based SOLELY on GitHub profiles, but for those with presentable contributions/projects readily available on GitHub, I feel it makes for a much fairer representation of the candidate than the alternative.

Me too, and that's why I set up our hiring process such that candidates are welcomed to supply code samples via github and other means if they can. However we recognize that this simply isn't feasible for everyone, and it's not held against anyone if that's how it is.

For me personally, nearly all of the work I've done over the last handful of years is on github, however most of that is contained in private repos that I can't share. I don't think that's what people mean when they say that I'm supposed to have everything on github :)

Agreed. You need to recognize that there are some of the best engineers in the world work at companies where they aren't able to put code on GitHub, or it isn't worth it for them. You're working on something secretive, you have a family and want to spend your free time with then rather than weekends dealing with pull requests, etc.

This mindset also creates and incentive for employers to keep their engineers from working on open source as much as possible, so that they don't look attractive to other employers and are never able to jump ship / ask a pay raise.

In general, I think it is a very lazy and ineffective answer to the "interviewing is hard" problem.

"...(open source and otherwise)." - how will that "otherwise" help?

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