re: Why do employers check job candidates' GitHub profiles? VIEW POST


The question as it’s stated sounds to me as “Why do people love cherry? It seems to me a pretty weak way to eat till full.”

I believe nobody makes a decision on the candidate based on GH profile only. But if Jean has one and John has none, it tells me that probably Jean’s more engaged in development in general and in open source in particular.

I like to work with people who love what they are doing.

Also, GH profile completely covers the write-code/whiteboard part of the interview. If the candidate loves to do whiteboard—fine, let’s do whiteboard :)


It also could just tell you that Jean has more free time and John has none.


It might also mean John doesn't publish what he writes.
Also upon further inspection of Jeans code we may find horrible spaghetti code.
Your period was way too much.

I did not make a statement in the vacuum, I was answering a particular comment about having more free time.

Under these circumstances my period is fine.

Periods rarely are fine but setting that aside you took one of many possible explanations for why one person might have more free time than another and portrayed it as vastly more likely than any other explanation.
Also, the assumption that better developers have more time during working hours is faulty, if I find myself with excess time at work I do one of three things.
1) find a way to add value to the project I'm working on either by testing or by finding ways to improve the Project.
2) Go off the clock and study up on new Technologies.
3) Do some small tasks for one of my other customers who always seem to have something lying around that needs a helping hand.

All this being said I have now been convinced that is time to clean up my Github and add a nice new project since the qualtiy of code I currently have on it is horrible stuff I wrote while watching cartoons.

Or it means John has a family and obligations outside of work?

If you are trying to imply Jean obviously has not, that’s not the case.

Free time is not taken from family; it appears because doing OSS and publishing code on GH [roughly] makes anybody a better (and therefore faster) developer.

Better developers have more free time even during working hours. That simple.

That is not true. Good developers use their working hours to get more work done. Not to work on OSS (unless their employer wants them to do that). If I finish my work early (which I regularly do), I pull tickets from the backlog. There is always more work to do.

unless their employer wants them to do that

We have a liberty to choose an employee, the slavery has gone. And I see no reason to work for an employer forbidding OSS contributions.

I pull tickets from the backlog

I am a strong believer in the necessity to grow up as a developer in different areas, which is not always possible just closing the backlog. I advocate doing OSS for the self-growth. And seeing the GH profile that clearly shows such attempts I unintentionally increase the candidate’s “reputation.”

The last but not the least, if I may, why would you bother doing this: ? I am sure the answering this question to yourself might shed a light on what do I mean.

Yes? But the employer is paying the employee for their time and expects them to work on, well, WORK while they are at work. And, while you might not see a reason, I've worked at plenty of jobs where my employer did not want me working on OSS during the day. They were perfectly good jobs and I liked what I was doing.

And that project? That was a random code challenge that I decided to put up on my github. Not really OSS... just a garbage Rails project.

You are speaking from a place of IMMENSE privilege and I hope you can recognize that at some point. In the meantime, I am happy to not be working on a team with you.

Also, I'm a terrible example. I don't have kids and actually have 8 hours to work on some dumb project.

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