Github as CV
It’s pretty common nowadays to read a job description that explicitly asks for a link to a GitHub account. In some forms it’s even a mandatory field.
I get it. By looking at a GitHub profile you can understand:
- the quality of someone’s code
- the way they organize a project
- the importance they attribute to testing
- the care they put in writing documentation
- the approach they have in interacting with other people, dealing with issues and pull requests.
It’s all great.
If you work for a company that defaults to open source, consider yourself very lucky. You CV is already ready, should you be fired tomorrow.
If you work for a company that allows you extract components and libraries from your projects to release them open source, consider yourself lucky. Your CV is in good shape, should you look for a new job tomorrow.
But … there’s an underwood.
There’s people that write great code during the day, then go home and enjoy time away from the keyboard.
There’s people that would like to contribute back to the open source community but can do it for just a few days a year.
There’s people that used to open source a lot of code but got burnt out.
Ironically, there’s people that were very vocal about GitHub as a must for a CV and now have a very outdated profile.
And there’s great developers that truly don’t care about open sourcing their code.
If you are hiring, I’d not exclude a candidate a priori because he/she doesn’t have a tidy GitHub account.
If you are looking to be hired there’s many more things that you can do to build your brand: blogging, podcasting and speaking at conferences are a few examples.
There’s a nice episode of the Changelog that touches on this topic. Give it a listen if you have a chance.