Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?
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One of the things I'm hearing suddenly is how I should have a GitHub account. In the past, I have not bothered because, aside from not really being a thing until after I had my first long-term job:
- I've seen maybe 2 job postings out of thousands mention it.
- I've had maybe 5 out of 100 interviews for development jobs ask me anything about code.
- I've had exactly 1 interviewer want to see a personal project (and then shit all over it).
- I've witnessed H1Bs steal from them with impunity so I don't see putting anything valuable out there which in my mind would defeat the point of using one as part of an interview sales pitch.
- I don't do, or plan to adopt, jQuery MVC for personal projects so it seems like it would hurt my job search anyway.
- Of all the people I know in development jobs (good and bad), only two of us do anything computer-related outside of work.
But for the sake of argument, what would I be expected to have out there anyway? There is zero desktop work here; it's web apps all the way down. Wouldn't you just, I don't know, go to a website URL if I provided one instead? This is one of those times I really do feel like I'm on Earth-73 or something.
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My view is that in certain contexts it could be a good thing to show, but when it becomes mandatory, it's original meaning is completely lost.
See also: cover letters, thank-you notes after the interviews
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@Zenith said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
Wouldn't you just, I don't know, go to a website URL if I provided one instead?
That'd just show that someone wrote a website. Big whoop.
Think of GitHub as being able to provide evidence that you're worth hiring, but merely being there doesn't count. Being active there is better, but it's just about evidence of activity, and many people have their evidence located in places where it can't be easily shown.
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When I was a applying for junior positions recruiters always asked for GitHub but no-one in in the interview ever mentioned it. Can you use git? Yes! box ticked
On the other side of the table it was used for storage for coding challenges. None of us could be arsed looking at their history. In my personal projects my code style is a bit different to my work habits. At work I tend to bend and fit in rather than force my style upon them was my main reason. Hacking shit together in personal projects is very different to hacking shit together in professional contexts for a variety of reason both good and bad.
I vaguely remember someone linking to a post about a developer who was out of work for a few months moaning that his 3?? day commit streak should of gotten him a job. In the scheme of things no-one really cares what you commit or how frequently as long as it works, it's readable, unit tested and won't break static analysis. The rest of it is what your point of view brings to a project and do they think they can tolerate you for 8 hours a days until they're gone.
TL;DR Most companies don't care. I would be wary of the ones that do.
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My company is trying to hire one more software engineer, but we're only getting applications from people who've effectively been jobless for more than a year. Let alone embedded systems experience, if any of the applicants had a GitHub-repo with anything more than a simple Hello World -equivalent, we'd hire them on the spot.
@DogsB said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
no-one really cares what you commit or how frequently as long as it works, it's readable, unit tested and won't break static analysis
As long as they deign to use source control. My previous coworker didn't. Now I need to hunt for differences between his version-branch-folders until we can find someone new to take over his devices (software support for said devices). Or until I get it all into Git.
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@acrow said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
My company is trying to hire one more software engineer, but we're only getting applications from people who've effectively been jobless for more than a year. Let alone embedded systems experience
Is that because you live in Foreignstan, or some other interesting reason?
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@pie_flavor said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
@acrow said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
My company is trying to hire one more software engineer, but we're only getting applications from people who've effectively been jobless for more than a year. Let alone embedded systems experience
Is that because you live in Foreignstan, or some other interesting reason?
I'm guessing it's because the schools push out java/web coders, whereas the whole industry needs C and Embedded. Granted, I'm now in a smaller company. And most of the people available go to work for big corporations like GE. I wanted to improve our chances by advertising on Stack Overflow, but the pricing was too hard to swallow for the company owners.
That and this being Finland, yes. Any foreign candidates will balk at the flat salary range combined with the tax rates.
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@acrow said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
As long as they deign to use source control. My previous coworker didn't.
Ow. That sort of thing has got to the point where it is a critical part of any and every competent software engineer's toolbox. It really doesn't have to be git, but it does need to have the idea of committing and history and branches (and merges would be a really good idea too). Which is pretty much all of them. Without this, it's insanely difficult to work on a project of any scale. Heck, our hardware engineers are starting to see this particular light (at least for their Verilog code).
Being able to actually commit stuff and push it to GitHub shows at least some of the basic skills. It's a Job Requirements Checkbox thing.
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I think it could be useful for someone who is at a junior level to further prove their skills where job experience is relatively light. As you start to get into the senior level, I think your job experience should start to take hold more.
But IMO it isn't at all necessary or required. Yes, you're relatively inexperienced, and you're up against someone who has a solid GitHub history, maybe you might fall short of that particular job, but there are other employers who don't even consider GitHub much at all, my own company being one of them.
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@dkf said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
Heck, our hardware engineers are starting to see this particular light (at least for their Verilog code).
Most hardware engineers, in my experience, have seen this light for a couple of decades. Branching and merging, that's only recently started to catch on.
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@HardwareGeek said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
@dkf said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
Heck, our hardware engineers are starting to see this particular light (at least for their Verilog code).
Most hardware engineers, in my experience, have seen this light for a couple of decades. Branching and merging, that's only recently started to catch on.
The problem with hardware engineering is that the schematics and layout files are of a proprietary format. Maybe binary. either way, they're all blobs as far as source control is concerned. (And if you didn't remember to mark them as such, and Git tried to merge them, you're in deep doo-doo.)
Sure, I've used Git for keeping my files sync'd between my desktop and laptop, but any conflicts mean lost work or stupid workarounds.
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@acrow said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
The problem with hardware engineering is that the schematics and layout files are of a proprietary format.
I work at the chip level, where (almost) everything is text — Verilog, SystemVerilog, C/C++ (firmware), build scripts, etc. — which are as amenable to source control as any text files. Schematics for analog circuitry and chip layout files aren't text, but I never get anywhere near those.
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@HardwareGeek Schematic and layout tools are graphical editors by necessity. Autodesk Eagle, that I use, apparently stores the files as XML. And is about as readable as... hmm... have you ever opened an .svg file that was made with, say, Inkscape?
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@acrow said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
And is about as readable as... hmm... have you ever opened an .svg file that was made with, say, Inkscape?
You'd need a DOM tree diffing tool, not a text diff, to get good SCM tracking of that sort of thing (assuming that Autodesk Eagle isn't using wish-it-was-XML). The basic version tracking system doesn't care, but the delta computation and merging care a lot…
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@dkf said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
assuming that Autodesk Eagle isn't using wish-it-was-XML
Wouldn't matter. It's one software package in more than a dozen. None of the file formats are exactly open (except KiCad, which is FOSS), and they're subject to change without notice. Unless the PCB toolkit's author decides to add version control support, I'm going to play safe and consider them blobs.
At least Eagle doesn't mess its own files so much that it can't open them anymore. There was one commercial layout editor in use at a place I worked in, some 5 years ago, that did just that. Crapped the open document randomly. No warning either, you just noticed at some point some random artefacts appearing. At that point, the current file was beyond salvaging, and your work of the last 30 minutes was lost. And then you had to go through your backups from the last hour, trying to find the last one that could still be opened. Wish I could remember the name now.
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@dkf said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
@acrow said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
And is about as readable as... hmm... have you ever opened an .svg file that was made with, say, Inkscape?
You'd need a DOM tree diffing tool, not a text diff, to get good SCM tracking of that sort of thing (assuming that Autodesk Eagle isn't using wish-it-was-XML). The basic version tracking system doesn't care, but the delta computation and merging care a lot…
And that's where you get into the 'locking workflows are evil' vs 'file locking is a mandatory SCM feature' flame war we've had before. Don't recall where/when. I think git was involved.
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@acrow said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
Unless the PCB toolkit's author decides to add version control support
The state of affairs that that statement involves is beyond retarded. Unless they're recording the state into a database; there are cases where that's a good choice. (What would be not a good choice would be using a homebrew DB implementation for that. Databases are not simple pieces of software to write.)
I'm guessing that the core problem is that they're just vomiting their internal object graph onto the disk, and they've never actually really thought about what information should be there or how it should be arranged. BTDT in my own code, but I learned not to do it 20 years ago…
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@dkf Many a CAD software has a long legacy. I hear many of them still use OpenGL 1 exclusively.
I'm just glad I use a sane one. Oh, did I mention that Eagle keeps a backup of the last 10 times you clicked Save? It does the traditional .sch , .s#1 , .s#2 , ...
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@acrow said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
I'm guessing it's because the schools push out java/web coders, whereas the whole industry needs C and Embedded.
Still? That was my big beef with CS programs almost 20 years ago. I wanted to graduate from Mickey Mouse TurboPascal programs to real Windows applications. Sadly, the department chair was a Java zealot, so it was all-Java-all-the-time (except for a handful of electives she kept trying to shut down). I had a hell of a time finding work after graduation as there were no Java jobs anywhere. Even today, Java jobs are completely non-existent in this area. If I hadn't picked up VB on my own over a summer, I'd probably be working at Target right now.
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@Zenith That part of my post was largely an assumption. In my time, at the university that I attended, the programming 101 (and 102) class were taught in C++. And looking from the online study-guide, they still are. But that's just one university, and I know that at least two other schools teach the basics in Java. The rest I have no idea, and there is no easy way to find out.
I've met a few people who were rather enthusiastic about Java. Sadly, the reason tended to be that it's "easier to use". and they don't mean the built-in libraries.
... I think we have a whole thread, somewhere around here, just about which programming languages are taught in which schools, how, why, and with what kind of environment. If we're going to bash the direction of university education, might want to continue there.
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@acrow said in Do job seekers actually use GitHub to any benefit?:
I think we have a whole thread, somewhere around here, just about which programming languages are taught in which schools, how, why, and with what kind of environment. If we're going to bash the direction of university education, might want to continue there.
Bottom line: the teachers are slow to change for many reasons, but the big one is that updating the course to use a new language is Just. So. Much. Work. It's not just the WTDWTF admins who
