[_mh56]

I have 50+ public projects on Github.

Some of them are live, have screenshots, proper documentation and such.

Some of them gets stars or people reach out for support on these projects.

Some of them I've advertised on Reddit etc and reached 100K+ views and a lot of upvotes in their respective Communities.

I also have a substack which has reached top of HackerNews once.

All this has netted me exactly ZERO opportunities till now.

Thankfully, I'm doing Github and Substack as a hobby/learning so no expectations = no disappointment.

But the author is deluded to think these things help. You might win the lottery and the right person might see your content at the right time. But it's better to just use this time to cram Leetcode and get a job.

[camhenlin]

I've held various roles over the years and personally believe that public contributions and innovative open source projects will often impress potential employers. Despite not coding much professionally anymore, I engage in fun personal open-source coding to maintain my skills. This strategy even played a part in securing my latest, predominantly non-coding role.

After reading your post, I reviewed your GitHub profile. You're certainly on the right track, but there's room for improvement. Here are my personal observations and opinions:

- You have numerous small projects, but they lack detailed descriptions and the README files don't tell me much about their purpose. Why are you building these? How can they be run? What functionality do they offer?

- Many projects have minimal activity, suggesting they might be incomplete or abandoned.

- There are several boilerplate projects like "calculator", "todo", and "tutorial".

- Your commit messages in most repos are quite short, often just one or two words. This practice might not be accepted in a professional team setting. I've been guilty of this with my personal projects at times too.

- Your project https://github.com/prakhar897/workaround-gpt shows promise in terms of community interest and the start of what could be a well-constructed README. Perhaps you should consider continuing with this project or developing a similar, well-structured project. Just a thought.

[nsxwolf]

So, it sounds like having a Github could be a net negative. I don't treat personal projects like I treat production code at work. I experiment, don't write a lot of unit tests, use bad practices because they're easier, and I get bored and abandon things because after all, it's not like I'm being paid for any of this.

If that's going to be seen as a red flag, then I'm not going to share any of that.

[camhenlin]

I certainly didn't mean to suggest that having a GitHub profile could be a negative. My point isn't about identifying red flags, but about pointing out areas that could be improved to make one's profile stand out - especially in the case of the person I was responding to. As someone who reviews numerous resumes, I'm providing insight into what I typically look for when I peruse a candidate's GitHub account, based on my personal experience. I don't disqualify someone based on their GitHub activity, but I do use it as an additional datapoint to help identify those who might stand out from their peers.

[berkes]

Just communicate clearly why it is how it is.

I've some GH repos whose quality I'm ashamed of today. But it's clear they were developed by a person with 12 years less experience than me today. It's clear it was just a hobby-project or clear that it wasn't ever meant to be continued this long. A line like "The code in X is a mess and needs a refactoring" is enough.

It is to me, when I researched candidates. When a ticket, todo or note shows that the author is clearly aware of the problems, and shows she/he can weigh off why (not) to fix that today, it tells -me- they are good in what they do.

A dev who shows to make decisions about quality, effort, workflows, based on experience and reasoning, to me, is worth a hundred devs that blindly follow The Sacrosanct Rule Of The Latest Cargo Cult Religion™. A dev who shows she/he grew over time, by showing "terrible" code in the past, to me, is worth a hundred devs that have been doing the exact same rituals for years or decades.

So, yes: by all means, show your worst stuff. But be sure it's clear that you know its "bad" and why.

[simonw]

I never said that having this stuff would get you the job offers. You still have to apply for the opportunities that are a good fit for you.

At least in the companies I've worked for in the UK and the US it should help you make it past the first filter - the "I have a stack of candidates, which of these are worth setting up an initial phone interview with" phase.

[pc86]

So few people even list their github profile on their resume. When I was a manager if I was reviewing resumes and you had a github profile listed your odds of getting that first screening call went up dramatically.

[_mh56]

Welp, I have a semi decent profile on Github. Recently I applied for around 100 small startups based in EU/UK, Got a total of 1 callback. In short, I followed all the steps mentioned but still fell flat. Really curious what are your thoughts on this.

Here's my Resume for reference: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u9F8_2m2W1mcKIoFs3hwUEn5Kgf...

[tzekid]

I think it's meant as an add-on to stand out when applying to a job.

I'm quite Junior so I don't know if this applies to more senior positions, but in my experience when applying to jobs my Github page was always a point of discussion when I got an interview.

[benzible]

I actively seek out open source maintainers when hiring. I recently hired an engineer (who happens to be Indian) I found via a popular package he maintains. I don't know how common it is to do this but, somewhat self-servingly, I think that employers who select for open source contributions may offer a better environment than those who don't.

[intelVISA]

I'm on the fence here: sadly it does seem that grinding LC is an optimal use of time for the avg job seeker.

That said, not sure you can easily quantify projects as having no impact. Back when I was a seeker my resume had a handful of non-trivial public projects buried in a footnote and one would come up in about 75% of interviews. Despite bias I doubt this is too unique assuming the projs themselves are interesting.

Remember: your entire resume is adtech for your skills to a future employer. I'm of the belief that if human eyes ever skim it: project: Java CLI fizz buzz will never outperform project: RISC-V microkernel in Rust.

[never_inline]

Brother you're from India? The market is much more tough and much more dumb here.

Due to competition, very few measures are competed upon very fiercely.

Whatever applies in west doesn't apply here.

I have had friends like you who did incredible projects and contributed to open source.

The best of my friends have ended up in relatively good startups due to open source and projects, after lot of struggle.

But on the other hand, I have seen absolutely incompetent morons who did Leetcode (or even cheated at it) and got a high life job.

Scale ruins things I guess. This market is pathetically fucked.

[AussieWog93]

I got my first software engineering job only once I had a successful open source hardware/software product. Every interviewer asked about it, and it was the reason I got in the door despite not doing anything CompSci related.

[moneywoes]

Yep, I think there’s a lot of survivor bias

[loeg]

If you want to come across better, consider grouping multiple sentences into a single paragraph.