[yongjik]

As a Google Engineer, I can assure you that nobody who interviews you will give a damn about your code in github. Unless you're James Gosling or someone at that level. (But then again I don't think they interviewed James Gosling in the same way they interviewed me, so the point is moot.)

Google interviewers are interested in how well you can code (or design a solution) in a whiteboard for 45 minutes. I'm not claiming that it's the best way, and who knows, it might be the absolutely horrible way to interview candidates, but that's the way it is here.

[microtonal]

As a Google Engineer, I can assure you that nobody who interviews you will give a damn about your code in github. [...] it might be the absolutely horrible way to interview candidates

It works as long as majority of the CS population dreams of a Google job. There are so many candidates that having a high false negative rate really doesn't matter. However, as Google slowly becomes less popular, it's current interviewing procedure might not work anymore.

I think that having high-quality open source project is a reasonable indicator of a person's technical abilities. For companies with a smaller stream of candidates, it would be silly to ignore such sources of information.

By the way, I am always surprised how obsessed people are trying to get into Google. After some persistent bugging, I went through a phone interview. I was invited for a follow-up interview, but decided that they could not offer the kind of position I was interested in. (No, I don't want to work 18 months in site reliability engineering when my interest lies with natural language processing.)

[peferron]

I'm glad to know that. I tend to spend my extra time doing company work, which cannot always be open-sourced; for example, a few months ago I wrote a small Go project, which is going to end up on the company intranet and wouldn't make much sense on Github. Look at my Github profile and it's empty; but put me in front of a whiteboard and ask me to write something in Go and now we can talk.

I'll start doing stuff on Github when I genuinely feel like it (probably soon, I have a few pending personal projects that would make sense there), but recently it feels too much like you should do stuff on Github because it's going to impact your future. Similar to how you should get a college degree, should nurture your LinkedIn profile (not sure anyone cares about that anymore), and so on. Bleh.

[toomuchtodo]

(Non snark ahead) Could this be why working at Google is no longer the prize it once was? And why developers would rather go to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, et al?

[yongjik]

(Completely idiotic response ahead) Umm, really? Every day I see thousands of developers who would rather work in Google than Facebook... :)

(Non snarky response) I dunno. I joined Google in 2008, and as far as I know Google was always like that. So, unless you claim developers have preferred Facebook etc. to Google for more than 5 years now, it's probably not related to the interview process.

[toomuchtodo]

From Glassdoor's data, it appears Facebook employees rate their experience better than Google employees from 2009-2012:

http://www.glassdoor.com/press/wp-content/files_mf/133228554...

Also base rate is higher at Facebook, and interview difficulty is rated lower at Facebook.

Somewhat disappointing, as I'm a huge fan of Google.

[alexgartrell]

I chose Facebook over Google two years ago (despite a more lucrative offer from Google), because I wanted to go where I could have more of an impact. The interview processes are nearly identical. One of my go-to questions was a question I got asked at Google, actually.