[spindritf]

> the demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed toward white men than the software industry is, which is saying something

What?

> You just get what other people think is useful. Aside from which, GitHub displays a lot of useless stats about how many followers you have, and some completely psychologically manipulative stats about how often you commit and how many days it is since you had a day off.

You get social proof, some measure of conscientiousness, and a crowd-sourced filter. All on one page. That sounds great. I don't see the problem.

Companies want to hire influential workers. It's relevant. So is putting in the work.

And products which people find useful are vastly superior to those that the author finds well engineered. I'm guessing many company owners will share that view.

[themoonbus]

It's a system which disproportionately rewards the lucky few whose employers allow them to either open source their work, or contribute to open source projects... or the people who spend their free time coding. I know plenty of folk who are damn good at their job but like to spend their free time on other, unrelated hobbies.

I'm actually lucky enough to fall into the former category, but I feel that if you only hire people with a respectable presence on github, you're disregarding a large number of people for something beyond their control that doesn't accurately reflect their ability.

[Anderkent]

>you're disregarding a large number of people for something beyond their control

What you spend your free time on is not beyond your control (at least when you're a software dev and presumably paid enough to actually have free time). And you might decide to spend it on other, unrelated hobbies. That's cool, but you should be aware that unless you can present that hobby as interesting, unless you can sell it as something that helps you grow, you are making yourself look less good that someone doing the same kind of work, and then doing OSS in their free time.

A company is not going to disregard you for not having a respectable github presence if no other candidates have a github presence either. But if there's a clear disparity, why should they take an extra risk by hiring you, rather than hire the person that can show them their actual contributions?

[themoonbus]

"at least when you're a software dev and presumably paid enough to actually have free time"

...or you know, don't have family obligations.

I do agree to some extent with what you're saying, but as others have stated, it should be one of many factors taken into consideration, and it depends on the culture the company is trying to foster.

I personally have looked at github profiles of people I'm interviewing, if they chose to share it with me.

[kmike84]

Choosing a company to work for is not beyond one's control. It is possible to specifically look for a job that allows contributing to open-source in some way, or, in other words, to blacklist those who explicitly forbids that. I've done this in both two cases I was on a job market and still enjoy this decision.

Maybe I see the world through rose-colored glasses, but I don't see why sane employer would like to forbid contributing to open-source project if e.g. this project is used for work and has some bug. And there are always bugs or inconveniences if you use something heavily. For some industries it is even hard for a developer not to be on Github, because a lot of software she uses is on github, and in a lot of cases the best way to fix the issue she's working on is to contribute to open-source project that caused this issue, instead of e.g. working around it by some hack.

I agree that discarding people without respectable github presence is bad (unless you're looking for a very specific kind of people, e.g. for marketing purposes). But I can see how not being on Github at all (even with minimal presence) could be a bad sign in some cases. Of course, industries are very different and this shouldn't be a general rule.

[mkramlich]

The problem is you only get what you measure. Then you rank only/disproportionately by those narrow measurements. It leads to "gaming" of a system. To min-maxing. (To use an old RPG term.) See Congress and Wall Street for powerful examples of how "gamed" systems end up hurting the rest of us in tangible ways.

I've seen it lots on GitHub, and the problem seems to be growing. The guy that parachutes into a project -- one with money-impacting code already deployed on 1000's of real world systems used by ordinary people -- submits a pull request where he's modified every single file in the project, making only superficial changes to formatting and whitespace, and probably the result of an automated tool, and most importantly DOES NOT THOROUGHLY TEST IT beforehand... yet, from GitHub's perspective he's now (a) an accepted code contributor, (b) modified lots of files -- prolific! -- and (c) has a high count of lines added/removed -- IMPACTFUL! -- and (d) very very busy beaver "working" on lots of projects. "Gosh, we want him!"

But does he/she understand threading, leaks, races, parallelization, good architecture, good documentation, automation, reproducability, security, scalability, strategy, pacing, production support, risk mitigation, algorithmic complexity, tradeoffs, market priorities, DRY, YAGNI, edge cases, BATNAs, etc etc? Well... er... maybe not so much. But his/her eyes just light right up when you mention you have a foosball table and a keg in your cubicle-or-overturned-door "office"!

[bjourne]

Perhaps you could link to such an instance? If you have seen it many times that is, I haven't seen it even once.

[hyperpape]

What does it say? That it's probably not a good measure of skill in any sense worth measuring, unless you think that 98.5% of the programmers worth hiring are men.

[stonemetal]

That it's probably not a good measure of skill in any sense worth measuring, unless you think that 98.5% of the programmers worth hiring are men.

I don't see how those two points are related. A measure can be good or bad independent of who you choose to measure by it.

Github(not necessarily just having an account but actually looking at what they have done) is a good measure of skill because it allows you to see the person's work output. You know exactly what they contributed to a project and what type of work they are interested in and are familiar with.

Now just because it is a good measurement of skill doesn't mean that it is a good hiring filter. The two are similar but not the same thing. A good hiring filter filters for skill but doesn't filter for other attributes like race and gender. It is kind of like saying measuring how much weight a person can lift is a bad measure for determining a person's strength because we only measured white guys. It is a good measure of strength, just misapplied if you are trying to find the world's strongest person.

[Anderkent]

> A good hiring filter filters for skill but doesn't filter for other attributes like race and gender.

It's a trade-off. You want to see as many people meeting your criteria as you can, but don't want false positives. A github profile might have many false negatives (because of the white man skew), but that's a price a company might be willing to pay, if they get enough applicants anyway.

[stonemetal]

True I more meant an ideal hiring filter not merely a good one. Biased hiring filters can get you in trouble in the US, especially if they are known to be biased. That is one of the reasons general IQ tests should be avoided here, they are considered biased.

[hyperpape]

I took it as implicit that a measure of skill is something that should work for most people. If you just mean it can be an indicator of skill (that is, something that tells you positively that some people have skill, but doesn't tell you anything about most people) we have no disagreement, we just were using words differently.