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by erichmond 4428 days ago
I wouldn't state it as intensely as justizin, but I agree with him. ~60% of programmers I'd call first to work on a project with me don't even have a github account.

Github is a great resume if you're young and don't have real work experience, if you want to change "tracks" and show you have skills in a different domain, or if you really love and support open-source.

I guess it's a self-resolving problem as companies who take not having github activity as a negative probably aren't places people without github account would want to work anyway.
1 comments
justizin 4428 days ago
i was more going after these angles:

  (a) once upon a time, it was _expected_ of a competent developer to be able to run a server with a web server and a resume html file.  putting your resume in github is no more impressive than putting your resume in your personal wikipedia profile.

  (b) some of us have been programming a lot longer than github has been around, and it does not come close to effectively showing community contribution over such a career.

  (c) as someone responding to my original comment noted, not all code can be published.  i have a lot of commits, even in github, which you can't see.
All that said, I do expect people increasingly to examine github for recent community work, I would be concerned with someone who had never used it, though outside the fad bubble of the sf mission, a lot of people are using bitbucket and - GASP - hosting their own git repos.

GitHub is a great tool, a useful community 'hub', but also a SPOF and a relatively young player in the source control space.

I can say from experience, however, it's just very frustrating to have a recruiter say that some founders ten years your junior who probably have a great idea and could be great to work for want to see a github profile.

kids, i helped build Rackspace, without which there would be no GitHub. Give those old-timers a call. ;)

Anyway, this debate may not be fair to OP who was just showing how to use GH to host actual resume. There are some advantages, but really, fire up a $5 DigitalOcean VM and show me that you know about code running some way other than foreground in your laptop console.

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