It can be worse. As I understand it, this person just wants to see code. I'd imagine that sending a zip file, or express willingness to do some small assignment would suffice too.
Meanwhile, I have been blocked from applying for a position multiple times because the online form required me to enter a LinkedIn profile, which I don't have. It would require a lot of time to create a profile and message all my relatives and past co-workers to build a nice looking network.
I just treat this as a sign that we were probably no a good match anyway.
Wow, that's awful! What a thoughtless requirement. On the other hand, it's helpful of them to filter themselves out of consideration so quickly. Who'd want to work at a place like that?
It doesn't have to be a real-world open source project.
Could be a project you built to learn a language or framework, for example.
Or some library you wrote for your own personal use. If there's nothing sensitive, you can publish it under an open license or even without any license at all...
Some employment contracts claim ownership of anything you create even outside of working hours, so even publishing those little learning projects could potentially be problematic.
For this purpose, you only need to show authorship, which is different from ownership rights.
In general, your employer can't stop you there. Some exceptions would be if it conflicts with their products or if you disclose technological knowledge that could jeopardize competitive advantage.
Some exceptions would be if it conflicts with their products
Amazon has that provision in its employment contract. The problem is that Amazon has its fingers in so many pies, no matter what you write, you could potentially get in trouble with legal. One person I knew there had to wait six weeks for approval from legal so they could work on a Lisp interpreter.
Even if they're not likely to win in a court battle, most people don't want to risk a dispute over something trivial.
Would you expect a little game jam game created in a weekend to lead to an ownership dispute with an employer? - Probably not, but I'm aware of a case where it has happened...
Why would you publish code that was written during working hours?
Why not publish an university project, a learning exercise, or something you built for fun? Surely there is more reason to create something than you're getting paid to do it, right? Or are artists just silly?
I think some of my university projects are published. But they're quite old by now, and not representative of the production code I write. I do learning exercises quite frequently when getting into new libraries/frameworks/languages, but again, that's on company time.
I don't begrudge others that do, but I don't code in my free time, I have other hobbies. Thus getting back to the original point made:
> Because every skilled person has time to build stuff in public.
I see this attitude everywhere and I swear it makes no sense at all. Interviewing and selecting
and hiring candidates is gatekeeping. Thats literally all it is.
I guess the implication is that it's elitist or somehow unfair gatekeeping?
If you ask the question "is it a more elitist form than gatekeeping than looking at your fancy university credentials or experience at a FAANG?" then I think it's not so much.
IME it's less time consuming than leetcode and take home projects and about 1000 times less soul sucking than both.
It's not unfair gatekeeping, it's incredibly dumb gatekeeping. You're definitely going to miss out on interviewing good candidates.
If the candidate can show code and you're willing to look at it because it saves everyone's time, then sure, go ahead. But there are plenty of very good reasons a candidate might not be able to do so.
Point me to a metric that you think is fair and it would probably take me 10 minutes to systematically demolish it as equally stupid gatekeeping.
Furthermore, he didn't say it was his only metric, he said it was a possible metric.
What if I use having a bachelors degree in computer science as a strong metric? I could just as easily turn the tables on that requirement: some of the best programmers I've ever known didn't even have university degrees at all and were completely self starters.
And there are plenty of diploma mills that hand out degrees in IT like they're candy.
For sure, but I cant really think of another low friction way to detect high quality candidates.
CVs are easy to bullshit as the OP points out and ascertaining performance on a technical interview comes at a high cost.
Search costs matter. Other than "I worked with this guy" (which doesnt scale) I dont know of a quicker method of uncovering an obviously decent programmer.
Search costs matter, and GitHub browsing is low friction, but extremely low signal on a very narrow bandwidth.
A lot of the best (technical-wise and ethic-wise) collaborators I've had had and have no public profile, some even not on LinkedIn. You won't find them there.
shrug this is the exact opposite of my experience. All the really great people I've worked with have had at least something there and I've never worked with somebody with a great github profile that wasnt also a great programmer.
Having a decent profile is rare enough that it cant be your whole hiring pipeline but IMHO it's a great reason to let somebody skip an assessment stage or prioritize them for interview.
The point is that you might not want to show toy code. Toy code I've written for fun is rarely written to the same standards I'd use for anything important, including code written for work.
It probably won't have elaborate CI/CD tooling with a clear branching strategy.
It probably won't have a comprehensive test suite.
It probably won't have systematic error handling.
It probably won't have carefully written comments to help other people find their way around it.
Most important of all it probably won't be designed or cleaned up to the standards of good professional code, because I wrote it for fun or to solve some specific problem and not to be a portfolio piece and I stopped once the code had served its purpose.
If anyone I might work with insisted on judging me on code like that they'd never get a realistic view of my level.
If I wanted to show someone an example of code that did faithfully represent what I can do I'd want to show them some of the many projects I've completed to a high professional standard at work. But of course that code really is usually confidential and at least in my case that tends to be because it's important to the business and might not be public knowledge yet so it really would be very unprofessional if I went around handing it out to anyone who asked.
I haven’t written a single piece of code outside of work since I started working - in 1996.
The only reason I have any open source code is because my company has a very easy open source process. I extract reusable non customer identifying code from projects and it usually takes at most 3 days for approval.
There is also a company sponsored open source project I contribute to.
Software engineering is a highly-compensated professional job. It’s a given with such jobs that professionals are expected to spend some of their free time on their own career development.
This means working on open source, staying up to date with new technologies, learning interview techniques.
Everybody is entitled to a job but nobody is entitled to a fancy job.
> a highly-compensated professional job. It’s a given with such jobs that professionals are expected to spend some of their free time on their own career development.
Except most highly-compensated professional jobs don't expect people to get continuing education on their free time. The state bar and medical boards not to mention engineering certifications all require continuing education. Everyone I've known in those fields is paid for the continuing education credit time.
Ah yes, gatekeeping at its best.
Because every skilled person has time to build stuff in public.