Initially, LinkedIn was just another site where you could find jobs. It was simple to use, simple to connect with others; it even had some friendly groups with meaningful discussions.
And then it gained monopoly as the “sole” professional network where you could actually land a job. If you are not on LinkedIn now, you are quite invisible in the job market. Recruiters are concentrated there, even if they have to pay extremely high prices for premium accounts. The site is horrible now: a social network in disguise, toxic and boring influencers, and a lot of noise and bloated interface to explore.
When Google decided to close their code.google.com, GitHub filled a void. It was a simple site powered by git (not by svn or CVS), and most of the major open-source projects migrated there. The interface was simple, and everything was perfect. And then something changed.
GitHub UI started to bloat, all kinds of “features” nobody asked for were implemented, and then the site became a SaaS. Now Microsoft hosts the bulk of open-source projects the world has to offer. GitHub has become a monopoly. If you don’t keep your code there, chances are people won’t notice your side projects. This bothers me.
Rant over. I hate internet monopolies.
What they’re asking for is a public portfolio.
Obviously, you can’t give them code that legally belongs to a past employer and they’re not allowed to look to avoid accusations of copyright infringement.
Especially if they do any reverse-engineering for interoperability, there must be zero suspicion that they were inspired by code they’re not allowed to use.
This is where open source contributions under permissive licenses come in.
Something shown to work in a real project is also viewed better than out of context code snippets.
When you’re essentially saying you have nothing to show them, you’re indistinguishable from someone who actually has nothing and is lying about their skills, so the onus is on the interviewers to vet you, which for various reasons may not be possible, so they’d rather just move on to someone with a clearly proven track record.
Ok but the original point still stands. Coding outside of work and at work is poor work life balance. Even my own projects I do are to learn not solve an actual problem in the world with code.
And a public portfolio is the CV that states “I worked for this company making thier products”. They might ask for the specific products, but there’s a chance some people never made public ones.
Github is for college and thesis projects. That’s what most people have on there.
The correct answer to these recruiters is still not stated yet. When they say
People should answer
Indeed. A clearly proven track record is a given, in that I worked at software company x y & z for a number of years each as a developer in these technologies and with these good references. You don’t need to see my individual contributions to understand that holding several multi-year dev positions at enterprise software houses tells you a lot.
Tbh, if my track record is in question I don’t expect to be at an interview, I expect my CV to be on a no pile.
I think the real issue is that recruiters learn how to interview graduate junior dev candidates and apply it across the board. When you interview mid/senior devs with years of experience for senior roles which require years of experience, maybe “do fizzbuzz” and “show us your open source work” is a little patronising, no?
Might just be me tho, maybe I’m just a prick. Could be.