I've got 30+ years of experience, in a variety of areas (early console games, Unix kernel hacking including ports and adding virtual memory and demand paging to a swapping system, BIOS software that shipped on millions of motherboards, SCSI drivers and firmware including writing the development tools and reference software NCR included in their SCSI SDK, PCI compliant credit card storage system, and much more).<p>They sent me to "Learn Python the Hard Way". A book aimed at teaching people with NO programming experience.
This may work for hiring interns but IMO there is a lot more that goes into a quality Sr. Engineer than can be identified through analyzing a candidates code commits.<p>A few examples of engineering qualities which seem to be either looked over or not respected on this board include...<p>- Estimation Skills (can the candidate estimate their own abilities and identify pitfalls in the upcoming tasks?)<p>- Documentation Skills (including diagramming, white boarding, etc)<p>- Communication Skills (can the candidate communicate to the recipient on the level which is required?)<p>- Systems Integrations concepts/experience<p>- Systems Performance concepts/experience<p>- Personality (e.g. can the candidate accept that their proposed solution is not the best in the room and go on to implement another proposal)<p>- Politics (can the candidate navigate the politics inherent in an IT organization or are they always burdened by conflict)<p>In my experience anyone can learn to code, and most people can put together an application, but to become a great performer in any IT organization, the soft-skills are even more important than the coding skills.
Interesting idea. Obviously, plenty of good people do not use github though.<p>This should be used to allow programmers to skip the phone interview stage, filter people in. However, it it should not filter people out... Just give others a phone interview.
Is this a joke? It doesn't seem very serious.<p>As for companies that would consider such a thing, what happens if someone does not, will not, or can not commit their work to Github?<p>Should I just commit stuff to Github just so I can say I did?
Just forking a bunch of Django/Python repos got >20K points and a "Not bad! Maybe you have what it takes" message[1].<p>[1]: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/cbkUK.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/cbkUK.png</a>
Here, let's try it on somebody we should all recognize:<p><a href="https://www.divio.ch/github/u/dhh/" rel="nofollow">https://www.divio.ch/github/u/dhh/</a><p>Welp. Huh. Looks like the creator of Rails isn't getting an internship.
Let's hope prospective interns aren't grading potential internships based on whether the company's web server melts down an hour after a post on hacker news. :-) All I get is a 500 error.
I think the true filter here is "You are going to get [blablablah] per month, to spend on beer." Non-drinkers need not apply.<p>Ah well, at least they're up front about some of their priorities.