Today, we're going to be talking all about does GitHub matter, does it matter on your
resume, does it matter in the interview, does it matter at all?
Does GitHub matter?
That's the question.
And, well, what is the answer?
Kind of like a yes/no.
It's kind of 50/50.
I say 50/50.
I think it's going to lay, or sway one way more than the other.
Let's talk about does GitHub matter.
Yes.
Let's go with yes first.
I'm going to start by saying yes, because when it's on your resume, it allows me as
the interviewer to do a lot more in depth research on your, to not only look at your
code, but look how much have you been doing, how active are you.
It's an absolutely great research tool that I love to use when people allow me to see
it.
Begs the question, though.
What if I'm not active?
Well, then it can almost be useless sometimes, because it's just a dead link, and I've now
wasted my time.
But I'll tell you this much, it is actually extremely appreciated when you have it, and
you have really good code on it.
And I don't mean you got to be the perfect coder, I mean code that represents you as
a developer, because far too often, I don't get an idea before you come in to know what
type of coder you are, but your GitHub will tell me.
Especially, if you have personal projects you've been working on, portfolio projects.
If you've contributed to opensource work, that is fantastic.
See, I love someone who's contributed in OJS while we're using Node, or maybe Angular.
I love to see those things.
Or maybe one of my favorite utility packages, Lodash.
If you commit to those opensource repositories, and you give back, it is a big bonus.
So, yeah, GitHub matters, but that's not the only thing.
It shows to me, also, that you've been practicing, and that you might have some ambition.
I know I could trust you to do whatever it takes to figure out how to build an app in
say, React.
Because I see about your GitHub, you're always learning stuff in the after hours, you're
always committing to things you want to learn.
You show that ambition, you show that hard work, that drive, that dedication to your
craft to be a great developer.
And that's why I was rephrasing that from a second ago.
It's not about you taking work home, and being a crazy worker.
It's about you as a developer always getting better.
The problems don't stop at 5:00, right.
You have to learn how to solve stuff up here, and if you just stop at 5:00 every day, you're
not going to get very far in your dev career.
Your dev career's going to go very slow, and that's not going to be fun.
So, your GitHub's the way, also, for you to show me, hey, I'm ambitious, I'm going to
do whatever it takes to learn your technology.
Now, yes, a lot of this has to be inferred to the interviewer.
But I'm telling you right now, it is very easy to see someone who's been working hard
over the last year, and has a solid commit line of just commits every single day on different
projects, different ideas.
Maybe even just one big project.
But it shows and it's a shining light on your GitHub.
So, for all of those reasons, which I'll sum them up later, it's a yes, GitHub matters.
Now, that's an answer to the GitHub matters on your resume.
Let's talk real quickly in the interview.
Does GitHub matter in the interview?
And I'm going to say, yes it does, because if you are ... There's a couple different
types of coding interviews you can get, and I've seen a bunch throughout my career.
One of the ones I remember earlier in my career was when I actually sat down for a half day
with a company to program with one of their programmers, and I was the one at the keyboard,
and when it came time to commit, and to add your messages, and then push it up, pull down,
maybe do a re-base, maybe do a pull request.
Granted, you don't do a pull request in the command line.
But knowing how to interact with Git in the interview became very apparent very quickly
that if I didn't know how to do it, I was going to look silly next to this other developer
who would've been my peer if I had joined that company.
So, yes, it can matter.
I don't know why I'm pointing.
But yes, it can matter.
We just talked about how Git was important in interviews and your resume.
Let's talk about the opposite side of the spectrum.
No, no it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter potentially, because you've been working on maybe top secret clearance
projects, projects that companies, maybe where it's also proprietary software, where you
can't do things outside of work, or you've signed an agreement that you will not work
on any public code outside of your current job.
As much as I hate to say this, it's somewhat common out there in the industry for certain
companies to do this to their employees, which I feel as though really hinders them from
becoming an even better developer, because then they don't get to work with the opensource
community, they don't get to work with other people, they don't get to put their stuff
out there and get feedback, which is crucial, especially earlier in your career.
A majority of interviewers will never hold that against you, and more than likely will
just go by the wayside.
They're like, oh, no GitHub, all right, we'll move on, and so it becomes not a really big
deal at all, especially if you have one of those reasons as exactly why you don't have
a GitHub, and so it's okay.
So, no in that case, a GitHub doesn't matter.
Also, you don't need a GitHub if you can prove yourself in person.
So, if you can in there and do the coding challenges, and knock them out, and show them
how good of a developer you are, having a GitHub doesn't help you.
As long as you know you can go in there, and you've practiced, you've studied, you know
you can do the all coding problems, you can do recursive functions, and all these great
things out there, you can do it all, then you have no need to worry, and a GitHub won't
matter for you.
Bringing all of this together, which way do you think it sways?
Because I do believe it is a yes/no answer.
Does GitHub matter?
It goes both ways.
But to me, it really rests on the side of yes, it absolutely matters, because it can
validate you before you come into the interview, and will allow you to really showcase your
dev skills ahead of time, and so they understand you as a coder, and the level you're at, and
it'll allow you to get a better interview experience.
Overall, I encourage you to make sure your GitHub's up to date.
I encourage you to take the time to put a couple side projects up there, commit a couple
lines of code a week, to be responsible on there, and potentially give back to opensource
code, and to take your time to show the world what you can do as a developer.
Until next time, see you later.