Some of the most interesting people I know are weirdos.

“Show us your GitHub”

Sure, here it is

“Looks empty”

Ya, I code for work, it’s all in private repos or in Azure Devops.

“So you don’t contribute to open source in your free time?”

No, I spend free time with my family. Again, I code for work, why on earth would I also use my free time for extra coding

“Thanks for your time but…”

Nah thanks for yours, I don’t wanna work for a company that expects me to code for them for for 8 hours and then go and code for someone else for free for more hours. That’s not a healthy work life balance, dickhead.

Edit: well this blew up (in a small lemmy kinda way). To clarify, before I coded for a living I coded as a hobby. Since I now do it full time, I don’t have any itch to scratch, I get my fill 40 hours a week. I’d ONLY be contributing to keep my GitHub looking a certain way for recruiters that one year in five I’m jobseeking and that feels like a waste of time. In reality it’ll probably be dark green the week before I started interviewing when I updated my website and then nothing before that until the last time I was interviewing.

Also, I chose to have a family and that takes effort, time and precedence over hobbies for me. If you also made that choice and you can code full time, have a healthy relationship with your wife and kids and still find time to have hobby code projects, all power to you. I don’t have the energy to open the laptop back up and get into something by the time the kids are in bed and I’ve spent some time with the wife. I’m not staying up into the night so a recruiter can glance at a chart and judge me to be a good or bad dev by how green it is.

How do I improve my skills over time? Tbh if the company I’m working for doesn’t allow me to block out a couple of hours to half day a week for learning I’m at the wrong company. I read, follow along with tutorials, experiment and think about how what I’m learning could be applied to the product I work with. Then if an opportunity to apply it comes along, I take it and either fail fast or bring something new, of value to the table.

Yup, the chart still goes green with contributions to private company repos, but those contributions also ain’t from my personal GitHub account, they’re from the one linked to my work email and I imagine they’ll close that account pretty quickly when I leave. Idk how that works tho, I only worked in one team in my whole dev career that seriously uses GitHub as source control, and they’re being moved to ADO as we type. GitHub is the go to for FOSS, but I don’t work in FOSS, I work in enterprise software and there’s much better enterprise git providers than GitHub (imho, ymmv). You can even throw the question back “do you actually use github here? If so can you tell me what lead you to go with that instead of other source control providers?” or side step it “I don’t really use github but I’m experienced in Azure DevOps and Team Foundation Server plus I’m fluent in git command line so I’ll be able to skill up in GitHub specifics pretty quickly if I need to”. Interviews are two way streets, I’m interviewing a company as much as they’re interviewing me, I have standards on where I’ll choose to work.

If you want a portfolio, I’ve got one, it’s on my website, the url of which is on my cv. Knock yourself out, sign up if you like, it’s public. I even updated it just for you last week.

Y’know why recruiters ask to see your github? Because they read in a book or a blog somewhere that that’s what they should ask when interviewing developers. 21 year old graduate developers looking for their first junior position, sure, maybe. That isn’t all devs tho.

I’d love for my car to be the inconvenient option but we’re just miles and miles away from that. Sure I could take the metro, it’d cost me more and I’d still need the car to drive to the metro station. Add an hour or so to what any given journey would have taken by car, throw in a handful of sweaty, rude and aggressive co-travelers and you have the answer as to why I drive everywhere.