> what I don't understand is how does it make sense to hire a coder whose code (a real (though not necessarily big) app code, not a 5-minute puzzle code) you have never seen.
Well, let's break this down a bit:
- if you hire a junior, all you care about is smartness & maybe culture fit. You get both of these better through interview than GitHub repo
- if you hire a senior, you hire for social/organizational skills, problem-solving skills, diverse expertise etc. GitHub is not particularly relevant
GitHub makes sense when you look for someone with deep specific expertise in a narrow, open-source-related technical area. Which is rare. I think it's more often used to check that "this person has coding style preferences similar to mine", which is IMO not really a great idea.
Makes sense, thanks. We are just speaking about different things then. All the times I were looking for coders I was interested in neither juniors (whom I would have to teach) nor seniors (who would lead the team) but middles (who would just write good code given a very specific task and very detailed design).
Well, let's break this down a bit:
- if you hire a junior, all you care about is smartness & maybe culture fit. You get both of these better through interview than GitHub repo - if you hire a senior, you hire for social/organizational skills, problem-solving skills, diverse expertise etc. GitHub is not particularly relevant
GitHub makes sense when you look for someone with deep specific expertise in a narrow, open-source-related technical area. Which is rare. I think it's more often used to check that "this person has coding style preferences similar to mine", which is IMO not really a great idea.