I live close to a city with a bunch of gambling companies and yeah, devs at those companies are definitely judged for their choices, similar to people who work for crypto / NFT companies. It has a reputational risk similar to working for porn companies (but less severe).
Exactly. The DJs that are innovative, crate digging, slightly pretentious music nerds are almost exclusively hobbyists, with a vanishingly tiny percentage of them being able to eek out a meagre living from it. The majority of full time DJs cater to mainstream audiences who absolutely do want to hear the same 50 - 100 tracks on rotation every time they go out. They want to dance and sing along to music that they're familiar with, and if the DJ doesn't play what they know then they won't dance, they won't stay, and the DJ won't remain employed.
It's actually very similar to web design - innovation has its place, but 99% of the time people want familiarity.
A typical DJ is allowed one weird song nobody has heard before. If it is a long show maybe one per hour. The rest better be songs the majority of people know and sign along with.
You might have a bit of confirmation bias based on the particular environments you've been in.
Having taken part in various types of electronic music/art scenes since the early 2000's, I've met all kinds of people. Local hobbyist bedroom producers playing for free. Semi-professional artists juggling gigs&touring with one or more side jobs. Full-time DJ's playing everything from small underground parties to some of the biggest parties/festivals at the time. They all cater to their audience to varying degrees, mainstream or not.
Granted, the scenes I've bumped into tend to be on the non-mainstream side. That's where you can actually go professional being that "innovative, crate digging music nerd" you refer to (removed "slightly pretentious" because that hasn't been my experience). It's tough, but it can be done, and it's a larger group of people than you seem to think.
I've also met some professional DJ's that fully cater to the audience in the way you describe. Many of them make statements like yours like e.g. "99% of the time", "almost exclusively hobbyists", "slightly pretentious", etc. I really don't get why, because it's just not true, and it comes across as a bit defensive or passive-aggressive to be honest.
I mean, of course there is the mainstream audience of the type you describe. But even that audience changes its opinion about which 50-100 tracks they expect you to play on a regular basis. That change has to come from somewhere, otherwise they'd still demand disco tracks from the 70's. That somewhere is the stuff that hasn't gone mainstream yet, and while the percentage of people that can make a living of it is probably not very high, it's a lot higher than what you claim it to be.
That vast overlap between underground/alternative scenes and the mainstream is super interesting, and I'm pretty sure that if you included that part into your statistics, you'd see a different picture.
NB: I might have a bit of confirmation bias based on the particular environments I've been in ;)
The author of this article has a reputation for an incredible sense of self-entitlement, he's the person who tried to do a hostile takeover of Redis after making a few minor contributions[0]. In light of that it's not too surprising that he's finding it difficult to find a job that meets his expectations.
> I can count people that provided an important contribution to the Redis code base in the fingers of my hand, and spare fingers remain. One of those contributors is Matt Stancliff, so I can't (and I don't want) ignore him when he disagrees about how the project is developed.[1]
This quote by antirez suggests they did made core contributions. Also the events you’re bringing to light seem to be rather old and not relevant to the theme. Being self-entitled is a bit cringey, though.
I agree, it was a long article and at first I was with him but after the first few hundred words the author seems to start complaining that his obviously sufficient work is not sufficient to get him a job which is nothing more than a logical fallacy and having a slightly big head, it says nothing about the wider job market as a whole.
Indeed it was very entertaining, relatable even, and at times a complete wish-fullfillment slasher flick!
But it kinda (definitely :D) misses the point that it itself set up at the beginning with the fancy FRED graphs ... almost in the same way as the author misses the point of (and thus the required choreography for successful) interviews.
(As others comments here mentioned that he seems to lack the self-awareness to correctly position himself on the bell curve meme, which gives him a lot of consternation.)
Strong opinions are great when you know when to deploy them :)))
At least he now seems to be self-aware, though it seems likely he wasn't so self-aware at the time of the odd proposal at a conference. Check out the GitHub sponsors link at the top of the article. I'm sure someone's going to take him up on the $12,000/mo one.
Agree, it reminds me a bit of the guy who was really obsessed by the mh370 mystery and happens to have found more pieces of the plane than anyone else. It’s certainly possible, but I remain skeptical
I mean, several of those parts has matching serial numbers with the corresponding parts installed on MH-370. I'm not sure how one could fake that without a lot of nonpublic information.
And didn't the dude in question walk along the entire coastline of Madagascar looking for washed up debris? That's certainly a plausible reason to find them.
People can be pretty weird. I once received death threats over a technical blog post I’d written nearly a decade earlier, because the reader was upset that I hadn’t updated it. (The date was clearly labelled at the top of the post)
It is really weird. I have had dozens of hateful messages or emails in the decades of online communication, but in terms of death threat both was somehow related to Intel.
First one was in 2013/2014 when I said by the current trajectory TSMC is going to overtake Intel by 2020. Second was Intel losing the Smartphone Modem and Foundry battle about a year later, due to failure to forecast capacity.
For a lot of these reasons I simply left most of the online hardware communities and forum.
It is strange a lot of people think of brands in Tech as if they are religion. And internet in the 10s is really different to the 00s.
Consider substituting 'criminal' (or 'felonious', etc) for "weird" in future tellings of this story. Death threats are generally regarded as a crime by police and judicial systems, and 'weird' tacitly excuses the crime committed upon you. A death threat is not in the same category as weird, and does not deserve a framing-pardon from us.
Yeah, personally I take this as a known fact of life on the internet. I'm surprised the maintainer let it get to them so much.
Like many popular creators today are learning, we all must "stop reading the comments", lest we never put anything out there ever again, for fear of critical feedback.
To those people you are the weirdo refusing to use the convenient platform that everyone else is on. This stuff just does not enter their brains because it has become utterly normalised. To them it's not bizarre to insist on using social media, it's bizarre to insist on not using it.
Unless it's half-assed, clumsy and short-sighted, and we are stuck with it forever, because standard. Until one's implementation becomes a standard thanks to the fact it wins as a library (as jQuery did), it should not be slyly forced into the language.
Github has network effects that will always be difficult for challengers to overcome. Even Gitlab is nowhere near taking over. GH is effectively a professional resume for many people, and if they're contributing to something they want that recorded on their profile. When was the last time a recruiter asked to see your Gitlab or Sourcehut profile? As far as they're concerned those contributions might as well not exist, and like it or not that really matters to people. In short, it's the people, not the code that counts.
I'm really surprised to hear that. My GH profile has got me plenty of jobs over the years and also allowed me to skip things like programming tests that are usually part of the interview process.
I've seen jobs claiming they let you skip their tests but none have yet to do so. I have multiple conpleted side projects. They are small non-commercial but not trivial and solve a problem for me.
You are fortunate, which is great for you, but your advice will not work for most people.
half finished projects that you developed on your own don't hold that much value. They may pad those green stats, but those can be faked quite easily. It's contributions to projects with other contributors that really matter.
Why work on half-finished personal projects when you can contribute to a high(ish)-profile public projects, especially such that your prospective employers might be using?
Seems like you lucked out, because this never really happened for me. I wish this was the case! I have a ton of half-finished projects I could show instead of doing tests.
Doesn’t seem like luck if he actually finished his projects. Every undergrad has a github full of half finished projects. Seeing professional contributions to a widely used project is a completely different story.
Even half-finished projects can be a valuable reference if they showcase passion, good development practices, or some specialty skill. Contributions to popular projects are valuable as well, but they should also showcase some of these attributes.
Something people often miss is that it's not enough to just link someone to your GH profile. If it's full of half-finished projects, they will likely look at your pinned ones (if you have those set), and not bother with the rest. The crucial thing is linking them directly to specific files of a project, specific PRs and contributions, that showcase the value you can bring. This makes the job much easier for the other side, while highlighting your strengths.
I have to agree a stubborn portion of companies refuse to look at it. It's their loss. If a company does not respect open source contributions I think it's a good filter.
I have so far found it to be a very good filter, helping eliminate BS or candidates grossly exaggerating their abilities. I've yet to experience the opposite but I have hope.
I'd definitely look at their code contributions on any code platform they'd provide on their CV. In addtion to this, sr.ht would hint me "you're actually interested in your craft way beyond what's in your school curriculum".
gitlab would hint me "you absolutely don't care about an UI which is slow as mollasses but you maybe have stronger moral principles."
I tend to agree. My company (and many other companies) don't let you use a personal github account for company code, so we have separate accounts for the businesses private repo. Obviously these contributions can't appear on my personal github account.
The other issue is that commit activity is just a very poor signal for engineer quality. I've met truly terrible engineers with the brightest green activity boards you'll ever see. And I've met absolutely brilliant wizards whose activity board is very sparse.
Seniority is another issue -- as you grow in an org, you won't always grow in a way that leads to more contributions. I personally am spending a lot of time pairing, a lot of time leading, and a lot less time busting out individual tickets with constant commits.
I've also found that instead of taking 30 commits over 2 weeks to finish a project, the more experienced I get, I can do the same work in 5 commits over 3 days. It's just the nature of experience. But which one looks better on the github activity graph?
As an interviewer it is the opposite to me. If there is a link showing your open source work, I want to review it to see if it indicates anything good or bad, and could be a topic for discussion. Too few people have good content there, so it can be a useful filter.
Me too. In particular, I look at how they handle pull requests. If it's full of derogatory comments or other asshole-isms, probably not going to be a fun person to have on the team. If they handle the occasional annoyance with a modicum of professionalism, it's usually a good sign.
I just find GitHub's interface very intuitive and easy to use. Even GitLab isn't close despite being very similar; and it was miles ahead of sourceforge, Google Code etc.
(This is from someone who is not a dev by profession and had no idea about version control at the time.)
One will never hear me defend GitLab's UI as "good" or "helpful" and for damn sure nowhere near fast, but in their defense the number of things they need to provide an interface for is much, much larger than GitHub's. I could very easily see them making better use of "and the rest of it" to put the 80/20 front and center versus the "cheesecake factory menu" approach they have going now
You mean that if you sent links to your Gitlab or Sourcehut profiles (or even your personal site) when asked for your Github profile, those recruiters would refuse to look at it?
If you replace "refuse" by "not bother to", the sentence suddenly becomes very believable. When you have dozens of resumes to sift through, and one applicant is difficult for no apparent reason, it's very easy not to bother. It's going to require a bit of effort to switch to the gitlab context and figure out the interface if the recruiter isn't used to it, which is annoying. Unless you already stand out for some positive reason, you don't really want to stand out for being annoying.
Well if clicking a link to your Gitlab profile is more difficult than clicking a link to your Github profile... yes, that could happen.
I have no idea how it could happen in practice. It's quite believable that there is some recruiter out there that has this kind of problem. But I do think it's quite safe to assume most of the tiny minority that will click on the link will get the same information from either one.
Well I personally am sick of seeing github profiles that are just a bunch of trash commits. List specific projects, what you contributed, and a link to who cares which service on your resume. Way easier to read
yeah i think they're much less likely to look at it, unless they're already significantly interested in you as a candidate for some other reason. We're in a competitive marketplace and having a profile that stands out is definitely an edge
remember that a recruiter is probably spending about 30 seconds assessing your job application, and that you're one candidate out of dozens. In that environment they're going to go with the easy route and showing them a bunch of pinned, interesting repos with a healthy number of stars in a format they're used to is going to help them to quickly put you in the "maybe" pile rather than the "nope" pile.
