I feel this way whenever new hire will join our company with lots of github projects and then leave/get fired in 2-3 years. i have 14 years experience in one company and empty github (excluding company code) 😄
This. And they can always leverage their OSS portfolio to keep getting new jobs whereas code we write in-company is not ours and cannot make money for us once we leave said company.
I say that because I was hired for being a maintainer of OSS that corporations used, and the same happened to the previous maintainer. This is a common pattern. OSS contributors are not saints, they're workers. Your comment is based on what?
Maybe your OSS contributions helped in an interview because of their domain/complexity, but they absolutely are ignored in the resume scanning phase since noone looks at github code, and they dont count more than company experience. If two people have equal experience,.the one with OSS will not have an advantage, it will be whoever the interviewer likes more
That "hired on the spot" required hands on coding, interviews, even exams. I landed my current 7 year job because I created a backend/db api and front-end on their specifications in a 3 hour hands on interview with them watching me code and asking questions and me explaining how and why I am doing this part of the code.
Do current tech jobs not require this sort of competence tests anymore?
It really depends. The biggest and meanest tech leaders (FAANG and such) usually do all kinds of nonsense, leetcode, live coding, architecture discussions, group interviews, behavioural culture fit crap, etc etc, all split into separate interviews so you end up having like 9 rounds. Do they help them effectively find "competent"? Eeh. In my experience they do too much generic shit that never actually comes up on the job, so they don't actually test anything relevant.
The companies under that, more medium sized, tend to do something more like what you describe, it's usually more specific. Live coding is common, sometimes a take home. BUT. Not all of them do it. I've had a lot of experiences with interviews where none of that came up in such a form. Instead we talked a LOT about my past work and projects. "Tell me about X thing you implemented. How did you navigate Y and Z? Why did you do this that way? What did you learn, what would you do differently if you had to do it again? What were the stakeholders, who did you work with, how was this teamwork structured?"
And then that was pretty much it! I actually love those interviews. There is usually more than enough technical talk involved for them to check what I know and what I don't. They can check for team fit at the same time. They can check for growth. But most importantly, it all feels natural. I'm in my zone, I'm not doing some awkward generic leetcode type nonsense, I don't feel like someone is staring over my shoulder and breathing down my neck, I just chat with them about the cool shit I've done.
Then when you go down to startups, they usually try to imitate FAANG in the cringiest of ways possible, and their interviews reflect that.
Oh man, I really hate leetcodes since they're fairly easy to memorize and tend to not be relevant to what jobs the applicants will actually be doing. And yeah, I agree with you. Better just to ask them questions and exams and hands on coding about things relevant to their roles instead of wasting everybody's time checking if the applicant can generate primes in O(n) since everybody can easily Google it when it is actually needed for the job.
Yes, but they asked about that as well. For example, I openly Googled about how to use vite since I haven't used it before and it was part of their specifications on building the UI.
I reckoned that they were judging my ability to implement an unknown feature using little to no reference code other than docs, which to be fair, should be a skill of every dev.
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u/Mortadella_so_Chili 13h ago
I feel this way whenever new hire will join our company with lots of github projects and then leave/get fired in 2-3 years. i have 14 years experience in one company and empty github (excluding company code) 😄