[edw519]

Do you think it's common?

Yes. I see it more and more these days, especially among recruiters and HR departments.

I believe there's an inverse correlation between the value one places on green squares and their understanding of what it actually takes to build software...

https://eddiots.com/931

https://eddiots.com/447

https://eddiots.com/2461

https://eddiots.com/2390

[Roark66]

Exactly. I hate this too. I'd rather keep my github activity private. It's nobody's business to know if I commit 30 times per hour or once per week.

On the other hand I recently encountered a very interesting hiring process. I think this is the first time in 20 years when I'm encountering some "new idea in recruitment" and I actually think it's good for everyone.

I'm talking about coding/other task based challenges you complete on your own. I recently got something like this sent by a recruiter. (2 coding challenges, one - writing a email to a junior colleague telling them how to troubleshoot an imaginary backend issue). I was very pleasantly surprised that web based system had over 20 languages you could choose from to complete the challenges and once I've completed it around midnight my time, by 7am it was already scored (by humans and pretty well).

I much prefer this kind of stuff to traditional "share your screen via video all and code live" or pre-covid, write your code with a pen on a whiteboard...

As for cheating possibility... They openly allow one to use Google etc, but there is barely enough time to complete the task, so someone extensively searching on Google, or trying to use chatgpt for the task would run out of time tweaking the prompt very quickly.

[em-bee]

i am not exactly a fan of coding challenges and i do like laive coding, but that challenge to write an email to a junior colleague telling them how to troubleshoot an imaginary backend issue sounds like something i'd really enjoy doing.

[safety1st]

I think this is a good hiring process. There is research which suggests that the hiring process which produces the highest performing hires is one that sticks as closely as possible to evaluating the candidate's performance on the specific tasks involved in the job.

In a dev job you're writing code, you have some degree of time constraint, you get to use Google. You're emailing a colleague with advice/suggestions. So yep. That company's test is pretty on the money.

We've used a similar process and it's super interesting to be on the hiring side and compare the results from different candidates when you give them the same problem. There were people who sounded really smart and polished in an interview but then bombed the coding test.

[djbusby]

I've been a proponent of the code-to-hire process for at least a decade.

There are for sure some challenges (some legal, some technical) but those replace other challenges that I think are less effective.

Interviews are pretty low value for skill-set - mostly for personality.

GitHub and SocialMedia spying don't reveal much about the Person-at-Work.

So, currently we find a nice candidate, brief interview for personality/communication then code test them. And I pay for the time too - but that value is capped for tax/paperwork reasons.

[xboxnolifes]

Was this the Woven-ran 4 question (recommendation system, email junior, invoice, database schema) interview? If so, I think the 4 questions are pretty good. The issue is I've had the exact same interview 3 times now from 3 different companies who use Woven.

If not, it sounded quite similar.

[shitlord]

At one point, you could backdate commits and push them to GitHub to make art with the red/green squares. I don't know if that still works, but recruiters generally won't be able to tell whether you're faking commit activity.

[irgeek]

This definitely still works.

[pjmlp]

HR departments many times hardly read the CV before the interview, let alone spending time on Github repos.

Additionally many people cannot make their work public anyway.

[legohead]

I remember a HN post where someone used git history to make pictures out of their github tracker. Seems like a silly thing for companies to pay attention to. I'm pretty sure you can make up old history if you want, too -- just turn yourself into a commit rockstar!