My favourite bit is the bit about “you can afford it, just choose a more frugal lifestyle” while young people today literally can’t afford to feed themselves. Also how about your ability to love your kids? Didn’t see that in any of your spreadsheets and your kids will hate you for giving them a shitty upbringing.

Close runner up is the bit about how we’ve had centuries of population growth, and it’s a huge deal that we’re not growing anymore without noting that all those centuries also included events such as wars and epidemics regularly killing off sizeable percentages of the population which doesn’t happen on the same scale anymore.

Exactly. Even Google, who have piles and piles of cash just sitting around and could easily afford it, don’t move into the printing business to save a few bucks. They just contract some company who offer that kind of thing as a service to arrange it for them. The company I worked for don’t even print the t-shirts, they just arrange the printing via a range of companies who do offer such a service. Everyone in between takes a little cut and Google still get their t-shirts at like £5 each.

Google love a t-shirt. Sold more t-shirts to Google than any other client by a mile and a half.

Not even Google ever printed 20k tshirts to give away for free.

Thats demonstrably false. I used to work for a merch company on the Google account and 20k custom printed Google t-shirts to give away at some event is a once every one or two months kind of order.

Indeed. A clearly proven track record is a given, in that I worked at software company x y & z for a number of years each as a developer in these technologies and with these good references. You don’t need to see my individual contributions to understand that holding several multi-year dev positions at enterprise software houses tells you a lot.

Tbh, if my track record is in question I don’t expect to be at an interview, I expect my CV to be on a no pile.

I think the real issue is that recruiters learn how to interview graduate junior dev candidates and apply it across the board. When you interview mid/senior devs with years of experience for senior roles which require years of experience, maybe “do fizzbuzz” and “show us your open source work” is a little patronising, no?

Might just be me tho, maybe I’m just a prick. Could be.

“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.