I don't see why a student should be measured differently when the developers with full-time jobs are excused with "maybe they just have a life". Some students have jobs outside of school or obligations/hobbies that take precedence over coding projects. I just think everyone should be held to the same bar, even students.
I'm not going to judge someone for having other obligations/jobs/hobbies or whatever else, but if I find a candidate with lots of great blog posts and GitHub projects/contributions in the area I'm hiring them for, I'm definitely going to factor that into my hiring decision vs someone who has none of those.
Well then you're likely missing out on good candidates - and those good candidates you're missing out on are likely to be under-represented. Parents, carers etc. - possibly very competent developers, who just have other commitments. I smell affinity bias.
Yes, but that is happening regardless. Everyone is missing out on good candidates.
Some people can't afford to go to a fancy school and don't have big companies come recruit on campus. Some people can't get certification or evening degrees because they have sick parents/kids to take care of. Some people can't do unpaid internships or make open source contributions that look good on their resume because they rely on the income from a job in retail. Some people can't do well in interviews because they have anxiety or other similar conditions.
I'm sure a lot of them are competent developers, but the reality is that there is no good selection process that tells you that with a good degree of confidence, so you have to look for other signals.
I largely agree with you aside from the final point about resigning ourselves to using these really poor signals. Recruitment is tough to get right, but we should keep improving.
Indeed. We should not make it something mandatory or a reason to deduct points from the dev if they don't have those but it would definitely be a good help if they do have it.
Well, the developers have full time jobs programming. Students don’t. At best they get a few CS classes that provide hands on, real world programming (albeit usually outdated). I agree that there are certainly students who have time commitments which prohibit them from doing extracurriculars. But I’m not talking about a huge commitment (heh) here. 50 commits over a year is like a few weekends worth of work. If you worked on a project once a month, you’d easy get to 50 commits.
I don’t expect students to code outside of class. But I also believe students who don’t code outside of class shouldn’t expect to get a job just because they have a CS degree.
I can't speak for where you live, but being a student is a full-time job here.
And your last statement makes no sense. If you don't expect students to work after work, then don't follow it up with the remark that you'd see them jobless.
When I was at University all my spare time was taken up by running a student media outlet, playing sports, and volunteering my time to student run services.
I would argue that all of these things have been much more helpful when finding work and interviewing than having Github commits.
And when I'm the interviewer, I certainly don't care how many Github commits someone has. If a new grad can't show me that they have experience working in a team of some description then it isn't going to work out.
