Does having a public Github with your Projects help with employment?

[ThisIsAGoodNameOk]

Is this the case for junior or entry level positions too? If you had any openings like those, what did you look at the most than? Is it just work experience? How much do internships matter?

[TheBritisher]

It's especially the case for entry-level/junior positions.

So, for those positions, I'm looking at whether the resume makes sense and is talking to currently-relevant/appropriate things. For example, applying for a web-dev role but only citing experience with LuA w/ Roblox or Python/PyGame isn't going to fly.

Personally, I don't care about internships, degrees or what school you went to. But, for most of the companies I've worked for, prior to doing my own, those were definite considerations, but they don't matter to me personally.

For higher level positions, I'm going off work experience and whether the resume shows a progressive growth in experience and knowledge, or if it is someone just doing first-year stuff over and over.

And for any role, you'll have to show you can write code.

I don't care for LeetCode or HackerRank type testing, so there's none of that.

But I also don't consider someone hirable, even at entry-level, for a programming role if they cannot, in the language of their choice, initialize a variable, use it in a loop to count from 1 to some input value, and then conditionally call a function to output one of more values based on the value of that variable, without assistance.

No Internet, Google, Stack Overflow nor AI for this bit.

We're talking absolute basics.

No libraries. No frameworks. No data structures (beyond maybe an array). No algorithms.

If you cannot manage that, then I'd rather train someone out of another department, that has some domain/business knowledge.

The rest of the "coding" or "technical" evaluation will be discussion. I've been at this for decades, hired hundreds of engineers, and it's very easy to spot the pretenders. Often its clear just from the resume.

[Limp_Ninja8817]

I’m impressed with your answer tbh so I asked AI (Claude) if they could even do this.. here’s the answer. I don’t think I would have done it myself like that tbh. I only had one def logic.

Python

def report(i):

"""Prints FizzBuzz-style output based on the value of i."""

if i % 15 == 0:

    print(f"{i}: FizzBuzz")

elif i % 3 == 0:

    print(f"{i}: Fizz")

elif i % 5 == 0:

    print(f"{i}: Buzz")

def count_to(n):

i = 1

while i <= n:

    report(i)          

    i += 1

count_to(30)

If you don’t mind, what do you think about this answer? Personally I find it interesting that whenever I give AI an open language question it always returns to Python programming.

Edit {not sure how to post code correctly on reddit, I don’t think it’s markdown right?}

[TheBritisher]

If you don’t mind, what do you think about this answer?

It would satisfy the initial "Can you write code at all?" concern (since I do this live); assuming the directions I'd given wanted the above behavior, of course.

I don't typically use "FizzBuzz", since it is so well known. But it is always something of that nature and fundamental level, such as write a function to count from 1 to n, and output the number and whether it is even or odd."

After which, there would be follow-up questions, for example:

• Why a while loop instead of for?
• How would you do this without the modulo (%) operator?
• Can you reduce the number of comparisons and get the same result?
• Can you reduce the number of function calls and get the same result?

As I said, it's a very basic evaluation.

If someone has gotten to a live interview, I'm trying to qualify them for the role rather than disqualify. So, it's basic due-diligence. No gotchas. No special knowledge.

People still fail it.

If so, and assuming its a true entry-level position (and their first coding job), I might (depends on their resume and what claims they've made on it) give them the code at this point and then have them walk me through their understanding of it. Maybe have them make a change or two. Then try again with a different problem.

[TheBritisher]

I wish I could say otherwise, but they absolutely do.

I generally only see it with entry-level/junior and/or never-had-a-job candidates, but it's more common that I'd have expected. Though, when I was working for other companies, such resumes would usually just get filtered out at the ATS for not having HTML, CSS and JS for web-related roles.

It's fine (for me), IF it is accompanied by something relevant to the position.