I feel like there are many devs out there who expose a lot of personal details and opinions all over the web. Maybe it’s just me, but when starting out with the internet I tried my best to separate my personal details (name, age, sex, country, ethnicity, family ties, relationship status,…) from usernames in public.
Seeing devs do it willingly and voice opinions on divisive or sensitive topics kind of messes with me. Aren’t y’all afraid of missing out on job opportunities if someone reads your opinions, code, or other stuff tied to your personal accounts? Or letting anybody (maybe family, friends, acquaintances, …) in on your personal life, mindset, opinions and other personal information?
If any of that is part of the hiring process - I don’t want the job.
If HR is incompetent enough to consider things like relationship status or political opinions then what other bullshit policies does the company have? It’s probably the tip of the iceberg.
By far most important thing is to have good colleagues, because without good colleagues your job will be miserable or the company will not last (or both). Made the mistake of working for a shitty job at high pay once and it was one of the worst decisions of my life.
Don’t waste your life working for incompetent companies.
Also, as someone who has hired devs… if you have a public profile, and it doesn’t make you look hopelessly incompetent, then your application is going onto my shortlist. Too many applications cross my desk to look at all of them properly, so a lot of good candidates won’t even get considered. But if there’s a GitHub or similar profile, I’m going to open it, and if I see green squares… you’ve got my attention.
You’ll get my attention wether the username matches your real name or not, but bonus points if it’s your real name. Openness leads to trust. And trust is criitcal.
I’m not sure I’d attach any meaning to real names online. There’s a whole group of us whose online names are just things they thought were neat when they were 12. And they’ve just stuck forever. There’s lot of reasons.
But otherwise, yeah. I’ll spend ten minutes looking up someone’s online profile. Mostly for GitHub if I can find it. If someone’s commenting on public prs and seems nice that’s a big signal.
I think that’s the crux of issue. If somebody’s open and said the wrong thing at the wrong time in their life, do you think whoever’s reading it will have the context to understand the circumstances it was written in? Also, won’t it make the selection process even more biased? IINM people like to recruit and promote people they most agree with or see themselves in. Giving a recruiter or company grounds to disagree with you doesn’t seem like a great start.
Let’s say a candidate writes in a blog post that they’re pro squashing commits and all their personal projects use it too, but your shop is strictly against it. How many developers and recruiters do you think it would taint during the recruitment process? Wouldn’t you run the risk of dismissing a candidate who in private is pro-squashing, but open to other ways of working professionally?
It’s not unheard of for people to lose their jobs for stating their political opinion online. #ByeByeJob is a hashtag and https://old.reddit.com/r/byebyejob/ is a subreddit for a reason.
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