Github and Open-source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged
Github and Open-source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged
Sat Jun 09 2018
I was born to immigrant parents. My mother's family left Algeria looking for<br>a better life in Syria and then Jordan (where I was born). On my father's side,<br>his family fled the war in Palestine to Syria and then settled in Jordan. My father's family was so poor that he had to sleep with ten<br>other children in the same room (his brothers and his brothers'<br>children). Luckily, Palestinians, for whatever reason, valued education above<br>everything else, so they made sure to save up to send my father to Turkey<br>(because there were no universities in Jordan at the time) to study to<br>become an engineer.
When my father came back to Jordan, he worked for the government as an engineer. There, he<br>faced discrimination because government jobs were typically reserved for<br>natives. Despite all this, he rose in the ranks for years until he became the<br>city manager of Amman, the capital of Jordan. My father's journey taught me<br>that as someone who's underprivileged or discriminated against you need to work<br>ten times harder than the next person to get ahead. You need to leverage<br>whatever tool you have to signal that you're great at your job. For him, it was his reputation. In a country ravaged by corruption my<br>father had a reputation for being so straight it baffled people (but it also<br>meant that we wouldn't get to see any of that corruption money, and we had to<br>grow up on a measly government salary).
Which brings me to the recent debate in the developer community on using GitHub<br>as a résumé. While I try to stay away from debating hot topics because it takes time to form an informed opinion, this was a subject that's near<br>and dear to my heart, so I had to write about it.
It all started with this tweet claiming that GitHub is the only way that<br>employers can validate talent.
10/ GitHub is the de facto source for validating top talent the world over.
Résumé or CV?
Please.
Show me your GitHub profile, commits you've landed, projects you've forked, code you've released.<br>— Joe McCann (@joemccann) June 7, 2018
While I disagree with this statement, I found myself also disagreeing with<br>people on the other side of the debate which, in my opinion, are also staking<br>out an extreme position. They're saying that GitHub is not only a "useless<br>signal" but is also discriminatory by nature. (I found<br>myself agreeing more with moderate positions like Kim's<br>here saying that basically, employers are shooting<br>themselves in the foot by excluding people with no GitHub profiles).
Starting with the assumption that employers would want to hire the best candidates for<br>the job[1], we can observe that they're<br>merely trying to navigate the problem of "adverse selection," which occurs in any<br>market where there exists an asymmetry of information. Because candidates can deceptively<br>spruce up<br>their resumes and maybe even rise in the corporate ladder by being gifted at<br>office politics, and because most good programmers are not in the job market<br>(they either have a job or get headhunted before they enter the market), this<br>leaves employers in a tricky position with an insufficient set of tools to evaluate<br>candidates (see The Market for<br>Lemons for an interesting<br>discussion on adverse selection). GitHub, on the other hand, cuts through the<br>bullshit (for the most part).
You can fake a resume, or end up with a good one simply as a function of<br>your privilege. For example, if you're born into wealth,<br>your parents can probably call in favors to get you jobs at prestigious<br>companies. But can you really fake GitHub profile? It's tough to do so,<br>and that's because the "screening", as it were, is done by OSS maintainers. You<br>can't bullshit your way into getting pull requests landed. And no matter your parent's<br>standing in society, if your code stinks, you can't contribute. This makes GitHub a<br>precious tool for recruiters.
Because open-source is good at cutting through the bullshit, it also makes it an equalizer. If you come from an<br>underprivileged background, you should absolutely use GitHub to get ahead. That's<br>exactly what I did. I owe my entire career to open-source.
Back in college, I didn't have a personal computer, and I was always on the<br>move -- from campus to the office, to home. Which made it tough to code<br>on projects, or solve homework because every time I got my hands on a computer, I<br>needed to setup the development environment. So I started dreaming about a world<br>where I can open a browser tab and start coding, in any language,<br>anywhere. Which started a multi-year project to build an in-browser repl. The<br>first thing I did was put a textarea with a button that evald JavaScript. I was<br>able to program on my Nokia phone and work on problems on the go. But I wanted<br>this experience to be better and to work for more languages.
Long story short, years after I<br>had the idea for an online repl was I able, with help from<br>friends, to...