Hiring by github/open source contributions mean you're selecting for programmers who have ample free time and an interest joining the overwhelmingly young, white, and male open source community.
You're going to filter out women, black people, and anyone with a family. You're also going to filter out people who are bound by nasty non-competes, or even people who just don't like to program outside work.
It's a tough one: you can clearly see how people navigate communities and get a much more in-depth picture of their development process, but you're also leaving people out that don't fit the mold.
> Would you be happy with such a process?
Until someone figures out how to do a blinded interview, focusing strictly on applicable skills and being conscious of bias is as good as it'll get.
No one is filtered by anything other than their own choices. There is nothing preventing a woman from using github - github doesn't even ask about gender or race.
I use github, I've put hundreds of hours of work into projects on github. But you can't see that because those repos aren't public. Could I, in theory, work on some open source projects on github? Sure. But to be honest the main reason to do so would be job related, to use github as a CV. Personally I think my time is better spent working on the projects that I already have going on (one of which is software dev for a charity that helps sick children) or starting on projects for my own business. There are plenty of good reasons for people to not have tons of contributions to open source projects on github, and ignoring that fact does nothing but artificially restrict your talent pool.
If I see good code, I know that (absent some sort of fraud) you are a good coder. That's a pretty solid "lets talk". In numbers, I'll interview 3 people with good code and maybe hire 1.
If I don't see good code, you put yourself into the same category as all the bad coders out there who can't code. I may need to interview 10 or 20 people before I find someone decent - I simply can't differentiate between you and them without spending hours on code interviews.
Obviously I'm going to talk to the people with visible code first, and only hunt for the needle in a haystack if I get desperate.
Ashe Dryden merely lists some personal choices of women (cleaning their house more, taking care of children), and some unrelated statistics about women in general. If she did somehow draw a causal link between those activities and not using github (she doesn't), it would imply that women should also be absent from Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. They aren't.
The second link is merely an animated gif of an octopuss.
The only point the third article makes is based on the implicit and unproven assumption that merit is uniformly distributed.
None of those articles remotely attempt to show that women are prevented from using github.
> If she did somehow draw a causal link between those activities and not using github (she doesn't), it would imply that women should also be absent from Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. They aren't.
Wait a minute, are you seriously trying to advance the argument that software development (the purpose of github) is as mentally similar as browsing the web for pictures of cakes (the purpose of Pinterest, as far as I can tell)?
Not sure if serious or trolling.
E: jcoglan is doing referer: madness, copy/paste the URL or bang refresh.
Hiring by github/open source contributions mean you're selecting for programmers who have ample free time and an interest joining the overwhelmingly young, white, and male open source community.
You're going to filter out women, black people, and anyone with a family. You're also going to filter out people who are bound by nasty non-competes, or even people who just don't like to program outside work.
It's a tough one: you can clearly see how people navigate communities and get a much more in-depth picture of their development process, but you're also leaving people out that don't fit the mold.
> Would you be happy with such a process?
Until someone figures out how to do a blinded interview, focusing strictly on applicable skills and being conscious of bias is as good as it'll get.