The other week I've got a call from a person who said something about being a "professional headhunter", "recruitment professional", something something dark side, and the dialog was like this:
(the person) - hey, my name is "headhunter something something", I work for "dark side inc." and I'd like to tell you about a great opportunity for you. I've seen your github profile and I think you will be a good fit.
(me) - hi, no thanks, I'm happy with my career right now, have a nice day.
I seriously hate this. Really. Github is not my CV and it should never be.
Github, among many others, is a place where people collaborate on projects or release things they'd like others to use or give feedback for. My contributions to the community are done in the spare time that I have, in almost 99% of the cases, or because I encounter a bug while I'm at work so either I file a bug or a bug fix to the project that I'm using (yeah, Tapglue is awesome in this regard, I can actually fix something in the community if we use it and I can do it).
Many people do this in their own spare time as well. Granted, there are companies like Google or others which allow people to work on open-source projects directly and thus they are more visible, but hey, they actually get payed for that, it's not only because they are cool persons and want to give something back to the community (not saying that they aren't cool and al, you get the picture).
But seriously, I have a job, usually 9 to 18 (more often than not 10 to whenever something in the late evening) and sometimes I have enough time to do something useful for a project that I use or for the community so... Yeah, don't hire me based on that. Hire me because I'm a good engineer, hire me because I have quite a few years of experience in what I'm doing, hire me because I enjoy what I'm doing and I always try to best myself and finally, hire me because I've seen sh*t and I'll fix it faster and better than your average ninja superstar cowboy guru hipster that advertises himself/ herself as such. And if you decided that you want to hire me, after seeing my LinkedIn profile, and after I pass whatever tests / recruitment procedure you have, and you say: hey, he's a nice guy, we want him. Oh and look, he's also contributing to the community back, then yeah, that's cool, it's a bonus, not a feature, not a mandatory activity.
Why I rant? Because it's called Software Engineering, not Social Media monkey typing, ok? We are supposed to help the others automate things, making them better, improving their life and quality of life, supporting people that have disabilities with better, smarter, technology and overall do our small part of the contribution for advancing the humankind to the next stage. But because of the myth that "everyone can code", we've got hispsters and all those self-promoted ninjas and cowboys and whatever else they are who are not even related to what a Software Engineer is or should be. Please promote quality not quantity, pretty please.
