So im hiring an Android developer for my company. ...

# random

[Paul Woitaschek]

So im hiring an Android developer for my company. What do you do with candidates that don't have any kind of public contributions? Like in not even a single issue created somewhere. Do you generally dismiss them?
For me being part of the Android developer community is a large part of my work Identity.

[tddmonkey]

There are plenty of reasons to not have any public contributions. Dismissing them can only lead to you potentially missing out on a great dev

[tddmonkey]

Many years back I used to think like that - looking back I dread to think how many good people I missed out on cause I was only looking for people who lived and breathed coding 😕

[fred.deschenes]

yeah I don't get this fascination with people having to code outside of work, I don't expect my mechanic to fix cars in the evenings

[fred.deschenes]

and maybe the dude does plenty of stuff but just doesn't put it on github

[tddmonkey]

There’s a dev on my team now - does great work, wants to learn loads of new stuff (he moved to my team TO learn new stuff), pushes us to improve things, couldn’t want anymore from a dev. He does zero coding outside of work hours, and has no public contributions. He has hobbies and a life outside of programming

[cedric]

@tddmonkey nailed it. External contributions are a “nice to have” and if I have to choose between two candidates, one with external contribution and one without, I’ll probably go with the former. But automatically dismissing engineers that don’t have such a thing is short sighted.

[cedric]

A lot of excellent engineers don’t contribute externally. An added bonus means that instead of coding on open source projects on their spare time, they might actually get some company work done…

[Paul Woitaschek]

Interesting, thank you all. What I don't get is: As an Android Dev I use libraries. And when I use libraries, I find bugs, have ideas how to improve them.

[Paul Woitaschek]

Why isn't this the case with every developer?

[fred.deschenes]

Well like any other profession, for some people it's a passion, for others it's just a job.

Maybe their lead was the one that reported the issues/feature requests, maybe they worked somewhere that didn't value open source (or their contract makes it so the company owns every line of code they write, in and out of work), maybe they just had another account, maybe they have a family and other hobbies, or maybe they just really don't care, but that's up to you to figure this out if/when you interview them.

You can't assume that everyone has the same drive and passion as you do, especially if it's your own company.

[kenkyee]

some people just don't have that drive...e.g., I'm usually the one reporting any issues to 3rd party libs. Everyone else does the "it's a job" thing and clocks out after work. I also check in and fix stuff on vacation and after hours though.
Doesn't mean they're bad devs...just that they have an off switch instead of an "idle" switch like some of us do...

[tddmonkey]

I’m one of the “idle” switch people and I’m glad there’s only one of me on our team. I’m sure there are times when the rest of the team turn up on Monday morning to be greeting with a PR for something I worked on over the weekend cause I had an itch to scratch

[Paul Woitaschek]

Why are you glad there is only one of you in your team? @tddmonkey

[tddmonkey]

I think it would generate too much work

[tddmonkey]

It does help force me to switch off a bit when nobody responds to my slack messages too!

[tmg]

Interesting, thank you all. What I don't get is: As an Android Dev I use libraries. And when I use libraries, I find bugs, have ideas how to improve them.

Do it i the work hours, it's work anyway and you need it.
all this pushing out outside work hours simply undermines your and your peers' value as devs.
Programming outside work should be something that is completely unrelated to what you do at your job. Even trying stuff should be included in a reasonable time in your work hours.