Social networking tools now allow professionals to post and share their work in online spaces. These professionals build reputation within a community of practice, often with the goal of finding a job. But how are the visible traces of their actions and interactions in online workspaces used in the hiring process? We conducted interviews with members of the GitHub "social coding" community to understand how profiles on the site are used to assess people during recruitment and hiring for software development positions. Both employers and job seekers pointed to specific cues provided on profiles that led them to make inferences (or form impressions) about a candidate's technical skills, motivations, and values. These cues were seen as more reliable indicators of technical abilities and motivation than information provided on a resume, because of the transparency of work actions on GitHub and relative difficulty of manipulating behavior traces. The use of online workspaces like GitHub has implications for the type of information sought by employers as well as the activity traces job hunters might seek to leave.

Activity traces and signals in software developer recruitment and hiring

Managers are increasingly using online contributions to make hiring decisions. However, it is nontrivial to find the relevant information of candidates in large online, global communities. We present Visual Resume, a novel tool that aggregates information on contributions across two different types of peer production sites (a code hosting site and a technical QaA forum). Visual Resume displays summaries of developers' contributions, and allows easy access to contribution details. It also facilitates pairwise comparisons of candidates through a card-based design. Our study, involving participants from global organizations or corporations that draw from the global community, indicates that Visual Resume facilitated hiring decisions, both technical and soft skills were important when making these decisions.

Hiring in the Global Stage: Profiles of Online Contributions

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects can be considered as learning environments in which heterogeneous communities get together to exchange knowledge through discussion and put it into practice through actual contributions to software development, revision and testing. This has encouraged tertiary educators to attempt the inclusion of participation in FLOSS projects as part of the requirements of Software Engineering courses, and pilot studies have been conducted to test the effectiveness of such an attempt. This paper discusses two pilot studies with reference to several studies concerning the role of learning in FLOSS projects and shows how using FLOSS projects as E-learning tools has a potential to increase the quality of the software product.

/pdf/using-free-libre-open-source-software-projects-as-e-learning-qnzgvqyr60.pdf

Using Free/Libre Open Source Software Projects as E-learning Tools

Technical and social competencies are highly desirable for a protean developer. Managers make hiring decisions based on developer's contributions to online peer production sites like GitHub and Stack Overflow. These sites provide ample history regarding developers' technical and social skills. Although these histories are utilized by hiring tools to help managers make their hiring decisions, little is known empirically how developers' social skills affect their technical skills and vice versa. Without such knowledge, tools, research, and training might be flawed. We present an in-depth empirical study investigating the correlation between the technical and social skills of developers. Our quantitative analysis of factors influencing the social skills of developers compared with factors affecting their technical skills indicates that better collaboration competency skills are associated with enhanced coding abilities as well as the quality of code.

What Makes a Good Developer? An Empirical Study of Developers' Technical and Social Competencies

This study aims to highlight the challenges and opportunities of using GitHub as a data source in both research and programming education.,This study provides general overview of the challenges and opportunities faced while conducting empirical research using GitHub as a data source. The challenges and opportunities are framed using the input–process–output model of open-source software.,GitHub data accessed from the application programming interface (API) can have several limitations, which can be overcome by Web scraping and using external data repositories such as GHArchive and GHTorrent. There are also several idiosyncrasies about GitHub that researchers need to be aware of to be able to use the data effectively, which can represent an opportunity for research. The challenges and opportunities are summarized for the licenses, community, development process and product of free/libra and open-source software communities hosted on GitHub.,This study provides a summary of GitHub-related challenges and opportunities that researchers can leverage to improve their empirical research. Furthermore, this summary can be a valuable resource for instructors that plan to use GitHub as a data source in their data-focused programming courses.

Mining GitHub for research and education: challenges and opportunities

/pdf/open-source-software-development-experiences-on-the-students-3v2o45b65u.pdf

Ju Long

Papers

Open Source Software Development Experiences on the Students' Resumes: Do They Count? - Insights from the Employers' Perspectives