Also, LaTeX can produce much, much better resumes than markdown. Here's a link to my (extremely dated) resume using the moderncv template: http://jsaxton.com/resume.pdf
It's great for a number of reasons:
1: It immediately gets the attention of the hiring manager, since it looks way better than the typical MS Word resume.
2: It's really easy to edit. If I want to add an item, I just add "/item Did X". It's great.
3: It's plaintext, so you can throw it in git, which is really nice. Since I don't want the public to know if I'm updating my resume, I keep my resume in a private git repository (the same private repo where I keep all my Coursera work).
What you mentioned about people liking the way the resume looks is absolutely true, but I still get a lot of people that ask for it in Word format, especially recruiters. I've in the past caught recruiters that have added/changed my resume to suite their requirements better, so having only a PDF actually helps stop that nonsense.
http://bertjwregeer.com/Resume-files/BertJWRegeer-Resume-Apr...
(Side note, I am looking for work, feel free to contact me!)
The interview (and to a lesser extent, cover letter) are where the specifics come out.
I feel like programmers should all realize this, which makes me think that the people that are going to be "judging" based on what's in there are not exactly people that are equipped to know if I'm a good programmer or not anyway.
Github is a great resume if you're young and don't have real work experience, if you want to change "tracks" and show you have skills in a different domain, or if you really love and support open-source.
I guess it's a self-resolving problem as companies who take not having github activity as a negative probably aren't places people without github account would want to work anyway.
(a) once upon a time, it was _expected_ of a competent developer to be able to run a server with a web server and a resume html file. putting your resume in github is no more impressive than putting your resume in your personal wikipedia profile.
(b) some of us have been programming a lot longer than github has been around, and it does not come close to effectively showing community contribution over such a career.
(c) as someone responding to my original comment noted, not all code can be published. i have a lot of commits, even in github, which you can't see.
All that said, I do expect people increasingly to examine github for recent community work, I would be concerned with someone who had never used it, though outside the fad bubble of the sf mission, a lot of people are using bitbucket and - GASP - hosting their own git repos.GitHub is a great tool, a useful community 'hub', but also a SPOF and a relatively young player in the source control space.
I can say from experience, however, it's just very frustrating to have a recruiter say that some founders ten years your junior who probably have a great idea and could be great to work for want to see a github profile.
kids, i helped build Rackspace, without which there would be no GitHub. Give those old-timers a call. ;)
Anyway, this debate may not be fair to OP who was just showing how to use GH to host actual resume. There are some advantages, but really, fire up a $5 DigitalOcean VM and show me that you know about code running some way other than foreground in your laptop console.
If you hit print you'll get a stylesheet suitable for distributing a PDF... or printing.
You can even change the colour theme with the left/right arrow keys, but that's just to help me pick a colour scheme, rather than a feature of the CV itself.
Even better, though, I have a real resume, much of which consists of a section "Open Source Project Experience": several paragraphs explaining the biggest projects I've contributed to, what I've done, and how that work is significant. That section in particular works very well with potential employers/interviewers. THat works far better than just saying "there's my work over there, evaluate it yourself".
We are entering a world where companies will have to compete to hire harder than ever before. Coding is a job that can be done anywhere in the world - so if they want to hire the "best" the companies need to be the most attractive.
OR ...
They need to guarantee low risk.
If you work in a company that does not expect to release some work product as open source, then it is not a company that is going to compete on that world stage.
If so then look at its approach to keeping employees safe and risk free - no layoffs, a nice profitable niche to exploit, no exploitation, no crazy deadlines, nice low turnover of staff.
If the company you work for is not competing for talent, nor is it giving you low risk in return for your work, then I strongly suggest you update your CV, on github or not.
PS
JoshTriplett comments are the sanest - in short "I have a github account for bugs I fix on major projects. I put that in my normal CV along with why what I did was important"
Now that is how to use a github account. I have some catching up to do.
You can generate an open source report card based on your profile, but you should not see github as your CV:
https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-c...
1. He blocks HN traffic (hence the idiotic octopus gif)
2. His post is incredibly inaccurate and simply wrong on so many levels
It's a project that generates both html and pdf versions of a resume written in markdown. It's distributed as a phar file so you can keep a copy in your bin folder and just keep your resume.md in it's own repo.
This was originally a way to experiment with css descendant selectors and learning more about the capabilities of wkhtmltopdf. It's limited compared to LaTex, but it's reasonable for a simple resume.
I'm actually surprise the library is getting any use at all. I hacked it together over a week after being frustrated with the options out there, then finding yours and wanting the same thing in node.
- github shows you spend too much time programming outside of daily job
- it shows how much more productive you are outside of work, possibly creating some uncomfortable questions for your boss.
- running project with 10K+ users could interfere with your daily job
- companies prefer younger 'not so much' experienced people who just follow
- most companies have strict ban on any open-source activities outside of job, advanced Githubers are filtered out even before interview.
I get enough spam from recruiters on LinkedIn thank-you-very-much.
Also, I have several resumes, depending on the role of the job I'm applying/striving for.
But I appreciate the sentiment of using GitHub for a document version manager.
This has had two good benefits.
1. Recruiters can no longer modify my resume easily to match their requirements. Yes, I've caught some recruiters modifying my resume they sent on to the company to include more keywords. (Which incidentally is also why I bring my resume to jobs with me) 2. I can have a more consistent formatting that is enforced. I've found that even with Microsoft Word different versions across platforms would display my resume differently.
Even if recruiters/companies require Word documents, most of them are more than willing to take a PDF instead. Most online forms that pull information out of a resume can pull information out of a PDF just as well as out of a Word document.
A smaller percentage wouldn't care one way or the other.
The idea that github is a resume is, to my mind, wishful thinking at best.