Comment by Mark on "Github profile for hiring?"

I'll give my personal opinion as a developer not responsible for hiring:

Most people with a good Github profile are good developers (at the technical/architectural level).
But there are also many good developers without an active Github profile.
Although there are very valid reasons to not code outside work, and one can be a great developer that way, it's hard to deny that all else being equal, the one that also codes in their spare time will reach a higher level faster.
Github activity that isn't work related shows an interest in coding and continuous learning.
Having a somewhat close look at Github seems much more useful than blackboard coding, intelligence tests, hackerrank, etc.

I may be wrong, but my impression working with good developers of both types (do and don't program in spare time), is that they both have good problem solving ability, but the ones who only code at work get stuck in old patterns much more. The ones that question the conventions are the ones that program outside them.

I think whether companies look at it is very mixed. I know there are not-small-sized companies that do, and ones that don't, but don't know the proportion.

I have a github profile with several projects and Ideas but I have my own gitlab instance with even more ideas .... the idea of publish or perish ... i don't like it.

I am way more interested how you think and how up to date you are, then your github profile.

it's a classic 1 of n problem to me ... just because this could correlate it's not necessary the causation for a good programmer. I like to assert things before I guess and project.

For example: Martin fowler -> 2 repos Eric meyers -> 0 repos and he wrote the monads in haskell ....

I am not against github profiles ... I just don't like heuristics in such cases.

Recruiting is pretty much always heuristics though, there's usually CVs or letters or references. In a way, the code someone actually wrote is much less heuristical than those things.

"Although there are very valid reasons to not code outside work, and one can be a great developer that way, it's hard to deny that all else being equal, the one that also codes in their spare time will reach a higher level faster."

Just to point out, coding on your free time or not is not an indication that can be gleamed from Github. I code every day after my day job; but it's for money / clients / freelance. Code that, while I wrote it, is still nothing I'd like to publicly share with the world as well, it belongs to my freelance clients.

I personally, have begun to put more code on Github - in private repositories - just for safe keeping (and I don't give a crap that MS bought them) and if a recruiter or freelance client wanted to see one, I'd share a small snippet - never a whole project.

Personally I'd send one or a few links to projects you do want to share to recruiters. I didn't so much mean the profile itself as the projects on it, and as Ben Buchanan (200ok) remarked, recruiters don't have much time to figure it out themselves. So I think it's not up to the recruiter to notice which are client projects.

Interestingly, I just found out that Hashnode has An active GitHub / Hashnode profile is a must in bold on most programming jobs.

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