I think it's a pretty bad idea to try to judge a developer from their github profile.<p>For the vast, vast majority of developers (no matter skill level), their github profiles are somewhere between "non-existent" to "a collection of weirdo stuff I played around with for a few minutes five years ago that doesn't reflect my professional output or interests at all". It just doesn't have much correlation to anything.<p>I've got several things on github, but even then it's not really representative of anything. If you look at my profile you'll see that it's a mess of random projects and toys in random languages. But it doesn't reflect how I spend most of my time.<p>There are a few niche cases where a github profile might matter - like if you are a consultant that specifically works supporting a OSS project and you want to show evidence of that to potential clients. But otherwise, don't worry about it.
I would never take negative signal from a GitHub profile, because for many, many developers, that will not be a meaningfully sized or representative example of their professional output. There exist many employers where you can do excellent work for many, many years and never OSS a single line of it.<p>I also think that the developer community far overestimates how much "have a good Github" is worth in terms of creating career equity, both because the people who you attempt to influence via it are largely not developers and, to the extent they are developers, are unlikely to spend hours looking at your Github profile trying to extract signal from it. You can probably get superior results for far less effort by writing ~3 good technical blog posts. (Do what makes you happy, naturally, but to the extent that getting well-paying exciting jobs generally makes people happy I'd recommend almost everyone treat having a small number of technical blog posts like exercise, in the "simply too useful not to do" bucket.)
As a hiring manager, I used to want to see a profile that competed with my own (at the time).<p>Now I've learned that (1) burnout is real, (2) work CAN be intellectually stimulating enough to not create that OSS desire, and (3) eventually your job ends at 5 and life takes over.<p>With that said, I WISH more developers opened issues on the projects they've used.<p>All too often I've seen people drop one dependency for another due to an edge-case.<p>Even a simple issue explaining the problem, providing a test case or sample code would be great as an indicator to how a developer approaches problems and seeks help.
I'm amused by all the "nothing" responses.<p>At Google, a candidate was referred to our team but had chosen to do all his interview questions in Python. This left me unable to discern "Can this candidate write code in C that actually understands memory handling and pointers?". Luckily, he had a GitHub repo for his work on a FUSE layer he had written that demonstrated that not only could he write in C, he also had reasonable commit hygiene (good commit messages, reasonable granularity, etc.).<p>I would never begrudge someone for having an empty GitHub profile (mine is unimpressive), but I've definitely both decided for and against candidates given the extra data it provides.
Have hired and let go of big time OSS developers before, with hundreds of packages they had written or maintained. Ultimately there was no correlation between their impressive Github resume and their ability to work as part of a team delivering product to customers, focusing on what matters to the business.<p>It seems to me that working on distributed OSS projects with strangers on Github or working on personal projects in one's spare time is a very different experience from how most software development shops are run, so there's only so much overlap there between the skillsets.<p>It does show you that the person knows how to write some code with no clear scope or deadlines, but that's a pretty low bar for most places.
I think Github is a tremendous resource, but while Github profiles can give a positive signal, they are not sufficient for negative filtering.<p>Many, especially older developers it seems, only begrudgingly have a profile for tickbox judgments encountered during job seeking. The best developer I ever worked with just didn't care about bothering with a Github profile, and the worst guy I ever interviewed had an expansive profile, including a repo with 80+ stars that was trivial and terribly coded, and our team's conclusion was that he got his bootcamp associates to star it.<p>At the end of the day it's a private company seeking a profit, and it's a little ridiculous that it's become defacto mandatory for proving you are a good developer, in the same (somewhat annoying and unfortunate) way that FaceBook has become defacto mandatory for proving you lead a social life.
I don't judge as a developer's quality based on their github profile. What a github profile does give me, is credibility to the claim that they are passionate about software.<p>When during an interview someone says they are passionate about software engineering and they have a github profile that reflects this, it gives me a reason to believe this person. But, I take the attitude that 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. When another person makes the same claim but with an empty github profile, I don't assume this person is lying. You can usually tell if someone is passionate or not by the way they talk abot their previous projects as well.<p>That being said, a well-used github profile is not a reason to hire someone and neither is an empty one a reason not to. Some of the best people in the field that I have had the chance to work with had zero, or close to zero, github contributions.<p>---<p>From the other side (the 'looking for a job' one), when interviewing with a company I worked for some years ago - they did ask me for a link to my github profile and some open source code I did. But the company made most of their software open source and they believed strongly in OSS. I believe this was done not to judge a person for the quality of the work, but rather to get an idea if the person also liked OSS.
Im an experienced developer who doesn't really have much on my github profile. One or two contributions to open source projects that I've used and a handfull of issues created or commented on. Most of my code is private. I'm not sure what, if anything, someone would take away from that, other than I'm not that active in the open source community.
* Do they have their own projects or do they contribute to others?<p>* How interesting are those projects generically and in the context of what I would need this developer to do?<p>* Are these projects actually used by anyone? Are there pull requests, etc?<p>* Does the developer actively keep working on existing projects or move around? I.E., are these learning vs hobby vs commercial?<p>* How is their readme? Does it exist? Is it sufficiently complete to convey meaning?<p>* How is the code organized? Is it reasonably laid out? Do they make use of third party packages and tools? Does it seem like they are re-inventing the wheel?<p>* Does the code work?<p>* Is the language chosen the right language for the job? Are they using idioms of that language or more generic ways of expressing loops, vsriables, etc.?<p>* How extensible is their design? Does it feel krufty or is it a pleasure to read?<p>* Is the code novel? Are they re-inventing the wheel or are they actually fulfilling a need?<p>* Are their projects wide and varied in scope and tools?<p>Those are a few things off the top of my head. Not an exhaustive list.
Nothing.<p>The presence of a high-quality, well-rounded set of projects in GitHub is mostly indicative of the fact that the candidate in question has the spare time to work on Free Software. That's a lifestyle thing, and not relevant to the hiring decision.
Nothing. IMO, the only thing that a Github profile itself tells me is how often they spend time interacting with Github and writing code.<p>The code within their Github repositories, on the other hand, can say a lot. But I won't spend too much time perusing it; I'll probably look at their resume, see "Oh, they can write Ruby and Golang and have a Github account", view their Github repositories, see their code, say "Okay, they can write ruby and golang" or "Oh no, they can't" and move on.
I know experienced developers that have few or none activity in GitHub at all. So, it depends.<p>You could find developers that:<p>1. write good code and are active in the community<p>2. write good code and are not active in the community<p>3. write ok code and are active in the community<p>4. write ok code and are not active in the community<p>5., 6., etc., (... you get the idea)<p>So, with number 2, you could see an empty GitHub profile and perceive it as low quality, but that's the wrong perception. See `pyrophane` comment as example.<p>Obviously on a hiring process a GitHub profile with activity is a great plus, but, again, it depends.
Here's one take, in order of increasing quality:<p>1. Participates somehow in popular open-source projects, by posting bugs or updating wiki entries.<p>2. Opened merged PRs for popular projects that fix bugs or add test coverage.<p>3. Opened merged PRs that add new functionality.<p>4. Is one of the maintainers of a popular OS project.<p>5. Created a popular OS project.
It depends on the size of the company.<p>- big companies: it's all about eliminating fake Resumes. they only use your web presence as a background check since they already have their own hiring process in place to evaluate a candidate (whiteboarding crap). In other words, they ain't care<p>- small companies: they will dig deeper since they don't get many Resumes on their desk. In this case, it will be about code quality, complexity, comments, design, etc. think of it as a coding assignment. It's much faster to pretend that the assignment was a project you've already worked on in the past. The evaluation criteria are the same as a coding assignment.
Nothing at all. Some of the best developers I have ever worked with are not interested in writing OSS software in their spare time. They want to spend time with their family instead. I feel the same way myself.
Unfortunately, the signals for hiring you get from GitHub aren't great. It could help more junior developers to show off some things that they've built if their initial resume doesn't have the experience people are looking for.
Haven't githubs new interface made it almost impossible to investigate what a developer has written? For example, on my profile page I have 32 repos. But 29 of them are forks of other projects which I haven't added anything to.
I've never known a developer with an impressive github profile.<p>I've worked at startups, and banks.<p>Thats 20 different people at least ... and all pretty good imo.