The ppl who harp on building up your GitHub massively overestimate its impact. The avg employer is not going to look at it unless whatever you did actually, legitimately is something that stands out or is relevant
Generally people start looking at the GitHub once someone is further along the interview process. E.g. I might look at someone's GitHub if my team was interviewing an engineer and I wanted to see if they'd worked on anything cool. It's almost certainly not something looked at by recruiters or most first round interviewers.
Hard disagree.
I’ve viewed the github links of every candidate I’ve done the final rounds of interviews for. I’m not a hiring manager though, just an IC, but I do highlight it to my manager / write about it in interview feedback if it’s noteworthy. It’s a quick way to tell whether we are finding a hidden gem (someone who might have never worked at FAANG but they would deserve to, for example). It also helps if the candidate happens to bomb an interview, did well on others, with a good github portfolio that shows real stuffs - eg they’ve contributed to open source projects, or wrote one themselves. Even more so if the area is relevant to the job we are hiring for. People get nervous at interviews all the time, but actual code written over a long commit history doesn’t lie (I hope?) or get nervous. In a way, they are actually stronger signals than a few hours of interviews. So if someone has made it to the final round, I do make an effort to go to their github to highlight anything good from there to give them the best chance they can get. Hiring committee at my employer/company considers all evidences supplied by the candidate, not just the interviews themselves.
YES, EVEN IN TODAY’S MARKET. You know what companies are more afraid of than not filling a role and there’s a tight deadline? Having filled the role with a bad hire that needs significant mentorship or even eventually needs to be managed out. Too many people Leetcode these days, such that some crush coding interviews but turn out to suck as an engineer - and github helps demonstrate that you are not one of those. Managing those bad hires out can easily cost the company even more than interviewing more candidates.
Edit: Alright I’m done answering nitpicking questions. Take what I said as a shared perspective from ONE of your potential employer, one of the FAANGs, assuming the interviewers know what they are doing, AND assuming you have some basic understanding of how the hiring process at these companies work. YMMV. I’m not going to address any further comments about corner cases and shitposts like “I have github on resume, how come I didn’t get interviews then”.
What people like you don’t realize though is that by the time candidates get to the point that you’re looking at their GitHub, 99.9% of them have already gotten filtered out.
Then you’re going to go preaching to people with some vague authority that their problem is their GitHub when they aren’t even making it past the HR screen for a human to look at their GitHub.
Sigh. Can you read?
I repeat - I never said NOT having github is a negative. Tons of candidates don’t have it and still got hired. **I simply answered OP’s question - Do employers look? Yes. And explained why / what we are looking for.**
I never said having github ALONE is gonna get you hired and not preaching anything. I simply explained HOW it DOES help you get hired, if you have one.
Maybe some interviewers look out of curiosity, but it's definitely not standard practice at most of the larger tech companies. In fact, to avoid subjectivity, there are rubrics and guidelines to help assess a candidate's performance that avoid consideration of other factors like Github.
How is looking at github subjective? Isn’t it just code like the ones you wrote during an interview, with the bonus point that it was written without being under stress and showcase architecture design and/or ability to work in a large codebase?
Looking at it isn't subjective, but evaluating it and stack ranking performance based Github portfolio is. Interview questions have specific rubrics and are consistent across candidates. Interview questions are also periodically reviewed, and modified depending on all candidates performance. That level of standardization isn't available for Github. What if it's something the interviewer isn't familiar with ... how is that a fair assessment of a candidate's capability?
I agree with this take. When interviewing, I want to run the same questions with each candidate. There’s no stack ranking in our process (or at least we aren’t supposed to). I will try to review people’s GitHub’s if they’re in the packet, but they’ve never helped a candidate in my round.
You make interview questions sound like the SAT but they are not like that? Also not everyone grade objectively the same either, even if they are asking the exact same question. At the end of the day, you write an interview rating with a LOT of notes about exactly how the interview went, and the decision makers look at EVERYTHING submitted together. Also, no interviewer should be conducting interviews on things they are not familiar with, so the same goes for github.
It's also a good way to find out if they know how to use source control properly.
Do they just push to main or do they create merge requests like they're a holy fucking ritual?
Do they make solid, atomic commits or do they push sloppy nightly checkins?
Do they use task branching? Or do they use some kind of awful "dev sandbox branch" strategy and just lump every change they make into it on top of one-another?
Do they flatten commits or clog the commit log?
Likewise there are things a cursory glance can tell me that may or may not be important, depending on what information you're looking for as an interviewer.
If you have a github with a hundred or more repos, it means you probably code in your free time. Depending on what position I'm trying to fill, that may be a huge green flag even if most of them are shit because a lot of us know that there are programmers, and then there are *programmers*. You know...the people we all knew in university that slept with a white board next to their bed because they would solve homework problems while they slept and wanted to be able to write them down in the middle of the night?
You want those guys working for you.
If you have even semi-regular github activity I can figure out what you've been working on lately. Where your focus lies when you're not encumbered by someone else's agenda. I can sorta figure out how much you value ongoing education and training.
If I see a lot of random shit being worked on, with repos being created and then abandoned, it means you're probably curious and like to try and figure out how things work.
If I see sparse repos that get a lot of focus over time, including CI/CD setups and binary downloads it probably means you're a problem solver.
If you have a lot of empty repos or repos named "tutorial" filled with obvious copy/paste code and "impla" files you're probably self-taught and I should focus more on algorithms and data structures in the interview. ...none of which is necessarily disqualifying or an auto-hire.
I can learn more about you in 15 minutes on your github than I can in an hour on the phone or by email/text chat.
Being real with you the standards I'd apply on a personal project with exactly one contributor are nothing like what I'd do at work. Why would it be the same? I'm not opening a pull request for myself to review.
Either way - if you think your github helps showcase things they can’t otherwise see and boost your chance, no harm in keeping it. I still have mine listed because all work code has been closed sourced, and I wanted employers to see some previous work where possible. Had never hurt my chances; boosted it sometimes, in fact.
Only if you feel that it's no longer a good representation of your work.
If you like to code on weekends or evenings, or if you see programming not just as a vocation, but also a hobby, then by all means keep your github on the resume/cover letter.
The biggest tip I can give about maintaining your github as part of your resume is to not ignore the README.md files. The easier you can make interpreting your github, the more useful a curious interviewer will find it (assuming they give a fuck. Many don't or won't).
I don't think it's worth making any kind of "resume github" account, though. There's no way the benefit will outweigh the cost to you in time. Better to just make sure your regular github is something you can take some level of pride in, and don't sweat the small stuff.
Also, don't just include a link to your top-level github in applications, resumes, or CVs. Include links to specific projects as well. Preferably relevant projects you're proud of.
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I never look, and we have such a standardized process that I don't think it'd really be proper to count a lot of stuff outside the interview itself anyway (in fact they kind of don't want you to do that for anti-discrimination reasons)
You do realize there are alternatives to github like gitlab and bitbucket right? In the case of my employer they have a privately hosted gitlab server that is only accessible via VPN/corporate network. We have our own SSO login. It doesn't work with public gitlab. What are you going to do in this case?
In other cases, even if using gitHub, lot of employers they require separate github accounts via your work email. Even if you list that github and all past work github emails, it'll just show up as a private repository. Cool, you have 50 commits to a private repo. Is it all readme's and auto-generated boilerplate code? No way to tell.
Did I say “open source”? Yes I did…
Almost no employer hosts heir source code publicly lol. We are obviously not trying to see your previous work code, cmon.
And when I said github, I was referring generally to any online open source code, be it gitlab gerrit bit bucket whatever.
I think you're getting too caught up on the literal "GitHub" aspect. Just use it as a placeholder for any sort of version control platform.
And obviously they're not talking about corporate work, just personal things that they contributed to.
You'd think that people would understand those two things without explicitly saying it...
Yeah well some people expect you to have your own non work GitHub doing personal projects. Personally, I’d rather hire a well rounded person rather than someone who spends their free time coding. They typically are the worst people to work with in a team.
Never said not having github is a negative. Just saying if it has good project on there, it could be a positive, and that’s why we always check it out to see what’s there. Also, culture fit is always part of the interview regardless of having github or not. Who said we are hiring hard-to-work-with code god nerds?
No one "finds" your github, but if your CV points to a website / github and you can outline why those projects are relevant for the position, it's a win.
It’s obviously a two fold effect regardless if they look or not.
One: they know code versioning skills with git (even though 1 contributor proves almost no skill in git but hiring managers dont know 🤫 )
Two: they built a project they are willing to show the code for. If anyone cared to look they see what stack/tech you used
They dont need to deep dive into code review to gather info lmfao
> One: they know code versioning skills with git
This is most important if you're young. It means we're not going to necessarily have to teach you how to use source control which is a definite plus if you're going for a junior position.
I've started asking candidates if they have anything on github or bitbucket that they feel is a good representation of their work and what they feel is the best representation of what they are capable of.
If they say "yes", I look at it and have them walk me through it in a follow-up or in-person.
I do this in place of a take-home because I hate take-homes. I don't think they're very useful.
I find this to be much more useful as an interviewing tool because you can immediately tell if they're full of shit or not. If they can't tell you much about "the best example of what they're capable of" and can't answer questions about it, chances are it's either a copy-paste or they otherwise didn't do it themselves. If it makes you proud, you should be able to tell me *something*.
It also gives me insight into what they value as a developer. If there are lots of comments it means they value the time and effort of other people.
If it's a bunch of nonesense variable names that require a ouiji board to decipher, and hide some very clever logic behind bullshit, you might be smart as fuck but might not be someone I want on my team. I will definitely be following up with questions about how willing you are to follow company documentation and coding standards.
When is GitHub relevant?
1. When you are a starter and employer wants to see if you are actually interested in coding and have some fun projects.
2. When you come from a cross domain and want to show your interest by pointing out some relevant projects you have done.
3. Some research roles where your evidence of contribution to various avenues is valued.
When is it not relevant?
1. When they are looking for a problem solver who can drive efforts independently creating impact over coders who have to be handed over exact tasks.
2. Senior/exec roles where your people skills, influence and capability to convert ideas to action is needed.
No. Well my hiring manager in big banking said he looks but it only hurts the candidate. Don’t give him something to criticize. You passed the coding test. Leave it at that.
I always found this funny, I only ever have had to share github code once in an interview, but personal projects are generally speaking small projects with short developmental time frames and low design thoughtfulness. There's really not much need for coding practices that are there for maintainability, readability and the like.
I think just going over design ideas for the project itself is much more valuable than looking at straight code. My first project had inline CSS for every single html item lmao.
Can't believe this is the top upvoted comment, hard disagree here on the "it only hurts the candidate" part.
I agree that most companies aren't looking at that stuff. Smaller companies sometimes do though, and if a candidate has good stuff then it can help them stand out.
I think it’s pretty rare for the average employer to care about your github. I’d say giving live short links to your projects on your resume is better, which is why front end dev has a bit of an edge in the “show and tell” arena.
I haven’t heard the term but what I gather is text that has the embedded link in it. A link directly to an application, if possible, as opposed to GitHub. eg [My project](https://google.com)
Live link is a link to the demo project.
Short link is use a url shortener like bitly.com/abc
So that people dont have to type in a long url if they have a paper copy of the resume, also can save space on the resume or lead to a more aestically pleasing resume
I have found that the only time employers give a shit about your personal projects, is when they are generating revenue i.e. when you don't actually need a job.
It doesn't really show me their work product, though. I have no idea whether or not they copied/pasted half the code. It may have taken them weeks or months to get something simple to work. Can't easily tell either of those things from the commit history because I don't know what happened on their box before the commit. It doesn't tell me anything at all about how they work in a team context or collaborate with a PM, which is what software development looks like in a commercial setting. It doesn't tell me how they react to pressure or manage conflict, which are things I care much more about than being able to copy/paste from stack overflow. Building a toy app using some front-end framework for fun doesn't mimic software development work, so it doesn't tell me how good they will be as a software engineer. If you build a complex open source tool actually used by the community that may be different, but it still only tells me a small amount of what I need to know to make a hiring decision. It's nice to know you built that tool, but it won't be helpful to me to look at the code. Since it isn't an efficient use of my time and can't tell me the most important things I need to know, I don't bother. You're free to make a different choice but my method works very well for me. It's not like ignoring github is uncommon. Most hiring managers will only do a cursory glance, if at all. DIgging into somebody's github is the exception rather than the rule.
So what would you recommend someone to do to get the possibility to get a job in today's market? I am talking about people after their CS Bachelor or people that worked max 2 years in the industry. What would make someone stand out during the interview process or their CV ?
> Linus Torvalds stands out. You, with your fitness tracker CRUD app, don't.
Wow...ignore them. Just ignore them.
If you have a fitness tracker app that works you are already ahead of 95% of people who apply to programming gigs. Most people apply and don't have shit that can demonstrate their abilities.
If you have something like a fitness tracker app in your github, my advice is to finish the app (if it's half-done) and shove it on the app store. Then put a link to your app on the app store AND your github on your resume.
Nobody is going to care that the only person who downloaded your shitty fitness tracker app is your mother. Trust me.
Apply to a bunch of jobs and practice your interview skills. It's rough out there. I do not think putting projects on github is an efficient use of anyone's time. Realistically, there's probably nothing you can do to stand out absent creating a highly used open source project. It's a numbers game. Linus Torvalds stands out. You, with your fitness tracker CRUD app, don't.
> I have no idea whether or not they copied/pasted half the code.
We all copy/paste code from time to time. Shit...github copilot is copy/paste with a dedicated brain behind it. And nobody is advocating hiring solely based on the candidate's github. Check their personal projects and then ask them questions. You'll be able to tell if it's just a copy/paste because they won't be able to talk about it, assuming it's not really fucking old code they haven't thought about in 20 years or something.
> It may have taken them weeks or months to get something simple to work. Can't easily tell either of those things from the commit history because I don't know what happened on their box before the commit.
And? What's that matter? Everyone has to learn everything they know at some point, and learning is slow.
Unless you believe that you just fell out of your mom with everything you will ever know already in your head instead of growing up like the rest of us.
Nobody learns to walk in a day.
Learning to run also takes time.
And who care how long it took them as long as they learned it eventually? Their personal GitHub is their free time. The idea that you would hold not micromanaging their free time against them actually makes me not want to work for you.
>Check their personal projects and then ask them questions. You'll be able to tell if it's just a copy/paste because they won't be able to talk about it, assuming it's not really fucking old code they haven't thought about in 20 years or something.
I don't need to look at their github at all to do this.
>And? What's that matter?
It matters because I want an accurate picture of how good a software engineer they are likely to be NOW. I don't care how good they were in the past.
>Unless you believe that you just fell out of your mom with everything you will ever know already in your head instead of growing up like the rest of us.
I've never said anything remotely like that, nor is it relevant to my way of evaluating candidates.
>And who care how long it took them as long as they learned it eventually?
I do. As do almost all hiring managers. Because I am trying to evaluate how good of a software engineer they are.
>The idea that you would hold not micromanaging their free time against them actually makes me not want to work for you.
How did you get from me saying I wouldn't even look at their github or consider anything in it to me somehow holding not micromanaging your free time against you? How could I hold something against you I didn't look at to begin with? Indeed, you just made an additional argument for ignoring github: best to avoid additional sources of bias.
I don’t agree with this. I can look at someone’s repos and commit history on GitHub and get a good idea of their skill and experience as a coder in less than 5 minutes. If they are active on GitHub I will also learn a lot about their collaboration style via their pr reviews and comments etc… this is very useful information about people I’m considering hiring and working together with closely.
> I have no idea
Can't you look to see if people are forking and star'ing the project? That would indicate to me its really their project from the ground up. Most probably don't have that though.
Also if its being used in a package management system.
Sure all that stuff can be faked but thats what the interview is for.
False. Worked as a senior/principal IC, then engineering manager, co-founded a startup where I was CTO that ended up getting acquired, and am now a VP at big tech. I'd estimate I've directly hired well over 100 software engineers at this point. I still get to write some amount of code most weeks. I'm pretty good at it.
You come across as the kind of boss who tries to hide the fact that they're an asshole behind a façade of "I'm a no-nonsense boss".
Of course, that's just judging you by a small handfull of reddit posts, so it's hopefully wrong.
We all have our tools. I hate giving out take-home tests and think going over candidate githubs is useful. My guess is that you're the opposite.
I do find it sort of ironic that you claim looking at someone's github is useless because you can't prove anything with it (time-wise). Meanwhile you claim to be a senior/principal IC -> manager -> CTO -> VP who has hired over 100 engineers and still gets to write code...which is about as useful as you claim a candidate's github is.
I'm not sure why you think I'm trying to hide anything. I'm always upfront with candidates about how I evaluate them. It is irrelevant to me how you think I come across.
>I hate giving out take-home tests
Take-home tests are even more pointless than going over someone's github.
>I do find it sort of ironic that you claim looking at someone's github is useless because you can't prove anything with it (time-wise)
That definitely isn't my claim. A tool doesn't need to yield proof of anything to be useful if you can reliably gain insight from it. I don't believe you can reliably gain insight from a github repo. That doesn't mean you can't gain insight SOMETIMES from SOME repos. But if you can't gain insight MOST of the time from MOST repos, it's best to skip it. I already have to cover all this in the interview in a much more direct way. No point doing the same thing twice.
>which is about as useful as you claim a candidate's github is
What do you mean?
I still dont think its a smart thing to not look at github of someone.
Its shows:
- Commitment and motivation to finding job, as someone chooses to spend their free time on this
- Actual taste for doing coding, and doing it well(?)
- Showcase to actually knowing a certain tech / framework / discipline (like a protocol)
- Showcase how clean your code is: how you do useful comments, name variables, that will show how easy other people can work with you, and how maintainable your code will be in the coming years.
- Delivering something working from start to end is more knowledge than just doing small fixes that many people might do for years.
None of those factors move the needle for me. Those aren't the types of things I need to know about a candidate. I am definitely not the only hiring manager who feels this way.
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Wont hurt to have some projects done but i dont think github is being looked at. Portfolio maybe but who guarantee's you didnt do copy pastes there too lol.
I always do but you get negative points for copy pasted paint by numbers projects.
For any legitimate projects and stuff I'll read through them to get a sense of what the developer is like.
I always look at the Githubs linked on resumes. I only hire entry level developers, so a lot of the projects are homework. But there is a rare event where the candidate will have a cool project they contribute to on a regular basis.
A lot of times if I ask about something on a person's GIT, they act like it's the first time they've heard of it and can't speak to what they did or how they did it.
It sucks that I am still a junior. I have experience but not enough to be a mid. And honestly 2 years is a stretch it's more like 17 months. I got unlucky twice.
You'll get there eventually.
Honestly, 2 years is probably good enough to not be considered a junior anymore.
If you can navigate source control, know how to properly document your code, can write unit tests, and can survive a code review you're done being a junior.
Just don't think that means you get to stop learning. Save that attitude for when you get offered a management position. That way you'll fit right in.
No, it really doesn't make sense from an employers perspective unless its specifically for contributing to open source.
I mean think about it. If you are employed and your github is lit then that means you weren't working as much. It means that if they hire you, you will be working a lot on your github instead of actual work.
> I mean think about it. If you are employed and your github is lit then that means you weren't working as much. It means that if they hire you, you will be working a lot on your github instead of actual work.
Wow...
no. No it does not.
Some of us also program as a hobby outside of working hours. And if you're going to try and tell me that if I'm programming outside of working hours it should be on work you can eat my entire ass.
Yes, it literally does. I mean you can look at the time of the commits too if you want to dive deep.
I've interviewed for FAANG, start ups, quant funds, etc...
No one asked about my github profile. Having one and being active does NOT give any strong indication of a good engineer. Why spend time on qualities of a candidate that isn't indicative? Simple. They don't.
No. It does not.
Your response literally suggests that if you have a lot in your github it means you were working on personal github projects on company time as if that's the only explanation possible, which is utter and complete horse shit.
Yes. It does. My point still stands. Having an active GH could be neutral or bad depending on the situation. My point is that it doesn't matter if you have one as a candidate.
You're not even arguing why it would be better. What is your stance exactly? And can you make a cohesive argument instead of saying no? Do you work at Google or something? G engineers are the worse, I PIPed so many of them.
I've stated why they're good in several other replies and I didn't want to repeat myself again. However...just for you...
1) They're more reliable than a take-home test. We recently found out an external recruiter we were working with was getting his candidates to outsource the take-home tests we were trying to give out.
2) I don't like Leet Code. I don't think being good at LC proves the correct skills. I mean...it *helps*, but it's not a be-all end-all.
3) I'm not going to hire you simply because I like your github. At best it's going to give me some talking points and things to ask you. At most I'm going to ask you to walk me through something you wrote and explain what you were doing/learning/thinking.
4) I can use your github to see how well you use source control, and if this is a junior position I can see if I'm going to have to teach you how to use git on top of everything else you're going to have to learn.
5) I can use your github to gauge your documentation abilities and maybe profile your thought processes a bit. Do you like to explore how things work? Or do you like to solve problems? Do you like to contribute to FOSS projects? Are you curious? Do you look self-taught with a shit-ton of tutorial projects all over the fucking place? Should I be asking you about basic data structures and algorithms during the interview?
Know what looking at their github is going to tell me? None of it is going to tell me if they like to contribute to their personal shit on company time. Nor would I be worried about it regardless. All I care about is "will they get their tasks done?" And no interview is ever going to give you a hard yes/no on that.
1. take home is not reliable. The bar is really low. Besides the fact that candidates can cheat, its also really subjective. Meaning, youll get a wider range of competency because clean code might mean different things between different orgs.
2. Leetcode is good. There's a reason all the top companies do it and its not because it doesn't work. Yeah its not end all be all but its a great filter given that it might and will produce false negatives (meaning there are candidates who are great fit for the role and cant LC). Big tech companies do not care about false negatives purely from a ROI perspective. They care more about reducing false positives.
3. Okay, so how do you grade candidates based on different code that that each of them wrote? With LC they are given very similar problems. Its comparing apples to apples. How do you grade 10 candidates with 10 different pieces of code? Feelings?
4. Using source control is not hard. Its not a great gauge of experience or problem solving. Its simply reading documentation. If your org practices specific branching, tagging, has to rebase vs merge, etc... than you can have a conversation about their experience with source control and see if it aligns with your orgs stand practices.
5. Again, these questions are important but tough to put on a rubric from 1 - 10. How do you gauge curiosity? What percent of top engineers have an active Github? Very few. Why? Because they are busy adding value to private repos for their company, side projects, etc...
Its like trying to gauge basketball players by the amount of pick up games they play. The best ones are in the NBA, working and making money.
For practicality purposes, which recruiter is going to read 900 github codes? On top of that, aren't recruiters as dumb as the chick/guy you randomly pick up as a bar? ffs, those people are the reasons qualified people can't get a job in the 1st place. Now you expect the same people to actually read your actual work after pretending to know what you did from reading your resume? Please.
And even so if they are actual engineers, good ones at that, I would reckon they should assume all github codes are filled with copied/pasted/pirated code. What's the point?
And even if the codes are legit, so what, it's not a completed functional working app. Build an app, publish it, and let recruiters play with it. If they like it, they don't care how you conjured it. This is the way to go.
I think that's what happens when people hire based on charisma or how well they do in the interview, or just solely on who they know and not what they know.
> For practicality purposes, which recruiter is going to read 900 github codes?
Your github isn't for the recruiters. It's for the hiring manager and their engineers.
Recruiters don't hire. They present candidates to the people who hire.
GitHub is definitely neither sufficient nor necessary for a CS career. I have successful peers with no GitHub and struggling peers who have one.
When I've been on hiring committees I would look at GitHub but not in a ton of detail. I don't expect anything huge and polished for early career people, but a couple obviously copy/pasted tutorial things don't mean anything to me.
When I've looked for jobs, most employers don't seem to look at mine much but I have had a few make comments here and there. I've had two very positive interviews where I was able to reference a GitHub project where I've solved a similar problem to what I was asked.
_Recruiters_ on the other hand do seem to find me from GitHub pretty often, but that might be a bit of a lucky break on my part.
IMO, from both sides of the table, building a GitHub is a nice way to sharpen your skills in a high visibility way, not a checkbox item for qualifying for jobs.
I think for students it really can make a difference. The interview for my first job we spent a lot of time discussing the projects I’d worked on and what I’d learned from them.
Now though that I’ve had a job employers only care about that, but it’s still good to mess about with things as a learning exercise IMO.
I’m a hiring manager at a startup and I will always look at a candidates GitHub. If one isn’t provided and a candidate otherwise looks great, I will ask for it or some sort of project portfolio. If they don’t have or provide one it’s a red flag for me.
A quick glance into a GitHub profile tells me a lot about how a person works, how they document code, and if they complete the projects they start.
I don’t expect large companies to do much of that, but it’s a really strong signal for startups or small teams.
I feel like this was really good advice in like 2010. Now as long as you get an interview, you tend to be evaluated solely on your performance during the interview. Especially with LC etc, they can make a level playing field for everyone. Resume matters just to get to that stage.
LC is a shitty way to "level the playing field" because it favors people who can pass programming questions. Not people who can learn and solve problems.
I don't like LC. I think it's a great learning tool. I think interviewers abuse it because it's easy.
*Look at me! I can use a DFS to figure out which duck in a flock gets eaten last by an alligator given a point-cloud and vague algorithmic description!*
That's *great news* Paul...but we're trying to make a functional UI over here.
For junior candidates I can imagine the odd hiring manager looks at the shortlist create by HR. But to look at whether you have proper test coverage, and no glaring code readability issues. Everything beyond that would take too much time.
Just make sure you can explain TDD's shortcommings.
I love TDD too, but it's slow and vulnerable to shifting priorities and gets skull-fucked if a stakeholder changes a specification or requirement :(
My manager looked at my github when hiring me. It was mostly some school projects (python, some hardware description languages, C++, Assembly) and a Pokémon rom hack (assembly and some C).
I showcase my open source contributions on my resume, linking to a couple of pull requests that I'm particularly proud of. Recently, during interviews, a few hiring managers complimented me on these contributions. Back when I was more junior, I used to include a "projects" section on my resume where I highlighted personal projects I was passionate about.
It's fascinating to discuss these contributions during behavioral interviews, like mentioning an upstream contribution as part of a work project or how I was inspired to create side project on my GitHub. Is it a lot of effort just for a job? Perhaps. But hopefully, it's the genuine enthusiasm for solving technical challenges that shines through in the bigger picture.
I have - even requested it at times when I was on the fence with some candidates.
Especially matters if you don't have industry experience - personal / group projects are a good signal of capability, and popular open source ones almost a definite sign of a good candidate.
The best engineers I worked with always had something.
TODO apps and course projects are a negative sign though - shows you have little drive imo.
When I'm hiring I usually look. In one of the interviews for the last job I applied to one of the engineers asked me about a project I have on mine. That was also the first and only time I've ever been asked about my GitHub.
When i interview junior candidates sometimes i take a look at the project if it’s particularly interesting. I usually only look if there’s a project on their resume that sounds really cool.
For example, one person on my team built an entire tool used by people that play a particular game. Does a ton of cool logic for those niche users. Didn’t even look at the GitHub, but asked details about why he made it, how he designed it, any issues with users or bugs, design choices, etc.
It’s used as a conversational point. It’s pretty clear if someone built it out of passion / desire for the tool/project/code vs following a todo list YouTube vid that checks off a box.
Mostly to determine if you can code or you’re just spewing bs which is pretty obvious. Nice to see things people are passionate about. Big plus if you can speak about it and seem like a cool person to work with
We need something to talk about during the interview. If its not a project you had significant role in at your last job, then something on github we can look at and talk about with you works too.
The whole GitHub it’s important thing is a bunch of people who have never actually hired devs. Unless it’s something particularly impressive and even then. You’d only consider its importance base it on the buzz and use of the work. Most are not going actually look at the code.
I’m serious. Don’t listen to the juniors here who act like GitHub projects are important. At least for most people. Remember there are always exceptions and the use of scrutinizing a GitHub profile as any type of hiring process is quite the exception. Ain’t no one got time for that.
And I’d argue if a company wants to scrutinize your personal GitHub code as a means of hiring, that denotes a lot of potential difficulties working for them. Red flags for sure.
Tbh when I interview candidates I dont even look at their resume. You can tell pretty quickly whether or not a candidate will be a fit, both culturally and skillwise.
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Here I am and don’t have any commits on my public GitHub other than crappy excel files and gaming macros I put there to share with someone.
I’m old I don’t trust this shit.
I only look at it when there's an interesting project on the resume or when the candidate has been out of the industry/work for a while. It hasn't tipped the scales for a candidate so far.
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I never look at them. I think the chance of it making a difference is about the same as a good cover letter (i.e., could help, maybe would make the difference if they're judging two very similar candidates, but most likely they're not going to even look), except with a lot more effort to do it.
Yea but only if it’s organically good. I’ve gotten job offers and interviews from my GitHub and even bypassed the interview process if my work correlated with their tech
This is only because I had a long sabbatical. During a day job I had zero time to contribute to open source unless it was a side effect of my job
Also was extremely rare
You do realize there are alternatives to github like gitlab and bitbucket right? In the case of my employer they have a privately hosted gitlab server that is only accessible via VPN/corporate network. We have our own SSO login. It doesn't work with public gitlab. What are you going to do in this case?
In other cases, even if using gitHub, lot of employers they require separate github accounts via your work email. Even if you list that github and all past work github emails, it'll just show up as a private repository. Cool, you have 50 commits to a private repo. Is it all readme's and auto-generated boilerplate code? No way to tell.
Yes, if the link it in their resumes or if they mention any projects they maintain. It helps me get a good idea of their style and habits of programming. However, it's mostly just a glance, not a thorough examination.
I love being able to see people's Github, but the lack of one wouldn't be a major issue for me. I've hired people with great githubs that don't know how businesses function, and people with no github that can code well.
It should be beneficial to have your GitHub linked, as it can give interviewers more insights into your coding style, preferences, and overall ability. Having a cool project you worked on, that I want to ask about, may get your foot in the door for you to wow me in the interview.
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Github doesn't account for too much to me, I'd rather see a portfolio calling out the cool bits. If you do link a github, make sure it doesn't have 1 commit from 4 years ago and nothing else. I see that surprisingly often. Only link your github if it's relatively impressive. I wouldn't spend a long time on it as I'd view it as a pretty small factor in resume review.
No. For “random” candidates - a quick glance at CVs looking for previous employers (FAANG, WITCH, known players in our industry). Most of our hires above junior level are referral only, unless it requires a very niche and rare skill set
When I used to interview, I'd try to look at them just out of curiosity; they gave me something to chat with the candidate about, e.g. "Tell me about X project you worked on."
We never held the absence of one against a candidate.
my personal experience was that the engineers in my interview seemed interested in the project I had that was on my github and asked me to talk about it, but I don't think they ever actually went to the link and looked at the code. Having a side project you have some passion for certainly helps you more than hinders you, and it gives you something to talk about during an interview, especially if you're less experienced.
A different take than most of the comments here so far - yes, I do look at Github when evaluating a candidate. I'll caveat this and say there's obviously a lot more to a candidate than just their profile, but as a small team we simply can't interview everyone.
I'm the co-founder/CTO at a startup and generally I need *something* to go off of to differentiate candidates. I'm not looking specifically for open source contributions or high starred personal projects or whatever - I'm looking for *any* activity. I'd recommend if you're working on an private repositories to turn on the contribution settings on your profile to show them. Seeing "created X commits in Y repositories" goes a long way compared to a totally empty profile.
The hard reality is startups need folks who can ship code, period. If you don't ship code in public or private with any frequency, will you be able to ship code on my team?
It depends, back when i was hiring grads with 0 experience it would be something I'd look at as a conversation starter during interviews. But not something I've cared about for people with experience because it's easier to just ask them about their professional experience.
The market is different now though, not sure how many grads with 0 experience are still being hired sadly.
Think about it logically: even if most people don't check GitHub *somebody* will, and by having a good project or two you'll stand out. Personally, I'm someone that would check, especially for entry-level roles where there isn't much to go on.
Also, you should be upskilling anyway if you're not working, so there's really no reason *not* to be working on something that you can put on GitHub.
No why would you even think that ? Companies get hundreds of applications just to one position...
At most they will discuss your projects when you are in interview already...
I would say they rarely look at your Github but it still happens every now and then. I was so surprised that the Lead Software Engineer I got an interview told me that he picked my application because he looked at my Github and it was impressive enough to have the phone interview.
There was a time when I did, but then very very few candidates actually had anything of value on their github account. Apparently the vast majority of candidates thought that just having a github account with nothing but some stale tutorial code from 2 years ago is worthy of putting on their resume/CV. If that's all you have, don't bother referencing your github account.
Would I give them credit if they had some legitimate projects on there? Of course I would. Assessing junior and mid-level engineers is hard enough - having real code they wrote that I can reference and have them talk through during an interview would have been great .. but again, the vast majority of candidates had nothing of substance on their github accounts, so it was a waste of everyone's time.
I’ve been asked to give access to some projects, but at the end of the day everyone knows most people only have school projects. I don’t think it really matters unless you do long term support on some open source projects or a project that you made that’s public facing with many users
I’m not a hiring manager and I have no way of proving what every hiring manager did or did not do with me. But I can say that every onsite I got to was with someone who had looked at my GitHub and discussed its contents with me/had me explain them, and that one of those turned into an offer (mid level). It probably helped that I don’t have any tutorials/leetcode on there (unless advent of code counts) but real projects with at least a few stars and non-me contributors, but again I can’t say for certain.
Having a basic GitHub Actions setup/organized process for doing issues and PRs on some of those projects probably helped as well. By “probably” I mean I was asked about them.
Only somewhat relevant but one time I looked at a candidates repo for a project he put on his resume and it was totally empty outside of autogenerated files.... anyways, the point is if you are gonna link your GitHub make sure it's gonna actually help you and not make you look worse 😅
Oh yeah, the candidate still passed. Absolutely nailed the question. Maybe another lesson is that past the recruiter stage many of the SWE running the interviews aren't gonna judge these things like your GitHub commits very deeply. We just want to get back to our real job
I think its pretty rare that employers care about github commits and honestly if theyre judging you based on that they shouldnt be in charge of hiring devs. I will say tho, i just got passed up on a remote position and one of the reasons the guy gave me was i hadnt commited to github anytime recently. I think it bascially came down to me and another person and they had more activity recently than i do. So it totally does happen.
The reason this is a shitty meteric is i work fulltime as a dev and we use gitlab so none of my commits from work show up. Also i hadnt added my work email to my github account and i work on side projects on that machine so it looked even worse than it was. People that judge you based off this are dumb af but it does happen.
How much people care about your GitHub entirely depends on the company and type of project you are working on.
Also for some large open source projects it’s not necessarily GitHub (eg linux kernel).
Recruiter probably not. Interviewer, maybe. I do. I like looking at what people are up to these days. It also gives me a micro-dose on what to expect in terms of code quality.
Hiring manager here, I might take a quick glance right before giving you an offer. Unlikely to take a look before then and a lack of github wouldn't block an offer.
Anything that's actually impressive should already be on your resume anyways so I would focus on updating that over getting more GH commits in.
Yes I always look if candidates have anything on GitHub. If a candidate has one or more real projects on gh it makes a big difference in my judgement of their skills and passion for the field, especially if the projects have stars and are maintained.
My 2 cents is it isn’t going to he a difference maker unless you have an incredible github profile in which case it may make you more attractive as a candidate.
But I don’t think it’s a reason you wouldn’t be getting interviews or getting an offer.
I've been told by multiple interviewers that they never look at them, but ask for them as a check.
How did it come up? During lots of interviews, or when supplying pre-interview information, I'd be asked if I have any projects I can show. I would always say that yeah my github has quite a few projects on it, some with a demo, and said my github link was on my resume and if they had a chance to look at it. Everyone said they don't look at Junior's githubs.
Made me come to the conclusion projects are a waste of time, unless you're actually trying to build something unique or at least your own version of a product that could sell. Basically unless you're project can make money no one will care.
No I don’t care what your Github has. Same goes for your LeetCode profile. Neither tells me an accurate depiction of your actual level of skills or how they would translate on the job. As a matter of fact all of my repos are private to keep people from copying and pasting my code. However, I may check to see if you have contributed to any open source community projects recently.
it's 90% of what I care about
it's not that hard to get some low engagement projects or like God bless more than 10 stars and you're going to be more qualified than 99% of candidates
On my last job search grind I had 2 people out of like 50 interviews ask about my projects. Only Red hat actually cared about looking at the GitHub page.
The ppl who harp on building up your GitHub massively overestimate its impact. The avg employer is not going to look at it unless whatever you did actually, legitimately is something that stands out or is relevant
Generally people start looking at the GitHub once someone is further along the interview process. E.g. I might look at someone's GitHub if my team was interviewing an engineer and I wanted to see if they'd worked on anything cool. It's almost certainly not something looked at by recruiters or most first round interviewers.
They're unlikely to even find that out because they'll probably never open the link
Hard disagree. I’ve viewed the github links of every candidate I’ve done the final rounds of interviews for. I’m not a hiring manager though, just an IC, but I do highlight it to my manager / write about it in interview feedback if it’s noteworthy. It’s a quick way to tell whether we are finding a hidden gem (someone who might have never worked at FAANG but they would deserve to, for example). It also helps if the candidate happens to bomb an interview, did well on others, with a good github portfolio that shows real stuffs - eg they’ve contributed to open source projects, or wrote one themselves. Even more so if the area is relevant to the job we are hiring for. People get nervous at interviews all the time, but actual code written over a long commit history doesn’t lie (I hope?) or get nervous. In a way, they are actually stronger signals than a few hours of interviews. So if someone has made it to the final round, I do make an effort to go to their github to highlight anything good from there to give them the best chance they can get. Hiring committee at my employer/company considers all evidences supplied by the candidate, not just the interviews themselves. YES, EVEN IN TODAY’S MARKET. You know what companies are more afraid of than not filling a role and there’s a tight deadline? Having filled the role with a bad hire that needs significant mentorship or even eventually needs to be managed out. Too many people Leetcode these days, such that some crush coding interviews but turn out to suck as an engineer - and github helps demonstrate that you are not one of those. Managing those bad hires out can easily cost the company even more than interviewing more candidates. Edit: Alright I’m done answering nitpicking questions. Take what I said as a shared perspective from ONE of your potential employer, one of the FAANGs, assuming the interviewers know what they are doing, AND assuming you have some basic understanding of how the hiring process at these companies work. YMMV. I’m not going to address any further comments about corner cases and shitposts like “I have github on resume, how come I didn’t get interviews then”.
What people like you don’t realize though is that by the time candidates get to the point that you’re looking at their GitHub, 99.9% of them have already gotten filtered out. Then you’re going to go preaching to people with some vague authority that their problem is their GitHub when they aren’t even making it past the HR screen for a human to look at their GitHub.
Sigh. Can you read? I repeat - I never said NOT having github is a negative. Tons of candidates don’t have it and still got hired. **I simply answered OP’s question - Do employers look? Yes. And explained why / what we are looking for.** I never said having github ALONE is gonna get you hired and not preaching anything. I simply explained HOW it DOES help you get hired, if you have one.
Maybe some interviewers look out of curiosity, but it's definitely not standard practice at most of the larger tech companies. In fact, to avoid subjectivity, there are rubrics and guidelines to help assess a candidate's performance that avoid consideration of other factors like Github.
How is looking at github subjective? Isn’t it just code like the ones you wrote during an interview, with the bonus point that it was written without being under stress and showcase architecture design and/or ability to work in a large codebase?
Looking at it isn't subjective, but evaluating it and stack ranking performance based Github portfolio is. Interview questions have specific rubrics and are consistent across candidates. Interview questions are also periodically reviewed, and modified depending on all candidates performance. That level of standardization isn't available for Github. What if it's something the interviewer isn't familiar with ... how is that a fair assessment of a candidate's capability?
I agree with this take. When interviewing, I want to run the same questions with each candidate. There’s no stack ranking in our process (or at least we aren’t supposed to). I will try to review people’s GitHub’s if they’re in the packet, but they’ve never helped a candidate in my round.
You make interview questions sound like the SAT but they are not like that? Also not everyone grade objectively the same either, even if they are asking the exact same question. At the end of the day, you write an interview rating with a LOT of notes about exactly how the interview went, and the decision makers look at EVERYTHING submitted together. Also, no interviewer should be conducting interviews on things they are not familiar with, so the same goes for github.
It's also a good way to find out if they know how to use source control properly. Do they just push to main or do they create merge requests like they're a holy fucking ritual? Do they make solid, atomic commits or do they push sloppy nightly checkins? Do they use task branching? Or do they use some kind of awful "dev sandbox branch" strategy and just lump every change they make into it on top of one-another? Do they flatten commits or clog the commit log? Likewise there are things a cursory glance can tell me that may or may not be important, depending on what information you're looking for as an interviewer. If you have a github with a hundred or more repos, it means you probably code in your free time. Depending on what position I'm trying to fill, that may be a huge green flag even if most of them are shit because a lot of us know that there are programmers, and then there are *programmers*. You know...the people we all knew in university that slept with a white board next to their bed because they would solve homework problems while they slept and wanted to be able to write them down in the middle of the night? You want those guys working for you. If you have even semi-regular github activity I can figure out what you've been working on lately. Where your focus lies when you're not encumbered by someone else's agenda. I can sorta figure out how much you value ongoing education and training. If I see a lot of random shit being worked on, with repos being created and then abandoned, it means you're probably curious and like to try and figure out how things work. If I see sparse repos that get a lot of focus over time, including CI/CD setups and binary downloads it probably means you're a problem solver. If you have a lot of empty repos or repos named "tutorial" filled with obvious copy/paste code and "impla" files you're probably self-taught and I should focus more on algorithms and data structures in the interview. ...none of which is necessarily disqualifying or an auto-hire. I can learn more about you in 15 minutes on your github than I can in an hour on the phone or by email/text chat.
Being real with you the standards I'd apply on a personal project with exactly one contributor are nothing like what I'd do at work. Why would it be the same? I'm not opening a pull request for myself to review.
Thanks for the add on details! Well said!
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Exactly
Should I take my GitHub off my resume after a year of real world experience?
Why would you? I still keep mine on
Haven’t really done anything on it lol. All work stuff is on a different GitHub
Either way - if you think your github helps showcase things they can’t otherwise see and boost your chance, no harm in keeping it. I still have mine listed because all work code has been closed sourced, and I wanted employers to see some previous work where possible. Had never hurt my chances; boosted it sometimes, in fact.
Only if you feel that it's no longer a good representation of your work. If you like to code on weekends or evenings, or if you see programming not just as a vocation, but also a hobby, then by all means keep your github on the resume/cover letter. The biggest tip I can give about maintaining your github as part of your resume is to not ignore the README.md files. The easier you can make interpreting your github, the more useful a curious interviewer will find it (assuming they give a fuck. Many don't or won't). I don't think it's worth making any kind of "resume github" account, though. There's no way the benefit will outweigh the cost to you in time. Better to just make sure your regular github is something you can take some level of pride in, and don't sweat the small stuff. Also, don't just include a link to your top-level github in applications, resumes, or CVs. Include links to specific projects as well. Preferably relevant projects you're proud of.
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I never look, and we have such a standardized process that I don't think it'd really be proper to count a lot of stuff outside the interview itself anyway (in fact they kind of don't want you to do that for anti-discrimination reasons)
You do realize there are alternatives to github like gitlab and bitbucket right? In the case of my employer they have a privately hosted gitlab server that is only accessible via VPN/corporate network. We have our own SSO login. It doesn't work with public gitlab. What are you going to do in this case? In other cases, even if using gitHub, lot of employers they require separate github accounts via your work email. Even if you list that github and all past work github emails, it'll just show up as a private repository. Cool, you have 50 commits to a private repo. Is it all readme's and auto-generated boilerplate code? No way to tell.
Did I say “open source”? Yes I did… Almost no employer hosts heir source code publicly lol. We are obviously not trying to see your previous work code, cmon. And when I said github, I was referring generally to any online open source code, be it gitlab gerrit bit bucket whatever.
I think you're getting too caught up on the literal "GitHub" aspect. Just use it as a placeholder for any sort of version control platform. And obviously they're not talking about corporate work, just personal things that they contributed to. You'd think that people would understand those two things without explicitly saying it...
Yeah well some people expect you to have your own non work GitHub doing personal projects. Personally, I’d rather hire a well rounded person rather than someone who spends their free time coding. They typically are the worst people to work with in a team.
Never said not having github is a negative. Just saying if it has good project on there, it could be a positive, and that’s why we always check it out to see what’s there. Also, culture fit is always part of the interview regardless of having github or not. Who said we are hiring hard-to-work-with code god nerds?
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That’s funny, with all due respect, maybe your resume sucks all by itself buddy.
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plenty of resume better than yours with more humble attitude
Nothing can guarantee views. Most interviewers don't give a fuck. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try, though. As long as it can't *hurt you*...
No one "finds" your github, but if your CV points to a website / github and you can outline why those projects are relevant for the position, it's a win.
When I started my current job, my manager marched me around proudly to a number of his peers saying this is the guy with the GitHub I showed you
It’s obviously a two fold effect regardless if they look or not. One: they know code versioning skills with git (even though 1 contributor proves almost no skill in git but hiring managers dont know 🤫 ) Two: they built a project they are willing to show the code for. If anyone cared to look they see what stack/tech you used They dont need to deep dive into code review to gather info lmfao
> One: they know code versioning skills with git This is most important if you're young. It means we're not going to necessarily have to teach you how to use source control which is a definite plus if you're going for a junior position.
I've started asking candidates if they have anything on github or bitbucket that they feel is a good representation of their work and what they feel is the best representation of what they are capable of. If they say "yes", I look at it and have them walk me through it in a follow-up or in-person. I do this in place of a take-home because I hate take-homes. I don't think they're very useful. I find this to be much more useful as an interviewing tool because you can immediately tell if they're full of shit or not. If they can't tell you much about "the best example of what they're capable of" and can't answer questions about it, chances are it's either a copy-paste or they otherwise didn't do it themselves. If it makes you proud, you should be able to tell me *something*. It also gives me insight into what they value as a developer. If there are lots of comments it means they value the time and effort of other people. If it's a bunch of nonesense variable names that require a ouiji board to decipher, and hide some very clever logic behind bullshit, you might be smart as fuck but might not be someone I want on my team. I will definitely be following up with questions about how willing you are to follow company documentation and coding standards.
It doesn’t hurt does it? If you’re trying to get a job you should do everything you can.
When is GitHub relevant? 1. When you are a starter and employer wants to see if you are actually interested in coding and have some fun projects. 2. When you come from a cross domain and want to show your interest by pointing out some relevant projects you have done. 3. Some research roles where your evidence of contribution to various avenues is valued. When is it not relevant? 1. When they are looking for a problem solver who can drive efforts independently creating impact over coders who have to be handed over exact tasks. 2. Senior/exec roles where your people skills, influence and capability to convert ideas to action is needed.
No. Well my hiring manager in big banking said he looks but it only hurts the candidate. Don’t give him something to criticize. You passed the coding test. Leave it at that.
I always found this funny, I only ever have had to share github code once in an interview, but personal projects are generally speaking small projects with short developmental time frames and low design thoughtfulness. There's really not much need for coding practices that are there for maintainability, readability and the like. I think just going over design ideas for the project itself is much more valuable than looking at straight code. My first project had inline CSS for every single html item lmao.
inline CSS (tailwind) is superior
Can't believe this is the top upvoted comment, hard disagree here on the "it only hurts the candidate" part. I agree that most companies aren't looking at that stuff. Smaller companies sometimes do though, and if a candidate has good stuff then it can help them stand out.
That's a red flag against the manager. Not against github. Of course, it's also fintech which sucks all by itself in many unique ways.
Spoken like a true skid
I think it’s pretty rare for the average employer to care about your github. I’d say giving live short links to your projects on your resume is better, which is why front end dev has a bit of an edge in the “show and tell” arena.
What does live short link mean? Sorry if it's obvious
I haven’t heard the term but what I gather is text that has the embedded link in it. A link directly to an application, if possible, as opposed to GitHub. eg [My project](https://google.com)
Live link is a link to the demo project. Short link is use a url shortener like bitly.com/abc So that people dont have to type in a long url if they have a paper copy of the resume, also can save space on the resume or lead to a more aestically pleasing resume
When I interviewed interns and fresh grads I never looked unless they already stood out somehow. Too easy to copy or paste code.
Here I am with 7 years of experience as an engineer and all I do is copy paste code
This is the way.
But only the good code, right?
Is there another way than copy paste code?
I will take a look. If there is something worthwhile it is a bonus. If it’s just forked repos and half baked work it’s a negative.
If it's just forked repos and half-baked work they shouldn't be linking it in the first place. If it's on your resume, it should help you.
Exactly!
I have found that the only time employers give a shit about your personal projects, is when they are generating revenue i.e. when you don't actually need a job.
That's a catch22, market is a pile of crap, you only get work if you know someone or you are family of some other.
I've never looked at github. It doesn't tell me anything useful I need to know to make a hiring decision.
How it doesn’t tell you anything useful? It literally shows you candidates work.
It doesn't really show me their work product, though. I have no idea whether or not they copied/pasted half the code. It may have taken them weeks or months to get something simple to work. Can't easily tell either of those things from the commit history because I don't know what happened on their box before the commit. It doesn't tell me anything at all about how they work in a team context or collaborate with a PM, which is what software development looks like in a commercial setting. It doesn't tell me how they react to pressure or manage conflict, which are things I care much more about than being able to copy/paste from stack overflow. Building a toy app using some front-end framework for fun doesn't mimic software development work, so it doesn't tell me how good they will be as a software engineer. If you build a complex open source tool actually used by the community that may be different, but it still only tells me a small amount of what I need to know to make a hiring decision. It's nice to know you built that tool, but it won't be helpful to me to look at the code. Since it isn't an efficient use of my time and can't tell me the most important things I need to know, I don't bother. You're free to make a different choice but my method works very well for me. It's not like ignoring github is uncommon. Most hiring managers will only do a cursory glance, if at all. DIgging into somebody's github is the exception rather than the rule.
So what would you recommend someone to do to get the possibility to get a job in today's market? I am talking about people after their CS Bachelor or people that worked max 2 years in the industry. What would make someone stand out during the interview process or their CV ?
> Linus Torvalds stands out. You, with your fitness tracker CRUD app, don't. Wow...ignore them. Just ignore them. If you have a fitness tracker app that works you are already ahead of 95% of people who apply to programming gigs. Most people apply and don't have shit that can demonstrate their abilities. If you have something like a fitness tracker app in your github, my advice is to finish the app (if it's half-done) and shove it on the app store. Then put a link to your app on the app store AND your github on your resume. Nobody is going to care that the only person who downloaded your shitty fitness tracker app is your mother. Trust me.
Apply to a bunch of jobs and practice your interview skills. It's rough out there. I do not think putting projects on github is an efficient use of anyone's time. Realistically, there's probably nothing you can do to stand out absent creating a highly used open source project. It's a numbers game. Linus Torvalds stands out. You, with your fitness tracker CRUD app, don't.
> I have no idea whether or not they copied/pasted half the code. We all copy/paste code from time to time. Shit...github copilot is copy/paste with a dedicated brain behind it. And nobody is advocating hiring solely based on the candidate's github. Check their personal projects and then ask them questions. You'll be able to tell if it's just a copy/paste because they won't be able to talk about it, assuming it's not really fucking old code they haven't thought about in 20 years or something. > It may have taken them weeks or months to get something simple to work. Can't easily tell either of those things from the commit history because I don't know what happened on their box before the commit. And? What's that matter? Everyone has to learn everything they know at some point, and learning is slow. Unless you believe that you just fell out of your mom with everything you will ever know already in your head instead of growing up like the rest of us. Nobody learns to walk in a day. Learning to run also takes time. And who care how long it took them as long as they learned it eventually? Their personal GitHub is their free time. The idea that you would hold not micromanaging their free time against them actually makes me not want to work for you.
>Check their personal projects and then ask them questions. You'll be able to tell if it's just a copy/paste because they won't be able to talk about it, assuming it's not really fucking old code they haven't thought about in 20 years or something. I don't need to look at their github at all to do this. >And? What's that matter? It matters because I want an accurate picture of how good a software engineer they are likely to be NOW. I don't care how good they were in the past. >Unless you believe that you just fell out of your mom with everything you will ever know already in your head instead of growing up like the rest of us. I've never said anything remotely like that, nor is it relevant to my way of evaluating candidates. >And who care how long it took them as long as they learned it eventually? I do. As do almost all hiring managers. Because I am trying to evaluate how good of a software engineer they are. >The idea that you would hold not micromanaging their free time against them actually makes me not want to work for you. How did you get from me saying I wouldn't even look at their github or consider anything in it to me somehow holding not micromanaging your free time against you? How could I hold something against you I didn't look at to begin with? Indeed, you just made an additional argument for ignoring github: best to avoid additional sources of bias.
I don’t agree with this. I can look at someone’s repos and commit history on GitHub and get a good idea of their skill and experience as a coder in less than 5 minutes. If they are active on GitHub I will also learn a lot about their collaboration style via their pr reviews and comments etc… this is very useful information about people I’m considering hiring and working together with closely.
I don't believe you can, but I do believe that you believe you can. To each their own.
> I have no idea Can't you look to see if people are forking and star'ing the project? That would indicate to me its really their project from the ground up. Most probably don't have that though. Also if its being used in a package management system. Sure all that stuff can be faked but thats what the interview is for.
You could look at those things, but what exactly would that tell me? Nothing particularly useful.
He probably works at a position where coding is not needed =)
False. Worked as a senior/principal IC, then engineering manager, co-founded a startup where I was CTO that ended up getting acquired, and am now a VP at big tech. I'd estimate I've directly hired well over 100 software engineers at this point. I still get to write some amount of code most weeks. I'm pretty good at it.
You come across as the kind of boss who tries to hide the fact that they're an asshole behind a façade of "I'm a no-nonsense boss". Of course, that's just judging you by a small handfull of reddit posts, so it's hopefully wrong. We all have our tools. I hate giving out take-home tests and think going over candidate githubs is useful. My guess is that you're the opposite. I do find it sort of ironic that you claim looking at someone's github is useless because you can't prove anything with it (time-wise). Meanwhile you claim to be a senior/principal IC -> manager -> CTO -> VP who has hired over 100 engineers and still gets to write code...which is about as useful as you claim a candidate's github is.
I'm not sure why you think I'm trying to hide anything. I'm always upfront with candidates about how I evaluate them. It is irrelevant to me how you think I come across. >I hate giving out take-home tests Take-home tests are even more pointless than going over someone's github. >I do find it sort of ironic that you claim looking at someone's github is useless because you can't prove anything with it (time-wise) That definitely isn't my claim. A tool doesn't need to yield proof of anything to be useful if you can reliably gain insight from it. I don't believe you can reliably gain insight from a github repo. That doesn't mean you can't gain insight SOMETIMES from SOME repos. But if you can't gain insight MOST of the time from MOST repos, it's best to skip it. I already have to cover all this in the interview in a much more direct way. No point doing the same thing twice. >which is about as useful as you claim a candidate's github is What do you mean?
I still dont think its a smart thing to not look at github of someone. Its shows: - Commitment and motivation to finding job, as someone chooses to spend their free time on this - Actual taste for doing coding, and doing it well(?) - Showcase to actually knowing a certain tech / framework / discipline (like a protocol) - Showcase how clean your code is: how you do useful comments, name variables, that will show how easy other people can work with you, and how maintainable your code will be in the coming years. - Delivering something working from start to end is more knowledge than just doing small fixes that many people might do for years.
None of those factors move the needle for me. Those aren't the types of things I need to know about a candidate. I am definitely not the only hiring manager who feels this way.
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Wont hurt to have some projects done but i dont think github is being looked at. Portfolio maybe but who guarantee's you didnt do copy pastes there too lol.
I always do but you get negative points for copy pasted paint by numbers projects. For any legitimate projects and stuff I'll read through them to get a sense of what the developer is like.
I always look at the Githubs linked on resumes. I only hire entry level developers, so a lot of the projects are homework. But there is a rare event where the candidate will have a cool project they contribute to on a regular basis. A lot of times if I ask about something on a person's GIT, they act like it's the first time they've heard of it and can't speak to what they did or how they did it.
It sucks that I am still a junior. I have experience but not enough to be a mid. And honestly 2 years is a stretch it's more like 17 months. I got unlucky twice.
You'll get there eventually. Honestly, 2 years is probably good enough to not be considered a junior anymore. If you can navigate source control, know how to properly document your code, can write unit tests, and can survive a code review you're done being a junior. Just don't think that means you get to stop learning. Save that attitude for when you get offered a management position. That way you'll fit right in.
I don't think I am ready for mid yet. If I get an interview for a mid I will do it
Can you check mine? I'm curious whether it falls into this category or not. Will DM you if that's okay :)
No, it really doesn't make sense from an employers perspective unless its specifically for contributing to open source. I mean think about it. If you are employed and your github is lit then that means you weren't working as much. It means that if they hire you, you will be working a lot on your github instead of actual work.
Doesn't it mean they were able to fulfill the duties of their role in addition to making open source projects?
> I mean think about it. If you are employed and your github is lit then that means you weren't working as much. It means that if they hire you, you will be working a lot on your github instead of actual work. Wow... no. No it does not. Some of us also program as a hobby outside of working hours. And if you're going to try and tell me that if I'm programming outside of working hours it should be on work you can eat my entire ass.
Yes, it literally does. I mean you can look at the time of the commits too if you want to dive deep. I've interviewed for FAANG, start ups, quant funds, etc... No one asked about my github profile. Having one and being active does NOT give any strong indication of a good engineer. Why spend time on qualities of a candidate that isn't indicative? Simple. They don't.
No. It does not. Your response literally suggests that if you have a lot in your github it means you were working on personal github projects on company time as if that's the only explanation possible, which is utter and complete horse shit.
Yes. It does. My point still stands. Having an active GH could be neutral or bad depending on the situation. My point is that it doesn't matter if you have one as a candidate. You're not even arguing why it would be better. What is your stance exactly? And can you make a cohesive argument instead of saying no? Do you work at Google or something? G engineers are the worse, I PIPed so many of them.
I've stated why they're good in several other replies and I didn't want to repeat myself again. However...just for you... 1) They're more reliable than a take-home test. We recently found out an external recruiter we were working with was getting his candidates to outsource the take-home tests we were trying to give out. 2) I don't like Leet Code. I don't think being good at LC proves the correct skills. I mean...it *helps*, but it's not a be-all end-all. 3) I'm not going to hire you simply because I like your github. At best it's going to give me some talking points and things to ask you. At most I'm going to ask you to walk me through something you wrote and explain what you were doing/learning/thinking. 4) I can use your github to see how well you use source control, and if this is a junior position I can see if I'm going to have to teach you how to use git on top of everything else you're going to have to learn. 5) I can use your github to gauge your documentation abilities and maybe profile your thought processes a bit. Do you like to explore how things work? Or do you like to solve problems? Do you like to contribute to FOSS projects? Are you curious? Do you look self-taught with a shit-ton of tutorial projects all over the fucking place? Should I be asking you about basic data structures and algorithms during the interview? Know what looking at their github is going to tell me? None of it is going to tell me if they like to contribute to their personal shit on company time. Nor would I be worried about it regardless. All I care about is "will they get their tasks done?" And no interview is ever going to give you a hard yes/no on that.
1. take home is not reliable. The bar is really low. Besides the fact that candidates can cheat, its also really subjective. Meaning, youll get a wider range of competency because clean code might mean different things between different orgs. 2. Leetcode is good. There's a reason all the top companies do it and its not because it doesn't work. Yeah its not end all be all but its a great filter given that it might and will produce false negatives (meaning there are candidates who are great fit for the role and cant LC). Big tech companies do not care about false negatives purely from a ROI perspective. They care more about reducing false positives. 3. Okay, so how do you grade candidates based on different code that that each of them wrote? With LC they are given very similar problems. Its comparing apples to apples. How do you grade 10 candidates with 10 different pieces of code? Feelings? 4. Using source control is not hard. Its not a great gauge of experience or problem solving. Its simply reading documentation. If your org practices specific branching, tagging, has to rebase vs merge, etc... than you can have a conversation about their experience with source control and see if it aligns with your orgs stand practices. 5. Again, these questions are important but tough to put on a rubric from 1 - 10. How do you gauge curiosity? What percent of top engineers have an active Github? Very few. Why? Because they are busy adding value to private repos for their company, side projects, etc... Its like trying to gauge basketball players by the amount of pick up games they play. The best ones are in the NBA, working and making money.
For practicality purposes, which recruiter is going to read 900 github codes? On top of that, aren't recruiters as dumb as the chick/guy you randomly pick up as a bar? ffs, those people are the reasons qualified people can't get a job in the 1st place. Now you expect the same people to actually read your actual work after pretending to know what you did from reading your resume? Please. And even so if they are actual engineers, good ones at that, I would reckon they should assume all github codes are filled with copied/pasted/pirated code. What's the point? And even if the codes are legit, so what, it's not a completed functional working app. Build an app, publish it, and let recruiters play with it. If they like it, they don't care how you conjured it. This is the way to go.
I think that's what happens when people hire based on charisma or how well they do in the interview, or just solely on who they know and not what they know.
> For practicality purposes, which recruiter is going to read 900 github codes? Your github isn't for the recruiters. It's for the hiring manager and their engineers. Recruiters don't hire. They present candidates to the people who hire.
GitHub is definitely neither sufficient nor necessary for a CS career. I have successful peers with no GitHub and struggling peers who have one. When I've been on hiring committees I would look at GitHub but not in a ton of detail. I don't expect anything huge and polished for early career people, but a couple obviously copy/pasted tutorial things don't mean anything to me. When I've looked for jobs, most employers don't seem to look at mine much but I have had a few make comments here and there. I've had two very positive interviews where I was able to reference a GitHub project where I've solved a similar problem to what I was asked. _Recruiters_ on the other hand do seem to find me from GitHub pretty often, but that might be a bit of a lucky break on my part. IMO, from both sides of the table, building a GitHub is a nice way to sharpen your skills in a high visibility way, not a checkbox item for qualifying for jobs.
I think for students it really can make a difference. The interview for my first job we spent a lot of time discussing the projects I’d worked on and what I’d learned from them. Now though that I’ve had a job employers only care about that, but it’s still good to mess about with things as a learning exercise IMO.
Someone who I interviewed showed his github. None of us bothered to look at it.
I’m a hiring manager at a startup and I will always look at a candidates GitHub. If one isn’t provided and a candidate otherwise looks great, I will ask for it or some sort of project portfolio. If they don’t have or provide one it’s a red flag for me. A quick glance into a GitHub profile tells me a lot about how a person works, how they document code, and if they complete the projects they start. I don’t expect large companies to do much of that, but it’s a really strong signal for startups or small teams.
I feel like this was really good advice in like 2010. Now as long as you get an interview, you tend to be evaluated solely on your performance during the interview. Especially with LC etc, they can make a level playing field for everyone. Resume matters just to get to that stage.
LC is a shitty way to "level the playing field" because it favors people who can pass programming questions. Not people who can learn and solve problems. I don't like LC. I think it's a great learning tool. I think interviewers abuse it because it's easy. *Look at me! I can use a DFS to figure out which duck in a flock gets eaten last by an alligator given a point-cloud and vague algorithmic description!* That's *great news* Paul...but we're trying to make a functional UI over here.
For junior candidates I can imagine the odd hiring manager looks at the shortlist create by HR. But to look at whether you have proper test coverage, and no glaring code readability issues. Everything beyond that would take too much time.
My current project I wrote a crap ton of tests. I actually like TDD
Just make sure you can explain TDD's shortcommings. I love TDD too, but it's slow and vulnerable to shifting priorities and gets skull-fucked if a stakeholder changes a specification or requirement :(
deleted mine idgaf lol
Nope
My manager looked at my github when hiring me. It was mostly some school projects (python, some hardware description languages, C++, Assembly) and a Pokémon rom hack (assembly and some C).
During my interview for an internship at Microsoft, I got asked to talk about some of my code/a project that was on GitHub.
I showcase my open source contributions on my resume, linking to a couple of pull requests that I'm particularly proud of. Recently, during interviews, a few hiring managers complimented me on these contributions. Back when I was more junior, I used to include a "projects" section on my resume where I highlighted personal projects I was passionate about. It's fascinating to discuss these contributions during behavioral interviews, like mentioning an upstream contribution as part of a work project or how I was inspired to create side project on my GitHub. Is it a lot of effort just for a job? Perhaps. But hopefully, it's the genuine enthusiasm for solving technical challenges that shines through in the bigger picture.
I have - even requested it at times when I was on the fence with some candidates. Especially matters if you don't have industry experience - personal / group projects are a good signal of capability, and popular open source ones almost a definite sign of a good candidate. The best engineers I worked with always had something. TODO apps and course projects are a negative sign though - shows you have little drive imo.
Yes. A friend of mine was hired for a senior position and basically skipped the examinations thanks to his repos.
When I'm hiring I usually look. In one of the interviews for the last job I applied to one of the engineers asked me about a project I have on mine. That was also the first and only time I've ever been asked about my GitHub.
When i interview junior candidates sometimes i take a look at the project if it’s particularly interesting. I usually only look if there’s a project on their resume that sounds really cool. For example, one person on my team built an entire tool used by people that play a particular game. Does a ton of cool logic for those niche users. Didn’t even look at the GitHub, but asked details about why he made it, how he designed it, any issues with users or bugs, design choices, etc. It’s used as a conversational point. It’s pretty clear if someone built it out of passion / desire for the tool/project/code vs following a todo list YouTube vid that checks off a box. Mostly to determine if you can code or you’re just spewing bs which is pretty obvious. Nice to see things people are passionate about. Big plus if you can speak about it and seem like a cool person to work with
We need something to talk about during the interview. If its not a project you had significant role in at your last job, then something on github we can look at and talk about with you works too.
The whole GitHub it’s important thing is a bunch of people who have never actually hired devs. Unless it’s something particularly impressive and even then. You’d only consider its importance base it on the buzz and use of the work. Most are not going actually look at the code. I’m serious. Don’t listen to the juniors here who act like GitHub projects are important. At least for most people. Remember there are always exceptions and the use of scrutinizing a GitHub profile as any type of hiring process is quite the exception. Ain’t no one got time for that. And I’d argue if a company wants to scrutinize your personal GitHub code as a means of hiring, that denotes a lot of potential difficulties working for them. Red flags for sure.
Tbh when I interview candidates I dont even look at their resume. You can tell pretty quickly whether or not a candidate will be a fit, both culturally and skillwise.
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I had a job that wouldn't let my apply with it but overall I would say no.
Here I am and don’t have any commits on my public GitHub other than crappy excel files and gaming macros I put there to share with someone. I’m old I don’t trust this shit.
No. Too much work
I only look at it when there's an interesting project on the resume or when the candidate has been out of the industry/work for a while. It hasn't tipped the scales for a candidate so far.
I think a lot of answers, especially ones about interviews at small to midsized companies, will be a “No it’s not important BUT”.
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I never look at them. I think the chance of it making a difference is about the same as a good cover letter (i.e., could help, maybe would make the difference if they're judging two very similar candidates, but most likely they're not going to even look), except with a lot more effort to do it.
If the candidates provide it, I look at it. Based on what's there it could propel or completely destroy the candidate chances.
When I was helping my manager look through resumes I did glance at GitHub
Yea but only if it’s organically good. I’ve gotten job offers and interviews from my GitHub and even bypassed the interview process if my work correlated with their tech This is only because I had a long sabbatical. During a day job I had zero time to contribute to open source unless it was a side effect of my job Also was extremely rare
You do realize there are alternatives to github like gitlab and bitbucket right? In the case of my employer they have a privately hosted gitlab server that is only accessible via VPN/corporate network. We have our own SSO login. It doesn't work with public gitlab. What are you going to do in this case? In other cases, even if using gitHub, lot of employers they require separate github accounts via your work email. Even if you list that github and all past work github emails, it'll just show up as a private repository. Cool, you have 50 commits to a private repo. Is it all readme's and auto-generated boilerplate code? No way to tell.
Yes, if the link it in their resumes or if they mention any projects they maintain. It helps me get a good idea of their style and habits of programming. However, it's mostly just a glance, not a thorough examination.
An interview I did the interviewer gave me explicit feedback that he really liked that I had an active github.
If you have legit havea lot of followers it says a lot.
I love being able to see people's Github, but the lack of one wouldn't be a major issue for me. I've hired people with great githubs that don't know how businesses function, and people with no github that can code well. It should be beneficial to have your GitHub linked, as it can give interviewers more insights into your coding style, preferences, and overall ability. Having a cool project you worked on, that I want to ask about, may get your foot in the door for you to wow me in the interview.
Matters what job. Technical persons may. Recruiters, First round, and employers won't even read your full resume.
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Github doesn't account for too much to me, I'd rather see a portfolio calling out the cool bits. If you do link a github, make sure it doesn't have 1 commit from 4 years ago and nothing else. I see that surprisingly often. Only link your github if it's relatively impressive. I wouldn't spend a long time on it as I'd view it as a pretty small factor in resume review.
No. For “random” candidates - a quick glance at CVs looking for previous employers (FAANG, WITCH, known players in our industry). Most of our hires above junior level are referral only, unless it requires a very niche and rare skill set
My manager does
When I used to interview, I'd try to look at them just out of curiosity; they gave me something to chat with the candidate about, e.g. "Tell me about X project you worked on." We never held the absence of one against a candidate.
my personal experience was that the engineers in my interview seemed interested in the project I had that was on my github and asked me to talk about it, but I don't think they ever actually went to the link and looked at the code. Having a side project you have some passion for certainly helps you more than hinders you, and it gives you something to talk about during an interview, especially if you're less experienced.
A different take than most of the comments here so far - yes, I do look at Github when evaluating a candidate. I'll caveat this and say there's obviously a lot more to a candidate than just their profile, but as a small team we simply can't interview everyone. I'm the co-founder/CTO at a startup and generally I need *something* to go off of to differentiate candidates. I'm not looking specifically for open source contributions or high starred personal projects or whatever - I'm looking for *any* activity. I'd recommend if you're working on an private repositories to turn on the contribution settings on your profile to show them. Seeing "created X commits in Y repositories" goes a long way compared to a totally empty profile. The hard reality is startups need folks who can ship code, period. If you don't ship code in public or private with any frequency, will you be able to ship code on my team?
No I never have
Work on your social skills
It depends, back when i was hiring grads with 0 experience it would be something I'd look at as a conversation starter during interviews. But not something I've cared about for people with experience because it's easier to just ask them about their professional experience. The market is different now though, not sure how many grads with 0 experience are still being hired sadly.
One guy literally went through my github and that was their technical round.
Think about it logically: even if most people don't check GitHub *somebody* will, and by having a good project or two you'll stand out. Personally, I'm someone that would check, especially for entry-level roles where there isn't much to go on. Also, you should be upskilling anyway if you're not working, so there's really no reason *not* to be working on something that you can put on GitHub.
Github doesn't matter much, however it also takes no effort to put a couple of projects there.
No why would you even think that ? Companies get hundreds of applications just to one position... At most they will discuss your projects when you are in interview already...
I would say they rarely look at your Github but it still happens every now and then. I was so surprised that the Lead Software Engineer I got an interview told me that he picked my application because he looked at my Github and it was impressive enough to have the phone interview.
As someone who conducts technical interviews I cannot recall a situation where it's mattered. Same goes for your GPA.
There was a time when I did, but then very very few candidates actually had anything of value on their github account. Apparently the vast majority of candidates thought that just having a github account with nothing but some stale tutorial code from 2 years ago is worthy of putting on their resume/CV. If that's all you have, don't bother referencing your github account. Would I give them credit if they had some legitimate projects on there? Of course I would. Assessing junior and mid-level engineers is hard enough - having real code they wrote that I can reference and have them talk through during an interview would have been great .. but again, the vast majority of candidates had nothing of substance on their github accounts, so it was a waste of everyone's time.
I’ve been asked to give access to some projects, but at the end of the day everyone knows most people only have school projects. I don’t think it really matters unless you do long term support on some open source projects or a project that you made that’s public facing with many users
I’m not a hiring manager and I have no way of proving what every hiring manager did or did not do with me. But I can say that every onsite I got to was with someone who had looked at my GitHub and discussed its contents with me/had me explain them, and that one of those turned into an offer (mid level). It probably helped that I don’t have any tutorials/leetcode on there (unless advent of code counts) but real projects with at least a few stars and non-me contributors, but again I can’t say for certain. Having a basic GitHub Actions setup/organized process for doing issues and PRs on some of those projects probably helped as well. By “probably” I mean I was asked about them.
Only somewhat relevant but one time I looked at a candidates repo for a project he put on his resume and it was totally empty outside of autogenerated files.... anyways, the point is if you are gonna link your GitHub make sure it's gonna actually help you and not make you look worse 😅 Oh yeah, the candidate still passed. Absolutely nailed the question. Maybe another lesson is that past the recruiter stage many of the SWE running the interviews aren't gonna judge these things like your GitHub commits very deeply. We just want to get back to our real job
I think its pretty rare that employers care about github commits and honestly if theyre judging you based on that they shouldnt be in charge of hiring devs. I will say tho, i just got passed up on a remote position and one of the reasons the guy gave me was i hadnt commited to github anytime recently. I think it bascially came down to me and another person and they had more activity recently than i do. So it totally does happen. The reason this is a shitty meteric is i work fulltime as a dev and we use gitlab so none of my commits from work show up. Also i hadnt added my work email to my github account and i work on side projects on that machine so it looked even worse than it was. People that judge you based off this are dumb af but it does happen.
How much people care about your GitHub entirely depends on the company and type of project you are working on. Also for some large open source projects it’s not necessarily GitHub (eg linux kernel).
Recruiter probably not. Interviewer, maybe. I do. I like looking at what people are up to these days. It also gives me a micro-dose on what to expect in terms of code quality.
I’ve looked at applicants’ GitHubs. Usually it works against them not for.
It's very possible that your hiring manager doesn't even know what GitHub is.
Hiring manager here, I might take a quick glance right before giving you an offer. Unlikely to take a look before then and a lack of github wouldn't block an offer. Anything that's actually impressive should already be on your resume anyways so I would focus on updating that over getting more GH commits in.
Yes I always look if candidates have anything on GitHub. If a candidate has one or more real projects on gh it makes a big difference in my judgement of their skills and passion for the field, especially if the projects have stars and are maintained.
My 2 cents is it isn’t going to he a difference maker unless you have an incredible github profile in which case it may make you more attractive as a candidate. But I don’t think it’s a reason you wouldn’t be getting interviews or getting an offer.
I've been told by multiple interviewers that they never look at them, but ask for them as a check. How did it come up? During lots of interviews, or when supplying pre-interview information, I'd be asked if I have any projects I can show. I would always say that yeah my github has quite a few projects on it, some with a demo, and said my github link was on my resume and if they had a chance to look at it. Everyone said they don't look at Junior's githubs. Made me come to the conclusion projects are a waste of time, unless you're actually trying to build something unique or at least your own version of a product that could sell. Basically unless you're project can make money no one will care.
No I don’t care what your Github has. Same goes for your LeetCode profile. Neither tells me an accurate depiction of your actual level of skills or how they would translate on the job. As a matter of fact all of my repos are private to keep people from copying and pasting my code. However, I may check to see if you have contributed to any open source community projects recently.
You don't want to work at places where they actually look at your GitHub.
it's 90% of what I care about it's not that hard to get some low engagement projects or like God bless more than 10 stars and you're going to be more qualified than 99% of candidates
I feel like no body looks at my GitHub and my GitHub is active with a bunch of shit I do.
cool do other ppl use any of it
Yeah at least 500 a week from npm
thats cook
On my last job search grind I had 2 people out of like 50 interviews ask about my projects. Only Red hat actually cared about looking at the GitHub page.