I am often brought in on the hiring process to vet peoples technical skills. I used to just try to ask questions in the hour or two I got with the person, this seemed no better than flipping a coin. Even if the person was honest and we were both talking about the same skill, but how do I know that their experience with that skill is applicable? Now I insist on seeing a portfolio of some kind for coders. A Github, Bitbucket, Sourceforge or any other publicly viewable body of source will do.

15 minutes with someones code is a much better predictor of skill than even several hours of discussion. It costs a lot less too.

1) added buzz keywords in his resume

2) hosted an instance of gitlab and took various open source projects (stuff that was not popular, but had enough polish), modified them and uploaded them.

After a week, he was able to land multiple interviews. While he did get called out once, almost all engineers/non-tech hr didn't bother calling his bluff.

I am not suggesting that you should lie on your resume or steal open source projects, just that depending on one factor (like github, or resume, or white boards) is futile and that tech hiring in general is broken.

I see plenty of GitHub profiles that are filled with forked/starred projects from other people, and nothing of substance.

I don't bring it to the candidate because it is worthless and there are more interesting things to talk about. But that doesn't mean I didn't see it ;)

Actually I have never once in my life see a good github profile.

Then I noticed that I had started censoring my code krapola. I was sepf conscious about the code I was making visible, as I didn't want to be judged. Then I decided that lame. Now I shamelessly put garbage on GitHub, too.

Coding poorly & having fun trumps curating a collection fancy schmancy artisinal repos. And I've also learned that my good code often lives at work, and never makes it to GitHub.

Unfortunately like most people all the clean and polished code lives in private work repos. All those things I learned from the unfinished repos is being used in work code. Oh well.

Noone gives a f* about the code you have in your github. Noone will read it ever.

When I say a "good" profile. That means you put a link in your resume to ONE project you want to show. The landing page is a README with a paragraph to explain what is the app, a quick start, and a few screenshots.

If you've got a link to the website (or desktop installer) AND there are a few icons of external integrations in travis-ci/appveyor/unittestthing/packager then your repo is absolute perfection. =)

Though I haven't interviewed candidates for a long time, I happen to be curious about somebody from time to time. The very first thing I do watching their GitHub profiles is to filter-out all the forks, only leaving "sources" (how GitHub calls them).

There are loads, usually with a fork of a couple of popular JS libraries, maybe a couple of commits but no PRs. Once word leaked out that having a Github was "a thing".

It is not particularly hard to determine if fork n` fix is the reason for the repo. A search for the name of a project will find out if it is a truly lazy copy. Then asking a few questions about why some class or function deep in the code does a thing can determine at least the level of motivation of the copier.

If I can ask an unlimited number of questions about the code and the copier can answer them competently does it matter if they copied? They are competent in the code they pointed me at.

It is hardly a perfect system, it is just better in every way than only an interview.

Why would someone with real skill and therefore a real profile work there? Let all the fakers go work at shitty companies.