That’s just flat out wrong. My GitHub profile has gotten strong interest from companies, including the famous big tech companies (I work at one currently), due to having a ton of open source contributions to major projects & smart analysis/questions through participation in open source communities. I also have gotten asked a fair number of questions directly related to my profile during interviews as well, often demonstrating that the interviewers took a non-cursory look at it.
The thing that companies don’t generally care for are non-impressive GitHub profiles. I don’t care about seeing code that doesn’t stick out as not from a craftsman, or just docs contributions when I review resumes/GitHub profiles. I want to see code demonstrating standard industry practices, and smart architecture decisions. I want to see an understanding of testing.
It’s up to the candidate to make good use of GitHub to impress. Most fail at it, but that does not mean that no one looks at GitHub profiles - on the contrary, they usually are quite revealing.
That's flat out true. Companies didn't even open the github link.
Your experience suggests that one should contribute to the major open source projects used by the big companies to get noticed by them. That's very different from the usual advice to write side projects.
The thing that companies don’t generally care for are non-impressive GitHub profiles. I don’t care about seeing code that doesn’t stick out as not from a craftsman, or just docs contributions when I review resumes/GitHub profiles. I want to see code demonstrating standard industry practices, and smart architecture decisions. I want to see an understanding of testing.
It’s up to the candidate to make good use of GitHub to impress. Most fail at it, but that does not mean that no one looks at GitHub profiles - on the contrary, they usually are quite revealing.