I don't understand that as a criteria to be hired. I could see it as something to help show off, but shouldn't you as an employee be focusing on your company's codebase and not OSS products (unless there is some bug in the product you could fix that impacted your company)?

Maybe it's since I've always worked for companies with > 500 employees, but there is always a pile of work on the products I've worked on that there was little time to contribute externally.

So you paste your bitbucket link into the github field.

Yes but many employers want to look at how many stars and forks your repo got on github. It's a nice metric to filter repos from candidates, it is not enough for sure but usually repos with tons of stars are considered a good signal and it allows employers to save time before they start looking at your code. Bitbucket doesn't have enough users to offer these kinds of interesting metrics unfortunately.

Wow, I've never seen that. I mean, people often like to see some kind of evidence of something you've worked on, and looking at someone's Github profile is an easy way to do that. But I've never heard of stars and forks being used as a crude filtering mechanism.

There are so many factors that go into whether or not a repo becomes popular, which aren't necessarily related to anything that reflects on the creator's merits as an engineering hire. I think you'd skew your candidate pool in a weird way if you leaned on these metrics too heavily. Honestly, I'd be curious to hear more about how it's used in hiring.

I'm not sure about your sampling of "many". I can count the number of interviews where my code was actually looked at on one hand; no doubt this is different for unicorn-type companies.

At any rate, enter the law of triviality. Making something simple that lots of people will understand is more likely to lead to more stars than something brilliant but complex, yet more indicative of development skill. This selects for gaming of the system and/or salesmanship; no doubt said employers will screech about a lack of "qualified" candidates before long.

Doesn't entirely solve the problem. But you could use multiple remotes. Still gives github power in terms of forks and stars, but your commits can be in many places. (and you can decide to do issues where you want)

You can easily make your bitbucket projects public and show them off. No need to be conformed into using a given service.

While I fully agree, there's somewhat of a chicken-n-egg problem here though, because part of the profile shows contributions to other projects/repos, and that's more of a github thing, partly because their profile is designed differently to focus on that, and partly because there are just many more popular repos on github to begin with, so to contribute to those, an Atlasssian bitbucket profile doesn't help much, IF the primary intent is to 'show off' activity. Personally, I couldn't care less, I very much like the fact that Bitbucket offers free private repos, and I also prefer the tooling and cleaner UI of Bitbucket over github's.

You raise a good point.

I know others have waxed on the irony of the centralized role GitHub plays in a supposedly decentralized world of the DVCS that is git.

It would be cool if there were a Behance or even a Dribbble for programmers: a way for us to present our creations well but also easily in a host agnostic and semi or fully automated way.

Many of us or don't invest the effort necessary to maintain a work portfolio, unlike say design oriented fields where it's the norm. I think there could be something to it.

I was refering to OPs use case where he mentioned the usage of private repos. Such commits won't show up in a Github profile either...