Sadly, shameless self-promotion works. It gets you hired, it advances your career, and it opens up doors to great opportunities. The talented hacker with just a standard resume that lists their projects and results will always get passed over for the self-promoter with mediocre output who glosses it up with superlatives and bullshit, blogs about himself every week and has 10K twitter followers.

Saying this is "sad" is the same thing as saying it's sad that marketing or sales have to exist. Not everything knows about everything that's out there. You have to tell them. That doesn't make the act of telling them bad or dirty.

As someone progresses in their career, their job is as much about selling the business or their boss on the direction they want to go as it is writing good code or architecting good systems. If your idea of a great website showcasing your work is a 12pt. Times New Roman list of GitHub links, what does that say about your ability to progress beyond stubbing out interfaces all day?

I'm afraid Xcelerate has shown us that hacker news readers' ego allows this sort of thread to get to the #1 page...

Totally agree with you. I struggle to write a bio for companies I work for, can't imagine dedicating an entire website just to memorialize myself.

It does seem to me that if one of the great virtues of a programmer is laziness then too much self-promotion is a resume smell. But then again, it seems to be the nature of the game for the foreseeable future.