That is one case. I've specifically hired somebody before who was so/so in the interviews but was the main contributor to a wonderfully written open source project. And was and is a great developer and great hire.

So there is a conflicting case.

No company is going to be perfect at hiring just the same way as no person is going to perfectly crush every interview. But there is no world where having contributed quality code to an open source project will hurt your chances.

There isn't data available on the general case, of course. But data from personal experience indicates: (1) many companies -- I'd say at least half of 'em-- still never look at portfolio code† (which -- even it's just a small personal project or two -- should provide plenty of conversational material for a perfectly decent and rigorous phone screen), or (2) if they do give you a take-home, they never attempt to use that as discussion fodder, either.††

Instead it's usually "Huh, you seem like you just might not be a complete dullard. Would you mind proving it to us by taking this 3-hour HackerRank test? 'Coz we know you've got nothing but time. And you'll go through just about any number of hoops to get us to pay attention to you."

† Even the ones who ask for it.

†† Even when we patiently and politely point out the gaps and ambiguities, sometimes quite glaring, in their cute little "challenge" problems. Which, again, many to occur in at least around half of these exercises.

Are you still hiring by any chance? I am looking for a new gig and I have bunch of open source work but no one is actually looking at it all, one interviewer even admitted 'oh we don't look at that much, maybe towards the end'. Even though they asked for it in their hiring page. You are definitely an exception.

Would be interesting to see which companies actually look at your github profile like they claim they do.

Problem is when that company becomes the industry standard at determining how interviews are done.

Was Homebrew actually particularly hard to write or an example of particularly competent engineering? Package managers are a dime a dozen.

I'm not involved in any package manager development, but this strikes me as extremely arrogant. Successful package managers are most definitely not a dime a dozen, and the skills required to make one and maintain it over years are something which the majority of engineers at Google (or anywhere) do not possess. There's a lot more to software engineering than working on the hardest of the hard tech problems, and being very successful on the social side is a huge asset that no company should discount based on the theoretical difficulty of the problem being solved.

Yeah right. Most developers wouldn't be able to even start writing a package manager, let alone maintain it for years as it becomes the most used one for a particular platform.

"Most developers" isn't the same thing as "most developers at Google"

While that was true 10 years ago; I don't think it still holds. Google is more big generic enterprise now with all trouble innovating that comes with that. Hence, why they must buy to be able to push innovation forward. This is just part of the natural life cycle of a company as it gets big and successful.

Isn't it standard nowadays to write a homework assignment and then have to whiteboard?