> I have nothing in my GitHub profile. Some toy repos of no particular significance... I don't think that should make me un-hireable...

Same thing with me but I don't think it's hard to spend some weekends and write something to express your motivation an illustrate your coding skills.

> people that have kids tend to not have much spare time... my company has me going through some bureaucratic process for any sort of open-source contribution that I intend to make.

I understand your point perfectly but what I don't understand is how does it make sense to hire a coder whose code (a real (though not necessarily big) app code, not a 5-minute puzzle code) you have never seen.

> what I don't understand is how does it make sense to hire a coder whose code (a real (though not necessarily big) app code, not a 5-minute puzzle code) you have never seen.

Well, let's break this down a bit:

- if you hire a junior, all you care about is smartness & maybe culture fit. You get both of these better through interview than GitHub repo - if you hire a senior, you hire for social/organizational skills, problem-solving skills, diverse expertise etc. GitHub is not particularly relevant

GitHub makes sense when you look for someone with deep specific expertise in a narrow, open-source-related technical area. Which is rare. I think it's more often used to check that "this person has coding style preferences similar to mine", which is IMO not really a great idea.

Makes sense, thanks. We are just speaking about different things then. All the times I were looking for coders I was interested in neither juniors (whom I would have to teach) nor seniors (who would lead the team) but middles (who would just write good code given a very specific task and very detailed design).

Having less time to "learning new stuff to stay relevant" makes us de-facto less hirable. The "github" thingy is just a proxy (as is the "whiteboard CS exercise").

I actually do learn new stuff. While on the current job, I've been doing:

- Code-hinting (semantic analysis) in an IDE - Product management - Low-level JIT codegen & optimisation (for ARM Neon & Intel SSE) - Some datascience (technology/ product evaluation for a 8-digit aquisition) - One of the early contributors to a web standard - Distributed systems, bigdata (mostly graph-processing at quite big scale - Facebook-big)

and probably other stuff I can't remember right now. I worked in half dozen different programming languages. I'm pretty sure I've "stayed relevant" more than the average Joe, but you wouldn't know it from github.

If you're not learning on the job you should probably find another one that's more challenging.

I suspect that Github repos, SO accounts, toy problems etc. are simple tools interviewers use to make some form of rigorous decision when the applicant's CV gives them little concrete evidence of skill. A couple of years of job experience will speak far louder than those at any company you would want to work for. Especially if you employed in a similar position at the time.

StackOverflow and Github repos are a wealth of information about a possible applicant. There's the code... yes. But there's also the comments on Stack Overflow and issues on Github.

Given that the person is presenting StackOverflow as an example of their profession, comments on SO would be very telling for how the person would be responding to critiques of their code and their responsiveness to questions. Much can be seen in the attitude and professionalism that would be seen in email. Things like:

* Do they write in complete sentences?

* Do they use spelling and grammar that would be appropriate to send to a client? A director?

* Do they range against all that is wrong with the world over little things?

Likewise, with Github there are issues that they have logged on other projects - do these issues contain sufficient information about the problem so that the person working on the issue can diagnose it? For issues on their own projects or projects they contribute to (and have taken ownership of the issue), are they responsive and provide useful information to help someone provide a good bug report?

I'm not too concerned with the code. That's easy to fix. But a person's attitude and providing these sites as an example of their professional mindset is something that can be difficult to get at in an interview when they are only trying to put their best on display.