Sharing my work got me, as an Aussie working mediocre jobs, on the right person’s radar to help me land a job at Facebook. This shaved probably 10 years off my career path. That was a great return on investment and a big leveller for someone who didn’t study at a brand name US college and have an obvious path to the door of a major tech company.

I’m now in a position to hire others. I certainly don’t mind if someone doesn’t have open source code shared. It clearly not a priority for many people. But I do appreciate when people do have a good backlog of work to show as it can give a seemingly lacklustre candidate a second opportunity to shine.

There are two critical assumptions you are making here:

1) The kind of development you do is conducive to sharing via small projects on GitHub. The first four years of my full-time programing career I was working on firm real-time signal processing algorithms designed to run on an MPI cluster of POWER or Xeon machines. My skills were focused on low-level optimizations for that environment and hardware, design and implementation of grid-distributed algorithms, and understanding how to translate radar concepts and mathematical models into code. Anything along these lines that I could have thrown together for GitHub (had it existed back then) would ave been trivial and not really demonstrated anything.

2) Everyone operates under a regime wherein they do not need permission from their current employer to release things on the side. Needing to do so adds work and can be a real impediment to even wanting to put things out for public consumption.

I don’t see why you’d bother trying to force your work into that model. If it’s not common in your industry then there is no one to compete against in GitHub stakes. Sounds like publishing a paper or being awarded a patent would have the same Effect of signalling that you’re good at what you do.

Github profiles are advertisement for programmers.

Advertising requires resources - time, money, creativity and commitment and not every business is ready to pay to price. Sometimes advertising pays off, some times it doesn't.

No police arrests a business owner for not advertising. Same with github profiles. Decide to have one, contribute a little, much or nothing at all. It's a matter of preference.

Just like you shouldn't exclude any companies just because they don't advertise.

And no I didn't have a lot of free time. I was working and going to school but when you're young you frankly don't need a whole lot of sleep.

You do if you have health issues, or mental health issues, or kids (some young people have them), or a long commute, or a second job, or if you're not young...

It's hard to recognize privilege when you have it.

If you happen to have rich parents who pay for the best college, that's an awesome opportunity. Nobody should have to feel bad about taking it!

If you are poor, but happen to have a lot of spare time, that's also an opportunity.

Complaining about privilege is not actionable. Focussing on opportunities is a lot more constructive: We can look for ways to give someone an opportunity!

It is actionable though. People can make hiring decisions on a candidates work rather than what they do in the spare time, just as they do in every other industry besides tech.

Of which Github and Open Source are but subsets.

The open internet is the substrate on which innovation runs.

They also weren't as visible and easily browsable.

So, you are perpetuating ageism then. Let’s see how cocky you are in 10, 20, 30 years when you can’t get a job because of all the bloggers crowing about their Github profiles...

That's not actually the case! Blind programmers are not rare, and as for the other: https://venturebeat.com/2014/10/01/max-strzelecki-warlocks/

You don't need to be young to code profesionally nor you need free time. Good job allows you to learn on the job. You need eyes and hands.

You're constructing the viewpoint you want others to see with no data or facts to back it up.

OSS activity is a useful low-effort implicator. As usual for implications, denying the antecedent remains a fallacy.

That is an assumption made without evidence. An equally qualified assumption would be that its a sign of privilege to not need to contribute to open source. You get an awesome education and go straight into well paying entry level position.

Committing to open source is not something casually done at ones leisure. Anything with traction becomes a significant responsibility and it takes an incredible amount of discipline and sacrifice to stay committed.

I think it's better to consider privilege as multifaceted rather than a single global quantity. And in that case, I don't see such a strong disagreement between you and the comment you're replying to.

I very much agree with your second paragraph.

Or maybe there are both friendly and unfriendly projects and a lot depends on where the underprivileged is trying to make it.