I have interviewed hundreds of candidates, not just red their CVs (typically around 1 candidate a week for the past 15 years, currently 3 candidates a week on average).

What I have learned is to be very cautious when looking through CVs lest you select for candidates who can make good looking CVs.

I have met many nice and competent people who don't write blog post and who can't make nice CV. They don't make projects for show because they have enough work at... work and they don't do ten other projects because they want to focus where it really matters for them. They might have other non-technical hobbies like riding a bike or picking up girls at the bar. They may not feel the need to impose their interests and thoughts on everybody else or they might think their thoughts and experiences are not at all valuable to general public.

A person who writes blog posts, for-show github repos, who creates public image, is just one of many types of developers. If you select for this you are missing out on many excellent people.

I think side projects can be valuable when you want to demonstrate competence at something, and you don't otherwise have experience to draw on. If you're a barista who's learning to code in their spare time, or you want to understand a hot new technology, sure. Otherwise, I'd rather ask you about your actual work.

Mine hasn’t been that way, but in my experience those publicly visible artifacts tend to be high noise signals anyway.

Over time I’ve generally converged on a few criteria for the resume stage: (1) does this person have a minimally credible claim of being able to deliver projects at the level of the position? (2) if the job requires background knowledge, do they have a relevant background?

If they have a public Github profile, I might go look at some PR’s created by them to confirm that they’re generally respectful to others and that their actual code looks not-insane.

Once you actually watch them work and talk to them, you will get a better sense for them as a candidate, but CVs really don’t tell you much, so it’s best not to pretend that they do.

Not every act of noticing must be noticed by general public, if that makes sense.

You might be doing a good job and get promoted and be part of 99.9% of population who will never make headlines.

> if someone was not on LinkedIn or didn’t have a public Git account, I found myself thinking ‘well, what exactly do they do?’

How about spending time with their family, Hanging out with friends. Relaxing and refreshing themselves so they are fresh and ready to go in the morning.

- working for a company which doesn't allow external contributions

- working on stuff which doesn't make sense on GitHub (does anyone care about a servo driver for a specific component used only on this board?)

- working for orgs where they're not allowed to say much beyond "I'm working for the government"

- not being interested in opensource (gasp!)

- word of mouth, specific industry consulting

Creating a LinkedIn account takes what, 30 minutes? You don't need to be one of those high achieving "Can you endorse me for X/Y/Z on LinkedIn" morons to "be on LinkedIn".

Similarly, your parent didn't for a Github account with weekly contributions to OSS projects. Let's be honest, I've seen so many accounts that are just "I was bored during a long weekend and threw together this 200 line utility script". And that's great!

This reduction of people into black and white comes up again and again in this discussion, and I cannot understand it to this day.

Pay me 300,000$ a month and we could talk about it without commitments from my side. Otherwise I don't want to justify myself towards my employer if I work on private stuff or not. Especially not with contracts in tech, which are already borderline abusive.

That said, I haven't touched my public repositories for quite a while. Why? I have a fucking job! Aside from that I also host gitea on my domain that you will also not get to know. Maybe I would create another one for public display, but that is very unlikely.

I get that some people are forward with this stuff and in general social media presence, but I am certainly not.

edit: Of course there is also bad code in my repos, but that is completely besides the point.

It's probably more helpful, in evaluating a developer, to see a progression of thought rather than shiny, functioning code.

It's just luck and survivor-ship bias.

The best way to recruit is to use a network, period. Having multiple people vouch for someone is far more valuable than seeing if he has a github. And even then - it might be a bad fit.

Companies never look internally when it comes to recruiting either. They blame other things, like developer "passion" and not fitting a "work hard play hard culture."

Different strokes for different folks.

I don't think this is the case (anecdotal evidence from friends and family in varied professions)

I think the problem is that there seems to be an expectation of knowledge of the exact technologies. I have to say that lately I have seen a lot more: X or equivalent but this might be related to devops engineer job adverts where maybe they've realised that the tools are similar enough that you can get up to speed quickly enough between them ...