Even if you read code naturally, fishing out individual contributions from a Github page is a chore; there are lots of things people can do on Github that will make them appear at first glance to be productive and important.
Lots of applicants give us Github links, and while I'm very happy to have them (please include them), I still have to look at the list of projects and figure out "is this his project, or is it a project he just likes and follows; are these his commits, or is he just backporting someone else's patch" &c &c.
I can't imagine how a hiring manager dev who hasn't used Github before could be expected to make decisions from it.
A forked github project shows the same number of forks as the original, but each fork starts its number of watchers at 1. Easy way to see if you "own" a project or just have forked it.
I agree that it's easy to figure out. It's just not automatic.
Re:The Internet is my Resume
by dpritchett on Thursday September 22, 2011 @11:57AM
(#3026487)
Well sure, but you've got quantifiable product/market successes. For someone in a more one-dimensional role the spiel might not be as easy. Some folks really just want to be a dev on a team of devs, and github is a great starting point for a technical interview.
You're right though, github doesn't optimize its presentation for the resume use case. There's plenty of room for other startups (see my Work for Pie plug elsewhere in the thread) to take that information and package it especially for hiring managers. StackOverflow Careers does a bit of that, too.
In isolation it's useless but if you've put some work into crafting your online presence (i.e. a homepage with a blog, an up to date linkedin profile and a few choice code samples on github), then IME it makes a good impression pre-interview.
If I were to have a hire-me page, I might link to code on Github, but it would be supporting documentation that no one would actually read after they got through my five minute hire-me spiel.