I've had exactly 2 interviewers tell me they've so much as looked at my GitHub.

Let the larger companies have that extra overhead. Let the savvy smaller companies have GitHub recruiting all to themselves.

Truth is that most candidates' public Github projects are either a sloppy copy paste/fork of other repos or are mostly useless with hardly anything. Pros usually don't share code on github unless they are maintaining Open Source.

I personally put more value on blogs and writing than github code because the blog/writing tells you their thought process and what is important to them vs github code which is just some end result.

That’s been my experience too. Not much to tell unless they’re doing stuff like advent of code and you can see what they did.

Please, no.

There's enough marketing geniuses hijacking other communication channels. Leave it to rest.

Because the last thing I want, is to be forced to code HR quality samples on top of the 8 - 10 hours that I already have to put up every day.

Life is too short for me to bother with Github portfolio.

Most recruiters use github for sourcing, what are you talking about?

This post feels more like a childish grudge against recruiters than a genuine question about github as a tool.

Judging by the number of emails to my git@ address... they already do

They do, but GitHub is just one website.

Most hiring managers will look at what you give them. Some like portfolios, some like name-brand degrees, some look for publications or parents...the important thing is to keep learning.

People tout GitHub portfolios because the are easy bonus points. If you spend a week learning a new language or framework, you can push your toy project without much extra effort.

Most recruiters aren't really capable of understanding a GitHub repo. What they are capable of is understanding keywords and skills. Many recruiters use tools that scrape profiles from GitHub, so they do things like "give me emails for python developers active on GitHub in the last 12 months".