robziehl2

Exactly, StackOverflow scores and even upvotes on Hacker News or Reddit is a neat metric, but in the same sense that commits pushed or lines of code written are. They hold some value but they are by no means determine quality or the value of a person's contributions.

Please see my response to @datalus below which addresses my thoughts on when I open source code.

Agreed, we all benefit from open source, I think it's almost impossible to avoid an open source tool at some point in your career now as a developer. I love Git and have a lot of respect for Github as a company. My intentions in my post was to address how people misuse such great platforms potentially.

Also, please see my response to @mafro below which addresses your final point.

TheCowboy summarized my intentions well. I have no hostility towards open source. I know what you mean when someone stars or forks a repository. I created a boilerplate project for Sinatra applications (a Ruby micro web framework) a few years ago and forgot about it, although now 20+ people are using it. Since then my Ruby has improved greatly and I want to give them something more so I am working on a version two of that boilerplate project for them. This is how I'm using Github, to try share my knowledge (what little I have compared to some). If you choose to use my Github as a job application requirement, understand your intentions and my intentions are very different thus exposing the flaw in how recruiters use the tool.

I had someone comment on my Github commit for the blog post itself and I'll copy it here so you can see my response: https://github.com/rziehl/from_the_terminal/commit/497939af2....

I have nothing against any tool or belief, just the misuse of that tool or belief.

You sir understood my point of view perfectly. I am not opposed to Github or any tool for that matter, only the misuse of that tool.

This is one topic I didn't touch on that I would have liked to but my post would have been even longer and it's already a fairly long read. I have another post planned that addresses this. Over the last year or so I gave a lot to employers and stopped coding things I enjoyed coding for fun. My Github profile probably makes it seem that I don't work hard because of this. For some weird reason though, I have worked on some open source projects on Github yet it doesn't say I contributed to them but you'll find my commits in the history on master.

Created a second account because HN says I was submitting too fast (no wonder there are no interesting AMAs on here).

I am all for a generic "Link to your code" field on a job application form but also provide an alternative like "Is your code not public? Send us an invite to your repository or send us a zip of some work that you are proud of". I am okay with that, I did this for a job application that required a Codility test which I didn't do. I am not saying that I am unwilling to give you my code, but for the sake of a job application it does not have to be open to the world. I agree that Github still has benefits for recruiters but they should not become blinded by it thinking it is the only platform where developers can showcase their code.