[fecak]

GitHub profiles are incredibly useful for college grads, bootcampers, and self-taught devs that typically can't speak of professional accomplishments.

As your professional accomplishments increase, the value of GitHub profiles (for most) as a marketing tool diminishes dramatically, but can still be helpful.

For developers at any level, repos are a good conversation piece for interviews. The interviewer can ask why choices were made, what the candidate might do differently now (shows growth), and start interesting technical debates.

I always ask my clients (I'm a resume writer and career consultant) if they have a GitHub profile if I don't see one listed, but I don't always include it on the resume. New entrants to the industry are not exactly punished for not having one, but it's becoming an expectation. This is different than expecting an older adult that may have life responsibilities that prevent (or simply no interest in) coding outside work.

[bphogan]

They are also great in demonstrating knowledge in a new field. For example, if you do C# at your day job but you want to move into Go. Showcasing side projects can demonstrate some experience. This helps sidestep the "well, I don't have Go experience" issue.

[mdip]

This -- exactly. I know of at least one person who's done this and a few others who were able to move into areas of their preferred language (i.e. going from a job that was mainly web/C#/MVC to mainly REST/C#/Angular or React) by doing this.

Even within a larger organization it's possible to use side-project examples as a demonstration that you're ready to move from a team that uses one discipline/language to an unrelated team. While a large organization might be willing to move a senior developer who's a less-perfect-fit from a different department if they've demonstrated that they can be trained/learn what they need to know, it's a lot easier if they can demonstrate that they're a lot more than a "less-than-perfect fit"

[closeparen]

Software engineering is highly contextual. As a professional, I write tested, documented code within mature and responsible architectures that harmonize with current and anticipated future business needs, my company's infrastructure, adjacent and legacy systems, pragmatic balance of technical excellence vs. deadline pressure, etc.

In a genuine passion project, I'm having fun. If you're checking whether I've dotted the Is and crossed the Ts in terms of testing, documentation, edge cases, etc. you'll find that I haven't, because the whole point of programming outside of work is release from the tedium of professionalism and an opportunity to go straight for the novelty and joy of making things work at all.

For projects specifically intended as portfolio pieces, I'm not sure how I could design software appropriately (or evaluate candidates' designs) in the contextual vacuum of "needing something to put on Github."

[mdip]

> As your professional accomplishments increase, the value of GitHub profiles (for most) as a marketing tool diminishes dramatically, but can still be helpful.

While I agree that they're less important, especially if there are commercial products/accomplishments that the candidate can point to, I wouldn't say that they diminish dramatically.

For a candidate that has years of industry experience, a look at a GitHub profile can serve as a solid metric for their growth as a developer. I want to not only know that a developer "has been doing something for a while" but that they're honing that craft. For me, personally, I want to look back on anything that's 6-months old and be able to point out everything that I'd do differently[0].

It can also serve much the same purpose that it does for grads/bootcampers. It gives you an opportunity to show off your knowledge in areas that may not be covered by your professional work -- maybe you're doing mostly back-end/systems and want to demonstrate knowledge in React/TypeScript/Angular/front-end. I knew a guy who's repo is filled with rust projects. Professionally, he was a (very capable) Java developer[1]. His rust-filled repo landed him an interview for a job doing mostly systems work in C/C++ with a hope toward moving things over to rust where it made sense ... and no Java work[1].

> I don't always include it on the resume.

I don't include mine, either. The best advice I received on resume writing was "It's to get you an interview, not a job", so I treat it as marketing copy. My github repos (I have a few github accounts) contain a lot of code that I shared because a few others wanted it and Github was the most convenient way to do it -- but that code was hastily written and was never meant to demonstrate my abilities. Some of it -- were it encountered by someone who doesn't understand that caveat -- would make me look bad. If I get a pre-interview (phone interview), I already have an e-mail ready with links to all of that waiting for a "To" field which includes boilerplate that I've also already casually joked about "I'm happy to send all of these to you to reduce time spent googling, as long as you promise you won't judge the thing I wrote in an hour at 2:00 AM on a Saturday night as a prime example of my coding ability and will at least give me an opportunity to apologize for some of the evil I've unleashed on the world."

[0] I always joke that I don't feel like I'm growing as a developer if code that I wrote 6-months ago doesn't mildly embarrass me.

[1] I learned, by accident, that he hated Java (I asked him if he was interested in putting his resume in for a Java position where I currently work) -- it was his first serious language and he'd since explored Clojure and many others but because he was known as "The Java Guy" where he was at, he wasn't able to get out of that line of work over there.