[beager]

I would hazard a guess that most pure recruiters aren't looking at your GitHub profile other than ensuring that you've provided one. The hiring manager or interview team, however, might be interested in it.

Here are some things that I check for in a GitHub profile, as a hiring manager and as a recruiter (hooray startup roles!):

1. Repos that aren't just forks. I've seen plenty of profiles where the majority or entirety of repos are forks. Unless there's some annotation that talks about contribution to those projects, I assume that those forks don't contain any actual development.

2. Code past the boilerplate. A lot of projects start with enormous boilerplate, checked-in node_modules, and large-app scaffolding. The README should have a pointer that says "actual code is in src/app/site" or something, otherwise I click around for where the commit message is something other than "initial commit".

3. A real README.md. Bonus points for README.md in the subdirectories.

4. A "real" photo of you. LinkedIn profile pictures tend to be very professional and buttoned-up (sometimes literally). Most GH profile photos in my experience are a closer of the real person though. You're more likely to see a casual photo, a hobby, someone's dog, a photo of their art, etc. When that person is working with you, they're going to act more like their GitHub profile photo than their LinkedIn profile photo. Conversely, when I don't see a profile photo, that's concerning.

5. Nothing too boring, or too creative, in the name. The era of screen-name judging is not over, and you will get judged based on your GitHub handle. John35082192 makes me think that John reluctantly created a GitHub account and loathes using it. XxCodeMurdererGoatSlayerJohnnyXx makes me think that John is a bit of a weirdo, and his code reviews may be... uncomfortable.

6. Stars. If your real repos have real stars (or even forks), that means that not only have you creating something cool, but you've created something useful, and marketed it at least somewhat well. NB: repo stars are not expected for professional-profile style repos, only if you're creating something for an actual OSS community.

7. A real github.io page/repo. Maybe this is the basis of your professional profile, maybe there's a link to a personal website in your profile, but I am interested in seeing how you present yourself beyond which repos you show first.

[cimmanom]

What’s wrong with not having a profile photo?

FWIW, as a woman, I leave my photo off github to avoid the assumptions people make when they know someone’s gender. In fact, there’s research to back that up: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/data-...

[petsormeat]

Same here; I'm woman, and over 50. I use a landscape snapshot from an enjoyable daytrip for my profile photo. Is this, like removing graduation dates from a resume, an undesired tell?

[burfog]

Most companies would discriminate in your favor for both reasons. I suppose it is unpleasant to be the token woman or the token old person though. It sucks to suspect that you are being kept around to meet somebody's quota.

[beager]

That’s a fair criticism. Having any kind of profile image I think is preferable to the default, because then it distinguishes you from someone who signed up a day ago. So it doesn’t have to be a photo of you, it could be a photo of your city, pet, some hobby etc.

Just something to humanize the profile, even if it doesn’t gender the profile.

[ddebernardy]

Or you could conclude that this person is in there to just get stuff done, and couldn't be bothered with wasting their time to fill in their profile, or was concerned with how their data was used by Github, or is a woman, or is part of a minority group that couldn't possibly benefit from posting a photo, or... There's all sorts of reasons why people don't post their profile online, and factoring this into your hiring criteria is about as valid as using graphology.

[paultopia]

Very much agree with the point others have made about photos being a bit problematic. I know that you don't mean to be doing this, but judging people for lack of a photo on their profile is an unintentional form of gender discrimination (and possibly race, religion, etc. as well), because of the different incentives that people have to post photos. Women who post photos get creepers, lots of people of color have reasons not to post photos to avoid other kinds of bias (and I imagine similar points with respect to, e.g., a Muslim person who wears religious headwear), older people probably have a disincentive to post photos because of the massive amount of age discrimination in tech, etc.

[detaro]

It feels kind of weird that large parts of the world have stopped to do profile photos on CVs for fairness reasons, but then you expect people to have photos in the links they put on said CV?

EDIT: and re forks: surely regular PRs against other projects would also tell you something?

[beager]

I definitely would expect real photos of the person on LinkedIn, and everyone I know who hires will look on LinkedIn as a confirmation of the resume. Not sure if this is a vector to enable bias or not, but it’s a reality of hiring for many.

[walshemj]

I don't have a pic on my LinkedIn for that reason CV's with photos can be discarded just for that in some countries.

[bjourne]

> 1. Repos that aren't just forks. I've seen plenty of profiles where the majority or entirety of repos are forks. Unless there's some annotation that talks about contribution to those projects, I assume that those forks don't contain any actual development.

Perhaps you are not aware of the workflow many fs developers use when creating pull requests? You start out by forking the project's repository and create a branch in it where you put your bug fix. Then you submit a pull request using the github UI. End result is that your profile contains a lot of repos appearing to never have had any activity unless you dig into them.

It also appears that you are using candidates github profiles more for finding negatives rather than positives, which is disheartening.

[ddebernardy]

> Conversely, when I don't see a profile photo, that's concerning.

Ever considered how women or non-whites feel about this?