[BjoernKW]

If you use your GitHub profile as part of your personal brand / marketing then these things absolutely are relevant.

As a developer in a professional context you'll hardly ever work alone or be the sole contributor.

Even if you use a GitHub profile just as your personal code repository code still is communication, even if it's just with your future self.

Therefore communication skills are crucial. A well-thought-out README file and consistent, readable code help others to understand your work. These aspects often are more important than what the code accomplishes.

Working, even efficient, but unmaintainable code is a risk. Ultimately, code is a precise specification of what the software at hand is supposed to do. If that specification is hard to understand it'll be much less useful.

[RussianCow]

> If you use your GitHub profile as part of your personal brand / marketing then these things absolutely are relevant.

The problem is when others assume this on your behalf. I would take a lack of proper readme as a signal that the repo isn't intended for viewing and judgement by others, not as a signal that the candidate has poor communication skills. If the repo is for a library that the author has published and is marketing for production use, then sure, but I'd wager that does not represent the vast majority of repos on GitHub, and to assume otherwise is foolish in my opinion.

[peruvian]

I use to think this way then I started working in the real world with developers who coded and documented work code cleanly but had messy GitHub profiles especially because until recently private repos were not free. A lot of people don't care about perfectly formatted READMEs, commit comments, etc. if they're just hacking on the weekend on something small... and that's fine.

Nowadays unless you pushed your profile and repos hard in the resume or interview process, I couldn't care less if the rest of the interview went fine. Worst case scenario they're "forced" to write good documentation as part of the job - not everything we do at work is natural or fun for us.