[humbledrone]

As a hiring manager, I am careful to avoid drawing any negative conclusions from looking at a personal GitHub profile, because I believe that sloppiness or "bad" code is actually just fine in the context of random personal projects. And of course not everyone programs for fun in their free time, so a lack of a meaty profile is not something I worry about. (I would sure hate for someone to judge me for a lack of comments in some random code I wrote a 2AM 8 years ago for giggles.)

But sometimes I can get a really strong positive signal from a GitHub profile. All else being equal, if a candidate has a meaty personal project, or has been an active contributor to other projects, etc, I can greatly increase my confidence that they're a good hire by reading through their code. It can sometimes show me that they're really capable in some dimension that's hard to assess otherwise.

In other words, a GitHub profile is not a make-or-break thing for me, but hiring is always based on information that's more limited than one would like, and sometimes a GitHub profile can provide enough extra signal to make a hiring decision easier.

I will say that one specific thing that is really helpful is the presence of simple README files for original projects that describes what they are and who the author is.