[zrobotics]

>>a bunch of sloppy inscrutable code on your GitHub, people are going to assume you tend to write sloppy inscrutable code

Im sorry, but wouldn't most developers have a large amount of code that fits this description? I likely have several mB of hacked python and bash scripts that were only intended to run once. But, I kept them in a repo because I occasionally would refer to an old script. But expecting a readme is a bit much, most of those scripts were lucky to get a descriptive file name, much less documentation. I hate doing documentation professionally, I'm certainly not stressing over it in my free time.

[ModernMech]

This kind of proves the point -- that if a recruiter is looking for a developer who values documentation, the state of documentation on a developer's GitHub is informative.

Personally one thing I've learned over the years is when it comes to referring to old code, having spent a few minutes writing out a description on how to run and configure it is a net time saver in the long run.