| > as you advance in your career, the expectation is that you will work on higher level concepts That's a valid argument and response to the OP in particular re: principal/senior positions. > Github profiles aren't really a place I've seen used to showcase architecture and design skills, nor how candidates work with others, and those things matter significantly more than a 20 line patch in an open source library You're underestimating how much work is actually hosted on Github these days. For example, what if one of the major contributors to an open source framework like Serverless, or a programming language like Swift, applied to your company? You're convinced Github doesn't matter, even though your default job application site probably requests a github link. In terms of documentation, formalized APIs, project management, github actually could still be a great source of information on advanced candidates and junior. I'm more inclined to believe the industry has been inundated by hiring managers who aren't qualified to evaluate anything technical, so fall back on canned questions which are of absolutely no value. "Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a coworker" is not going to give you useful information. Everyone knows these questions exist, and everyone prepares some bullshit answer to them. What you are selecting for is "How rehearsed is this candidate." Wow, it turns out 90% of candidates had identical "challenges" and "learned" from their "experience" and are "growing as an engineer!" It does make interviewing easier, and certainly helps with demographic hiring quotas if you don't actually care about a person's technical history - when you are hiring computer programmers. Edit: Another point I'd make is that, as a candidate, when I find out who I'm interviewing with I always search their github. Most github profiles actually suck and are negative signals. |
Of course if someone has built their career on open source work then their Github profile matters, but that's less than 1% of all developers.