[Jach]

How do you distinguish between "made a crappy chat app with Python+Flask because I wanted to play with Flask [and perhaps by making it public my hiring prospects will improve as a bonus, or not, but I don't have a strong reason to just keep it private on my machine]" and "made a crappy chat app with Python+Flask because I want to put Flask on my resume and hopefully my hiring prospects will improve"?

Or is it just that it's crappy enough to turn you off? If that's the case I'm kind of in agreement with the sibling that it seems overly harsh. Github-as-code-archive is a fine use case, I've never expected that someone linking their account should also be actively contributing to some projects used by other people. I'm happy just to see code of any sort, I don't care if the project is dumb or half-completed or finished or abandoned or still being worked on with a bunch of other people.

The only account that rubbed me the wrong way when I interviewed FTEs and interns was the kind that had nothing but a bunch of forks of other repos on it, no commits in them. It's like they were trying to pull a fast one on me, hoping I'd only look at it for a few seconds and think "oh lots of repos, good coder!" I'd have preferred an account be literally empty, because then at least I can believe they only linked to it out of some imagined (I hope) dumb HR filter as shallow as "has github acccount? check!"

[serial_dev]

> The only account that rubbed me the wrong way when I interviewed FTEs and interns was the kind that had nothing but a bunch of forks of other repos on it, no commits in them.

Maybe they didn't understand how GitHub works exactly? In the first weeks of me using github, I didn't notice the star feature, so I just forked a project, so I have it on my list. Even today, if I see an important repository, I just fork the repo if I'm afraid the original author will delete the repo.

[Jach]

That's a possible charitable interpretation, sure. Still, it's weird, the only reason you should want to link your github account is to showcase some of your work. If there's nothing of your work there, not even any gists, what's going on? I don't care if you have a ton of forks so long as there's also something of your own I can look at.