[LikelyABurner]

Don’t kid yourself, posting your code on GitHub won’t lead to your being “discovered”, either.

Online portfolios are the worst lie we tell young developers. It’s the software industry’s version of “exposure” gigs: they get a few more bits they can shove into their models, you get jack shit.

Every, and I mean, every job I got I got because I either knew a guy or I knew a guy that knew a guy. You are far better off going to conferences and networking.

[vidarh]

I have a 30 year career in this business, and I know full well what my Github and other online exposure has done for my career, and my experience does not mirror yours. It has mattered. It's not "made" my career, but it's smoothed paths and gotten me respect from people I'd otherwise not have gotten anything out of. I do accept it won't matter for most people.

But that was not my point. My assumption to start with is that most of us do not put much on Github that more than a few other people will care about. But most individual accounts are also of minimal value to Github or other people training LLMs. So however small recognition you get from having code accessible publicly (for me it's the occasional recognition when doing job interviews and a few e-mails from people now and again), you lose that to take away far less value to people training LLMs.

For the vast majority of us, it takes a vastly inflated ego to think withholding our code from a public repository will even be noticed by more than a handful of people. There are exceptions, to be sure, but they are vanishingly small proportion of us.