[rawbert]

Am I the only one who is not maintaining some kind of private Github repo? I am doing this job for the money and not the "coding fun". If I had the urge to code more, I would just do more hours in my regular job and get paid for that.

[emerongi]

I think none of my coworkers in different jobs have had Github profiles with public code.

I have a Github profile with multiple public repos, but I don't think it helps with anything. I once had an interviewer say "it seems like you don't have much on your Github profile".

[fmajid]

Many developers have taken to making junk pull requests with things like typo changes to make their GitHub contribution graph look more green, as that's all the HR drones doing screening will look at.

[cmcaleer]

> I once had an interviewer say "it seems like you don't have much on your Github profile".

This sounds like a softball question to invite you to talk about your projects phrased in a slightly ignorant way, possibly on purpose. If you had quality projects on your GitHub this should be an extremely easy statement to answer with "I disagree because x and I'm particularly proud of y and its popularity with n users and feel that it demonstrates skills z". It's a perfectly fine way get a chance to state the value you demonstrate on your GitHub. I'd have no problem with getting this.

[emerongi]

Sure, but if an interviewer phrases it in this way, they should also fully expect to be shut down. I don't see any reason to not just go "talk me through the projects on your Github profile". To me it signaled that they minimalized my work, especially because there's at least 3 projects on my profile that I'm more proud of than any non-public work I've done in my professional career. Maybe I'm sensitive, but I guess it just signals that there won't be a fit.

[qkeast]

If an interviewer phrases a question this way, they're explicitly framing the conversation in such a way that the candidate is on the defensive and has to justify themselves in their response, and it highlights a power dynamic between the interviewer and the interviewee.

The interviewer could easily craft this question in any number of ways that creates space for the candidate based on what signals they're looking for. And it should be on the interviewer to get this right, not the candidate to interpret it as intended.

Of course, it could also be that the interviewer's looking for signals around how the candidate approaches being placed on the defensive and belittled; but hopefully the candidate will recognize that signal for what it is. Why would a candidate want to work in a place where they'll be expected to be on the defensive and belittled, to the point where it's highlighted in the interview process?

[tkiolp4]

Linking your GitHub profile works if:

- you have a very popular repo

- you have submitted a significant amount of PRs (or interesting issues) to popular repos

Your toy programming language that hasn’t received a single star nor a commit for over 2 years, your “fix typo” PRs, nor your countless forks don’t matter at all because: interviewers rarely look at them, if they do, they won’t understand it, if they understand it they will judge the smallest mistake they can find, and chances are, you yourself don’t remember a thing about your most interesting project.

[ahhfgshando6698]

No, my GitHub is entirely private save for a couple of 6-8 year old archived school group projects, and the very occasional pull request.

I can understand why it may be useful if you are making a big switch in terms of the type of programming you do and can see myself putting together a "portfolio" in that case. Otherwise its probably worthless.

This isn't to say I don't have side projects or experiments I do for fun. They just don't go on GitHub (and why should they? It's not particularly more convenient than any other way to host your code. Mostly I use cgit these days since it's very platform portable and lightweight and I can host it internally with just a c compiler), and if they do, there's very little benefit to them being public unless you are doing what I mentioned above about needing to "prove yourself".

I'm not a web developer though, maybe it's more valuable the closer you get to frontend stuff? Just a thought, I don't actually know enough about that to say.

[vineyardmike]

Plenty of people code for fun. Or choose to spend free time learning new things.

My job sometimes gets really boring and uninteresting. I can then scratch the itch by working on something for my own benefit and interest.

[brabel]

Yeah, I can't imagine only writing boring code at work and never getting to learn new, interesting things that could get me a role using those things that I actually enjoy using (now I am past that already, but I've done this all my career and would recommend unless you don't care at all about enjoying your job).

[vlod]

I've always wanted to ask for the github profile of the person asking me the question. I doubt they would get the irony of that however and probably get myself red-flagged.

[bluedino]

Judging by my traffic logs nobody actually looks at those anyway

[morelisp]

Most people will not get paid more for working more hours.