[jdale27]

I've spent a lot of time screening resumes for software engineering positions.

Having a public GitHub profile is not a requirement, and most GitHub profiles I see are worthless. They're either large open source repos where the candidate contributed a few trivial changes among thousands; or personal repos that are just them working through some cookie-cutter online tutorial. The most useful repos from a screening perspective are where you created a non-trivial project from scratch. It doesn't have to be anything ground-breaking or truly novel. It just has to show evidence that you identified a problem worth solving, and spent some meaningful amount of time solving it, so that the code you wrote is a faithful representation of your ability to build and evolve a software system over time.

A lot of people just post "student code", which is badly organized, badly formatted, sparsely commented, and untested. This gives me no positive signal. Putting in the time to apply professional software engineering standards, even to a personal project, is much more likely to give me a positive impression of your capabilities.

Aside from the repo question: this just seems to be a difficult time for job-seekers. Lots of companies are doing layoffs and slowing hiring, is my perspective on the situation.

Other resume signals:

* A degree from a top 10 or top 20 university may help you stand out; top 50 is nothing special (but not a negative either).

* Sad as it is to say, if you've been hired at a well-known tech company with fairly high standards, that does provide a positive signal. If the only companies you've worked at are small startups I've never heard of, it's a bit harder for me to justify spending 30-45 minutes on a phone screen.

That said, the #1 thing I look for is whether you've done the previously done the kind of work I need to have done, and done it successfully (e.g., you stayed a while at the same company and the company didn't fail). (Obviously I can't attribute that to you individually, but I might at least give you a chance to demonstrate your depth of knowledge and ability in a phone screen.)

[TillE]

> you created a non-trivial project from scratch

I think a lot of people overestimate the amount of effort it takes to create a moderately successful, useful project. Like, make a plugin for something. Demonstrate that you can solve a real problem competently.

If you have any kind of outside interests, you probably have an itch that can be scratched this way.

[pavel_lishin]

I think you might be over-estimating the ability of many software engineers to write a whole project - any whole project - from scratch.

I mean, you're not wrong - it's not that hard - but it's also amazing how many people in our profession aren't particularly good at doing more than make small modifications in some giant monorepo at work.

And like, if you don't have the drive or desire to outside of work, that's fine! Maybe you've got other hobbies, or a family, or as much interest in practicing your work at home as an average dentist. So the lack of a Github repo full of fun side projects shouldn't be a negative signal. But I also know that I've worked with people in the past that I don't think actually could make A Thing from scratch without someone holding their hands the whole time.

[mckravchyk]

And the irony is that those people will only automatically get bonus points for being an "engineer" of a large, well-known company while a solo developer creating an impressive project can be viewed as an amateur and likewise people working in startup jobs that have more technical ownership will have less of a resume.