[jt2190]

  > You will make more money if you have an active github 
  > account.

I highly doubt this, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

There's also a downside with sharing too much information about yourself without being present to answer questions or provide more context: It lets an employer discount you as a potential candidate simply because of their misunderstanding of your work.

As evidence, refer to the "n projects on github have SQL injection security flaws" articles that show up here occasionally. But we all know that when you're just hacking around on something for fun, you might write code like this. The point of your project might have been to quickly demonstrate something cool, yet it can be used to demonstrate that you lack security awareness (even if that's not actually true.)

[3pt14159]

If you doubt this then you are probably in a completely different industry than I am. I cannot prove it to you except by my own experiences with managers and salary recommendations.

[jstelly]

This seems highly dependent on which kinds of software companies you are talking about. I hire lots of developers and I have never looked at anyone's github profile. Also, I don't recall any candidate asking me to look at their profile. I have seen a few resumes that have included one, but not very many - and I look at a lot of resumes.

I'm not making any judgement about the value of the profile, but in my corner of the world it doesn't seem very important or even common.