[king_jester]

> In interviews where I've been the interviewer, we've used it as a filter to determine if a candidate cares enough to code on their own, if they contribute to open source projects, what their coding style is like, what languages they gravitate to writing in, and just as a general personality guideline.

This is covered by the OP, but if you are using Github as a part of your hiring decision, you are going to be putting at a disadvantage many different kinds of people who do not or cannot contribute to open source or personal projects. The OP argues that Github is not necessarily a useful indicator of the things you mentioned and if Github becomes a very influencing factor for many companies hiring decisions, then it becomes de facto required and means you must work more as a programmer than you already do. This extra work is more able to be done with those that have free time and more personal resources (e.g. income), so some types of people are probably being excluded from your hiring process, leading to more a of a developer monoculture.

[woah]

Or there's increased pressure on people to generalize solutions so that they can release them on their own as github projects, benefitting everybody.