[cowsandmilk]

(a) if someone I am interviewing has no idea what github is, that's a negative sign. this is completely unrelated to whether the person has time to contribute to projects (b) many great engineers have small forks of other projects. This shows me that: (i) they know how to find and adopt open source projects into their workflow, which will save me money (ii) when there is a bug or something that does not fit how they want to use the project, they are able to make that 15-line change or fix. (iii) if their fork is merged back into the original project, that can indicate quality of patches, ability to work with a community, explain benefits to their changes, etc.

Honestly, those skills are very valuable indicators and do not require someone to be giving up their nights and weekends to OSS.

[scardine]

His theory is based in the premise that most GitHub (and FOSS) contributions are made by hobbyists in their free time. This is a common misconception of the FOSS economy.

Open source is not about donation, it is about cooperation and cooperation makes economical sense for a lot of business. Yes, there are the free-riders, but they are the copycats, we are the ones setting the pace.

Startups tend to be pushing the envelope, people from all genders from all over the world are being PAID to fix bugs and implement new features during the business hours, not over weekends. I do, I'm Brazilian and not white by north American standards, so this whole "github bias" thing is BS based on a naive assumption.