[mkramlich]

I found it interesting that the OA OA concluded that it biased to white men. I concluded something a little different.

I concluded it biases to: folks who most have the free time and the mindset and the kind of desperateness to be doing it. Or income-increasing ambition. (Like the kind that's strongest when you're unemployed or under-employed.) Therefore, it biases (again, only statistically) to young males around college or high school age. Most likely living in their parent's house, or in a dorm, or perhaps out in their own place but without a spouse, kids, sick family members, or any significant hobbies other than computers. And without a long established work history "out in the real world" and thus lots of fellow coworkers/clients/managers to help keep them fully employed out in that pesky meatspace. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing necessarily. Or that this pattern is universal and without exception. I'm just saying this is the pattern I see in the majority of cases. I didn't sense any inherent pro-white bias, or something pro-male. With avatar icons and code commits and pull requests the Internet truly doesn't know or care whether you're a dog. (Only whether you're a smart enough dog that can interact and deliver.) It was just pro-... a certain set of qualities. If a certain demographic is more likely to have those qualities, then, that demographic will be disproportionately present and active there on GitHub. It's not a conspiracy, just the physics and economics of it.

And there's nothing necessarily wrong with it. But it's important to realize it's at play. And to neither blindly assume that anyone without a GitHub presence, or an active one, or large one, is somehow incompetent/unqualified at software engineering. Or that everybody active on GitHub is a young white male in their parent's basement. Instead, treat each person as an individual. And realize that the entire world hasn't fully converted over to your wonderful new "rule of thumb" about hiring. Yet. And perhaps never will. And that too is not necessarily a bad thing.