> Also, the big part of that issue is people are incentivized to make their GitHub profile look good to have a higher chance of getting hired.
Do people really get hired for bunch of PRs to random repos on GH or just think they will? My impression has always been that GH profile is completely ignored by both recruiters and interviewers.
And this kind of behaviour is a red flag for people who actually go digging through the GitHub profile. Like techical people in the last stages of a hiring process.
Is this aspirational or anecdotal, or is this what technical people in FANNG/tech actually do? I hope it's true but it strikes me as the kind of thing that most technical people involved in the interview process would be too tired/overworked to do.
I agree. As a technical person who has been involved in hiring, I never looked at github. My evaluation of a candidate was based on how he/she answered questions in the interview, and my general sense of "could I work with this person every day." I had no spare time to go beyond that.
> "could I work with this person every day."
Communication skills (or lack thereof) on PRs or issues they opened is something I try to look for if they provide a Github profile. Signs of a big ego that will likely get in the way of day-to-day work is the main thing I look out for and it's sadly not that uncommon.
Nobody ever has brought up my GitHub though I did use my private GitLab projects to land my first dev job.
I've seen quite a few HR hiring processes where a mediocre HR person (knows to look for GH profile + activity on that, but not how to evaluate them) is paired with engineers with too little input power. In those processes, people that game their GH profiles tend to benefit.