Why GitHub is not your CV

  willing and able to work for free

Me working for free for an employer that tells me what to do does not lead from me working in my spare time doing what/how I want.

The thing is, something can be both a filter against 'underrepresented groups' AND a valid criterion for hiring.

Requiring a CS degree probably biases in favor of white and asian males and against black females. It is also a very valid filter for hiring programmers (pace the self-taught).

Not much can be done about this fact except for increasing the pipeline of underrepresented groups into CS degrees, recreational programming, OSS participation, and so forth.

I recently went through a job change, and to enhance my chances, I spruced up my Github profile, and put a link to it at the top of my resume. It's not the most active profile, but all the work there are wholly self-initiated projects, all of which tackle some interesting, often original problem. One of the projects randomly ended up with a few stars without me posting that link anywhere. Having code out there would give me a little leg-up over the intense competition, right?

Of the dozen or so tech phone screens, not one asked about it. Only one asked me to talk about a personal project, and it was abundantly clear he had not looked at the Github link.

At least he asked. One phone screen was with a recruiter at a famous open source company, and even she had not looked at it. To be fair, it was a recruiter call and not a technical one, but I thought she'd at least acknowledged it.

Most of the phone screens turned into onsite interviews, and again, nobody even mentioned Github. Well, it did come up in one interview, where the interviewer was doing a deep dive into IP networking details, and I told him in an offhand manner that, y'know, I had code out there that did exactly what he was asking...

The companies I interviewed with ranged from a couple of startups to a bunch of US technology giants in a variety of fields, and many of them get discussed on here regularly.

My advice is, don't put too much stock in your Github profile to help your job prospects. For whatever reasons, maybe the same as TFA's, practically nobody cares. Instead, invest in practicing the same old Google/Amazon/Facebook whiteboard-a-problem style that everybody and their grandmother uses, even if the work involved is nowhere near the kind of work (some people at) Google/Amazon/Facebook do.