Why GitHub is not your CV

This post is horribly misguided to the point of being malicious.

Nobody is using Github as their only hiring filter.

On the other hand, Github is just about the best generic indicator of useful contributions of a coder back to society: visible code that someone else found useful. If someone wants to provide whomever is interested with more custom evidence of their work, that's great, and there is a way to link to your homepage for that. But Github stats do not lie, and the constrained profile format is a feature, not a bug.

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.

This is a common misconception about the FOSS economy.

It is not about donation, it is about cooperation and net efficiency, and a good share of open source maintainers and contributors are very well paid to do what they do - they are not hobbyists donating weekends to the cause.

Did you read the linked article on the subject?

http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-th...

Here's some key points from it if it is tl;dr

Marginalized people in tech - women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others - have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity.

     Women are far more likely to be a primary caregiver of not only children, but other ailing and aging relatives. 59-75% of caregivers are women.1
    
     52% of women caregivers with incomes at or below of the national median of $35k spend 20+ hours each week providing care. The largest racial demographics in this group are black and hispanic2.
    
    Women perform more unpaid labor (most visible in domestics and child care) than men. On childcare alone, mothers spend more than twice as much time per day as fathers do.  On average, working fathers spend only 10min more per day on child care when they are not working, whereas working mothers spend nearly twice as much when not working3.

    Due to additional pay inequity contributing to less access to paid childcare, women of color perform far more child care than white women.

    Those with medical conditions requiring that they regularly visit medical facilities or perform other health-related activities such as getting additional sleep, regularly exercising, doing physical therapy, being away from backlit screens, not sitting in a chair for an extended period of time, resting their hands, etc are all affected by what becomes an extended workday.

    Those with a longer commute have less free time. Those who make less money can't afford the same housing costs as those that make more and are able to live in a city, so they are negatively impacted here again.

    Women earn 76-89% of men's wages. 6

    Women of color earn as little as 55% of white men's wages. 7

I know many women that either don't contribute to OSS because they've been dismissed for being women - being too pretty, not pretty enough, being forced to prove their competence more than their male counterparts because they're women. I've talked to women who use gender-ambiguous github names and don't post a picture of themselves as their avatar because of how quickly this happens. In addition, the sexual harassment, slurs, and other derogatory language that are used directly or indirectly at these groups of people causes many to not want to participate at all.

Additionally, there are very public instances of assuming someone is male. with a link to this hacker news post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6712954

Some research about how women get 25 times more harassing messages then men:

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/4243412_Assessing_th...

More research about harassment of women online:

http://indiana.edu/~tisj/readers/full-text/15-3%20herring.pd...

Where can I learn more about #1? Sounds very interesting.