Oh you focused on the “polishing” and not the “there’s nothing to show” part
People good at their jobs because they do their job: nothing on github
People in the business of performance theatre because they dont have a job to be good at: plenty on github. It can be legit code they wrote, that was not the point at all.
I don't like the idea that every developer has to have code on github. If they want to code for work and nothing more, then that's fine and shouldn't disqualify them from any jobs. We shouldn't expect people to spend years of employment building up a portfolio for the next time they're looking for a job.
However, I don't see how looking at the code people write isn't informative. You can see many things, from small-scale code style decisions to how they structure an application just from looking through their github profile.
Writing code isn't a performance, it's literally what you want to pay them for.
Of the people with code on github, a lot of that is forked projects with small contributions, and the rest is small convenience or learning projects that werent meant for scrutiny. If its curated its because they are making a performance that also has nothing to do with being with an employee before meeting you.
Github presence is just a non signal. Thats the only point.
We agree that if you have a different way to see how theyll actually structure code for you, then its useful
Okay, so you've addressed profiles with low-quality code and curated portfolios; but what about normal people who just put their projects on the platform? Their profiles will be a good representation of how they generally do things.
The stuff I have on Github is a mix of university projects (about 30 years ago), forked stuff I keep in sync with main repo (just in case they go away), a couple of half baked projects that I occasionally touch on rainy days and lack the rigeur of what gets deployed into production at work.
But hey, maybe HR will be happy I have a GitHub account.
Depends on what they have on there though, my GitHub mostly has projects from ~2010 when I was a very different engineer to the one I am now (this was before my first dev job)
But commits are timestamped though? It's easy to see if a github profile is active or not, and which projects likely represent someones current level of skill.
> People good at their jobs because they do their job: nothing on github
Even better if they have both, worked on open-source projects or have created useful open-source software used by other companies and are already working in their other job(s) or have personal real-world projects they can point to; which those are clear advantages and a simple quick filter to use.
No need to ask about frivolous leetcode questions around re-implementing sorting algorithms or wasting more time asking the candidate to write proofs for those algorithms where realistically you're going to just import it from a library or look up the solution on StackOverflow.
Unless you're Google, a FAAMNG company, university or general research related position or if the position isn't for a typical CRUD application development, then there is little to no justification for wasting everyone's time on pointless leet-code puzzles and this applies to the majority of companies.
People good at their jobs because they do their job: nothing on github
People in the business of performance theatre because they dont have a job to be good at: plenty on github. It can be legit code they wrote, that was not the point at all.