I can take a 10 minute look at a designer's portfolio and get reasonably accurate insight into their style and abilities.
Do you think a 10 minute scan of an arbitrary GitHub account is the same? I say decidedly not.
Do you think a 10 minute scan of an arbitrary GitHub account is the same? I say decidedly not.
For example, an applicant that goes through the trouble of writing a thoughtful, reasonable README for every one of their projects signals a positive quality.
When comparing two candidates, that's certainly something to consider.
Perhaps more tellingly I've interviewed people with seemingly impressive GitHub accounts who were just terrible. That experience leads me to believe it's easy to set up a GitHub that "looks good" without having the chops to back it up.
There are a lot of great engineers with empty or "bad" Github profiles.
1. They care enough to have a Github profile
2. I can see their actual interests.
3. I know they're interested in random experiments
4. I can see if and how they treat their projects. Are they dedicated maintainers, or do they just fire off one-shot projects without ever deciding to maintain them?
And a whole lot more. A person who maintains a single shell script project with diligence is worth more to me than a thousand developers with bullshit lisp and haskell repositories.
Yes, there's a bunch of great engineers with empty or bad github profiles out there. But those engineers aren't showing me that they're great engineers. The ones with a single or few well-maintained projects do.
I just know a lot of people find side projects fun because they can let loose a bit and try out random stuff that may not be their "best" code.
This is still a huge asset. It's important for a person to want to grow and learn new stuff. When it comes to hiring a person, there's a whole lot of stuff that's important. Maintaining a long lasting project is one of them. Having an interested in fun side projects, also. It doesn't have to be good code. In fact, I have my fair share of "this project is not maintained and should not be used in production code" repositories. That's just shorthand for "this code sucks".
Many people have their favored hiring "hacks", and they almost never actually signal for the things they purport to. It's way too easy to fall into confirmation bias or overstate one's ability to judge others.
You can't because design isn't about style, it's not art. It's about solving problems and increasing your employers profit.