GitHub can be faked by taking work of others. When screening there’s no time to investigate each artifact. It’s nice if someone has a github repo, but it’s by no means the deciding factor.
Yeah. I often look at a candidate’s GitHub profile before an interview to get a sense of what they’re interested in - but mostly so I can ask interesting interview questions. “So, I saw on your GitHub you’ve made a few projects building terminal based UIs. What got you into that?” / “What are the big challenges in making modern terminal UIs? Why don’t more people do it?”
Just happened to come across a coworkers GitHub today and really only looked at it for like 5 minutes. My take always were: “wow they have a LOT of recent activity”, “all the history of this repo is 8 years old”, and “didn’t know they coded with next|node|ruby”
But it gave positive impressions
I'd say that's what the README page is for that you can create and gets shown at the top of your profile.
I summarized my most important projects, the languages I know and some other simple facts about me. Mainly because i have a lot of "trash" on my gitlab which is just for personal use (I am always unsure if i should keep that public anyways)
Yeah, I have a fairly prolific GitHub portfolio so the first 5 minutes of most interviews are flipping to a random GitHub repo and asking me what is going on there. Makes me think they're trying to have me prove that I'm the author of it.