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Comment by koreth1 | Hacker News Reader

I always look, and I'm always happy to see something meaty enough to actually talk about in an interview.

Somewhat to my surprise, I've found that at least 90% of candidates who include a GitHub username, when I go look at their repositories, either have nothing but unmodified forks of existing open-source projects or obvious "go through the tutorial for technology X" projects. I can totally get how, after seeing that kind of thing ten times in a row, people might give up looking.

But I still always look, both at the person's public repositories and at their contribution history in other public repos.

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Precisely this. I often check GitHub profiles if a candidate provides them, but I have the same experience. It's often times completely empty, or just a half-finished tutorial. Once it looked like a really active developer (like commits on almost all days), but that was from a repo with generated commits to make the GitHub contribution history look nice... not actual work.

Tip: If you're applying and want people to look at your repo. Mention this in either your cover letter or on top of your resume. If it's empty, better to leave the link out altogether.

I’ve open source something from every project I’ve done at work since I’ve started my current job. Again - after going through the open source approval process.

So I’m thinking about with each major bullet point of what I did in STAR format, I’ll have a footnote to the open source code that came from it

Yeah come on just throw it on the CV if you are proud of it. Expecting the interviewer to actually click through your GitHub account and figure out what you did is additional work for them.

I am at a point in my career that aside from my current company, I haven’t done a traditional submit my resume and interview in years. Even this job kind of fell into my lap without me seeking it out.

My prior two jobs came from knowing someone who knew someone looking for my particular combination of experience and meeting them.

I’m not saying I’m a special snowflake. But I’ve previously been hired for more strategy/architect type positions where the CxO or director wanted someone who was vetted.

I think scruple meant not just putting a github nickname, but specific links to repos. That’s what I do - but people still don’t give a shit.

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