Whilst worthy, a developer's contributions to OSS or public code commits aren't the only determining factor of their quality/hireability.
From a purely practical perspective, being a developer who exclusively works on closed-source code in 2014 is a bad career decision.
Depends on the context. I have lots of pure crap in my bitbucket and github accounts, because I tinker and explore outside of my day job. I even have one project that is almost complete (that is, it functions without bugs and doesn't make me want to scratch my eyes out when I look at the UI), but because I work on it for an hour here, an hour there, in the capacity of said exploration, the quality of the code is...less than stellar. Yet somehow I manage to be employed without a single gap in my resume.
That I don't have a high-code-quality complete project in these locations says one thing and one thing only about me, with respect to being a signal to employers: I'm not willing to devote myself 100%, heart-and-soul, to programming at my peak for 10+ hours a day.
You're deluding yourself if you think your comment about being a bad career decision applies outside of a small sphere (usually web-dev or mobile-dev for startups seeking a very particular kind of employee (young, naive, willing to work long and hard for relatively lesser pay). I have yet to see a job I'd be otherwise qualified for or interested in list "have a github profile with projects for us to look at" as a requirement, or even a nice-to-have. Certainly that won't necessarily last forever, but right now it's not a bad career decision for a great many (vast majority) to eschew public display of their personal code projects.
Frankly, I view the insistence on public display of personal code in the same category as I view trivia-quiz-interviewing: they're both bandwagon nonsense things that people convince themselves are highly effective ways to measure people.
> I have yet to see a job I'd be otherwise qualified for or interested in list "have a github profile with projects for us to look at" as a requirement, or even a nice-to-have.
Every job on this job board has such a requirement.
That may be true, but there's a whole world of programming jobs out there that have nothing to do with "web development". There's all sorts of internal corporate app stuff, embedded system/firmware, control systems / automation of various sorts, scientific computing, simulation software, data mining / machine learning stuff, etc., etc., etc.
You mean 99% of developers? There are very few companies who let you work on open source as part of your day job, and if a company only wants to hire devs who work on open source in their free time then I don't want to work for that company.
If you have a job that's exclusively closed-source and with no down time there's a good chance that's a bad job. You have to think about your own career. Unless it's a prestigious position that will make you attractive to other employers, you have to consider that being isolated from the larger software community puts you at a disadvantage in the market.
I guess that's where I disagree. I don't know how you can tie "ability to work on open source at work" to how good a job is. What does one have to do with the other?
Also, "down time" is just another way of saying "free time". If I have free time, I won't be in the office. Which brings me back to, I don't want to work at a company that only wants people who work on open source in their free time.
I really think the amount of open-source you work on has nothing to do with how good of a programmer you are or your work ethic. Which is why, for me, asking for a github profile is a red-flag when applying to jobs.