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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

"few real-world developers actually have profiles there"

Is that really true? I work for a mega-corp and I still put as much work as I can on GitHub. You always have side projects you can put up there as well.

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I work for a megacorp. I have a few unfinished personal projects on github but everything else if confidential. You're not going to find out much about me based on my github account. However, it seems to be a requirement for a lot of jobs these days, especially in startup landia. So if you can't share things you do at work then you have to spend all your free time doing OSS or side projects that you can share on github or no one believes you can actually do what you say you can.

> So if you can't share things you do at work then you have to spend all your free time doing OSS or side projects that you can share on github or no one believes you can actually do what you say you can.

Nah, just keep on looking for work at a place that is willing to invest time in evaluating you.

It's really true that most developers don't have Github accounts. There's also not a strong correlation between sophistication and having a Github account.

Most developers know about Github, of course, and have used it. You know, to get stuff.

I think the OP is correct that few developers are on there, but among the crowd this site is likely to want to attract, most are.

That said, 99% of my contributions are in private repos, so my profile won't tell you a lot.

I work for one too and it's hard to even discuss Git itself with someone here; most people just know SVN. The stack in my industry is very stagnant and I think a lot of people just learned what they had to when they were still young and became set in their ways. They have families now and coding has become a 9-to-5 chore; they're not interested in keeping a portfolio up to date or even trying anything new.

I'd presume most people who come to HN are interested in evolving their skill set. The common worn-out office drone doesn't visit HN.

Git != Github.

I have always used git, privately (eg: Bitbucket). And if I want to run an open source project, I can very well do that with Bitbucket too. I don't know why employers ask to see a Github profile.

I never said Git == GitHub.

I meant that they don't even know Git, let alone GitHub.

Sadly I know this situation too well and my industry is moving blazing fast (web dev).

I interviewed at Amazon 2 years ago and they wanted to do a real time coding session, but had no way of easily sharing code. I said I'd just post it in a GitHub Gist and read out the URL and he was dumbfounded and had never heard of this before. So yeah, _lots_ of developers don't have GitHub profiles or even know what it is.

I suspect so. I have a profile, but there are only some trivial programs there. Of developers that I am contact with these days, maybe at most 10 percent of them have put profiles there.

We live in a vacuum here on HN. Most developers are not us.

It's a good (open discussion, latest topics and trends, expanding the palette with exposure of ideas) and bad thing (secret/slower paced work environments, unexposed devs, rockstars that don't need it, etc).

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