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Comment by johnpolacek | Hacker News Reader

I am shocked by how few candidates have much of a Github profile at all. So the good news is that it is easy to stand out.

Have some projects that are finished. They don't need to be extravagant. Just show that you can ship code and know how to explain how/why to use it in the README or for extra points a nice gh-pages demo page. Once you have a few projects under your belt, you can create a nice home for them with your username by making a public repo with a project name of username.github.com - see https://pages.github.com

For front end, if you prefer codepen over Github as your online code portfolio of choice, that is fine too (at least in my opinion). Or both.

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I'm shocked that employers would even think of requiring you to have a github profile, more so a public one.

Think about it: having a full-time job and a life implies that large numbers of very employable people have absolutely no time whatsoever left over to dedicate to maintaining a current set of contributions to high profile open source projects, let alone 'some finished projects'.

If a company can't figure out during the interview that a person is able to ship code then they should review their hiring practices, not pass the burden to their potential hires.

Also, you're probably de-selecting all the women developers because it's very rare indeed to come across a profile of a female on github.

The extra hilarious part of what I like to call "The GitHub Paradox" is that 99% of the companies wanting you to have a fleshed out GitHub profile don't have one themselves and none of their current employees do either.

Haven't you heard? You're supposed to put in 10 hours a day at the office, then go home and write blog posts for the company, then make meaningful contributions to multiple open source projects.

Oh, and drop half your take home pay on hardware and software so you can be up to date on whatever tech they decide to go with in the future.

You should check out this profile. https://github.com/jlord

Well, she works at Github, so she ought to have a significant profile...

I work on a team of about 25 people, all quite top notch. I think there are two github profiles of any substance out of the bunch. My own profile, for example, is basically a scratch pad where I toss random half-baked experiments that I want to show to a specific person, and the occasional fork/bugfix on someone else's project.

A well-stocked github profile can be a bonus for a candidate, but it's just asinine to reject someone for lacking one. Heck, my biggest personal project has been underway for several years and will be for several more, but I'm keeping it under wraps and very few people even know it exists. Some very good developers spend all their free time with their kids, or training for IronMan races, or doing community theater. And some people work for companies that would try to lay claim to code the person wrote on their own time, so they just don't bother.

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