Here’s what ends up happening. To game the system, applicants start linking to virtually empty GitHub accounts that are full of forked repos where they, at best, fixed some silly whitespace issue. [...] Outside of that, there’s the fact that not all side projects are created equal. [...] While awesome side projects are a HUGE indicator of competence, if the people reading resumes can’t (either because of lack of domain-specific knowledge or because of time considerations) tell the difference between awesome and underwhelming, the signal gets lost in the noise.
It looks like genuinely interesting side projects are a good indicator, but enough people list trivial repos on their resume that just having bullet points on the piece of paper on its own isn't a significant indicator of quality anymore. The only thing she was counting for her analysis is whether or not side projects were listed on the resume, she wasn't taking quality into effect.
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From the article:
It looks like genuinely interesting side projects are a good indicator, but enough people list trivial repos on their resume that just having bullet points on the piece of paper on its own isn't a significant indicator of quality anymore. The only thing she was counting for her analysis is whether or not side projects were listed on the resume, she wasn't taking quality into effect.
That forking behavior is exactly why I hate the idea of companies expecting people to use Github to showcase their side projects.
And I really support the idea of side projects, preferably on something other than a default Github page though.