Sorry, but this would prevent most people who work for big corporations from ever getting hired.
It might work for smaller companies trying to sift through a bunch of applicants and they need a way to get a little more insight into their abilities.
I’ve always been amazed at the off-hours interestes of other devs where I’ve worked. They seem to go in one of two directions:
1) they spend time off-hours working on stuff they enjoy that’s unrelated to their job; or
2) they leave the programming at work and prefer spending time on totally different things.
I’ve met a few folks who like plaing with open-source projects, but none of them ever said they thought it made a difference in terms of getting a job.
Keep in mind, these are big engineering companies, not small shops that do things like build websites. Graphic artists have “portfolios”. Programmers have “knowledge”. Code embodies knowledge, but doesn’t always reflect it. Most of what you’ll see is how the organize their code, what their coding style might be like, what they comment and don’t comment, and if you’re good enough to recognize different design patterns in the code then you can get some idea of how they think. If you run the software, maybe you can see their UI skills.
However, the chances of what you’re looking at having any relevance to the job at hand is not very good, based on my experience on both sides of the hiring fence.
Reading code is a slow tedious process that leaves more questions than answers. I want to know how you think and solve problems.
I was working at a place as a contractor and we had to hire four more people on the team. Someone arranged for a headhunter, and he showed up one day with an 18” pile of resumes. After about the first dozen or so they all started to look the same. The two other colleagues working with me bugged off and refused to waste their time. What do you do in that case?
We decided to write up a short questionaire with four questions that gave us a lot of insight into their understanding of some problems we were dealing with in our code. We had the headhunter send it out and asked them to answer to the best of their ability and return it. (Only about half did, which was really helpful.) We weren’t looking for anybody to answer all four like it was a Master’s Thesis. We just wanted to filter out those who had such a limited knowledge of what we were doing that we didn’t have to even waste our time interviewing them. From that perspective, looking at code on github is far more time-intensive than scanning a resume and four more detailed tech questions that applied very closely to our project.
If someone at a prospective employer has time to waste going through my github code looking to be impressed, I don’t want to work there because their priorities are messed-up. I can get what I need just talking with you.
I will be brutally honest. When I review what someone has done the resume is less impressive than the work done when it comes to software.
Anything you can opensource and share with the public do so. make a website that is based on the same domain as the same email you submit resume's on. link any working demos you may have. link your projects via git so they can look at what you make.
Keep a project journal someplace and make that available.
You can be the best dev in the world. but unless you can show off what you do nobody will have an idea.
Resume's are for headhunters mostly. they look for buzzwords and consistent work. as well as references.