Job applications and GitHub profile oddities

I sift through a surprising amount, to me at least, of curricula vitae / resumes each month and one pattern I’ve started to notice is the ‘fork only’ GitHub profile.

There’s been a lot written over the last few years about using your GitHub profile as an integral part of your job application. Some in favour, some very much not. While each side has valid points when recruiting I like to have all the information I can to hand, so if you include a link to your profile I will probably have a rummage around. When it comes to what I’m looking for there are a lot of different things to consider. Which languages do you use? Is the usage idiomatic? Do you have docs or tests? How do you respond to people in issues and pull requests? Which projects do you have an interest in? Have you solved any of the same problems we have?

Recently however I’ve started seeing a small but growing percentage of people that have an essentially fork only profile. Often of the bigger, trendier projects, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform for example, and there will be no contributed code. In the most blatant case there were a few amended CONTRIBUTORS files with the applicants name and email but no actual changes to the code base.

Although you shouldn’t place undue weight on an applicants GitHub profile in most cases, and in the Government we deliberately don’t consider it in any phase past the initial CV screen, it can be quite illuminating. In the past it provided an insight towards peoples attitude, aptitudes and areas of interest and now as a warning sign that someone may be more of a system gamer than a system administrator.