Sloan's Inbox: Applying for jobs with an inactive GitHub profile?

How important is it to recruiters and hiring managers that I have an active GitHub profile?

Unless you're being interviewed for a Developer Advocate type of role where you need to demonstrate how you can use Github as a social platform, I would not feel the need to prioritize the activity and appearance of my presence. I've been involved in the hiring process of software engineers for 10 years, and we only look at Github for supplemental insights and to review code tests that are published to the platform. Outside of that, we don't dig into your past projects as a means of filtering you out of consideration.

Github is not a definitive metric/portfolio for how skilled/active a person is as an engineer:

• People could be using Gitlab instead of Github
• Private projects is where the real work happens for the majority of us, and those won't necessarily translate into public content for prospective employers to review.
• Some people maintain a personal and employer-specific github account, so their personal account won't necessarily reflect their career.

At least in the US, having a LinkedIn profile is far more valuable than a Github one in the application process.

Do you expect your work to relate to your Github presence?
Do you think an active Github profile would be a reflection of your skills?

I never look at Github for my decision-making, unless it is explicitly mentioned in the application. And even then, I'm not looking at activity, I'm looking at content. It's trivial to make a Github profile look active while contributing nothing of worth. It's also trivial to pour junk projects onto Github that are essentially just tutorial typealongs. None of that tells me how you work and what you're capable of.

Heck, my own Github is a mess. There's a couple of years-old repos on there that were just random toys to explore some techniques, tools that were single-purpose but quick to rig up, and a few forks of things I happened to need a quick fix for. Almost completely worthless (some probably even detrimental with more Github-minded hiring managers) from a hiring perspective.

Some people do look at Github with a lot of weight, of course. I personally wouldn't want to work at any of those places, though. Take that as you will.

As you mention that you apply

as a new developer

I'd say it's drastically important indeed. If you don't have too much experience to brag about, I'd suggest to work diligently for a reasonable period of time on some pet projects to showcase your knowledge and skills. Even something simple, like a utility lib or anything functional (depending on your area of expertise) would allow you to stand out for recruiters and hiring managers, especially those technical-savvy ones. There's a ton of resources here on dev that would help you with finding ideas, inspiration, and examples. For instace you could try something like dev.to/search?q=personal%20project...

As someone running regular jobs for 4 years I would say it is not a requirement. Most of my work is into companies' private repositories, and when you work on a 9-5 it's not easy as before to work on open-sorce or side projects. We have other stuff to take care in life.
I've never been asked by recruiters about my GitHub status, even though I have the link on my résumé and it never hindered me to get a job.
However, if you're looking for your first job, it may be a good start to have something to show, and upload your project on GitHub may be useful.

When I had my first job 8 years ago, I didn't even had a github account. I was at my first steps in programming and needed to figure out a lot of things. I found an agency that selected me because of my my wish to learn and grow. When I started teaching coding in the current place, many years later, my github profile still wasn't very active, but they selected me for my skills, after a technical interview.
It's nice to have a rich github profile, but isn't THAT importante for many cases. For a long time i was afraid to make interviews because of my poor github profile, i felt like I was missing some very important requirment, but experience is not like that.
You will make your github profile greener, but it takes time and will come to you naturally. Just take your time, focus on your skills and show how much you mean to learn and grow, this will make you land your first job! 😃

You don’t need an active (public) GitHub profile to be considered as a candidate. As already mentioned by the previous commenter, many people don’t put their work on GitHub, and that’s totally fine!

Having said that, you should have something that you can show to interviewers, even if it’s just an unfinished side project or something you made for school.

A GitHub profile with interesting work can be a good advertisement but I'd never discount someone for not having one or having no serious projects in there, for one reason: people shouldn't be penalized for keeping work work and spending their free time doing completely different stuff.

And one may also want to spend their 'leisure coding' on things completely detached form work, as I do myself: work is mostly C# and some JS or Java. Leisure is almost exclusively C plus random dabbling.

You also can't expect applicants to do their leisure coding in public. They might not be into the open source ethos, may be working on some proprietary project (e.g. a game) or simply prefer to keep to themselves.

As an interview it helps seeing some code, but there's plenty of opportunity in the interview process to assess someone's skills.

I've been developing profesionally for ~8 years, and my public github is pretty barren.
Unless you're working for a company that does open source, your gh is probably gonna stay pretty empty. Don't worry about the stats, it's all about the knowledge you demonstrate during the interview.

An active Github profile is not required to be hired. If you are working for an company mostly you will work in company provided github so it will be hard to maintain your personal github activity.