If you are a developer who is looking for jobs, anyone and everyone would suggest you one thing – to build up your GitHub profile through contributing to projects on a regular basis as much as you can. Well, this is not absolute anymore. In certain cases these days, GitHub contributions are making people lose out on jobs while they may be making bucks through the platforms.

JLarky, a developer who works at Fogbender, posted a few days ago on X that he is looking for job opportunities as he might be leaving the role. Few days later, a lot of people have been sharing their GitHub profiles, sharing how many contributions they have made in the last year. JLarky also posted his profile, which showed that he has been making numerous contributions, but is still not able to land a job. 

Interestingly, a user points out that the reason he thinks should land him a job is the exact reason that is not landing a job. Why would a company want to hire someone who gives away all the code for free? 

Isn’t open source the way forward?

Developers earn from $5 to $30,000 from a Github repository every month. A lot of times, people who post on GitHub have been regarded as developers who already have a full time job. Funnily enough, people say that job is actually about someone who has very less experience and has too much free time on their hands. Moreover, it is very easy to copy code and pad it to your GitHub profile and fake your contributions to open source.

On the other hand, it is very necessary to make your presence and capabilities visible online to be hired by companies. So even if you are working at a company, if you ever wish to switch, how else will companies know you’re a “10X Super Duper Hyper software developer”? The more you contribute to open source projects, the more recognition you will get, and thus get noticed by hirers. 

While that is true, the other side of this is you don’t really  need a GitHub presence anymore to get a job. People who have contributed barely on GitHub have been able to get jobs easily, when compared to people with high rated profiles. But the reason cannot be said is just that. 

As soon as you join a company, you realise that a lot of projects that you would be working on would not make it to your public profile, simply because it is a closed source project of the company. That is simply because code is valuable. Some companies won’t even let you use their private repositories. In the current era of AI models, a lot of companies do not want their codes to be used by AI models for training auto-code platforms, just like GitHub Copilot. 

Takes time, but you get what you want

To an exciting note, a lot of companies started out as open source software. For example, Redis, the database company started out as an open source repository on GitHub, then eventually converted it into a company that offers several services through their premium offerings. There are a lot of examples of startups that are being born out of open source and are now minting money such as MindsDB, MongoDB, Kubernetes, Hoppscotch, Kafka, and so on. They are even hiring for roles.

On the other hand, there are many high profile developers who do not care about acquiring jobs. For example Antonio Cheong, a developer who released an open source Bard API on GitHub for free by reverse engineering it, proudly says that he is an open source developer. He continues to contribute on GitHub and has since then built a lot of open source projects like ChatGPT open source, vectordb, and many more. 

The best part is that maintaining a GitHub profile by contributing to open source actually gets recognised by big tech companies. So while people might be landing jobs with ugly GitHubs, if a developer waits for long and keeps building his profile, they might end up in a company like OpenAI, Google, or Meta. 

Thus, while forgetting about GitHub profile is not the answer, it is also not smart to completely rely on it. It is great to contribute to open source, but it is ideal to learn a lot of other skills that the market, which is highly competitive right now, requires right now if you need a job. 

However, there are platforms like MachineHack that are offering jobs through their platforms and also let you build your profile based on how many hackathons and contributions you take part in, something that is missing for GitHub.