Yes, it could be done but it would take a fair amount of work to make it actually convincing. There will definitely be red flags to anyone who has actually used Github.
Also, there’s people like me for whom this isn’t particularly helpful advice. I have quite a lot of techical knowledge gathered over the decades but spend very little of my time programming. I can write code, but it’s not at all my core strength. Thus my GitHub profile is pretty anemic and only contains small useless projects and tiny bug fixes. The only way that I know of to show off my skills online is to write articles in my blog. But keeping a blog up to date is a lot more work, whereas a GitHub profile you more or less get “for free” when you contribute patches and such to open source projects.
Also, there’s people like me for whom this isn’t particularly helpful advice.
To be fair to the author, he was clear his advice might apply in specific context of trying to get through screeners starting underprivileged. His conclusion was Github could be a great tool for sending a signal of competence. The success stories he saw made him further encourage everyone in such circumstances to immediately go for that option as low-hanging fruit. He qualifies his claims on the Github part pretty well for these kinds of articles.
Nice article.
But I’m afraid it’s not that hard to fake a Github profile full of contributions.
Yes, it could be done but it would take a fair amount of work to make it actually convincing. There will definitely be red flags to anyone who has actually used Github.
Also, there’s people like me for whom this isn’t particularly helpful advice. I have quite a lot of techical knowledge gathered over the decades but spend very little of my time programming. I can write code, but it’s not at all my core strength. Thus my GitHub profile is pretty anemic and only contains small useless projects and tiny bug fixes. The only way that I know of to show off my skills online is to write articles in my blog. But keeping a blog up to date is a lot more work, whereas a GitHub profile you more or less get “for free” when you contribute patches and such to open source projects.
To be fair to the author, he was clear his advice might apply in specific context of trying to get through screeners starting underprivileged. His conclusion was Github could be a great tool for sending a signal of competence. The success stories he saw made him further encourage everyone in such circumstances to immediately go for that option as low-hanging fruit. He qualifies his claims on the Github part pretty well for these kinds of articles.