Ask HN: What do employers look for in a github profile?

Code they've written. Review and evaluate.

I'm mostly interested in how well they play with others.

  * Do they contribute to other projects?
  * Will they follow "upstream" coding standards?
  * Are their commits descriptive?
  * Can they work with maintainers to get the patches right?
  * Was an effort made to split larger patchsets  into   smaller bits?

It's also nice to see folks who attempt to isolate the occasionally necessary hacky bits from the rest of the code base.

If the job requires using and committing to open source, the employer is looking for involvement in open source projects. Otherwise, the employer is looking for a vague indicator of "gets it" (at minimum gets Git and at least one language.) If the employer is evaluating code quality, they are looking for someone who codes similarly -- neither significantly worse nor better along any axis. This last level of code analysis is a sign that the employer has a weak culture and is unable to teach its standards, or is so strapped for time that the position requires immediate productivity. Therefore it's not worth worrying about the last kind of Github inspection.

I just want to see that they can write code and that it isn't awful. When looking at their code you can get a feeling if you would want that person mucking around on your project. If the person is passionate about programming they will have code they are proud of and that can be the start of a conversation.