If I am considering a candidate enough to look at their GitHub, I will actually look at the content.
If someone was actually trying to pass this off as relevant work, I’d disqualify them for being dishonest. They’d be 1000x better off by having no GitHub history.
Not if it's in a private repo... you won't be looking at anything. Are you going to outright reject a candidate because you can't see contributions to their current employers private org/repo? I believe this is the point the poster is trying to drive home. You can't see their contributions because they're private.
If you commit only to private repos then you shouldn’t be linking to your GitHub, as this article also says.
Resumes are for communication. Communicate! Tell the reader what you do, and demonstrate it as much as you can. Everyone knows that private repos are a thing, that’s okay. This can be articulated.
The article says verbatim "Don’t include a link to your GitHub link if it’s empty." yet you're giving 1000x (your words) credence to an empty profile versus someone working privately. Private contributions show up on the graph, you just can't see the content of the commit. So it's not empty and to your point it can be articulated. Sounds like you just want to see some examples of work, just ask for that, but that's not a resume.
“A commit graph and nothing else” is approximately equivalent to empty as far as I am concerned. If I clicked such a link on a resume, I’d say “wtf am I supposed to be looking at here?” If your repos are private, just tell me they’re private.
It is well known that many engineers can’t share their work. It isn’t a requirement. But if you do share your GitHub, make sure it adds value to your resume and doesn’t detract from it.
My Github has projects I have worked on in the past. Most of them are stable and don't need anything more than a few npm dependency updates a year. Linking to it to see these projects is useful to the kind of company that wants to see some small things I've built. If fake contributions to a private repo will tick a box somewhere, so be it.
The scenario is the author of this blogpost, who apparently wants to see that I'm dedicated enough to write code every day. I am, but it's for my employer, not the public. I'm not going to go home and waste even more hours of my life in front of a keyboard to prove that I'm doing something I already am.
I am sure the author is aware that not all software is public. I think the authors point is that you should find the best way to demonstrate your dedication, not that you have to do it in any one particular way.
If employers use stupid metrics, they get stupid data. Making a Github account look active is exactly as honest (in some ways more) as saying with a straight face that I'm passionate about <boring sector served by company's product>, and that's been required for decades.
Yeah, that attitude is plenty enough to get you a job at a megacorp looking for a good-enough coder to fill a position.
But early stage startups, as mentioned in this article, don’t really work that way. You’ll be working closely with people who are enthusiastic enough about the company to make major sacrifices to be there, and they will want to work with people who feel the same way whenever possible. You’ll be interviewing with these people, they will be senior, and they’ll recognize feigned enthusiasm.
You can set it so it shows contribution stats from private repos. Also companies with healthy attitudes to devs can allow their enterprise GitHub instance to transfer contribution stats to dev’s personal GitHub accounts.
