Something caught my attention recently that made me question what really matters in tech hiring. I heard about a developer who landed a massive 46 LPA position at Amazon, but when I checked their GitHub profile, they only had 9 contributions for the entire year.
No consistent commit streaks, no impressive open source contributions, nothing that would make their profile stand out. This really got me thinking about whether we put too much emphasis on GitHub activity.
We always hear that having an active GitHub is crucial - daily commits, green contribution graph, multiple repositories, contributing to open source projects. But maybe what actually counts during the hiring process is your problem-solving abilities, technical thinking, and how well you perform in coding interviews rather than your commit history.
I am not trying to downplay the importance of GitHub or anything like that. Just curious about what everyone else thinks about this. Do you believe GitHub contributions are as critical as we make them out to be, or are there other factors that matter more?
depends on the company and role level. GitHub’s huge for junior positions when you don’t have much work experience to showcase. senior roles? not really - your best work’s locked away in private company repos anyway. some devs just want to code at work and skip the side projects. doesn’t make them worse devs.
GitHub activity is mostly vanity metrics. I’ve worked with devs who had impressive profiles but couldn’t debug basic issues or grasp system architecture. The best engineers I know barely touch public repos - they’re shipping real features at work. Interviews should test what matters: writing efficient code under pressure, understanding trade-offs, and explaining technical decisions. Contribution graphs don’t show any of that.
GitHub activity is just performance theater - it doesn’t show real development work. I’ve worked at three companies in the past five years, and my best contributions were all in private repos that’ll never go public. The stuff I’m actually proud of - database optimizations that saved thousands in infrastructure costs, microservices handling millions of requests - none of that shows up on my profile. Hiring managers want to know if you can jump into their codebase and solve actual business problems. That’s why technical interviews exist - GitHub doesn’t tell the whole story. You could have perfect green squares and still bomb at debugging production issues or designing scalable systems. That developer you mentioned probably nailed the fundamentals during interviews, which matters way more than commit frequency. GitHub’s fine for personal projects, but using it as a productivity metric completely misses the point.
There’s a big misunderstanding about GitHub’s role in hiring. Most recruiters aren’t staring at your contribution graph - they just want to see clean, readable code and basic version control skills. I’ve been in the industry for years, and GitHub works more like a portfolio than a productivity tracker. When I review candidates, I check code quality in maybe 2-3 repos. I don’t count commits. The Amazon example nails it - big tech companies run you through brutal technical interviews that test real problem-solving. You’ll hit system design rounds, coding challenges, and behavioral interviews that matter way more than green squares. GitHub activity might help during resume screening, but it won’t save you in a technical interview if you can’t deliver.
GitHub activity is totally overrated for hiring. I’ve done interviews at tons of companies and most interviewers barely looked at my GitHub. They just wanted to see if I could solve their problems during technical rounds. Most experienced devs work on private repos anyway, so their public GitHub means nothing. I know senior engineers with almost no public commits who are amazing at their jobs. Companies like Amazon care way more about handling their scale and complexity than whether you push code to personal projects daily. Sure, a decent GitHub might help you get past initial screening, especially if you’re junior. But once you’re actually interviewing, it’s all about showing you can solve problems and think through technical challenges. That Amazon example you brought up proves exactly this.